YOU are a TV producer. You have to pick a team for a discussion programme. What kind of men do you look for? There is only one answer: one-armed men!

It is no good picking someone who, when asked his opinion, says, “Well, on the one hand, you can take this view. On the other hand, you can take that. There is much to be said for both sides.”

Of course there is — about nearly every disputed idea on earth, from votes for women to the eight-ball over. But two-armed men are a bore in a TV argument.

For a lively discussion programme you need one-armed men; men who refuse to squat on the fence and who come down with a bang on one side or the other.

That is what you get in Who Goes Next?

You have seen the programme on Monday evenings, I dare say: three men marooned in separate hutches, like rabbits; each required to supply 30-second answers to questions about current events. There is no time for waffling.

The questions are framed by the producer. His name is Milton Shulman. He Canadian, a theatre critic who looks rather like a well-dressed sleepwalker.

But this is misleading. For he is a connoisseur of wrangling. He takes a genuine pleasure in pandemonium. So he concocts questions to make his team disagree.

His regular performers are Richard Crossman, Labour MP, Peter Thornycroft, Tory MP, and Malcolm Muggeridge: three kinds of one-armed men.

Crossman is 52, son of a High Court judge, a public school and University Socialist (he went to Winchester, like Stafford Cripps and Hugh Gaitskell) and a natural partisan. I doubt if he knows the meaning of the word “neutral.” If Crossman saw two flies having a race across a windowpane, he would instantly back one of them to win.

Crossman is a believer. Muggeridge is a disbeliever. He disbelieves in all sorts of things. Show him two flies racing across a window-pane and how would he react? I would expect him to say that they are overrated animals, that the idea of a race between them is absurd and that the whole thing is a put-up job.

Yet Muggeridge is an ex-partisan. His father was a Labour MP, and he himself was once a Socialist. At the age of 30 (he is now 56) he went to Russia. His close-up view of Communism made him write a book called “Winter in Moscow” — a funny, brilliant, bitter study in disillusion. Since then he has travelled across the political spectrum to the point of becoming deputy editor of a Tory newspaper. Now, he is in no man’s land.

If Peter Thorneycroft, the third man in the team, saw those two flies having a race, he would look up the stud book, decide which of them should win on form and back it, simply as an intellectual exercise.

He is a complicated Tory. At a guess, I would say that his heart is on the Left and his mind on the Right. This mixture makes him puzzling to orthodox politicians. He is very able, with a streak of what the Irish call devilment.

He became an MP at 29, a Cabinet Minister at 42, Chancellor of the Exchequer at 48. In 1958, after 12 months as Chancellor, he walked out following a dispute about Government expenditure. Now 50, he has a crowded past and a speculative future.

There is one really big difference between him and his team mates: he has helped to govern this country. He has sat in cabinets, bargained with foreign Powers, learned at first hand how men are ruled.

Widely as they vary in temperament, outlook and cast of personality, the three have something in common. All of them shrink from the stock phrase, the catchword, the formula that means nothing but sounds impressive. They all have muscular minds.

Moreover, all of them. I am sure, agree that there is one phrase in the English language which is more majestic than any other. If the Recording Angel wants to capture their attention on the day the world ends, he need not bother about his trumpet. He need only say: “For the sake of argument.”

At those words, Crossman, Muggeridge and Thomeycroft will instantly start up, forsake everything else, and join in.

The post Wanted: One-armed men! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

The post Granada gallery appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE younger generation — often attacked — can take a bow for a change. In fact, one section — the children who appear in Granada’s Junior Criss Cross Quiz — can take several bows.

They have established a reputation for politeness, good manners and, above all, sportsmanship.

About 500 children have been in the programme since it began more than two years ago. What have the people who work on this noughts and crosses game general knowledge learned?

Pam Marsden, head of the contestants’ department at the Manchester studios, said: “Mainly that children are better at taking disappointment than adults.

“In the grown-up quiz programmes, competitors are keyed up all the time. They will retire winning a fairly large sum of money rather than risk losing it on another question or another game.

“But usually the children, who have a large number of points at stake, representing several prizes, press on to the end. They don’t mind a risk. And they are sporting when they lose.

“That characteristic shows in the early stages of the preliminary test. They are set a paper of 25 general knowledge questions.

“The producer interviews them while the papers are being marked. They are given the verdict straight away. It is amazing how matter-of-fact they are.

“I think they are philosophical because they are used to examinations at school and feel that it is not a matter of life and death; just a game.

“We find many adults who see the programme write and say when they think they have seen a particularly well-mannered child in the show.

“This sort of letter usually comes from older viewers conscious of the behaviour of the younger generation.”

Bill Grundy, quizmaster for five months, spoke of a boy in a programme who had won almost 350 points. This entitled him to a canoe or a stereophonic record player.

Said Grundy: “The lad was playing well and wanted a canoe. He accepted a further challenge, played two drawn games.

“On the third, he lost; not only the points he wanted, but those he had piled up. Instead of the canoe he went home with a book token.

“I sympathised. His reply: ‘Oh, that’s all right, Mr Grundy. It was very enjoyable.’ I was most impressed.

“People think girls are bad losers at games. But this is not true in Junior Criss Cross Quiz. I have yet to see a defeated contestant — boy or girl — be unsportsmanlike.”

Over to programme researcher Yvonne Levy. “The children seem to have a leaning towards certain interests.

“‘Pets,’ ‘Is It True?’ ‘Odd Man Out,’ and ‘Nicknames’ are firm favourites with boys and girls. Girls steer clear of engineering, fearing technical subjects. Boys shy off fairy tales. They are keen on science.

“We like letters from children suggesting new subjects, but they must cover a wide field. Pets, say, include all animals, not just one type.

“The contestants like coming to the studio. They enjoy getting stars’ autographs at tea time as much as being in the programme.

“The children, too, get fan mail after the shows. Other youngsters write to I them, and this produces pen friendships.”

The post 500 good sports appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

ALAN HINDLE grinned, and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s no secret, really,” he laughed.

“Just commonsense. Ignore the subjects and stick to plain, straightforward noughts-and-crosses … and you can’t fail.”

This kind of commonsense has meant the Junior Criss Cross Quiz championship of Great Britain to young Hindle.

Fourteen soon, Alan, a technical school boy from a terrace house in a suburb of Manchester, was 10 weeks on Junior Criss Cross Quiz collecting 1,650 points — an all-time record.

He won points, not pounds. Juniors cannot play Granada’s noughts-and-crosses game for money. They score points that are later converted into prizes such as radios, typewriters, cameras, and books.

Alan “spent” his points on a record-player, tape-recorder and collapsible canoe.

If he had been playing the senior game, where filled-in squares are worth £20 [£390 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] instead of 10 points, his 1,650 score would have been £3,300 [£64,000].

That is nearly £1,000 [£19,500] more than the game’s record champion, Glasgow journalist Rushworth Fogg, won in the last Criss Cross Quiz series.

Alan Hindle played Junior Criss Cross Quiz to an almost infallible system. Almost infallible? He was eventually knocked out by … a girl challenger. I asked him if he minded revealing his success secret. “Of course not,” he replied. “Just commonsense.”

Then he repeated: “It’s easy. Look. Ignore the subject categories on the board altogether. They only confuse the whole thing. Stick to noughts-and-crosses. Play the game that way, and you can’t fail.”

Can’t fail? What, I asked, if you give a wrong answer ? Alan said: “That’s your fault. They’re very easy questions, anyway. So long as your opponent fails one or two as well, it shouldn’t make all that difference.

“You could probably get away with one wrong answer. But fail two, and I reckon that would be fatal.”

Said Alan: “Let’s suppose, for a start, that you’re the challenger. You will be, because the champion is already in the ‘X’ box. The champion has his question, gets it right and puts his ‘X’ in the bottom left-hand-corner of the board.

“Now for the all-important move. The first one. Most challengers get their first question right and then make a terrible mistake. They put their ‘O’ in a corner box. That’s wrong. The challenger’s first ‘O’ should always go in the centre. I worked these theories out with a school pal. We both applied to go on the quiz, and were waiting a year for our turn to come round. So we spent the entire year swotting up on noughts-and-crosses.

“My pal went on before me, and was knocked-out first time because he didn’t put his first ‘O’ in the middle. He went to one of the corners.”

Isn’t the centre question always the hard one? “Yes,” smiled Alan. “That’s one of the risks you’ve got to take.

“Now you’re settled into the centre square, it doesn’t much matter where the champion puts his ‘X,’ He’ll never beat you. Every move he makes, you block him. It’s as easy as that.

“Assuming you both answer your questions correctly, you must draw the game. A few drawn games, and sooner or later your opponent makes a mistake … and you’ve beaten him.”

Right, Alan. Now let us take it from the champion’s position. Into the ‘X’ box we go.

“First thing to remember here,” said Alan, “is that you’ve got the advantage from the start. You have first go at the questions, and the challenger must follow you around the board.

“The way to win is to make for the corner boxes all the time with your ‘X’s, and you’ll never be beaten. The golden rule throughout is, make the subjects take second place on the board. Play noughts-and-crosses first and foremost. I shudder when I see grown men and women getting their answers right and then throwing the game away by not playing noughts-and-crosses properly.

“Of course, crises do crop up during the game. You’ve got to be careful, and not let too many questions slip by. It’s easy to become big-headed as your points mount up, and then you do tend to become careless with the answers.”

Alan went on: “Your opponent is probably nervous. But I found that the nervous ones were the toughest fighters.

“They seemed to be all keyed-up before they went on the air, and then they fought the hardest of all. The over-confident ones were easy. They soon fluffed their answers.

“When you’re knocking up a good total, you’re faced with the difficult decision of withdrawing or carrying on. If you drop out, you run the risk of being called a coward. If you carry on, they accuse you of grasping.”

What happens to noughts-and-crosses champions when they leave school? “I’ve not decided,” said Alan. “It depends on how things go at school. Chemistry is my best subject, and I expect there’ll be plenty of openings for scientific types in the future. Plenty of time yet to think about that.”

The post TV’s boy quiz wonder appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

NEW house … new car … even a new job. Six weeks in Criss Cross Quiz meant all these for schoolteacher Rodney Challis-Sowerby.

Just a year ago, 34-year-old Rodney was the first champion to win £2,000 [about £40,000 in today’s money, allowing for retail inflation which doesn’t include house prices – Ed] in Granada’s noughts-and-crosses general knowledge quiz.

The show is back this week for another winter run. Already hundreds of applications from viewers who want to play the game are in the files.

I spoke to smiling Rodney Challis-Sowerby in the study of his new red-brick bungalow in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire.

Piled on the desk were 50 new books. They were for his school’s library. He was numbering them so they could go on the shelves next morning.

“I’m the head of the English Department in a new school in Warrington,” he explained. “And I’m a different man — thanks to six weeks on Criss Cross Quiz”

This is his story …

“I was born near Bolton, and went out to Africa when I was four. My father worked for Tanganyika Railways. When I was seven, we returned.

“I had a good school career, and then went on to a teachers’ training college. On initiation night we students were fooling around, and I had a bad accident. It laid me up for some time. But it did far worse for me than just that — it robbed me of my self-confidence.

“I had a teaching job, but nothing out-of-the-ordinary. I felt it was the best I could do.

“When I saw Criss Cross Quiz on TV, I wrote in, and passed the preliminary paper test.

“Why did I do it? I suppose I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something.

“I did. I went on the air, stayed in the game six weeks, and won £2,020 before I was eventually knocked out by a woman challenger.

“My experience in Criss Cross Quiz improved my morale and confidence, and everything seems to have gone smoothly for me since then. New house, new car and now this better job.

“I’m tackling things now I would never have dreamed of before. I’m doing a lot of writing. I’m producing and acting in amateur dramatics, and I travel around lecturing at evening classes.”

How does it feel to be a quiz contestant? What is it like to walk into a TV studio, a complete stranger, and be challenged on general knowledge in front of millions of viewers?

“I was fortunate in one way,” said Rodney. “I was called to the studio one week, and waited behind the cameras for my turn to come. It didn’t. I was not needed that week. The champion was still going strong.

“And I had a grand time. Everybody connected with the show — producer, quizmaster Jeremy Hawk, technicians, and the people behind the scenes — was very kind. My nervousness soon disappeared.

“The ice had been broken for me. When I went to the studio the following week, I felt completely at home. I went on the air, completely forgot the cameras, and concentrated on the game.

“Brainier men and women challenged me and lost. Not because they didn’t know the answers, but because the strain momentarily overcame them.

“They were camera-shy. One challenger was a post-graduate student of political science, a First Class Honours man. He was doing well against me until a camera moved in close to him. I saw him tremble and sway backwards away from the lens. He fluffed every question after that.”

Does knowing how to play noughts-and-crosses help? “Definitely,” said Rodney. “A Liverpool University man I know who entered for the quiz could get all the answers right, but he was no good at noughts-and-crosses. He lost.”

What about viewer-reaction? Is the champion a TV star overnight? Any fan letters?

“No begging letters, surprisingly enough. I expected a few when I reached the £2,000 mark about Christmas time, but I didn’t get one.

“I had two abusive letters telling me I had won enough and should withdraw to give somebody else a chance. I ignored them.

“I was recognised wherever I went. Shop assistants would hurry to serve me, and passers-by would stop me in the street to congratulate me. When I was on holiday at Oban, in Scotland, a woman approached and asked me if I was Rodney Sowerby. She had a 5s [25p in decimal, about £5 after inflation] bet with her husband that she was right.”

Has a schoolteacher any advantage as a contestant in Criss Cross Quiz?

“I think I had.” said Rodney, “because my special interests are history and geography. And so many of the categories in the quiz were from these subjects: kings, queens, mountains, rivers, capitals, countries, politicians.”

But isn’t it risky for a schoolteacher to chance his reputation before the eyes of the nation?

“The boys at school rarely mentioned it.” said Rodney. “One evening I failed a question on kings. I told Jeremy Hawk: ‘I’ll never hear the end of this at school.’ But not a word from anybody!

“I got into trouble one night, though. I didn’t know the name of one of Pat Smythe’s horses.

“When I got home, my daughters, 11-year-old Loraine and eight-year-old Karen, were disgusted with me. I don’t think they’ve ever really forgiven me for that!”

The post What it’s like to be… a £2,000 Criss Cross Quiz man appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

OLD Harrovian Jeremy Hawk sipped a glass of white wine in the Public Schools’ Club overlooking London’s Green Park and said: “Frankly, old boy, this is something quite new for me.

We were discussing Jeremy’s appearance on ITV as a quizmaster. For actor Hawk is now seen regularly as compere of Granada’s highly successful Criss Cross Quiz.

As the programme is screened on three evenings a week — Monday, Wednesday and Friday — Jeremy has become the most frequently televised compere on ITV.

His selection came after weeks of secret tests, before studio audiences, for which many of TV’s top personalities entered. Students from Manchester University appeared as contestants — at two guineas a show. Each try-out was studied by Granada executives.

After watching five programmes, Eddie Pola, Granada’s variety chief, announced himself satisfied, and signed up Hawk.

How does TV’s latest quizmaster like the series? “For one thing,” he says, “it doesn’t insult the public’s intelligence. Yet it still has excitement and entertainment. The contestants have a choice of nine subjects in each game, and there is no limit to the amount a contestant can win.”

After Harrow, 39-year-old Jeremy, who was born in South Africa, had a short spell in his step-father’s wool business in Yorkshire. “I hated it,” he said. “I used to stand on the bales and sing Any Old Iron. The workers loved it — but it held up production.”

His family compromised and sent him to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first job was assistant stage manager with Bournemouth Repertory at £3 a week. Jobs with other repertory companies followed, until revue writer Eric Maschwitz saw him at Reading and picked him for the 1940 revue New Faces at the Comedy Theatre. Here, he sang and danced with Betty Ann Davies.

Other West End producers engaged him as a juvenile lead in the early years of the war. One of these productions was for the Arts Theatre in the John Jacques Bernard classic Springtime of Others.

Although Criss Cross Quiz gives him the first chance to appear on ITV in his own show, Jeremy has contributed to the success of other programmes. George and Alfred Black engaged him to direct the comedy sequences in Get Happy, the series which established comic Arthur Haynes as a TV star. He also appeared as a performer in its successor, The Arthur Haynes Show.

Before that, he partnered Benny Hill in two Sunday Night at the London Palladium programmes.

Jeremy’s partnership with Benny, however, isn’t the first time he has worked on stage with a comedian. For three years he appeared, with the late Sid Field, in the role of Dr. Sanderson in the comedy Harvey at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

While Jerry Desmonde was compering The 64,000 Question, Jeremy replaced him temporarily as “straight man” to comedian Norman Wisdom. Now, Jeremy follows Jerry and gives up comedy partnerships for quizmastering. From Jerry Desmonde’s success, it looks as though the best training for the specialised role of a TV quizmaster comes from that seldom acknowledged yet all-important occupation … a comedian’s “straight man”.

