NOTHING captures the imagination of children more than playing detective. But after Granada’s It’s Wizard on Thursday at 5p.m., they will be able to play the game with much more assurance.

Twenty-nine-year-old Gordon Luck, who presents the science-with-smiles show, thought back to his own schooldays (“I always enjoyed going round the house with a magnifying glass, trying to spot fingerprints”), and decided that an edition of It’s Wizard devoted to criminology would be just the thing for his millions of young viewers.

So, on Thursday, Gordon, the scientist-turned-actor, plays detective with his schoolboy assistant, Jeremy Purser. At the beginning of the programme Gordon will appear in traditional Sherlock Holmes garb, complete in every detail from deerstalker hat and Inverness cape to magnifying glass and “curly” pipe.

The idea came to Gordon while he was spending a holiday with friends in Newcastle upon Tyne. “They arranged for rhe to have a look round the police headquarters’ crime laboratory there,” he said.

“The detectives were very helpful, and I really enjoyed my visit.” He was so impressed with his back-room research that I thought a little more on-the-spot information would not go amiss and arranged for him to see the fingerprint department at Manchester City Police headquarters — only a few hundred yards from the Granada studios.

When we arrived, CID Superintendent Frank Williamson took Gordon straight to Inspector Trevor Green, who runs the fingerprint bureau for the Greater Manchester area. His “beat” extends from Rochdale and Oldham to Stockport and Salford.

Although it was only nine in the morning, Inspector Green’s staff were already bustling about checking bottles, vases and clocks brought in from the scenes of recent crimes.

But Gordon was the first “live” customer of the day when he light-heartedly agreed to have his own fingerprints taken by Sgt. Roy Jarvis. Said Gordon: “Anything in the cause of science!”

“This won’t hurt a bit,” said Sgt. Jarvis as he placed Gordon’s fingers firmly on an inked plate.

Then Gordon got the full treatment — individual rolled impressions of each finger, plus separate thumb-prints. Sgt. Jarvis reproduced them all, with the care of a real craftsman, on an official record form — which Gordon kept as a souvenir of his visit. Inspector Green, 21 years in the Manchester fingerprint department, told me: “A fingerprint officer’s evidence is never acceptable in court until he has had at least seven years’ experience classifying and comparing prints. And, of course, in each case there is a double check safeguard.

“An officer, comparing prints on record with those brought in from the scene of a crime, must always have the independent opinion of another member of the department before he can say with authority that they are one and the same.”

What are the chances of two people having identical fingerprints? Said Inspects Green: “In practice it is impossible for two people to have identical prints. There are no known cases in the world.”

As we left police headquarters, Gordon told me of his plans for the programme.

“Now that I know just how it’s done, I shall be taking Jeremy’s fingerprints. Then, having already set up some booby traps I shall leave the laboratory for a couple of minutes and let Jeremy wander around.

“No doubt he will be tempted to take a swig from a bottle of lemonade which I shall leave for him, and he will go around opening drawers and cupboards. And he’ll pick up coins and other articles which will have been specially treated with the dye used to detect thefts.

“It should be an interesting experience for Jeremy.”

Interesting for the millions of would-be amateur sleuths, too. For apart from hints and tips on how to be a detective. Gordon will also be telling his young viewers how to avoid the attentions of burglars when going on holiday.

The last word comes from Manchester’s Chief Constable, Mr. John McKay. He told me: “With special propaganda films and programmes like this, television is doing a wonderful job in helping the police to prevent crime.”

The post A private eye on Jeremy appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

UNTIL a few weeks ago, science held little attraction for 13-year-old Jeremy Purser. But since he was chosen to ask the questions in It’s Wizard he has become more fascinated than he believed possible.

Says Jeremy: “I prefer the experiments we do in the studio to the ones we do in the school laboratory, even though they are equally interesting.

“The difference is that at school we have to draw complicated diagrams and write up notes afterwards, and that rather takes the enjoyment out of it.

Jeremy, son of a catering firm executive, ruefully confesses that though he came seventh in his form examinations, he was 24th in science. There are 36 in his form.

His science master, Mr K. H. Waterman, reports however that Jeremy does quite well in science and asks many questions during class. “Appearing on television has increased his curiosity for general knowledge in every field,” he told me.