The post Jeremy Hawk – the quiet quizmaster appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IT is back to school again for Junior Criss Cross Quiz this week — after a fortnight’s “holiday” for Wimbledon.

Back to a new “teacher,” too. Quizzing quiz-kids in the junior version of this general knowledge noughts and crosses game will be Canadian TV personality Elaine Grand.

Says Elaine, whose mother was once a schoolmistress in Manchester: “I am thrilled and looking forward to working on the show.

“I love doing TV with youngsters. That is why I have always enjoyed myself as chairman of We Want An Answer.

“Children are far more at ease and unpretentious on TV. They are not as much affected by the cameras as adults.

“I always find with We Want An Answer that they ask far better, more searching, questions than any adults would have done. It is the freshness of the vision of youth, I suppose. Instead of asking the questions they feel they ought to ask a celebrity, they ask what they really want to know.

“They ask bluntly, and often boldly, for the facts.

“With a TV quiz like Junior Criss Cross Quiz youngsters react much better than adults. They play it as a game purely and simply, with nothing important at stake.

“When an adult is told his next question is worth £1,000 he is scared. All that money represents a new car or the down payment on a house.

“A child would not see it that way. A sum like £1,000 is beyond his comprehension — it is right outside his experience. So juniors play this as a straight game of noughts and crosses.”

Not that the youngsters get money, anyway — they play for points that are convertible into prizes.

Criss Cross producer Clement Cave likes working on the junior version.

“Youngsters are more telegenic than adults,” he says. “They are less inhibited. They react so much more naturally to things happening around them.

“Age is important, too. We restrict our contestants to the over 12 and under 15 group. And we usually find that the brightest are on the younger end of the scale. Our biggest prize-winner was a girl of 12½ years who built up 850 points. When they are coming up to 14 they are beginning to look at life almost like grown-ups. They are at that awkward between-age, and beginning to get self-conscious.

“Junior contestants seem to go into the game with a firm determination to win as much as they can. Adults tend to be more cautious. They win a few games and then withdraw. The youngsters will press on. Apart from their winnings, I think they want to make the most of being on TV.”

Cave insists on his junior contestants not being called children on the programme. “We call ourselves Junior Criss Cross Quiz. We never remind contestants or viewers that this is a show for children. We want to avoid any suggestions that we are talking down to children.”

Choosing contestants for the junior show is tougher than for the adult version. Contestant-organiser, Reg Marsh, explained: “Children from all over the country write asking to be on the programme. But we have to restrict contestants to those living in a 10 mile radius of the studios; it is important that they should not miss school to be on TV.

“We audition challengers about 20 at a time, and, by giving them a 25-question test paper, make sure they are the standard we need. Then we have to ask education authorities if they have any objection.

“We give contestants the VIP treatment at the studios. A member of the staff collects them from school in a taxi and sees them home after the show.”

Examples of the prizes that can be won: 50 points wins a pair of skates; 100 points a boy’s tool kit; 150 points a record-player; 200 points a cinecamera; 250 points and upwards a portable typewriter.

Biggest prize-winner in the programme so far is 12½-year-old Rosalind Hilson, a doctor’s daughter, from Ashton, near Manchester. Her 850 points won her two prizes — a radiogram and a bicycle. That’s Rosalind in action at the top of the page.

The post It’s fun being a quiz-kid appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE future shines bright for Criss Cross Quiz interrogator Jeremy Hawk. Next Friday he makes his 74th appearance in the game which he launched on television seven months ago. And both the senior and junior versions seem likely to last for a long time to come.

Criss Cross Quiz has raised Jeremy Hawk to the top ranks of TV personalities. This winter his services are eagerly sought to open new stores. And no doubt when summer is with us he will be asked to do something similar at garden parties.

Needless to say, Hawk is immensely enjoying his sudden rise to fame. He loves his work, the chance it gives him of continually meeting new and interesting people, the drama of a well-fought game, and the tension and excitement when the total in the winnings box passes the four-figure mark.

He told me in particular how delighted he is at the success of Junior Criss Cross Quiz.

“I’ve met all kinds of contestants in these two programmes,” he said. “But I can say quite confidently that the children taking part in the junior edition are far easier to work with — and I should think, from the expressions on their faces, they are often much more enjoyable to watch.

“They are not nearly so inhibited as their elders. They are bright, cheerful, confident. And they get a kick out of the game.”

Hawk himself is relieved to find there are no difficult tongue-twisters among the junior-sized questions prepared for the Wednesday game.

“I’ve had to contend with quite a few in the adult quiz,” he recalled. “The most difficult of all was when I asked a contestant to give me the common word for … sorry, but I still find the name absolutely unpronounceable. Fortunately the man was a scientist and when he saw me getting hopelessly tongue-tied with it he said, ‘Do you mean acetylsalicylic acid? The answer is aspirin.’

“Gilbert Harding, an old friend of mine, once ticked me off for mispronouncing the name of the French mixed fish dish — bouillabaisse. And mother told me off — and quite rightly, too — for not pronouncing Haydn correctly.

“In both cases I was conscious I had said it wrong, but was too late to correct myself. Of course, I never see the questions before a programme, so I have no means of checking these things.

“A number of the questions include foreign words, so it is perhaps just as well that I have a smattering of a few languages. But I still came unstuck when I had to read out Prokofiev. It is a wonderful Russian name, but I had so much trouble that in the end I had to spell it out!”

Judging by the size of his fan mail, however, viewers don’t mind these occasional slips. “Yes, I get lots of letters,” he agreed, “and they have taught me that I have to be careful what I say during the programme.”

An important part of Hawk’s work is putting contestants at their ease. “It starts when I meet them for the first time at supper,” he said.

“Then we have a run through the programme – with dummy questions, of course — to get them used to the cameras.”

Hawk has received many letters from contestants after they have been on the programme thanking him for the considerate way he looked after them when they were facing the cameras.

But on only two occasions has he met them later. “Once, I was visiting my mother in a London hospital and I bumped into one of our winners there to see his father, who was also a patient.

“Then there was an out-of-work salesman we had on the programme. I mentioned this fact in the hope that it might help him get a job. The other day I was walking down a street and just by chance saw the young man in a showroom window and now he’s a car salesman.”

The post Answers are child’s play for the kids appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

PAT McHUGH, the vivacious, 22-year-old Concentration hostess, has had a variety of jobs since she left school a little more than six years ago.

She has worked as a dentist’s receptionist, in a cocktail bar, as a policewoman, nurse, shorthand typist (with a bus company, an undertaker and an aircraft firm) and model.

“All good experience,” she says. “But right now I’m concentrating on being my own boss. I hope to be able to go into business at the end of this year. It all depends on how much money I’ve saved by then.”

What sort of business? Pat thought for a moment, then said, slowly: “Well, I haven’t quite made up my mind yet. I feel that I’m pretty good at selling things to people, and I’d very much like to own a gown shop.

“On the other hand, I may just invest my money in some property and leave it at that.”

Pat’s good looks and trim figure have won her a string of beauty titles, appearances in TV’s Holiday Town Parade — and cash prizes, too.

“Twenty pounds here, twenty pounds there … it all helps,” says Pat, who has just won a preliminary heat in another national beauty contest — for “Miss England”—and will appear at the finals in London later this month.

“When I first started on the modelling course I used to wonder if I should ever make it. I used to get up at 7am to go to my job in Chester from my home near Mold, in North Wales.

“Then I went to the modelling school in the evening. After doing all the strenuous exercises, I was almost asleep on my feet as 1 walked the last two miles home—the bus service finished hours before I got anywhere near Mold.

“My mother wasn’t so sure that I had made the right decision, but my father backed me up and now everything’s fine — I’ve no regrets.”

She added: “Of course, there are some days when I wonder whether it’s all worth it … everybody gets a fit of the blues occasionally … but then a nice job comes along and every thing in the garden is lovely.

“I manage to keep busy, and I enjoy life. It’s exciting. A model’s job isn’t a steady one by any means. There’s no wage packet every Friday. But if you like meeting people — and I most certainly do — it is worthwhile.”

Pat’s busy life does not leave her much time for hobbies. But when she is at home in her own three-room flat in Liverpool she likes to read or listen to records.

“I’ve got a very wide selection, but I enjoy the slow and easy numbers most. Music helps to release the tension after a long day.”

Occasionally, Pat goes ice skating. “I’m afraid I’m not good at it. They say it’s excellent for the figure – but I’m not so sure. I suppose it all depends on whether you can stay on your feet or not!”

There was a mischievous twinkle in Pat’s grey-green eyes as she rubbed a recently-bruised elbow.

Then Pat announced that she had just made one of the biggest changes in her life. “My hair,” she said. “I’ve changed the colour from auburn to strawberry blonde — and I have been worried to death.

“It’s a big step for a girl to take, you know. The night before I came to the studios for the show I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering what people would say.

“A new hair-do is as good as a tonic to a girl, but a change of colour is a bit drastic.”

And do people like it?

“The verdict seems to be about 90 per cent ‘Yes’ and 10 per cent ‘No,’ so I’m quite relieved. Most of those who said ‘Yes’ were men, and I’m very glad about that, because they tell the truth when they are talking about women.

“I think women tend to be dishonest when they are asked to give an opinion about another woman, though I must admit that a hairdresser girl friend of mine said it was marvellous, and that made me very happy.”

What about men and marriage? Pat drew herself up to her full height of 67 inches, looked at me and said: “I’m not interested in men. I’m much too busy working.”

But there was a smile on her face as she said it.

The post Concentrating on Pat McHugh appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A WELL-KNOWN phrase or saying, the name of a city or country, statesman or TV personality, the title of a popular song, a play or a book — each is a potential picture puzzle for Concentration.

No particular formula is applied in the choice of the puzzles. The only requirement is that they should lend themselves to presentation in words and pictures and that they should not be too easy, not too difficult, for contestants and viewers to solve.

George Cross, producer of Concentration, said: “It is necessary to keep a standard which reaches a general level, but you cannot put a measure on it. Some ideas are discarded because they involve long phrases which would be too unwieldy to present in the available space on the Concentration board.

“On the other hand, if the puzzles were too easy to solve, the show would be lacking in entertainment, for it depends on keen and quick competitors for its appeal.”

Cross finds that almost all his thinking is now in terms of picture puzzles. “The process is almost automatic and has become second nature to me,” he said, and added, “We aim at keeping the drawings uncomplicated so that the puzzles are not cluttered up with too much detail.”

The ideas which have been sketched out roughly as puzzles to be used in the programme are passed each week to Granada graphics artist Bert Harrop.

But the puzzles that Harrop works on are never used in the show the same week for the heavy curtain of security that shrouds the programme ensures that only one man — producer Cross — knows which will be used and when.

To ensure that this strict security is maintained, a carefully thought out routine takes effect from the moment the rough sketches arrive on Harrop’s drawing board.

He marks out the puzzle on the 30 separate pieces of cardboard bearing numbers corresponding to those on the Concentration board.

But there are never more than six pieces of the puzzle on his drawing board at any one time so that anyone looking over his shoulder would see only a small part of the complete picture.

“And that wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone,” said Harrop. “For instance, the vertical stroke of a letter T may coincide with the intersection of four parts of the puzzle and anyone seeing a mark on the corner of one section would have no clue even to the letter, let alone the word which it begins.”

When he has completed a puzzle the 30 sections go back to Cross and are locked away in his office safe … in sealed envelopes.

The steady stream of completed puzzles are stock piled so that if anyone had seen one it would still be impossible to find out when it would be used.

Two hours before the show is due to go on the air he unlocks the safe and takes out five or six puzzles.

The sections of the first puzzle to be used in the show are split into vertical columns and handed to the men who load the Concentration board, so that each has no possible chance of solving the completed puzzle.

The operation begins with only just enough time to complete it before the show is on the air.

At this stage, producer Cross is still the only man who knows the answer to the puzzle because the men work from the rear of the board and see the triangular sections — each carrying a part of the puzzle, a prize and a number — presenting to them the puzzle “face” in a series of back-to-front squares.

When the puzzle is rotated to its correct position for a last-minute check to ensure that it has been properly mounted and that no plus signs have been missed out only Cross and Harrop see it.

Cross makes the final check and Harrop does any necessary retouching.

And, as compere David Gell opens the show, Cross hands out another puzzle which is loaded into a second board. “I always have more puzzles than are needed, so there is never a chance of anyone finding out which one is being used,” he said.

Now concentrate

These four Concentration puzzles were specifically drawn for TV Times. If you can’t solve them, the answers are below.

1. Epilogue to Capricorn
2. Take Your Pick
3. Armchair Theatre
4. Concentration

The post Meet the Concentration puzzle man appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

SAID Count Basie: “So many jazzmen were being called King that I decided it was time I had a nickname”

We had just entered the Granada studio for a rehearsal of his hour-long Personal Appearance, which viewers will see on Wednesday.

The Basie group will be the first American big band to be starred in a British television show.

As the Count eased himself on to the piano stool, he told me his first name is really William.

He got it 58 years ago when he was born in Red Bank, New Jersey.

The Count rippled some fast single notes, stabbed the air with an index finger — and the entire 16 piece band swung into climactic sound.

The impact is as solid as the Rockies.

It has been that way for a quarter of a century. No matter how many musicians come and go within the orchestra — and many of the greatest names in jazz have worked under him at one time or another — the stirring Basie beat never wavers.

What kind of man is this thick-set maestro soon to be seen by ITV’s millions?

In a business which is often tough and always demanding, the Count moves around with a smiling affability and a built-in calm which few things, if any, seem able to disrupt.

Dave Lambert, the red-bearded leader of the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross singing team — you’ll see them, too, in the Basie show — told me:

“The Count is marvellous to work with. Mind you. he’s the boss all right, but he never becomes excited. If anybody gets out of line he just jerks his head sideways … and glares. I guess that’s always enough!”

There’s a story among musicians who have known him for years. Once a saxophonist, tickled by a hurriedly whispered private joke, laughed out loud during a performance, instantly, the Count slammed out a weird chord on the piano — and the saxman shot bolt upright as if his chair had suddenly become red hot.

For his television show the Count brings in a new singer whom he recently discovered in an obscure New York club.

She is Irene Reid, from Savannah, Georgia, a vivacious 31-year-old and the mother of four sons and a daughter.

Irene, who started singing at high school, is enthusiastic about working with the Basie band.

“It’s all so wonderful I can hardly believe it,” she said. “Hearing that tremendous rhythm section behind is just about the biggest thrill of my life.”

The Count learned piano from his mother. When he grew up he went on tour with a vaudeville group, finally landing in Kansas City.

“I was just a kind of honky-tonk piano player with the show and we didn’t have any big names in the cast and we didn’t do much business,” he recalled.

“When, inevitably, the show folded, I knew I couldn’t do any good sitting around feeling sorry for myself and wishing I’d never left home, so I started making the rounds to see if there might be a spot in town for a piano player.”

He found one — playing accompaniments to silent films. “I played for everything and anything, from horse operas to passionate romance films — great experience.” he said.

Then he joined the almost legendary Benny Moten band. When Moten died in 1935 the Count formed his own group — and a radio broadcast from a small Kansas City station shot him to the stardom which has never left him down all the changing years.

Unlike some musicians, he doesn’t look down on all contemporary trends. The Twist, for instance.

“I like it,” declared the Count. “It’s good, swinging music for dancing — and basically, jazz is music for dancing. Yeah, you can tell everybody I’m for it.”

British bandleader Ray Ellington had dropped in to listen to the television rehearsal. Peering down like a friendly cliff, he said suddenly: “This is gilt-edged jazz.”

It was almost time for the show to go into another full rehearsal. Cameras were re-positioned, microphones regrouped. The subdued chatter of technicians and visiting musicians faded.

There was a tense hush. Then once again the rippled single-note introduction. A split second in which time seemed to hang suspended in the hot, still air.

Then the whole band was surging, like a vast, throbbing powerhouse, into One O’Clock Jump — the number most closely linked with Basie’s name.

I predict that in addition to the band, the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross singers will make a sensational impact on viewers. Perhaps the more appropriate word is unique!

The fetching Annie Ross who appeared several years back in the London West End revue, Cranks, has lived in America on and off for many years.

The Count, by the way, is happily married and has an 18-year-old daughter. She isn’t a musician.

I suggested that perhaps one in the family was enough.

The Count chuckled.

“Sometimes,” he said amiably, “sometimes it gets to be almost too much!”

The post Count down for Basie appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

ROUND the door of the dressing-room peered a face with toothbrush moustache and dark, slicked-down hair.

“I was about to have a nap, but welcome in,” said top trumpeter Eddie Calvert, who, with singer Marion Ryan, is among the stars of Personal Appearance on Wednesday.

“Sleep?” I said.

“You can sleep after,” said Marion, my companion and guide through the studios. “We won’t keep you long.”

“O.K. then,” said Eddie, who flopped into an easy chair and prepared to be interviewed.

“I started playing a musical instrument when I was seven,” he said. “I taught myself.

“No one even knew I was learning to play a musical instrument. I used to play my dad’s cornet when he was out. He caught me one night.”

Eddie grimaced at a painful memory.

“I never learned to play a musical instrument,” said Marion. “Couldn’t even tinkle on a piano. I never had any lessons — we were too poor.”

“My father bought me my first cornet,” continued Eddie. “It was either that or putting a padlock on his own. And when I was 11 I joined Preston Town Silver Band.”

“As a mascot?” asked Marion.

“Certainly not,” said Eddie. “Lots of lads of that age play in prize bands.”

Eddie told us how he got into the Forces. “My father decided that the Army was the only place for me to complete my musical education. I joined the Territorials when I was 12. I had to lie like a trooper to convince them I was 14,” he said.

“But my military career came to a sticky end. I found myself called up and given a job as a despatch rider. In the middle of the blackout in 1941 my bike went slap into the back of a three ton truck. I was in hospital for four and a half months. When I was in hospital I did some thinking. I decided I wanted to go into show business.”

Eddie worked with many top bands — Oscar Rabin, Billy Ternent, Geraldo — eventually became musical director of a leading London restaurant.

“I booked lots of top artists,” he said. “I turned down some too. I once turned down a young fellow named Dickie Valentine who was trying to get started in show business.” Eddie blossomed out as a solo artist about that time. His first big break came in 1953.

“Sheer coincidence, the whole thing,” he said. “I was driving home in my car, arguing with my wife about a new German tune sweeping the Continent.

“Norrie Paramor, who has his own orchestra, was driving home in his car, arguing with his wife about the same song.

“Both car radios were on — and during the course of the arguments the tune was played. It was too strong a coincidence to ignore. So we decided to record the tune. Remember it?”

We remembered.

It was called O Mein Papa and sold 5,000,000 records.

The post Marion Ryan meets ‘mein papa’! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

PAUL ANKA, star of Granada’s Personal Appearance on Wednesday, is an agreeable youngster who seems remarkably composed by the fact that, at 20, he earns a million-and-a-half dollars a year.

Even more remarkable, he has reached this palmy income bracket in just four years. Only the tax man is likely to halt the flow of Anka dollars to any appreciable extent.

For Paul is something of a one-man band. He doesn’t have to pay a lyric writer, music writer, or even a song publisher. He does the lot himself.

Two American artists make their first appearance on British television with Paul in this hour of music and comedy — 16-year-old vocalist Linda Scott and comedian Johnny Carson.

Linda, who will sing Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off with Anka, soared to success a year ago with her first recording of the song I’ve Told Every Little Star, which sold 1,000,000 copies.

She won a Golden Disc. At 16, Paul did the same thing with his first recording, Diana.

Johnny Carson, who has had his own television show in America for the past four years, has been described by newspaper critics as “a logical successor to Bob Hope and Jack Benny.”

“In this programme,” said Irvin Feld, Paul’s personal manager, “you are going to see the new Paul Anka.

“When he was in Britain nearly four years ago. he sang his current hits which were aimed specifically at the teenagers. Songs like Diana.

“But since then, Paul has been undergoing a vast change. He has been bridging the gap between teenagers and an adult audience.

“The result is that he now appeals to audiences of all ages. We have even given him a facial change. We had a plastic surgery job done on his nose which makes him better looking than ever,” said Mr. Feld.

“His voice, too, has a fullness and a range it never had in the beginning. Even his song writing has changed. He is writing mature lyrics now.

“In Wednesday’s show he will include a 15-minute spot in which he will sing only established ballads and some of his own songs written in the same vein.

“It will be like telling the story of his life in song, a sort of potted biography.”

The story of his life is really his four-year-old career. Before Diana put him on the map, Paul was just another school kid who had dabbled at singing from the age of ten.

His family are Syrians, although Paul was born in Ottawa, where his career began to open up after a New York record company heard him singing on the radio.

He talks assuredly and frankly: “I’m not a brash kid,” he says. “You have to try and stay reasonably humble about success.

“I started out as a Rock ‘n’ Roll singer and, let’s face it, I owed my success to the teenagers. But I knew in my mind that I had to bridge the gap and get the adults to accept me, too.”

He drummed his fingers assertively on the table. “I don’t kid myself. I’m just out of the kindergarten stage. I’ve got a long way to go.

“But I figure it this way. The all-time greats, fellows like Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby … well, they have to retire some time. Younger people have got to take over.

“The freakish thing about this business is that you can make a lot of money. I’ve done just that, and it’s nice to have the money.

“But, honestly, the accomplishment of becoming a great entertainer means a whole lot more to me right now.”

In America. Paul has been described as a “sort of sophisticated Rock ’n’ Roller.”

“In a way,” says Paul, “that’s a compliment, I guess. It shows my development is being noticed. But really people say this about me because they don’t know yet how to describe me.

“It’s true I was the youngest among the kids like Fabian, Tommy Sands and Frankie Avalon to appear in night clubs in the States.

“This is why they call me sophisticated. Playing the plush night clubs in America is a measure of success. So in that sense I’m a pioneer.”

Paul summed up: “This is quite something, but it doesn’t scare me. At my age I suppose I should be scared by success. But I have never got into anything that I didn’t like.

“I love what I’m doing too much to be worried about it.”

The post Now for the new Paul Anka appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A PHONE rings in the Northern Newscast office at the Granada TV Centre in Manchester. News editor David Plowright answers it, then turns to reporter Terry Dobson and says: “Four feet snow drifts on the Snake Pass. Take the radiophone car — and hurry!”

Dobson grabs his overcoat; rushes to the waiting car. The engine of the black saloon is ticking over as he slides into the seat beside the driver. Off towards the hills — and another eyewitness story.

Granada’s car was the first in the North to be fitted with the new telephone equipment. It has given on-the-spot communication in remote country districts where telephones are rare.

As the car races along slush-covered roads, Dobson makes his first call to base. “Car A102 calling exchange … car A102 calling exchange.”

Twenty miles away on Winter Hill, only a stone’s throw from the ITA transmitter, stands the GPO receiving station through which Dobson’s call passes to the new Peterloo exchange in Manchester.

Dobson, in the car, and Plowright, in the office, discuss how the story shall be treated. Then Dobson relaxes as the long climb to the snow-clad moors begins.

Another hazard lies ahead — patches of fog close in on the narrow road that twists over the Snake Pass. The car edges cautiously round hairpin bends, bumping along over rutted snow, dodging drifts which in places have hidden the low stone walls marking the roadside.

Suddenly the headlights of a stationary lorry are seen. The car stops and Dobson steps out — into a knee-deep snowdrift. The lorry driver tells him of hold-ups on his run from Sheffield. Back into the car goes Dobson to report progress — by phone.

Farther along the road are more lorries. Some are moving; some have been stuck for hours. Film cameraman Steve Stephens records the battle against the weather as lorry men help each other to dig their vehicles free from snow.

As we watch, Dobson tells me: “This is the sort of story we get right through the winter. The weather is always news.”

Dobson phones his story from the car. This way it can be quickly assessed against other news pouring in.

The typewriters of copy typists Barbara McDonald and Freda Roberts are chattering out more reports from the towns and villages bounded by Carlisle and Middlesbrough to the North and Barmouth and Grantham to the South.

Every correspondent is pinpointed on Plowright’s wall map by flags names and telephone numbers for and easy reference.

On another wall is a chart into 20-year old newsroom secretary Anne Beaty sticks coloured pins denoting the number of times cities and towns have been mentioned in the bulletins week.

“This gives us a picture at a glance of the newsiest spots in our area and the places which might yield good, off-beat stories,” said Plowright.

“We are a team which goes into people’s homes every night to tell them in a simple, but vigorous, manner what has been happening.

“The news we aim at is not all death and disaster. We try to keep a balance by using the lighter, more human items, the stories with a touch of glamour or oddity them.

“We concentrate on getting material which has not appeared in the evening newspapers so that we have a fresh and lively bulletin.

“That is why, each night, we present a tailpiece to the news that is unusual or amusing. These are items which lend themselves to a brief, humorous comment from the newscaster.

“We work to a five o’clock deadline for film and are proud that we have given pictures of an event which has taken only 45 minutes earlier.

“News stories, of course, can be accepted right up to time we go on the air.”

Keeping Northern viewers in the news picture is a tough but exciting job that has taken Dobson and his colleague, Don Kerr, thousands of miles, often in trying conditions.

Dobson and Kerr write the stories the and the film commentaries needed for the six-minute bulletin. “We always write more than are actually needed so that we can pick out the best just before we go on the air,” Dobson told me.

He has checked through the reel of film shot by Stephens on the Snake Pass and decided, in consultation with film editor Dick Thomas, the sequence and running time.

In the newsroom, urgency increases as programme time nears. Newscaster Brian Trueman arrives just as Plowright is shuffling through a wad of stories for a suitable news tailpiece.

The room is now full of people. Final checks and changes are made. Trueman sits in the tiny studio. A red light flashes … and another Northern Newscast begins.

The post Car A102 speeds the news appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

JEREMY LUBBOCK, who brings a new face and a new style of playing to Granada’s Piano Pops, is including many “oldies” from the pages of composers like Gershwin, Rodgers and Jerome Kern.

“And why not?” he said, “Their numbers may not be in the Top Twenty, but some of them are still as popular as ever. An up-to-the-minute example is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which is enjoying new lease of life.”

Not that Lubbock’s appreciate of music is restricted to any particular style. His musical education has ranged from harpsichord classics to the latest thing in “rock.”

It all started when Jeremy was a toddler. The Lubbock home in Berkshire was the centre of musical life in the neighbourhood. At the age of four he began to explore the keyboards of the two pianos his parents owned.

He had a strictly classical upbringing. Beethoven and Bach were his childhood heroes.

But as Jeremy grew older his taste changed to lighter compositions. “My preference,” he says, “is for tunes that are of popular appeal and yet have a lasting value … and it is my opinion that there are only half-a-dozen people who have written tunes that come into this category.”

Lubbock admits that none of the tunes he has written has reached the high standards he has set. His own contributions to music so far have included jingles for television commercials and a score for a short film.

He has also written a blues number, which had its first public hearing in Piano Pops. It took him 10 minutes to compose and is called Nameless. “It is tremendously difficult to find a title for a blues, so I just took the easy way out,” he says.

Lubbock is 6ft 3in tall and in the studios is provided with a grand piano that matches his proportions. But he tends to dwarf the miniature piano he uses for rehearsing the programme in his flat in London’s Holland Park.

This is an unusual instrument, decorated in Chinese lacquer — jet black with gilt illustrations of traditional Chinese figures with a background of rustic bridges, pagodas and willow trees.

Lubbock, now 28, was originally meant to be an architect. It was only three years ago that he decided that he wanted to be a full-time musician.

“I’d always had a hankering to move into show business, but it took me a long time to take the plunge,” he said. “Whether I took the right decision remains to be seen, but right now I don’t regret the change.”

Even so, he’s not taking any chances. On the drawing board in his flat are the plans for a shop he is designing for one of his friends. “An interesting project which I cannot resist doing,” is how he describes it.

Since his appearances in The Sunday Break last year, he has spent three months playing in a Paris night club.

“I suppose it was good experience,” he says, “but I didn’t care much for the hours. I was on duty from nine o’clock at night until four or five o’clock in the morning. Then I would have breakfast and take a swim in a floating pool moored in the River Seine before going to bed.”

The post New style old tunes appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE teenagers, who, after all, are the people who dictate the trend in popular music, seem to be getting a little tired of rock ‘n’ roll.

By that I do not mean rock ‘n’ roll is dying. Just that in 1960 we shall be hearing less of it. The time is ripe for something in music — a new sound, a new gimmick – something original.

The trouble is that nearly all the musical permutations have been done. The cycle has been round about 20 times already. But if someone can think up a new angle and get out just one recording I am sure it would catch on. The public is always willing to accept a change — so long as it has something to offer that is worthwhile.

At the moment the swing is towards the more melodic numbers. I think the big bands are going to return to favour, too. Proof of their unflagging popularity lies in the fact that bands like those of Ted Heath, Glenn Miller, and Joe Loss are still heard every day on record request programmes.

They set the style when melody and popular music was well into the “swing” phase.

That phase is coming back. It is under way already. I know this is true because I get hundreds of letters from the people who watch Piano Pops telling me how nice it is to hear a good tune.

I am sure that 1960 will be a year in which there will be a flood of this kind of music from Britain’s Tin Pan Alley.

There are plenty of good writers around, like Tolchard Evans, Michael Carr and Robert Farnon, who can produce tuneful music that appeals to a wide public — not just to the teenagers but to the parents and elder brothers and sisters.

There will be catchy tunes that make everybody want to sing — music that stays in the mind day after day, the tunes you can’t get out of your head, that set office boys whistling as they walk along the street and office managers singing in their baths. Everyone I talk to says the same. The number with a melody is becoming more and more popular with musicians.

At one time I refused to play rock ‘n’ roll, but I got so many demands for it that I had to play it. Now, the pattern of popular music is changing, slowly, towards the sweeter numbers. And I am pleased.

It points to a return of the romantic music that was so popular just after the war — the gorgeous tunes with words like “moon” and “June.”

The Top Twenty is going to be crammed with this kind of song in 1960, because these songs are easy to listen to and to remember.

They are the songs with a melody that lingers on — the sort of tunes I play each week on TV.

I hope that in Piano Pops I have been able to help people forget some of the cares and worries of the world for a few moments and perhaps recall, through some favourite tune, a happy occasion.

The post Catchy Tunes are catching on again appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IN a smoke-filled Hongkong dance hall a young British Army lieutenant was persuaded to sing a number with the band. He got enthusiastic applause, and resolved then to take up a new career as a “pop” singer.

Now, two years later, the lieutenant, Gary Marshal, is established on the British popular music scene. On Wednesday, he sings with the Ted Heath Orchestra in Granada’s Bandstand. He has reached an objective.

After Sandhurst, and winning his commission, he was posted to Hongkong. There, after his military duties, he wanted something to do with his spare time, so he applied for an announcing job with the English language commercial radio station – and got it.

“They took me on as a board announcer, doing 14 hours a week of news and disc jockeying in the evenings,” said Marshal. “After a few months I was not only a board announcer, I was a bored announcer.”

The other English language station, the non-commercial Radio Hongkong, offered him more work, so he switched stations. He then found time to write two newspaper columns a week — a short story and a record review feature.

He courted and married an American girl born in China. “We now have a year-old son, Jamie, who — I swear — was born with a real cool haircut. He loves music and already looks like an out-of-work tenor sax player,” said Marshal.

How did he find the time for soldiering, married life, radio work and newspaper writing? His explanation: “I am a ‘night person’ and don’t like going to bed early.”

Marshal left the Army in August, 1958, at the end of his five-year term. A month later, a friend took him along to an agent. The agent looked up, noted his good looks, and said: “Bernard Delfont’s Sunday Night at the Prince Of Wales … The Frankie Howerd Show.”

Marshal, astounded, said “Fine.” And that was how he found himself playing a “wide boy” in a sketch with Frankie Howerd on ITV.

“After the show I dashed home and asked my wife ‘How was I?’ She said ‘I blinked and missed you!’” said Gary.

Later, he acted in TV commercials. “One of them was made at the Guards depot, Pirbright, where I found myself wearing a steel helmet, a pack on my back, and all the gear I hadn’t worn in years,” he said.

He went into cabaret, where he insisted on using his own drummer and pianist. “The extra expenditure was worth it,” he says. ITV talent spotters saw him and, as a result, he appeared in a number of shows. He also landed a recording contract.

Singing in front of the Ted Heath Orchestra in Bandstand is for Gary Marshal the realisation of a long-standing ambition. It was always his favourite band and, two years ago, hearing that Ted Heath was looking for a male singer, he took him a recording.

He said I was as good as any he’d heard, but there was a technical fault in my voice.” said Marshal. “He told me to come back when I had got rid of this fault. But I never found time to re-apply. Now, at last, I am to sing with him.”

The post Lt Marshal gains his objective appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

AS far as the money went, it didn’t matter to the 16-year-old coloured girl whether she cooked hot meal or sang hot songs. She was paid 35 dollars a week either way.