Some experiments that Jeremy has been doing in the studio with magician Billy McComb have been covered in class. “But on the whole they are quite new to me, and it’s fun finding what happens and why,” said Jeremy.

The work he has done at school has provided a basic knowledge of the preparation and properties of hydrogen gas. How it is made and what it is used for … making oil into fat and margarine, making ammonia, and in oxygen hydrogen-welding.

In the “explosive” type of experiment, Jeremy and his form mates have prepared hydrogen gas by adding zinc to acid. The gas is put in a test tube and exploded by heating over a Bunsen burner. The exercise proves that hydrogen burns explosively when mixed with air.

One of the more spectacular experiments Jeremy has done in the school laboratory was the burning of magnesium in a jar of oxygen. This produces a blinding, dazzling flame.

Says Mr Waterman: “The boys have covered only the first stages in chemistry so far. The early work is designed to show them the use of laboratory techniques and apparatus.”

But in the studio Jeremy has already come into contact with the exciting world of space travel. This happened when McComb showed him how anything burned in liquid oxygen burns stronger, faster and brighter than it would in ordinary air — one of the principles used by scientists on rocket research.

To illustrate the point, McComb dropped a white hot ball of steel wool into a bowl of liquid oxygen.

Jeremy also took part in an experiment which simulated the eerie silence of outer space.

McComb showed this by extracting the air from a jar containing a bell. When the bell was rung it could not be heard, proving that sound needs a solid — air for instance — to enable it to travel.

In the programme dealing with balance and equilibrium, Jeremy discovered that a half-crown could be balanced edgewise on the point of a needle.

Says Jeremy: “I would like to do some experiments at home, but I have never got around to it. I haven’t got a chemistry set, but I sometimes help my friends to do experiments when I visit them.”

Away from the studio – and school — Jeremy is an outdoor boy. He sometimes lends a hand in the garden of the Pursers’ new detached house at Wilmslow, Cheshire. Said his mother, Mrs Marjory Purser: “He likes to be out of doors whenever possible.

“He’s a Boy Scout and at the moment is concentrating on getting his First Class badge. During the summer holidays he’ll be going camping in the Lake District.

“In the school holidays he plays in the woods and goes swimming with his friends. He is fond of animals and often takes our cocker spaniel, Sonny, for a walk.”

Jeremy is a keen amateur photographer and was delighted when, at school, he had to make a pin-hole camera.

“It’s a simple camera,” says Mr Waterman, “made from a cardboard tube, black paint, greaseproof paper and a pin.

“This was an exercise we did in connection with the study of light.”

Is Jeremy sufficiently interested in science to make it his career?

He said: “I am certainly interested in the subject, much more than I was before I appeared in the show, but I don’t think I could make a go of science as a career. I haven’t really made up my mind about it yet.”

The post Jeremy Purser finds It’s Wizard appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

MAGICIAN Billy McComb was sitting in a comer of the studio talking into an empty cocoa tin and writing “Yours, Ahkkx LbBnla” in an autograph book.

Even for a master of the unexpected this was an unusual performance … one that demanded an explanation. As if he read my thoughts, Billy whispered into the tin, mysteriously: “Hold on a minute. I’ve got a visitor.”

Then he turned, and said: “I’m just trying out our new studio telephone. All you need are two tins, two nails and a length of string. But it really works.”

That made sense — the tin can telephone was a trick I remembered from my own boyhood. For the uninitiated — you take two cans, bore a hole in each, tie a piece of string to a nail each end, passing it through the holes. Two people then hold the string taut, one listening while the other speaks. The sound vibrations travel down the stretched string.

But what about “Ahkkx LbBnla”?

Said Billy: “Oh, that’s my code name -just another of the things we’ve been getting up to in It’s Wizard. It’s simply Billy McComb with each letter moved a step backwards in the alphabet.”

Since this Granada children’s programme started three weeks ago, Billy McComb has been devoting his spare time to the fascinating ways of presenting science with smiles.

“It’s one of the most satisfying shows ever done,” said the veteran of 200 television appearances. “In fact, everything I have learned in my life seems to have been leading up to It’s Wizard.

“There’s been the pre-medical course I took at Trinity College, Dublin and the medical and Bachelor of Science course I took at Queen’s University, Belfast, which have given me the scientific background that is essential for this programme.