Donna Hightower, who sings as a guest in the next two Granada Bandstand programmes, “realised that sleeping all day and doing three or four hours a night in a club was better than standing in front of a stove for eight hours.”

So she threw away her apron, bought a couple of evening gowns and started singing.

For a long time she thought her voice was not good enough to take her to the top. “What, me sing professionally?” she said, and dismissed the idea as a lot of hard work with no returns.

“My father was a musician, and we were very poor,” said Donna. “He was also a farmer. Sometimes he worked his own land; sometimes he worked for others.

“It didn’t seem to make much difference; we were still poor.

“He taught music, too, and could play any instrument he could lay his hands on — harp, piano, accordion, harmonium.

“But I never saw a trumpet or anything like that when I was a kid. I reckon they were out of our class.

“He tried to teach me to read music, but I could never learn.”

Now she wishes she had. For, in addition to singing, Donna composes.

“A tune comes into my head and, as I think of the melody, I make up the words. Then I sing it over and over again until it is photographed in my memory. Then I go to sleep.

“When I wake up I find I’ve forgotten it. But it comes back and I sing it into a tape-recorder.”

It sounds a rough and ready way to compose. But she has reached the Top Twenty in America too often for her methods to be laughed away.

It all began in a Chicago restaurant when a customer asked the girl behind the counter to turn up the radio. There was no radio … Donna was singing over the stove.

The customer persuaded her she had talent, and she started singing at weekends in a club for five dollars. Then a newspaperman took her on a tour of Chicago, trying to get her a booking. They began by asking for 100 dollars a week. They ended by accepting 35.

“A woman from a record company came down and she said I had a kinda unique style,” Donna went on. “I guess I had. I could hardly keep time.”

She recorded, and waited for success to come. But nothing happened.

She went back home to Los Angeles. “I must have been pretty good, because I won a talent contest; and then I made some more records for another company.”

But they brought in little money, so New York was the next stop, “knocking around, doing practically nothing.”

Then, a year ago, she met a group of song-writers, who asked her to make some demonstration records of their songs.

They liked her voice even better than they liked the songs. “We’ll try to get you a recording,” they said.

In her smooth caressing voice Donna told what happened then. “I picked out my best tunes, and we just went in and sorta jammed something. The disc came out last January.”

It was a hit. The 35 dollars a week cook turned out to have a million dollar talent – both as singer and song-writer.

It has brought her to London and soon maybe it will take her to Paris. And though she still likes cooking she is in no hurry to get back to her home in Brooklyn.

“Things are just beginning to break for me,” she said. “I’ll be around for a while.”

Musicians say that this girl, at 24, is a singer’s singer — which is their way of bestowing high praise.

I’m no musician, but Donna Hightower is my kind of singer.

The post From Cooking to Crotchets appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A FIVE-FOOT-NOTHING girl with dark hair and twinkling brown eyes stands in a corner of the studio, her fingers snapping and her feet tapping as the Ted Heath band rehearses.

Viewers will see her next Wednesday as a guest singer in Granada’s Bandstand. Nineteen-year-old Maureen Evans has come a long way from the school plays and concerts in which she appeared at home in Cardiff.

In fact, she has been a success ever since she got her first real taste of show business at the age of 15.

She told me: “I began appearing at local concerts when I was 12. At 15 I was asked to sing two songs at a Lord Mayor’s charity matinee at the New Theatre, Cardiff.

What happened? Maureen scored a big success. The theatre manager signed her up for a week’s variety.

“That was the most thrilling day of my life,” said Maureen, her eyes alight with excitement at the memory.

It was exciting, too. for Maureen’s mother, Mrs Lavinia Evans. She sat in the stalls watching the daughter who had blossomed in three years from just a schoolgirl soprano to “pop” singer.

Maureen switched to “pop” songs because she enjoys them more. It was a switch that led to three summer seasons at Llandudno, many TV appearances and a disc contract.

She confessed: “I suppose it is just as well that I am in show business, because I do not think I could do any other job.

“I got plenty of encouragement from my music and drama teachers at school and produced and acted in a few plays. I enjoyed producing more than acting. But I always wanted to be a singer.”

Maureen loves her work, but she is still a home girl at heart. This commercial traveller’s daughter likes nothing better than to have her family and friends around her.

Travelling about the country is something Maureen detests. She told me: “I have never quite got used to it.

“I was only 15 when I did my first four month summer season.

“Four months! It was the first time I had been away from home, and every night I rang Mother to cheer myself up.

“I love to be with the people I know, and at home I often have my friends in to parties. Sometimes we have three parties in a week.”

She also enjoys lending a hand with the household chores, decorating — “I did out my own room” — and helping her aunt make the dresses she wears on TV.

“If I had not become a singer. I might have gone in for dressmaking,” said Maureen.

For a girl who is only 60 inches high — “I wear 4in heels all the time” — clothes are something of a problem.

Said Maureen: “I have the greatest difficulty when it comes to buying new outfits. That is one reason why my aunt makes most of my dresses.”

The post Home is where the heart is appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

TOP stars of London’s jazz clubs will be seen on Thursday in Granada’s Bandstand. They are the Tony Kinsey Quartet, tenor sax player Ronnie Scott, and pianist Eddie Thompson.

Ronnie Scott recently embarked on a venture that is binding these musicians, and others who have appeared in Bandstand, even closer together: he opened his own jazz club. The Kinsey Quartet have played there and Eddie Thompson is more-or-less the resident pianist.

Eddie Thompson was born blind in 1925. At a Wandsworth school for the blind, he played a few piano duets with George Shearing, who emigrated to America.

“I think we usually played Let’s Have A Basin Full of Fun in G flat — the first key I learnt. They tried to stop me playing jazz at school because they said it was degrading. But my mother bought me records and soon I was collecting early Basies, Shaws, Goodmans and Ellingtons,” Eddie told me.

“So I grew up with the idea of playing jazz for a living. But at another school for the blind, I was trained to be a piano tuner and repairer, a job which has stood me in good stead because some club pianos are appalling. After leaving school I nearly starved for a year, tuning a few pianos, trying to get a job as a musician. Then for six months I landed a regular job as a solo pianist touring as one of Brian Michie’s discoveries.

“After that I did various jobs, including working as a Dixieland pianist with Freddy Randall’s band. Went to the States as part of an exchange scheme for the Louis Armstrong All Stars, who toured Britain.

“America was gruelling — we were put in a rock ’n’ roll show — but very interesting. A year later I went again with Tommy Whittle’s band. I had a marvellous time — even stayed a week with the great pianist Thelonius Monk.”

These days, Eddie is spending his spare time learning to play the saxophone, which he may eventually play professionally. He can read Braille music, but seldom needs to because, like most blind musicians, he has developed an exceptional memory.

He only needs to hear a piece of music once or twice to be able to play it.

Kinsey’s quartet have appeared in earlier Bandstands, but this time Tony will have a different saxophonist.

“Kathleen Stobart used to play tenor with us, but now she has three children and she has had to leave to look after them.” said Tony. “Now, we’ve got Alan Branscombe on alto. The others are Bill LeSage on vibraphone and Joe Muddell on bass.”

Drummer Kinsey told me he has recently moved to a house at Sunbury-on-Thames “where I can play all I want”.

Pianist Denis Wilson’s Trio will also be appearing in the programme. Wilson, who has often broadcast and arranges accompaniments for “pop” songs, says his music has “wide popular appeal and enough ingenuity, I hope, to appeal to musicians.”

The other member of the trio are Frank Clarke (bass) and Alan Ganley drums.

The post Jazzman Eddie keeps ’em on the note appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BRITAIN’S best small bands will play weekly for viewers, beginning on Thursday. The series, presented by Granada, is called Bandstand and the first four programmes will star Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band at one end of the studio and the Ray Ellington Quartet, with Valerie Masters, at the other.

“Each week we’ll have at least one guest. The first will be Don Lusher, the modern trombonist in the country,” director Dave Warwick told me. “The week after, it will be harmonica player Max Geldray, an old friend of Ray Ellington. Then we’ve booked a veteran star, trumpeter Nat Gonella, followed by Johnnie Gray, a good tenor saxophonist with a flair for comedy.

“We will have comedy only where it is involved in the music, as it often is with Ellington. We won’t go in for comperes with a lot of comic patter. The bandleaders will do the announcing and will be encouraged to develop their own personalities.”

Warwick, a blond, outspoken man from Southport, will book jazz and near-jazz groups of all kinds. He knows the subject well because for years he was a dance band drummer and vibraphone player, but he found the going hard as a drummer because the market was glutted — “by about 20,000 people who had learned to play in the Services, fooling around with small groups in NAAFI canteens.”

Whenever he directs a band programme – he did seven of a Humphrey Lyttelton series, Here’s Humph and a dozen Ray Ellington Shows — he does a bit of drumming, strictly for fun, by sitting in with the bands during run-throughs. He looks forward to a reunion with the Lyttelton band later in the Bandstand series.

Others he hopes to have on the show eventually are the Tony Crombie Quartet, Georgia Brown (“a talented singer who recently returned from America, where she has been making records with jazz stars”), trumpeter Kenny Baker, the Dill Jones Trio, Joe (Mr Piano) Henderson and singers Dick Francis, Rosemary Squires and Maxine Daniels.

“Ray Ellington’s original pianist, Dick Katz, has become a manager. I’d like to get him back on one programme to do a solo spot,” Dave Warwick said. “I’d also like to see Ray Ellington’s original girl vocalist Marion Ryan, come back and do a song with Valerie Masters, the girl who replaced her.”

Although there will be a good deal of jazz, Bandstand will not be aimed entirely at teenagers.

“In America, jazz appeals to an older public,” Dave pointed out. He believes Bandstand may make some adults take a stronger interest in it.

“I’ve noticed that teenagers who like jazz even “educate” their parents by pointing out some of the good things to listen for,” he said.

“If you take a well-known number — say, I’ll Be With You In Apple Blossom Time – and play the first eight bars straight you can then go into the most advanced modern jazz idiom and people will appreciate it. But if you start off playing intricate jazz, you won’t hold the audience.”

Some of the guest musicians Granada hope to feature are not necessarily big stars, but they are all well-known in the music world.

“I don’t suppose Don Lusher, for example, means much to the mass of viewers, but every serious fan in the country knows about him,” said Dave.

The programme may not be confined to jazz and dance groups. There may be a gipsy band, or a Trinidad steel band.

“Our policy is flexible,” concluded Warwick. “We don’t know yet whether to concentrate on bands of contrasting styles or groups of the same sort. We would like to hear from viewers about their musical preferences.”

The post For Britain’s best small bands – a weekly… Bandstand appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

When 15-year-old John Bratley went for his first trip on a Grimsby trawler a Granada team went with him. Deckie Learner on Wednesday tells the story of John’s tough, 22-day journey to the Arctic Circle and back with an £8,000 haul of fish. John’s 33-year-old mother MAVIS BRATLEY tells here the story of the Grimsby wives and mothers who wait and worry

I REMEMBER it so well … it was a Tuesday. Television cameramen were busy in the docks filming my 15-year-old John off on his first trawler trip to the Arctic.

But I had lived it all before. My mind went back to when I was a 17-year-old bride watching my husband sail away. This time it was my son.

As I stood on the docks. I remembered the wave of loneliness that swamped over me every time I watched my husband’s trawler diminish into a speck on that unrelenting North Sea. Was all this to happen again?

Surely I should be used to it by now. I was born into a Grimsby fishing family. When I was 14 I was a fish worker. Three years later I married my trawlerman.

I was 17 and from the moment I was married I knew what it was to be lonely.

I saw my husband for three short days every three weeks. Like thousands of other Grimsby wives I lay awake at night listening to the wind howling round the docks, worrying and waiting for the boats to come in.

Then would come the great day. My husband would be home. For three days we painted the town red. Then came that waiting again.

This went on year after year. We had four children, but they saw their father for only six weeks a year. It was a life I had to accept, for the sea was in my husband’s blood. Twice he tried to give it up, but each time he went back.

Last year, ill-health forced him to take a shore job, and for the first time we were together as a family all the time in Carnforth Crescent, Grimsby. At long last my husband was with me and the children.

My dream didn’t last long. For recently, my only son John, said: “I want to go to sea.”

My sleepless nights and days of waiting were about to start again.

One hope I had was that John would go through three weeks of seasickness wishing he had never set eyes on a trawler. Then he would go back to the safe barrow boy’s job he held in the docks.

He had never been on a boat in his life, but had grown to love the sea through hearing his father talk about it. He knew how I felt about it—he also knew I wouldn’t stop him going. He was found a job as deckie learner on board the 800-ton Ross Renown.

But I had five weeks’ grace. John had to go to Grimsby’s nautical school. It was here that he was chosen for a documentary film about life on a trawler.

I was still hoping. I didn’t believe John was really going until he came home with his brand new fisherman’s kit. I didn’t dare tell him how worried I was.

Then came the day. The cameramen lined up to film the farewell. I couldn’t remember half the things I wanted to tell him. He was upset and hurried out without looking back … Another part of my heart had gone out into the North Sea.

The weather at home was terrible. Storms, heavy rains and gale-force winds – I kept waking up at night thinking about him. It was as if the clock had been turned back.

I tried hard to stop myself thinking about the things I knew could happen to the boats out there. I just kept thinking he would be cold and tired and homesick.

I kept saying: “He will be home safe and sound and so fed up that he will never want to go to sea again.”

Then came a letter from John’s firm. I imagined all sorts of things. But it said that John would be home in a couple of days. I waited hopefully to hear that he was a one-trip sailor.

But as soon as he came home I could see he was itching to get back. He had almost grown up overnight. And he hadn’t been seasick!

But I do feel proud of the way he has settled into a tough job.

When he is older I will tell him: “Give up the sea when you marry. Don’t make your wife suffer the life I had to. A woman wasn’t made to watch the sea and wait.”

I’ll tell my daughters, Jean, who is 14, Janet, 10, and seven-year-old Sharon: “Don’t marry a fisherman. It is not worth it for three days’ happiness a month.”

FOOTNOTE. There is a focal point in our home. My husband Arthur and I often glance at the calendar. There is a red ring round the date of John’s next homecoming.

The post The Cruel Wait appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

HE eased his 24 stone weight into a chair. “The fat man will disappear from the earth in the next 30 years,” said Willoughby Goddard.

“I think it’s a certainty, because the doctors are getting far too clever at reducing people’s weight.”

Goddard, one of the great British character actors of TV and films, with a status in Hollywood, too, plays Assistant Police Commissioner Sir Geoffrey Norton in Friday’s The Man in Room 17.

He mopped his brow with a huge red handkerchief. “I’m lighter than I have been for months,” he said. “I was 30st. on Broadway last year.” He played Bumble, the Beadle, in the British musical “Oliver!”

“I had to give the part up. I couldn’t stand another New York summer.” But didn’t New Yorkers flee the city in the humid months? “They do,” he said, taking a mighty draught of lime juice from a tankard, “but the place is swarming with tourists. There is hardly room to stand on the pavements.”

Goddard, well known on TV for his performance as Gessler in William Tell, sheds up to 6st. by going on a “savage diet” every 18 months.

He said: “I punish myself for three months, then eat heartily for the next 15. My life would be miserable if I watched my figure all the time.

“I’ve been lucky, really. I earn a good living from the theatre because I’m enormously fat. It’s the only way that one can cash in on obesity.

“There are plenty of fat extras, of course, but the poor dears can’t act. We are all cast according to our physique, but fat is no use to you unless you can act.

“And even as a fat character actor you are no use until you can play a man of 50. You have to be seething with age and decrepitude. It’s ghastly.

“If you are young and fat you play Billy Bunter, and then there’s nothing else. It takes years to decay sufficiently for an agent to take interest in you.

“I’ve been fortunate in that I entered the theatre in the middle of an era of fat villainy. It started in the early part of the century, and people like myself and Robert Morley have carried it on.

“As long as we’re about, I think fat men will be reasonably fashionable on stage. It’s not a promising future for newcomers, though, because as doctors find new methods of weight reduction there’ll be few fat men about.

“The playwrights will find less work for us to do, and only period parts will be available. That won’t bother me. I shan’t need work by then.”

Goddard, who lives with his wife and six-year-old son in Barnes, Surrey, has played all the classic fat roles, and Falstaff many times.

Without padding? “No,” he said. “The real thing doesn’t look as impressive. Anyway, no fat man should ever be asked to play Falstaff. There’s too much running around.

“Fat men should always play lovers and do nothing but lounge about elegantly. But always the writer sees the fat man as a character who must dash around to make the audience laugh — much to our discomfort.

“That’s the way it is in the theatre today. Fat men run, thin men lounge.”

Would he have done so well in show business if he had not been so fat? “I think so. You’ve got to be able to act as well. I didn’t begin to put on weight until I was 25.”

Did he worry about his weight? “Not any more. I’ve come to terms with myself over the years.

“But if my son shows the slightest sign of obesity, I shall put him on a diet instantly.”

The post Willoughby Goddard sees a THIN future for FAT actors appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Tuesday’s final programme in the action stills series Camera in Action, deals with fashion photography from Victorian times to the present day. And you’ll be seeing pictures by Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Cecil Beaton and David Bailey, the fashion photographer whose camera “made” top model Jean Shrimpton. What makes Bailey a big success?

MAGGIE FRANCE went to see him to find out

AS fashion photographers go, David Bailey has gone a lot further than most. He is just about the most successful and most sought-after of the breed in Britain.

He is essentially a with-it young man — in a world where fantasy and practicality meet head-on: where models become the raw material of the photographer’s craft. His style — tender and exotic — is unmistakable.

For David Bailey the girls he photographs become delicate, ephemeral creatures, unlike the frequent remote and angular women in the pages of the “glossies.”

This, he believes, speaks for itself and for him.

“If I think a girl is beautiful she will be beautiful in my picture. People say that models are not really beautiful, but they are — they are the most beautiful girls in the world. Usually,” he said, “I love them.

“It is impossible not to become emotionally involved with them. There they are, looking marvellous and beautiful … it is inevitable. It is the same with any lovely thing.”

Bailey is the man who made Jean Shrimpton the most famous and most copied model in the world. The frail, fey face that has launched a thousand front covers.

Bailey has an inconsequential charm. He has the face of a disenchanted cherub; brown, restless eyes; shaggy hair. He looks very young. He is 27.

He dislikes fervently being labelled a “fashionable” photographer, and rejects impatiently the idea that photography is the new art form.

“It is creative — but a photographer just creates something from the materials available. Like a skilled cabinet maker. You can’t call that art.”

Behind his camera Bailey is absorbed, concentrated. If he is arrogant it is because he knows he is good at the job.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I hate what I am doing to the girls. It turns them from human beings into objects. They begin to get fanatical about the way they look. They can’t stop watching themselves in mirrors.”

Fashion and photography. Ever since the camera was invented there hasn’t been one without the other. Above, as it must have been in early Edwardian days. Below, you see David Bailey at work creating another of the masterpieces that have made him the most sought-after fashion photographer in Britain today

Before I met Bailey a photographer colleague told me: “You’ll get on fine … you are a girl.”

Certainly it is believable that he can, if he requires it, make a girl fall in love with him across the room. But not every girl. Some react against his confidence and this unobtrusive talent for getting his own way.

“If a girl feels that way about me I just needle her until I have got the degree of aggressiveness I need. I think an aggressive woman can look very good in a picture,” he said.

He is newly married to French actress Catherine Deneuve. “This girl I’ve married is a very funny girl,” he said. “I feel that it is doomed to success. But I never want to work with her if I can help it. I think that would break it up.”

He reverted to the subject of fashion … he has just signed a new contract with Vogue magazine.

“I like what I do, but it is not my whole existence. I take fashion pictures, but I am not particularly interested in fashion.”

He prefers to take portraits, and has a book of portraits to be published soon. It is called “David Bailey’s Book of Pinups” — he is concerned that no one should hold him responsible for the title.

He plans also to direct a film — a science fiction story which he has written himself. “Funny, but sinister,” he explained. The provisional title is “The Assassination of Mick Jagger.” The star is Mick Jagger. “He’s one of my best friends,” said Bailey.

He has no intention of shinning up trees to take fashion pictures at 40.

He is crazy about furniture and wants to open an antique shop. He believes he will do this soon — he makes decisions swiftly and carries them out with jet propelled speed whether they concern making a film or going round the corner for coffee.

His three cars: a mini, a blue and black Rolls-Royce convertible which is his favourite possession; a Morgan which looks like a cherished veteran, but is in fact this year’s model, and which he drives like a bat out of hell.

He remarked that the Morgan was not very fast – only did 110 mph.

The post Cameraman in the fashion appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOR the first time, a British television news programme is to cover the world from the world.

In The World Tonight starting on Tuesday, an international television link-up will put on your screens a running news documentary that has never been attempted before.

It will show the world to Britain as the world sees itself — not simply as a snap report from camera crews who dash in and out from one news area to another.

In the past, as the programme’s executive producer Tim Hewat points out: “British TV has covered the world from London. This, apart from other disadvantages, has led to producing stories that are exclusively British orientated. We see things happening in, say, Tokyo, as through British eyes. We will show them happening as seen through the eyes of people in their particular part of the world.”

To achieve this global flavour The World Tonight has set up a complex network of five key bureaux where permanent representatives will compile their reports.

As in London, there will be a The World Tonight team in Rome, and Tokyo. Paris and New York, plus roving producers Dietrich Koch and Russell Spurr. We introduce to you here these highly specialised people and take you into the environments from which they work to bring you The World Tonight.

Over to Tokyo and Australian journalist John Maher. Tucked away on the ground floor of a four-storey building of Fuji Telecasting Company is the cramped but efficient nerve centre of The World Tonight‘s Japanese bureau.

Space in this building, which houses most of the throbbing soul of Japanese TV, is at a premium. But John opted for his tiny, 10ft. square, pastel green office with its duck-egg blue Venetian blinds right here next to the cameramen and technicians, rather than select a more spacious apartment away from all the action.

To New York: Imagine Wardour Street, running like a spine through London’s Soho — spiritual home of British film-makers. Now imagine it blown out, big and broad and wide. That’s 53rd Street where nearly every door leads to a film studio, a cutting room, a producer’s plush office, a script writer’s den.

Here, for the new programme, work producer John McDonald and reporter Bill Biery in a comfortable atmosphere of controlled luxury. Off-white, deep-pile carpets, a Telex machine mumbling quietly to itself in a corner, leather chairs, coloured telephones. Efficiency — American style.

To Rome: Producer on the spot is Hugh Pitt. His beat ranges from the entire Mediterranean coast to the troubled oil kingdoms of the Middle East.

London: Reporter Jo Durden-Smith is 23, one year down from Oxford. He works from West End offices with live con tradictory clocks, a massive wall chart and an ordered confusion of scripts.

Paris: Sparkling, magic, feminine city. Appropriately, a woman-on-the-spot — Producer Joan Harrison, chooses to work from her sedate apartment a stroll from the Champs Elysées. In this fashionable part of the city she sits with French reporter: Denise Fabré sifting material.

All aiming to bring the world to you.

The post Watch on the world appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WHEN Hugh David and Wendy Williams, the stars of Granada’s Knight Errant Limited, have any free time they climb into their car and point its nose towards Wales — towards the land of their fathers.

In private life they are Mr. and Mrs. David Hughes, but David altered his name to avoid confusion in the world of entertainment with singer David Hughes.

At the Manchester studios, where they were rehearsing for the Thursday adventure series, Hugh told me: “My mother came from North Wales and my father came from the south. I was born in Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire.”

Green-eyed Wendy was born in Surrey, of a Welsh father and an English mother.

“But,” she told me, with pride in her voice, “I went to school in Colwyn Bay in Denbighshire, and I adore Wales. When I hear the anthem The Land of My Fathers it always brings tears to my eyes. My father’s family live in Anglesey and I’ve got hosts of relatives there.

“Hugh’s parents are settled in Cardiff, so it’s natural for us never to think of going anywhere but into Wales when we have time off from the studios.”

“Not always to visit our families,” Hugh added quickly. “Sometimes we go just for the scenery, for the sheer pleasure of driving through the beautiful hills and valleys.”

What is it, I asked them, that makes the Welsh so patriotic?

“Well,” replied Wendy, “I think there is a sense of belonging in all of us.

“People with Celtic blood seem to me to have this feeling more strongly than others. Welsh people seem to be even more patriotic when they are away from home.”

This brought a smile to her husband’s face. “That’s very true,” he said. “I remember a friend telling me about a Welsh stationmaster who was in Manchester a long time ago.

“He wrote beautiful nostalgic poetry about Wales while he was in Manchester, but as soon as he left England and went home he gave up writing.”

Hugh and Wendy first met in Wales. They appeared together in a television play at Cardiff, in February, 1959. A mutual friend, the Welsh actor Clifford Evans, introduced them. They got engaged on St David’s Day last year.

Their marriage service at Surbiton, Surrey, took place only six days before the beginning of the present series of Knight Errant. It was conducted by Hugh’s father, the Rev. J. Williams Hughes, a Baptist minister who was formerly principal of the North Wales Baptist College at Bangor.

I asked Wendy if Welshmen are more romantic than Englishmen. With one of her infectious chuckles she said:

“In my limited experience they are not.

“At least, not in the sense that they shower a girl with flowers and whisper sweet Welsh words in her ear. I didn’t even get a bunch of leeks on St. David’s Day.”

The post Knights errant take to the hills appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

DIRECTOR Chris McMaster was placing chessmen in position on a plan of the set for “The Conspirators,” Thursday’s episode of Knight Errant Limited, when I called to see him at the Manchester Television centre.

“I’m not playing games,” he explained. “I’m just working out some camera moves. These chessmen represent people standing round the bar in a village pub in Ireland.

“And there,” he added, indicating some pencilled squares on the plan spread over his desk, “is the village street. We’re going to have somebody riding down there on a bicycle and a couple of women with shawls and baskets and a donkey to give the place atmosphere. It’s going to be great fun.”

Not so funny, however, for publisher Stephen Drummond (Hugh David) who, with secretary Frances Graham (Wendy Williams), finds himself in an Irish seaside village trying to sort out the ownership of a piece of land and gets involved in some of the local shenanigans.

Chris McMaster is Dublin-born and theatre bred. And this is the first time in the four-and-a-half years he has spent in television that he has worked on a show with an Irish setting.

“We’re going to have a real hooley (that’s Irish for party) with this one,” said 32-year-old Chris, who joined his father’s theatre company in Dublin when he left school at 16.

“To make this as authentic as possible we are using film shot in Ireland,” he added, “and half the cast are Irish, or have a strong Irish connection.”

One is 47-year-old, Omagh-born Patrick McAlinney, who plays barman Sian Kelly. Pat, an actor in Dublin, on Broadway and in London’s West End for the past 25 years, describes Kelly as “a cynical sort of chap, typical of Irish barmen, I suppose.”

Dublin born Harry Hutchinson, who will play publican Joe O’Kelly, has not been home since 1955 when he played in Sean O’Casey’s The Bishops Bonfire, in Dublin

Says Harry, who is 68 and has lived in England for 30 years: “Irish publicans tend to be very friendly, hospitable people. They are well-endowed with the gift of the gab, too, of course.”

The other Irish members of the cast are Michael Golden, Tony Quinn, Howard Lang and Alan Barry.

The post It’s Knight Errant’s move appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BACK to the television screen next Thursday comes Granada’s Knight Errant Limited, the firm that specialises in solving other people’s problems — and rescuing damsels in distress.

The head of the old firm, Adam Knight, had to rush off to Canada to manage his uncle’s farm after the series ended last June. The new boss is publisher Stephen Drummond, a friend of Adam.

He took over because he thought the project too worthwhile to let die. Helping him are his secretary, Frances Graham, and a member of the “old firm”— “Daily Clarion” reporter Liz Parrish.

Drummond, who, according to the scriptwriters, is 32, intelligent, observant, a ski-ing and Judo enthusiast, is played by actor Hugh David, who is 35.

He matches up well, for, like Drummond, he went to university, took a degree in physics and mathematics and is keenly interested in modern history.

Hugh, his black hair flecked with grey, has the good looks and grooming demanded by the role. He points out that there are other facets of his character which agree with those of the TV hero he will be playing.

He told me: “Ski-ing for instance. Fve been ski-ing on holiday in Austria for about four years. I think I can say I’ve got past the stage where a broken leg is imminent — though I realise it could happen any time. But I don’t fall over so much now, so I suppose I’m progressing.”

Drummond, more interested in people than in books, is the sort of person who wants to help. It was this trait in his character that led him into Knight Errantry.

“That’s me,” said Hugh. “After qualifying as a physicist I worked in industry and did some research on jet engines. But I wanted to work with people rather than machines.

“In 1946 I became a teacher. I enjoyed that very much, but gave it up after two years. I felt there was too much restriction on the individual approach to the task.”

Three years at drama school in London resulted in Hugh winning a gold medal. That was in 1951 and, after a year in repertory at Whitby, he joined the Old Vic in London for three months, then went to Bristol.

Since 1952 he has made countless TV appearances — “playing parts ranging from a Borstal boy to Lord Nelson” — and has scripted schools programmes for television and radio.

His experience of helping people? It was his wife, actress Wendy Williams, who answered that question. Wendy plays the part of Frances Graham, Drummond’s secretary, She said: “He’s a smoother-out of trouble for everybody. People are always coming to him with problems.

“He has a sympathetic approach which makes them want to confide in him.”

But when Wendy and Hugh first met, nearly two years ago, it was Wendy who did the smoothing out! She explained: “We were working together in a TV play and Hugh was playing a love-sick 18-year-old boy. I played the part of his brother’s fiancee, who helps him to come to terms with his problem.”

What sort of girl is Frances Graham? The official description goes like this: Aged 26, gay, vital impulsive, very feminine, has violent enthusiasms which don’t last long.

She looked thoughtful, then said: “Well, I’m 25 and the rest of the description isn’t so far out, either!

“I’m impulsive — most women are, it’s a more feminine characteristic than masculine — and I can’t bear insincerity or incompetence. I’m the sort who must have things right. If they’re not, I want to know why.

“I like to have good things about me — clothes, furniture, food, everything. Enthusiasms? I don’t swing about. If I become enthusiastic about something I usually stay loyal to it.”

Blonde Canadian actress Kay Callard, back in the programme to give a helping hand to the new owner of Knight Errant Limited, married actor-director Jack McNaughton two months ago.

Her role, too, ties in with her own background. Before she became an actress, Kay worked on a small newspaper in Canada as a reporter.

While the show has been off the screen she has been able to spend more time on her hobbies … sculpture, gardening and collecting fine glassware.

Said Kay: “The garden is only the size of a pocket handkerchief, but it had become a little overgrown so we had to chop down the weeds and rescue a grapevine that was being choked.”

The post A new knight for the old firm appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

OF all the things I dabble in, drawing cartoons gives me aa much fun as any — probably because of a knack I have of isolating a person’s most telling characteristic.

Now, in trying to single out a clue to my own character, I cannot do better, I think, than borrow the immortal words “Sometimes I sits and thinks; sometimes I just sits.”

There it is in a nutshell. The fact is I have an inexhaustible capacity for doing nothing. I am lazy about anything that smacks of work. But acting, because it was something I once did for fun, is excluded.

I was a member of three amateur dramatic societies while still at school in Nottingham. Since then, I have never thought of acting as anything but fun.

My family having no theatrical connections, however, (my father was in the decorating business until he started teaching), it never occurred to me to take up acting professionally.

The idea of my doing so came from Leigh Crutchley, then Drama Adviser of Nottingham Council. He started me working for my Royal Academy of Dramatic Art scholarship, giving me unlimited coaching and encouragement.

Until then, my fondness for animals had made it seem more natural for me to try to become a veterinary surgeon. But as Latin did not come naturally to me, I gave that idea up. Figures baffled me, too. Science interested me at school (and astronomy still does) but the maths involved, the theories and principles, have always been a stumbling block.

I am also rather impractical, and the combination of all these drawbacks seemed to rule out all the usual jobs.

I suppose I could have become a photographer — I have always enjoyed getting an unusual picture. The snag was that I knew I should never have the application to master the technicalities, or cope with the routine work.

Once I decided to go on the stage, though, I knew for certain that it was the only job for me — the only one where I could be wholeheartedly happy.

I realise now that long before this I had been unconsciously conditioned to my present way of life. We lived in London until the outbreak of war when my father took up a teaching appointment at the Nottingham School of Arts.

My memories of those early days are a bit disjointed, but it was undoubtedly as a child that I assimilated from my father a great deal that was to give me tremendous satisfaction. For instance, I developed a feeling for texture, and an eye for line and colour.

I like to see good design in common household things like pots and pans, tables and chairs. And — right in character – the line of a motor car means much more to me than what is under the bonnet.

Recently, however, I did paint our old cottage near Stratford-on-Avon. Mind you, it was only my anxiety to see a job finished that kept me at it. Another time I would be only too glad to hand over the interminable business to an expert.

But we would still do the designing ourselves. Thisbe and I (my wife is a Stratford girl and named after Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) have a lot of fun with colour schemes.