“Then my long study of magic helps me in the presentation of effects. And my experience as a cartoonist makes it easier for me to give clear blackboard demonstrations.

“It’s Wizard is one of the hardest types of show to put on,” he said. “You can either make it wildly complicated and unentertaining or extremely simple and still unentertaining. However, we feel I have found the perfect formula for presenting science to children in a way they can all understand. Everything I do in the show is tried out beforehand on my boy Sheron. He understands exactly what I’m doing and what I’m getting at, and he’s only nine.

“The main idea is that almost every experiment we do can be repeated by a child in his own home and using everyday objects. The average child cannot ask his mother for a cathode-ray oscilloscope, but he can borrow a basin of water or a packet of baking powder to try out something he’s seen on the programme.”

But whatever ingredients are required, there will never be any risk of a young viewer blowing up the kitchen after watching It’s Wizard. One important rule of the programme is that no experiment must be attempted that is in any way dangerous.

“In fact, we would like parents to cooperate with us,” said Billy, “not only by watching the programme but by helping children try out experiments for themselves.

“An interested mother or father can be of great help to a child, and they will find that It’s Wizard will also broaden their own knowledge about the workings of things around them.

“I know it’s doing a lot for me personally. Every now and then a bell rings in my mind as I relearn something I first knew about during my own schooldays 15 or 20 years ago.”

Since he gave up medicine to make a profession of his boyhood hobby of conjuring, Billy McComb has travelled widely.

He has been seen on television in seven countries. Viewers from the north of Germany down to Monaco have known him as a magician. The Italians have seen him as an illusionist, the Spaniards as a lightning cartoonist. And in America he has worked as a television producer.

But his first interest has always been magic.

He is an international authority on the subject. One of his books on magic is a standard textbook within the profession. He is one of the three examiners who test magicians for membership of the Inner Magic Circle.

And in July he will be the No 1 lecturer at a world gathering of wizards, when he flies to Boston, Massachusetts, for the International Congress of Magicians. This will be the second time he has been star attraction at the Congress.

The post It’s Wizard – but it’s safe! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

STRIKING effects and fresh techniques making possible new strides forward in the art of puppetry are promised in Four Feather Falls, a series about a Wild West town of that name Granada presents next Thursday. Each 15-minute show is shot in the same way as a feature film, using elaborate sets and location shooting.

An electronic device — which I am told has never been used before in puppetry — ensures that the puppets’ lips are synchronised with the voices (of Kenneth Connor, Denise Bryer, Nicholas Parsons, David Graham and singer Michael Holliday).

The puppets’ wires are so thin (1/5000th of an inch [about 0.005mm – Ed]) as to be invisible on the TV screen. The sets at the studios of AP Films in Slough, Bucks, where the series was created, include a 30ft by 15ft [about 9×4.6m] prairie with trees, rocks and scrubland, and a main street of Four Feather Falls with a sheriff’s office, a saloon, a livery stable, stores and sidewalks.

The big man of Four Feather Falls is Sheriff Tex Tucker. Tex has a simple and effective formula for dealing villains: “Git outer town and don’t ever come back.” He is helped by his horse, Rocky; his talking dog, Dusty; and his magic guns, which he will be demonstrating in the first programme on Thursday.

It is a formidable crime busting combination; life is far from peaceful, but Tex’s methods are so successful that he never has to kill a bad man, not even such desperadoes as Pedro the Bandit, Fernando and Big Ben.

Even the Injuns are friendly, up to and including Chief Kalamakooya and his little son Makooya. As for the townspeople – they are strictly in the “hearts of gold” category; notably Martha Jones, who sells candy and goods in the general store, Grandpa Twink and little Jake.

Magic abounds in Four Feather Falls – thanks to Chief Kalamakooya, who rewards Tex for saving the life of Makooya with some inside information on Indian magic. And, moving behind and above the scenes, there is a good deal of real-life “magic” of the technical kind. At an empty hotel ballroom in Slough — to the not-so-wild West of London — the creators of the series, Gerry Anderson and Arthur Provis, started making their films with just £500 [about £9,500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation] and a lot of faith.