The simple lines of the cottage called for white walls, dark floors and white rugs. Our soft furnishings are in plain, light colours and we like to vary contemporary furniture with what I believe to be the only antique that goes with it – Elizabethan.

For ornament I am fond of brass, particularly old telescopes. I have several 18th century ones and they make pleasant decoration. I also use them to look at the stars.

When I was working in London we used the cottage only for occasional weekends. It might happen again but Stratford will remain our permanent home.

We both know Stratford well. Thisbe was brought up here — her father was born in the adjoining cottage — and as a schoolboy I often visited the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Then after leaving the Academy I joined the company, and the three years I was there cemented my liking for Warwickshire — the heart of England. From Stratford I returned to Nottingham — this time as a professional actor in the repertory company. In 1955 I went to London, and later to Moscow, with Peter Brook’s production of Hamlet. I had already toured Australasia with the Stratford company.

After this came two plays in London — with our marriage sandwiched between them. One of these, No Time For Sergeants, ran for 18 months.

It was then that I did a lot of drawing. Flatteringly, people sometimes ask why I never try to sell my drawings. But, even if I thought there was a market for them, I should never have the necessary drive and ambition.

With music it is the same. I wish I played some instrument, but I know I would never practise. Oh, I tinkle away at the piano sometimes, but nothing much comes out. So I have to get my music — jazz preferably — from the gramophone.

But to make a professional job of anything one’s heart must be in it, and acting is the only thing that really counts with me — the one really constant and absorbing interest.

The post Self portrait appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

LEARNING to drive a motor car can be a nerve-shattering experience in itself but, when Richard Carpenter takes to the road with L plates, he finds he has an additional hazard to overcome.

Hazard? “Yes,” says 28-year-old Richard. “I keep hearing the Voice of Conscience. But it sounds so much like part I play of Peter Parker, Adam Knight’s assistant in Knight Errant ’60, that I could swear he’s sitting in the back seat, chunky grey sweater and all.”

Or perhaps it is just that Richard, who for six days a week is Peter Parker as he rehearses for the show at the Manchester studios, finds it difficult to forget him … Anyway I went along with Richard on one of his driving lessons to get the whole story.

As he drives away from the motoring school, he explains: “I start off brimful of confidence. But by the time I’ve turned a couple of corners and made three or four gear changes it happens.”

It? As he pulls up to allow a pretty redhead right of way on a pedestrian crossing, Richard gives a demonstration. He bawls: “Keep to the left, man! You’ll get us all killed!” And explains this is what nosey-Parker conscience says.

There is an immediate but unexpected reaction.

The redhead stops. Obviously she has heard. She stares. Obviously she is scared. She rushes on. Obviously thinking she is lucky to get away.

“See what I mean?” says Richard, looking unhappy and jerking his head in the direction of the fleeing female. “She thinks I’m a nut case. And when I’m out driving I almost convince myself.”

But there is nothing crazy about Richard when he is off duty at his flat in Hampstead, London where he lives with his actress wife Annabelle Lee.

He admits he is a handyman around the flat and enjoys painting, decorating and assembling electrical gadgets.

His collection of jazz records ranges from the early discs of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to the latest issues of Duke Ellington. On the serious side, he likes Bach and Vaughan Williams.

There are some interesting sounds coming from the gear box as Richard juggles with the lever and returns to the subject of Peter Parker.

“It’s difficult coping with the gears when you’ve got a pest like Parker nagging at you. The trouble with him is that he knows all there is to know about the theory of driving a car, but put him behind the wheel and he would probably go speed mad or something.”

Richard glances out of the window. It is a sympathetic glance. An L driver has stalled his engine at the traffic lights and is being driven to distraction by the blast of hooters from other cars.

There is a thoughtful look in Richard’s eyes as he turns and says: “Hear that? Parker would be one of those people who are making all the noise. He regards car ownership purely and simply as a means of getting quickly from one place to another.

“My interest goes further. When I’ve passed my test — if I ever do with Parker breathing down my neck — I shall use every spare moment to drive out into the country to explore.”

Richard is particularly interested in architecture, and likes to visit churches and old buildings.

He was a painter in oils before he turned to acting, went into repertory at Chiswick, Dundee and Chesterfield, and toured the Middle East with the Old Vic. Now, he paints a word picture of the failings of Peter Parker…

“His head is like a junk shop of knowledge that needs sorting out. Each new thing he becomes interested in absorbs him completely for a time. For instance, he was writing a book on ‘What’s Wrong With Britain Today.’

“What happened? Why, it petered out, of course. Now he’s engaged on ‘An Analysis of Human Behaviour’.”

And Richard Carpenter, the motorist, gets tangled up in it?

“I don’t know about that,” says Richard as we pull up outside the driving school. “But I do know this: Parker gets tangled up in my motoring — and it’s driving me round the bend!”

The post The back seat voice of conscience appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WHEN I met John Turner at the studios he had just finished an episode of Granada’s Knight Errant ’60, the series in which he plays Adam Knight, champion of the wronged.

“How does it feel to be a modern St George?” I asked.

I expected his eyes to shine with fervour. They did not.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “but I believe it’s not a bit of use dashing to the rescue of the modern maiden in distress. For instance, if you give up your seat in a bus to a woman, the odds are that she will refuse it. You insist. She still declines. And before you know what is happening, some unscrupulous male slips into the seat.”

A good talking point. Before I could reply, we were joined by Richard Carpenter, who plays John’s assistant, Peter Parker, and Kay Callard, Liz Parrish in the series.

Said Richard, taking up the theme: “Chivalry has been dead for years. Old women tend to expect it, probably a cause they were brought up during a period when life was more leisurely and there was more time for gallantry.”

Kay decided it was time to put a woman’s point of view.

She said: “Surely, the original meaning of chivalry, if you forget the romanticism of the writers, was the strong and idealistic individual fighting the battles of the weak and oppressed and rescuing the unfortunate and wrongly persecuted?”

“But the knights of old were men who went about the country simply looking for trouble,” said John. “They fought for milady’s honour just for the sake of fighting.”

Richard backed him up. “If you tried to do that now you would find yourself in jail. Really, the knights have been replaced by the police.”

Kay agreed that there were fewer damsels in distress. But she still thought there was a lot to be said for the old-fashioned male. “He treated women as the weaker sex and was much more thoughtful than the young man of today,” she said.

John wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “That’s just a lot of nonsense!” he said as he went into the attack.

“The modern young man is every bit as thoughtful as those in the days of old. Women are always the same. They expect chivalry and then demand equality.”

Kay countered with: “Why not? There are still parcels to carry, doors to open and chairs to set to the table. Aren’t men gallant enough for these courtesies?”

Said Richard: “These courtesies, as you put it, Kay, are just basic good manners not chivalry.”

But Kay was not going to be put off. “According to my dictionary the modern definition of chivalry is ‘Gallantry of spirit, bravery and courtesy.’ Men can be chivalrous by being courteous. Aren’t you courteous at home?”

Richard retorted; “If my wife is working, I do the housework. If I’m working she does it. But let’s get back to Knight Errant ’60. We’ve done a lot in the name of chivalry in this series, John. What would you say are the modern dragons?”

John thought hard, then said: “The physical dragons are people like the blackmailers, confidence tricksters and thieves from whom we’ve rescued Sally Smith, Shirley Laurence, Carol Wolveridge and Marianne Benet in the programme. But some of the dragons were in our own minds. Or they were disguised.”

The mention of disguise appealed to the Peter Parker in Richard. He suggested that Moira Redmond, who appeared in the Mediterranean cruise episode, was an example of the dragon in disguise.

“Do you mind,” said Kay, “if I come I back into this discussion? What it amounts to is that there are still just causes to be fought, if not by knights in armour then by scientists and politicians.”

John agreed, with the reservation that there were still many dragons at large in the community, perhaps not so important, but which ought nevertheless to be put to the sword. “For instance, overbearing matrons who charge to the front of the queue at the shops,” he said. “What is a mere man do?”

Kay sympathised. “Put it down to bad manner. I‘m ashamed of my own sex I when I see things like that.”

“Good for you, Kay,” said Richard.

John was more cautious. “Not so fast,” he said. “What Kay would like to see is every man falling over himself to dance attendance. Call it the Continental touch if you like, but really, it’s just a paradeof little tricks and flattering phrases.”

“Continental men tend to put women on a pedestal more than Englishmen do,” replied Kay. “And that makes a woman feel good. But I wouldn’t say women are fooled by it.”

It was time, thought Richard, to call a halt. “How about coming down off that pedestal you’ve just been talking about? Then we can all go for a drink.”

Said Kay: “Good idea. And if I may I say so, very chivalrous of you gentlemen.”

The post Says Knight Errant ’60 – there are still dragons to slay appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

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.

CONFEDERATE cannons blaze a trail of death across your TV screen. Frenzied Union cavalry horses totter in the turmoil. The air is rent by the cries of the dying and the smell of burnt cordite.

The scene is Gettysburg, bloodbath of the American Civil War, the savage, heroic conflict in which brother slew brother. An indelible chapter in American history written long before the movie camera was invented.

Yet in Camera in Action, a series of programmes (starting on Tuesday) which covers aspects of life and the world in the second half of the 19th century, the scene is reconstructed as accurately and dramatically as the day it happened.

How is it done? By painstakingly piecing together a jigsaw of still photographs taken at the time. Granada have made them come to life by using the “action stills” technique which they pioneered in Britain five years ago.

The idea is to take still photographs and drawings and range a stop-motion camera over them. The cameraman will start with a shot of the entire picture, then zoom in on a detail, pan across to another corner of the picture, and so on.

The film is shot frame by frame, re-positioning the camera after each exposure. When linked at speed, the pictures from the past become a dramatic moving story straight from the pages of history.

Why is the technique so effective? said director Peter Jones: “Because the photographers of the day did their job so well. In the ‘Prospect of Whitby,’ the second programme, for instance, I think viewers will be staggered by the beauty and quality of Frank Sutcliffe’s photography.

“And in each programme we have had access to the original negatives or a new set of prints.”

The first in the series, “The Uprooted,” is the story of the vast European migration to American in the 19th century.

The “Prospect of Whitby,” is the story of the birth of the Yorkshire holiday resort; “The War of Brothers,” dealing with the American Civil War; and “Fashion Photographers,” a look at fashion photography down the years.

All the events will be seen as they happened, using photographs from museums, private collections, magazine libraries and family albums.

More than 250 photographs used in Tuesday’s programme came from pictures by Jacob Rüs and Lewis Hine. They were shot from different angles more than 90,000 times and then edited to make up the half-hour programme.

Action stills cameraman Ray Goode, who shot each one of those 90,000 frames separately, told me: “At first it was decided to write the script and then fit the photographs to it. But it was too stilted.

“Finally we decided to write the script to fit the photographs. There was a great deal of experimenting to be done.

“We have tried to make the stills come alive with the minimum amount of animation.”

The post Camera in Action brings history to life appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOR the four years Mr. Swindley puffed and huffed his imperious way around the intrigues of Coronation Street, the man who played him, actor Arthur Lowe, had a problem on his mind.

As far as he was concerned, publicity, interviews and public appearances were OUT. “I don’t want to be type-cast,” he said.

Now, with the Chaplinesque-like Swindley projected as the star of Pardon the Expression (Wednesdays) the risk of lifelong identification seems higher than ever. Why the change in attitude?

“When I was first asked to play Swindley,” said Lowe, “I hadn’t the faintest notion that the part would last for four years. We all thought that Coronation Street was a modest little cameo of Northern life which would run for seven weeks and then finish.”

Arthur Lowe left Coronation Street for a spell earlier this year, to appear in the stage version of John Osborne’s play, “Inadmissible Evidence.”

“When the invitation came to star in Pardon the Expression, I was faced with a terrible decision. It took me weeks to make my mind up,” he said.

Why did he plump for Swindley? “Because I like to think of him as a funny man with international possibilities.

“I’m hoping that he will appeal to a much broader audience than Coronation Street. If we do well enough we might crash the overseas TV market and go some way towards fulfilling my next ambition to become an international star. ”

Arthur Lowe is an agile man — mentally and physically. He has many of Swindley’s mannerisms. He beams broadly, then his furrowed brow will crease in thought as he weighs your questions.

“Having made my decision to stand by Swindley,” said Arthur, “I am now wholeheartedly in the part.”

One thing he has learned to do is leave Mr. Swindley at the studio door. “I never take him home with me. I’m very fond of Swindley but he’s just another character whom I happen to have played longer than the rest.”

The post Mr Swindley goes it alone appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE Northern magazine programme People and Places little show that features the big names – stars of stage and film as well as top personalities from the worlds of music, art and sport.

The list of people who have appeared in the programme, which comes from Granada’s Manchester studios and is one of the company’s longest-running shows, is peppered with celebrities.

Here are some of the names: Lord Harewood, Henry Sherek, Katherine Dunham, Sheila Buxton, Tessie O’Shea, Dickie Henderson, Alfie Bass, Ted Lunee and Bill Fraser.

It is the sort of programme which presents the people who produce it with a never-ending streams of problems.

A phone call – sometimes just 10 minutes before the programme is due on the air – tells the producer that one of the artists has been held up and cannot get to the studio on time.

That is the kind of situation the presents a challenge to researchers like Jim Coburn, who are continually at the producer’s elbow.

The last time it happened he grabbed a taxi and drove three miles from the studios in the City Centre to the lodgings of comedian Freddie Earle. Freddie was making an omelette when Jim rushed in and said: “You’re on TV.”

Freddy [sic] dropped his fork, climbed into the taxi with Jim, and rushed to the studio as fast as traffic-choked roads would allow. He faced the cameras on an almost empty stomach and without a touch of make-up. There had been no time even for that.

“This sort of thing has happened a number of times,” said Jim. “We have had people rushing through the studio doors even during the 10-second count down to ‘on the air’ – and you can’t get much later than that!”

It happened again when Michael Holliday missed his train. The result was a frantic telephone call to jazz singer-trumpeter Leslie (Jiver) Hutchinson, who was appearing that week in Manchester.

Leslie was asked to jump into a taxi and head for the studios immediately!

Last-minute illnesses, late trains and planes, mechanical breakdowns. These are hazards which face the team that bring People And Places to the screen.

Under the heading of breakdowns comes the story of the luxurious taxi – the last word in comfort – that was sent to Blackpool to bring Dickie Henderson to Manchester for an appearance on the programme.

In Blackpool, the car developed engine trouble. So Dickie had to make the trip in an old-fashioned “boneshaker”.

The story of People And Places is not without its lighter moments, for the programme has always been liberally sprinkled with humour.

Interviewers Bill Grundy and Chris Howland started a gag with ran for weeks. It was the now-famous joke of long series of incidents carefully contrived to prevent Chris Howland singing on the programme.

It began, almost by accident, when Chris was given a singing spot – right at the end of the show. But because times ran out, the singing spot had to be cut. And on each occasion afterwards, something happened to prevent Chris being heard.

Letters began to roll in demanding that Bill should let Chris sing. But the joke went on.

Lord Harewood, who was in the programme to talk about the opening of Harewood House to the public, helped to keep it running. He told Chris: “You be down at Covent Garden at 10 am tomorrow for an audition.”

Later, Gary Miller, who was also in the conspiracy, asked Chris to sing with him in the show, but he said Chris would have to have a straw hat and cane if he wanted to take up the invitation.

Everybody thought that Howland would at last be heard. He dashed away for the vital hat and cane. But when he got back – breathless, and consequently unable to sing – only two bars of the number remained.

Chris continued to “campaign.” In a demonstration in which he was seen accompanied by about two dozen girl supporters, he carried a large board bearing the demand: HOWLAND MUST SING.

And Howland did. Standing beside a fountain in the studio grounds, he sang The Rain Falls On Everybody. It certainly on Chris, for Bill was seen busy at a tap. Chris got drenched.

There have been moments of unintentional humour, too. One of these came when the Spanish guitarist Pepe Martinez had to be coached to answer two questions in his very limited English.

The questions were: How long have you been in England and how long does it take to become a good flamenco dancer?

The answers, in the correct order, were six weeks and 25 years. Pepe gave them the wrong way round!

The People And Places team recall the time, too, when things got really hot, at the end of a demonstration of action painting. Part of the action was to set fire to the painting. The artist did. And because the show was under-running its time limit, the cameraman had to hold the shot as the flames leapt upwards.

A studio fireman stood by with an extinguisher, powerless to act because if he had done he would have put himself between in the line of the camera.

Said producer David Main: “Though we like to be up to the minute with items of interest to our viewers, we do not aim to be quite so hot on the trail as we were on that occasion.”

The post Getting people and places together appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

In South Vietnam, a primitive backward comer of South East Asia, where Vice-President Johnson had “looked into the eyes” of the people, 20,000 American troops are engaged in an endless struggle – endless that is, unless it should end in something worse. In the past seven years 300,000 Vietnamese and 1,400 Americans have been killed and wounded.