Their team, consisting of Reg Hill (who does the model work and special effects), Jim Marsh, John Read, Sylvia Thamm (who works the robot-like electronic switch panel that synchronises the dialogue), and puppeteers Christine Glanville, Mary Turner and Roger Woodburn, works a long, tough day.

Filming starts at 8.30 in the morning and ends at 6.30. If they get more than four minutes of film “in the can” each day they consider it good going. It takes a week to shoot one episode.

Everybody has to get used to thinking small. They work in a Lilliputan world and all the props have to be specially made — no life-size articles will fit this miniature world.

Here is how the voices are synchronised: the voice “dubbers” speak their lines in a London studio where they are recorded on tape. Then, at the film studios, the tape is played back and linked, via steel strings, to magnets inside the puppets’ heads.

Sylvia Thamm works what they call a “four-channel natterer” so that at the touch of a key-switch any of four characters can be switched into circuit and the lips made to move by the electrical impulses from the sound-tape.

Everything clear? Well, never mind — just put it down to electronic magic.

Sheriff Tex Tucker needs two voices. Nicholas Parsons does the speaking and his songs are handled by Michael Holliday, who has recorded some new numbers for the series, including Phantom Rider, Two Gun Tex and the catchy theme:

“In Four Feather Falls, Four Feather Falls,
There’s always magic in the air.
But anything can happen. Anything at all …”

And it usually does.

The post In this Wild West town… the sheriff is 20in tall appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A WOMAN whose actions would echo round the world in a few hours’ time, drove her car up to the gates of Wakefield prison.

“Friend or relative?” asked a warder.

“Friend,” she replied.

“OK,” he said and led her to a visiting room.

Inside, a pale man sat at a bare table. His face had been prominently featured in newspapers and magazines throughout the world. He wore a navy-blue, battledress-style uniform and white shirt. He fingered round-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles. He had been “inside” for eight years.

They exchanged pleasantries and she handed him the book he had asked her to bring. Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago.” They talked earnestly for half an-hour, the woman memorising everything he said. A warder stood stolidly a few feet away.

Daily Express reporter Esther Rose had become the first journalist to interview Dr. Klaus Fuchs, after the atom scientist had been sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment in 1950 for revealing atom secrets to the Russians.

Next day, Esther’s paper splashed a banner headline across its front-page: “FUCHS SPEAKS IN JAIL”. That headline went round the world. It was printed in nearly every language except Russian.

Esther, now editor of Granada’s The Headliners (Wednesdays), recalled: “They raised hell in the House of Commons. Everybody wanted to know how I’d got away with it. It was dynamite. It’s still a trade secret. They never even asked me why, if I was a friend, I’d suddenly shown up after eight years. They never examined the book. For all they knew, I might have been someone from ‘the other side’.”

Corridors of power buzzed with speculation. The Fuchs’ case had been one of the biggest spy trials of the first half of the 20th century and British security services hoped that the fuss was all over. In fact, it had begun again.

Fuchs told Esther: “I am going to East Germany when I am free.”

A year later, he did so. Esther Rose remains the only reporter to have spoken at length with him. Her persistence at Wakefield paid off.

Similar application stamps her work as editor of The Headliners. She retains her flair for inspiring confidences and obtaining colourful material. She defined the art of editing: “It’s a sort of seventh sense about what can be done about what will make compulsive viewing. It’s a question of picking the right stories, hammering them into shape and presenting them in the best way.

“Television and newspaper editing are equally difficult but in different ways. In television you must explain to the eye — you must let people see as much as possible. What you do must be seen to be done.”

Esther is amused by the fact that she had to leave newspapers to become an editor. Her uncle was Henry Rose, Northern Sports Editor of the Daily Express, who died in the Munich air crash, and her husband, Harry Whewell, is News Editor of The Guardian.

But she consoles herself with the thought that it was an ex-newspaper man, Tim Hewat, formerly of the Daily Express, who made her editor of The Headliners.

“He proved himself equally at home with the Press and television,” she said.

There are two other Tims in this energetic woman’s life: Tim Thomas, the young graduate who introduces The Headliners, and, most important of all, her three year old son Tim. “Mine’s called Tim-Tim to distinguish him from the others,” she said.

Esther manages to preserve a nice balance between her home life and work with The Headliners — proving that “editing can be a woman’s world, despite what some of the men say.”

The post Woman behind the headlines appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.