It is a war in which, as one American lieutenant told World in Action, “you don’t know many times who your enemy is until he shoots at you. It’s hard to fight someone when you can’t see them and when a man can lay down his rifle in a rice paddy and pick up a plough after he shoots at you.”

On the night when the Tall Texan and the Man from Arizona were fighting it out at the polls — to the overwhelming victory of LBJ – World in Action presented a programme about Vietnam, a subject that looms large in American minds and one which posed President Johnson with his first major crisis after re-election.

Mike Hodges and Mike Boultbee led the World in Action team into the paddy-fields of Vietnam. Arnold Bulka did the research.

Vietnam is a country of 30 million people, part of what was once called French Indo-China. It is split in two – with the communists holding the North which borders on China. The communist leader is Ho Chi Minh, aged 74, one-time pastry cook in a London Hotel, and now known to his 16 million people as Uncle Ho.

Uncle Ho is a professional communist. He studied the theory well at Moscow’s University of the Toilers of the East, where he graduated with honours. In 1944 he was smuggled back to Vietnam to lead guerrilla partisans fighting the Japanese who had taken over the country from the French. As soon as the Second World War ended, Ho set up his own makeshift regime in the North before the French could come back in and stop him. In the months that followed, the French and Ho found that the country was not big enough to hold both of them. And they went to war.

For eight years Ho and his peasant army, supported by Chinese arms and money, fought a quarter of a million of France’s best troops and killed 94,000 of them. Then on 7th May, 1954, at Dien Bien Phu – a place the French will long remember – they tried to break the ragged communist army. But the day ended with the pride of France’s army captured, scattered, wounded or dead.

The French Empire in South East Asia was now at the mercy of Uncle Ho, the Marxist-Leninist pastry cook. For with the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French could no longer prevent the communists from taking over, not only Vietnam itself, but also their two other protectorates Laos and Cambodia.

The private little war in Indo-China seemed set to develop into a clash between the Big Powers of East and West. So they met together in Geneva in July, 1954 – rivals with one aim in common: to prevent each other from taking over the area. At this Conference three vitally important decisions were made:

One, that Laos and Cambodia should become independent, neutral states;

Two, that Vietnam should be divided in half, with Ho Chi Minh and his Communists taking over north of the 17th Parallel, and the French-backed anti-Communists holding on to the South;

And three, that an election would be held in all Vietnam, north and south, within two years, to decide on a single government for the whole nation.

Lord Avon, then Sir Anthony Eden, was Britain’s representative at that Conference. He told World in Action, “We were trying to bring to an end a very bloody brutal war which had been waging for some time and which was going at that time badly for our French allies who’d had a big defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In those conditions I’m sure that the agreement was the best that we could have got. The working out of it, inevitably, has had many disappointments but fundamentally the idea was sound – to try an create a protective pad between the Chinese forces in the North and to make of these three states, if we could, countries – little countries with an independent way life.”

The Geneva Agreement did not, in fact, bring peace to Indo-China. And principally this was because of the man chosen as the first leader for the new state of South Vietnan – Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was an aristocrat, a Roman Catholic bachelor, who was opposed to both the communists and the French. His choice by the Geneva powers was by no means unanimous.

“In Vietnam, as it seemed to me,” said Lord Avon, “a wrong turning was probably taken when Diem was appointed as the Head of the Government of that country. That was many years ago. This isn’t hindsight, because the time I and the French representative to Geneva counselled against the appointment. However, it took place, and he ruled the country for many years.”

Diem became a virtual dictator, running the country with a Government that was practically a family firm. Even his sister-in-law, the beauteous and ruthless Madame Nnu, was given office – and with it access to the economic wealth being poured in by the Americans. Comfortably entrenched, Diem refused to risk an election.

From the north, Ho Chi Minh retaliated. He sent in his guerrillas, the terrorist force known as the Viet Cong, which is now harrying the Americans. This underground force opened a savage campaign of destruction and murder. Not even the children were spared.

Diem, meanwhile tried to soothe his people – handing out lollipops to the children and at the same time asking the Americans for military aid. Between 1956 and 1963, the Americans poured in 16,000 soldiers – “advisers” they called them – and enough equipment to arm the 300,000 strong South Vietnamese forces, but Ho Chi Minh continued to win. At the same time. Diem and his regime were in serious trouble from their own people. Diem became more dictatorial. Then he made his worst mistake. He refused to recognize Buddhism, the country’s biggest sect, as an official religion. Buddhist monks committed suicide in public, dousing their clothing with petrol and then setting themselves alight. Students rioted, and finally in November, 1963, the Army took over. They arrested and executed Diem and his brother.

Even then South Vietnam still failed to find a strong government. First they had General Minh – Big Minh. He was ousted by General Khanh, who gave way in turn to another temporary administration. Still, despite more and more American aid, the war in South Vietnam continued to be lost. And among the 20,000 Americans serving there the casualty list grew daily.

The Americans in Vietnam are fighting an enemy who most of the time is invisible. An estimated 30,000 Viet Cong guerrillas – the V.C.’s as the Americans call them – form the hard core of this hidden army. Some of them live in the jungles. And like the animals of the jungle they have learned how to hide well from their enemies. They even dig themselves into holes in the ground and have to be smoked out at bayonet point. Many other V.C.’s, however, live in villages where the local peasants hide them, feed them, and even finance them through an organized tax system.

The V.C.’s fight a hit-and-run war, as one wounded American Army Lieutenant described:

“The military operations are very difficult in a guerrilla type war, because you do not know where the enemy is. The guerrilla, if he sees a big force, disappears – and when he sees a small force he gets enough together to overcome this force and eliminate it. We went this one day to visit this village and everything was going pretty well, we stayed there for an hour or so talking to the people and nothing extraordinary happened and we returned. Unfortunately, the guerrillas were waiting for us. They probably saw us go in – it was about 2 kilometres or so, of undisturbed road – and they were waiting for us to come back. This was probably one of our mistakes. We had two jeeps and a 2½ ton truck with about a platoon of infantry in it. But this did not deter the Viet Cong at all. They planted a 105 round, I figure, with some extra explosive on the side of the road, and as our jeep came near he detonated it.”

The guerrillas move swiftly from place to place, and their task is made all the easier by the continued refusal of the South Vietnamese Government to stop people travelling freely about the country. An American captain explained, “Take for example the man that lives up north in some city. He gets a mission from the V.C. to go down and blow a bridge. He gets his orders, I don’t know where, but he gets them from some Communist leader. He comes down and blows this bridge, turns right round, goes back and he’s been gone only six or eight hours. Who’s missed him. Remember, people saw him walking on the road down here, or coming in a sampan, but nobody stopped him.

“If we don’t have any population controls,” he went on, “this compounds a problem that the military people have in combating these types of people. You don’t know where they are. They don’t as a fact wear uniforms, though some of their hard core units do – they’ve got a type of uniform. But as far as all of them being identifiable we don’t know who they are. This is a terrific frustration as a military type operation for a soldier.”

The main battleground in South Vietnam is the Delta of the Mekong River. This region, twice the size of Yorkshire, is flat and waterlogged, a maze of canals and rivers. It is here that practically all of the rice which feeds people of South Vietnam is grown. And whoever controls the Mekong Delta controls the country. In this flooded area, the guerrillas are hard to find and hard to get at; they are, in their own words, like fish in an ocean of peasants.

“They come down the Mekong by sampan and junk, usually at night,” said a U.S. Navy lieutenant. “When they reach the district they wish to manoeuvre in they go into the small canal. Some of these canals are so narrow that when we take our boats in we are brushing the trees on the bank. The V.C. wear civilian clothes, and they look just like a fisherman or farmer, but when you stop their junks and search them you find weapons hidden underneath, and pamphlets, propaganda material. V.C. also use the sampan and junks to attack civilians, this is another thing we are trying to stop. The V.C. in the area generally don’t appear in uniform, but they will join a hard core V.C. unit that’s been trained in North Vietnam.”

From a base in the Mekong Delta World in Action cameras travelled on one of these patrols. The U.S. Navy Lieutenant aboard explained the risks:

“We lose more boats to mines than by any other offensive means the V.C. employ. They will plant a fix mine of a 200 or 300 kilo strength in a narrow canal. This mine will be connected with electrical wires, to a lookout point on the beach. The wires are buried under the canal and run over to the beach into a grove of trees or into a hidden area. The V.C. put a lookout on the canal and when the boat they want passes over the mine they cross wires over very crude batteries.

“Two days ago we finished a salvage operation on an army personnel carrier that was sunk by a mine in a small canal down the river from here. The V.C. had fixed the mine knowing that the personnel carrier had to cross the river at this point.”

This patrol took World in Action up a small river in the Delta. The force consisted of: a monitor, armed with a heavy gun for shelling the V.C.’s on shore; two small gun boats; and two armed troop carriers with Vietnamese soldiers aboard. The patrol was under complete Vietnamese command. A Vietnamese Naval Captain and a Vietnamese Army Lieutenant gave all the orders. The U.S. Navy officer aboard could only make suggestions with no guarantee they would be accepted.

This patrol was the first to sail up the river for ten months. It was considered important to show the flag to the villagers, because large numbers of Viet Cong had been reported along the river banks.

“We usually operate within easy rifle range of the V.C.”, said the U.S. Lieutenant. “They have rifles, they have machine guns and a few Recoilless rifles. When you fight the V.C. they usually pick the time to fight. We have to look for them, and when they ambush us they usually are in a pretty firm position. So far from what I’ve seen, I couldn’t ask for a better group of fighting men than the ones on these boats because when they find an ambush they go right in after it.”

On this day the patrol did find an ambush. Viet Cong terrorists, hidden in the jungle thickness, opened fire on the patrol. The patrol boats fired back. As the gun boats and the guerrillas shot it out, the troop carrier swung downstream … and crashed into the banks. The troops jumped ashore to circle round the guerrillas and cut them off. But by the time they got there the guerrillas, as usual, had vanished.

The captain of one of the gunboats signalled that his men had killed a lot of terrorists, but not a single body was found. The Viet Cong carry their dead with them. Day in, day out, this is the war in South Vietnam.

Day in, day out, too, another war is being fought – a war for the minds and hearts of the people of Vietnam – a war of propaganda. At the 17th Parallel, the line that divides North from South, the two sides match propaganda poster for propaganda poster, word for word, flag for flag, loudspeaker for loudspeaker. Every day, Hanoi Hannah, the sweet-talking Communist Radio announcer, speaks to the peasants of South Vietnam, promising for everyone the better life.

Despite smooth words the casualty list grows. In one week alone in October, 1964, nearly 3,000 Vietnamese from North and South, were killed or wounded. As the war drags on, bitterness and hatred eat into the hearts of the Vietnamese. For this is a civil war – and civil wars are always the most brutal. North and South equally kill, maim or torture with the cold-blooded enthusiasm of brother set against brother. And as usual there are the bystanders – the people who just happen to get in the way. The American G.I. would be less than human if in the midst of all this he did not find himself downhearted. And back in the United States, the anger, the frustration and the humiliation of Vietnam is felt by the American people.

“There are soldiers over there,” said one man who was interviewed, “dying in this war without a name. We’re getting nowhere, we’re just sitting there. They’re not doing anything. There’s no sense in it. And you have to pay money to keep them there, so there’s no sense in it.”

Said another, “I think we should invade Vietnam.”

And a third, “We should just not let our men get knocked off one at a time, we should put our foot down and get out, one way or the other.”

Amid emotions like these, Senator Goldwater found willing listeners in his election campaign.

“Where has weakness brought this world since the end of the Second World War?” he demanded of his supporters at one meeting. “Twelve nations have fallen to Communism. In the past three years alone, Laos has been torn apart. Indonesia has been set afire. And South Vietnam has been soaked with American blood.”

The tough talk sometimes explodes into action. In August 1964 two American destroyers patrolling off North Vietnam were attacked by North Vietnam gun boats. As a reprisal, aircraft of the U.S. 7th Fleet bombed and strafed North Vietnamese naval bases, carrying the war over the border for the first time. China and Russia protested – but back home in America there were those who were heartened by the attack being carried into Communist territory.

Some American politicians, however, do not see this as the way to win in Vietnam. Among them is Democratic Senator William Fulbright who is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I think that this tough talk, which is sometimes called brinkmanship, is irrelevant to modem conditions and it is also very dangerous. In the days of simple gunboats and very limited weapons you could engage in this kind of psychological warfare with impunity. If you did make a mistake it was not particularly disastrous in most cases, but today with nuclear war and with the highly sophisticated world we live in, I think this kind of policy is both dangerous and is irrelevant to the problem, in the sense that it isn’t designed in any way to solve the problems or to get at a solution.”

So long as the war in Vietnam continues to go against the Americans, so long will a threat remain to Britain’s interests in South-East Asia. For if Vietnam falls to the Communists the way will be open to Laos and Cambodia, through them to the pro-western nation of Thailand, and through Thailand to Malaysia, the new federation which provides most of our tin and rubber.

The strength and morale of Communism in the Far East got a new boost on 16th October, 1964, when China exploded her first atomic bomb. Today many Americans talk tougher than ever on Vietnam.

But the American soldiers in Vietnam, the weary and the wounded, know better than any civilian that this is not a war that can be won with guns or bombs alone. As the wounded lieutenant said to World in Action: “This is a guerrilla war – a war for people’s minds, and hearts.”

The post The V.C War appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

At its Convention in the Cow Palace, San Francisco, on 15th July the U.S. Republican Party picked the man to fight Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 American Presidential Election. Against all the earlier odds, the outsider who suddenly came right out in front was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater represented the extreme far Right of his party. He stands for talking rough and tough to the Communists. He voted against the Civil Rights bill which aims to bring equal rights to the American Negro. Goldwater’s views have alarmed a lot of people – including many American Republicans — but his supporters, not unnaturally, are fanatically “pro-Barry”. A fortnight before the Republican Party convention. World in Action, with some prescience, went West to look at the man from Arizona who had become big news for the world.

Barry Goldwater was born and bred in the West – in Phoenix, Arizona. His grandfather, “Big Mike”, came to the territory less than 100 years ago. He came out to trade with the miners, ranchers and cowboys who were opening up the West. Like all true Westerners, even today, Barry Goldwater has built himself a homestead in the wide open spaces. He has a wife and four children – two girls and two boys.

Barry Goldwater ran the family department store in Phoenix, founded by his father, until World War II, when he served in the American Air Force. He only entered big-time politics in 1952 when he became a Senator for Arizona.

Most of Goldwater’s political henchmen also come from Phoenix. Stephen Shadegg is one of them. We asked him what he thought about Goldwater, the Westerner:

“He has an honest respect for the necessity of paying your debts. This is something we seem to have lost sight of in this country; we postpone it. He believes that every tub should stand on its own bottom, every man should sleep in his bed, and this is something that we have in the West. I think that in the more collectivized societies and in the big urban centres they’ve lost this. He has an intense interest in all people. He could not be a bystander while someone else was being involved in an unfortunate situation such as that incident we had in New York when 36 or 28 people watched while someone was being murdered. He has to be a participant, he’s an activist. Everything he does he has to do well. When he became a photographer he had to do it well enough to achieve membership in your Royal Photographic Society, and when he got in the war he had to fly an aeroplane. He was a pilot before he entered the service, but he was over age. He still managed his way round the red tape and became a service pilot and flew all during the war. In politics he’s much the same way, he s a very intense man about whatever interests him and he explores all of the possibilities – contrary to the present impression that he goes off half-cock; this is completely untrue. He’s a man who wants to examine all of the alternatives so that he can make a reasonable judgement.”

What is it about Barry Goldwater and his beliefs that appeals to his followers? Alistair Cooke, broadcaster an journalist, explained:

“I think that the appeal of Goldwater is a distortion of a very healthy impulse and it’s something that’s present in 19th century, the middle 19th century, especially out West where people who were frustrated by the congestion of cities and so on could move into open land which reached to the horizon and could stake out their own home and their own way of life and control their environment. Now the big argument inside the Republican Party is just how far you can go to control your own environment, that of your city, that of your county, that of your State, or whether the Federal Government has to move in into vast areas which are now controlled by the individual States. And I think this is a form of what you might call ‘Wyatt Earpism’. In other words, to simplify it – probably grossly – the appeal of Goldwater is the appeal of Wyatt Earp who says ‘Let me have ten minutes with Khruschev in Tombstone, Arizona at high noon and I’ll bump him off and lower taxes and everybody will be happy.’”

World in Action went with Goldwater supporters to Republican Convention in Dallas. Like many Westerners they talked about “the old frontier”. Said one man with enthusiasm, “He’s the spirit of the old frontier that we’ve always had in this country – to do something yourself rather than depend upon somebody else to do it. Like he wants to own his own business, go to his own doctor, go to his own church, take care of his own family rather than depend upon the State to do it. And this is where most people go for him because he is for the very thing that widens the frontiers of America – the reason that the English colonists came over to this country to begin with. The whole thing to me is something that goes back to the original conception of why the Constitution was first … I don’t know whether I make sense or not, but it sure feels good! I’m for him because I am in business for myself and I don’t like to be dictated to by someone in Washington on how to run my business, because I know more about how to spend my money the way I want to than someone in Washington.”

“This is the entire Goldwater concept,” said his companion, “the government is best which governs least.”

“People who make in this country 50 dollars [about $500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] a week and are supporting a family,” went on the first man, “it’s not unusual for them to contribute anywhere from five to ten dollars [$50 to $100] a month towards Barry Goldwater’s campaign. This is how strongly they believe in individualism.”

Said a girl with them, “Well, I’m too young to vote, but I can talk loud and I can run around and call out signs and sell hats and pass out badges and do just as good even though I can’t vote.”

Those Americans who “go” for Goldwater really “go” for him all the way. One of the factors that contributed to the Senator’s surprise success has been the passionate zeal of his volunteer helpers. Eleven thousand Republicans attended this Dallas Convention – almost all of them were “Barry’s Boys” the name given to Goldwater supporters. They arrived wearing Goldwater badges and slogans “Au H₂O,” the chemical formula for gold and water.

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party which fought the Civil War to end slavery of the Negroes, seemed suddenly to have gone to the far Right. This upheaval in the Party took many people by surprise. But it did so, Alastair Cooke explained, in a gradual way:

“What I think nobody figured on was the fact that for the first time in modern history a Republican really excited the South, and that’s because the new test of liberalism in this country is now race relations. Usually a Republican candidate isn’t going to start counting his votes in the South because they aren’t going to be any use to him the moment he starts running for the Presidency since the South is a Democratic kingdom, more or less. Now, for the first time, a Republican started with this enormous popular support – the whole of the South behind him. This gives him overwhelming power at his Convention to get his nomination. But the moment he starts running for the Presidency he’s still got to try and beat a Southerner in the White House.” At the Convention in Dallas Senator Barry Goldwater made his bid for the Southern States:

“My good friend John Tower, fellow Americans, fellow Republicans,” he said, “I’ve looked forward to this for a long, long time and I never in my wildest dreams imagined that the reception would be anything like this, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. (cheers) If anyone wants to know why and how we’re going to win the 1964, let him come here and get his answer. We’re going to win, we’re going to win because we are now truly a national party. We are no longer a party that has to write off one great section of this nation, the South, (cheers)

“From the courthouse to Congress, we’re going to concede nothing here in the South this year. For the first time in American history Republican candidates are going to contest more than 70 Congressional districts that have always been foregone by default and for the first time in the history of this country all twenty-three Congressional seats in this great State of Texas will be contested and we’re going to win them.

“I intend to lead a united party on a platform of principles, the same platform and the same principle in every part of this nation, (cheers) I mean principles of leadership, principles which will preserve our Federal Republic, principles of respect for constitutional government, for law and order. I mean principles that look upon violence in the streets anywhere in this land, regardless of who does it, as the wrong way to resolve great moral principles. (cheers) This is the way that will destroy the liberties of all our people.

“I come before you today to make no sectional appeals. The issues now confronting our nation go beyond any one section or any special interest. They go right to the heart of our destiny as a free and constitutional republic and they involve the hopes of freedom everywhere in the world, (cheers)

“The peace of the world and the defence of this nation go hand in hand. It’s the destiny and the responsibility of this nation to keep the peace and there is no other way to do it than remain as we are today, the strongest nation on earth in all ways – spiritually, morally, economically and militarily. (cheers)

“Now those of us who live away from the coast of this country are often accused of being isolationists, of wanting to close our eyes to the rest of the world. I need not remind you Texans that nothing could be further from the truth. We are not isolationists. The real isolationists are the men who can’t see beyond the ballot box, who talk and talk… (cheers) who talk and talk but fear to act, who can only mumble when the American flag is tom down and trampled on and spat upon. (cheers) You and I and millions of Americans want to hear someone speak up for America in this troubled world. (cheers) We know that the world cannot be inspired by turning out the lights in the White House. (laughter) That’s L.B.J. now – Light Bulb Johnson (laughter and cheers), and you’ll find him out in November. (laughter and cheers) We know that the real need is to turn on some light. We need more light at the White House, not less. We need more light around the world – the light of American leadership, the light of freedom.

“I intend to speak plainly about all these matters, because I have a deep feeling of responsibility that those who are coming on after me, my children, my grandchildren, and your children and your grandchildren – I have a great feeling of responsibility for a heritage that must be passed on, and when I’m gone and there’s trouble in this country I don’t want my children to point to me and say ‘If father had only said this at the right time maybe things would have been different.’ I intend to speak as I feel because I am concerned about our country and I am concerned about our world. (cheers)

“This nation today is being dishonoured. Not a single new major strategic weapon system has been introduced in the past three years. The very strength we hold is the result of the sound, resolute planning of General Dwight Eisenhower. This Administration has nothing to do with it. (cheers) And this disarming means that America stands still while the Soviet is free to advance. As we go into the 1970s, there are plans to leave us a Strategic Air Command with no new bombers, with a damaged force of old ones and with just a minimum of the strength with which it has been able to keep the peace so far. The business of the S.A.C. is peace and if you don’t allow the Air Force and the Strategic Air Command, the Air Wing of the Navy, the Army and the Marines to make progress in the air, then we are heading for trouble, and real trouble, because this power is what the Soviets understand.

“There is no magic in winning elections. There’s no secret word. There’s no certain amount of millions of dollars that must be spent. There’s no cut-and-dried television image. There’s only one way that wins elections and that’s people like you. (applause) So I implore of you, act as adults; don’t cany your grudges into the ballot boxes: carry your hearts and carry what’s good for Texas and what’s good for the United States, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican – America is our first ballot. Thank you. (prolonged cheers, applause, and singing)”

The rise of Senator Goldwater within the Republican Party caused many people to ask if America as a nation was turning away from Liberalism and moving towards the extreme right wing in the political spectrum. World in Action put this question to Alistair Cooke. “No, absolutely not,” he replied emphatically. “I think this in fact is a proof that this whole movement of the extreme Right – which by the way is absolutely minute; the Birchites, for instance, in the California local elections have had their brains beaten out – has no power whatsoever. But I think that this movement of Goldwater’s is the last exertion of the Old Frontier. You know, this is Gary Cooper running for President, and an awful lot of people would wish it could be so. Like the devotion to the Western on television, its the last gasp of individualism.”

And so in November the Man From Arizona rode to meet The Tall Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson. It was a Presidential Election very much in the tradition of The Old American West.

The post Au H₂O appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

On 15th April, 1865, in the last weeks of the American Civil War, Vice-President Andrew Johnson became the seventeenth President of the United States. He succeeded Abraham Lincoln who had been shot while attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre the previous evening. Ninety-nine years later a second Vice-President Johnson succeeded to the Presidency after another assassination.

The week after its programme from Dallas World in Action moved to a second town in Texas to investigate the background of the West’s new leader. Tim Hewat took the team to Johnson City.

Life for the people of Johnson City is slow. The motorist, hurrying along Texas route 281 linking San Antonio and Wichita Falls, could well fail to notice the town. Its people are typical hill folk, unhurried, with plenty of time to talk. Many of them work in the saddle, although today most cowboys drive their horses from one part of the range to the other – and some of them just drive all the time.

The people of Johnson City are modest people, like George Biars, who has been mayor for fifteen years, largely, he says, because no one else wants the job at a salary of eight shillings a day [40p in decimal, about £7 in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed].

The biggest thing in town is, of course, Lyndon B. Johnson himself, whose grandfather gave his name to the place. Mr. Johnson was born in a two-room home and he went to school at Johnson City High School. His first job was shining shoes. Then he worked on the roads. Today, Mr. Johnson lives in his own ranch, the L.B.J., on the banks of the Pedernales River. And, partly through his marriage to “Ladybird” Johnson, he is comfortably off. Mrs. Johnson was the chairman of the television and radio station, K.T.B.C. in Austin, Texas, until her husband became President when all the Johnsons’ wealth was put in the hands of trustees.

Highpoints in Johnson City life are the barbecue parties that Mr. Johnson gives from time to time at the L.B.J. for visiting V.I.P.s. One such party was for President Ayub Khan, of Pakistan, who was showered with gifts. Another party was for thirty ambassadors from newly-independent African nations.

Naturally the people of Johnson City admire Mr. Johnson greatly. And, naturally, they are all watching closely to see how he is getting on as President in Washington. But the event they all remember, and indeed the Texas politicians in the State capital at Austin also remember, is Mr. Johnson’s speech at his old university in 1961, for that was the time, they say, when he recorded his philosophy and his beliefs.

Mr. Johnson was Vice-President at the time and he was speaking to students on graduation day at the State College of South-West Texas, near Austin, 42 miles from Johnson City.

“I have a long, well-worded, carefully-drafted speech, he began, “all of which I’m going to stand behind and none of which I’m going to read, because we are faced with the hour of decision and it is you that is going to make the decision.

“In the world today we have two great systems; strong systems competing with each other for the mind of man. One is the collective communist system. One is the democratic system. One is the system of slavery. One is the system of freedom. And each man in each country on the face of the globe is sitting up there in judgement on those systems. The average father and mother want for their children just what you want for yours – relatively simple tastes they have. They want a place to worship, a school to train their minds, food for their stomachs, clothes for their back, a roof over their head, and a little recreation now and then. And that’s about all the average man and woman, wherever he lives, desires. That’s about the extent of his ambition. And now he’s looking at these two systems to see which one offers him and his family the greatest promise for the future.

You are a product of the democratic system. Because of your sacrifices and your diligence, you are concluding a course today and going out into the world. You are some of he privileged people because a relatively small percentage of our total population has the privilege of sitting here with caP and gown on. And therefore you have a very special responsibility to the system that produced you; the system at made it possible for you to have a trained mind and a sound body.

“The three greatest friends that Communism has are illiteracy, poverty, and disease. And they’re the three greatest enemies that our democratic system has. And if you haven’t learned it, you ought to hear it now – that our nation, the richest in the world, the most powerful in the world, is out-numbered 18 to 1 in the world. And no nation can long enjoy great applause when all of its neighbours and all of its friends and all the other nations are impoverished.

“So you, as the leaders and the products of our system, have got to help us in the years ahead to find a solution to eradicating poverty, to improving the standard of men and women and children’s living, to improving their housing, to cleaning their slums, to stamping out the diseases of cancer and heart and all the other killers, so that in your time and my time when these two systems come in mortal combat with each other, you can proudly say Democracy has worked; the proof of the puddin’s in the eatin’, and the coon’s skin’s on the wall: we have educated all our young; we have provided security for our old; we have cleaned our slums; we have made home-owners of our people; we have driven disease underground. We have not sat back and lived with our selfishness and with our greed. We have not been content to be misers. We have practised the Golden Rule. We have done unto others as we would have them do unto us. Yes, we have marched forward like zealots – with a missionary zeal to try to make San Marcus and South-West Texas College and Central Texas and Johnson City a better place than we found it. We have tried to make this a better world than we were born into, and we are determined and dedicated to reward our Maker with the fruits of our labours and we are determined that they shall be made.”

Then Mr. Johnson talked of his visit to South-East Asia, to Saigon, the capital of troubled Viet-Nam.

“When I went into the dark streets of Saigon,” he continued, “my secret service men had cables from our Intelligence people saying that ‘you must be very careful and not get out of your car, you must be surrounded completely with security people, and never shake hands, because this is a very dangerous period – 14 were killed in the town last night – 4,000 mayors and city officials have been killed in this area this year.’ And I said ‘If they don’t want me to speak to them and to talk with them, then let’s don’t go.’ Because I want to know them and I want them to know me. I want to know Asia and I want Asia to know America. And I have learned in my limited experience in this world that you can usually look into a person’s eyes and see what is in his heart. And I want them to look into my eyes and into the eyes of the United States of America.

“We tore the big Air Force signs off of our plane and just painted on Old Glory. We tore the United States Military Air Transport sign down and we just put ‘The United States of America’ on our 707 jet. And we looked into their eyes and we think they could see what was in our hearts because they came in thousands and tens of thousands would surge forward like an Atlantic wave just to touch the hands of someone from America; just with the hope that maybe, perhaps, somehow, somewhere, their little child could get rid of the tape-worms in his stomach and have a chance, that only one out of ten there now have, of getting into school.

“And I’ll tell you that after three or four days we not only looked in their eyes and saw what was in their hearts, but we instilled in them a determination to climb and climb and climb until they reach the top of the hill so that their children could have a school and their children could have food and their children could have clothes on their back.

“I came back to Washington, not distressed, not discouraged; I came back strong in the belief that when people know each other, they understand each other, and if they understand each other, they don’t need to fight each other.

“So if they ask you what he said at your graduation address, you try to remember that he said that you were walking into a world of opportunity, not a world of obstacles; that you were a special missionary for democracy; that you owe freedom and liberty so much that you wanted everybody to have a little bit of it; and that you realized the principal enemies of freedom and liberty were illiteracy and impoverishment and disease; and that you in your own little way with your sheepskin, regardless of how much they paid you per hour or per day or per week, if there was enough to sustain you, you were going out to make war on these things, so that the people of the world could live in peace and prosperity.”

The post L. B. J. appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

When you walked through the door into Granada Television in Cross Street, Manchester you felt the place was special, certainly different from the other media temples I had worked in. The main reception area was dominated by a large compelling painting by Francis Bacon, the canteen illuminated with a challenging mural by John Bratby. In every office hung a portrait of P.J. Barnum [sic], the American circus-owner, as a reminder that we might be journalists, but never forget the razzle-dazzle.

– Michael Parkinson, Parky: My Autobiography, 2008

You will most likely already be familiar with stories of innovation in television, whether through technology, graphics, formats or presentation. Let me describe an early example of a regional news and entertainment programme which not only set a high standard in its field, but provided a template for what was to come later.

Granada TV was a company with drive, determination and flair – always bold whilst cautious (to quote from the coat of arms of Wallasey, within the company’s service area.). Even as the company was being formed, part of their forward-thinking attitude was that staff should not be drawn from the BBC, to prevent “contamination of the new thinking” to quote a Granada executive. Talent search took the company executives to Canada, to bring fresh blood into TV, an area that the parent, Granada Theatres Limited, had no experience in.

Most of the ITV regions put out regional news bulletins varying in length, including Granada’s Northern Newscast, but there were plans in the fifties to develop a new type of early evening news programme. It would complement the ITN news whilst providing contrast, reflecting not only topical news and regional issues, but also covering the arts, sports, and human interest stories. Derek Boulton, public relations officer said that the programme should make people feel that the North “is a good place to be, and we’ve got our own voice”.

The new show, People and Places, ran from 9 July to 20 August 1957 as a networked programme, presented by Peter Jones (comedy actor, chiefly known for In All Directions) and Elaine Grand (who later presented Thames’ Good Afternoon). From contemporary accounts, it’s best described as a miscellany, with sketches, interviews and music usually by the Derek Hilton Quartet. The programme was revived starting from Friday 23 May 1958, but this time only for the North, and presented by Bill Grundy, later joined by Chris Howland. Derek Hilton and his trio provided music (including the theme). Gay Byrne replaced Chris Howland in 1961. People and Places finally came to an end on 18 January 1963.

The Beatles were featured on later editions in 1962 and 1963, and a film shot by Granada at the Cavern in August 1962 didn’t make it onto the programme due to poor sound – but it was broadcast a year later on the show that replaced People and Places.

Launched on 21 January 1963, the Scene at 6.30 presentation and production team included Michael Scott, Michael Apted, Johnnie Hamp, Peter Eckersley, Michael Parkinson, Chris Kelly, Bill Grundy, Leslie Woodhead, Gay Byrne, Barrie Heads, Philip Casson, Brian Trueman and David Plowright: soon to be well-respected media figures not only in the North, but throughout the country and the world. TVTimes trumpeted Scene at 6.30 as “a no-punches-pulled, hard-hitting, bang-up-to-date look at today’s big talking points. And what’s new and original in music?”

Talking of which, the Beatles were not the only group featured – many other artists performed! Lulu, the Searchers, Long John Baldry, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Duke Ellington and hundreds of others went to Manchester to appear, and, in many cases, to chat about their music. In November 1963, the Beatles performed I Want To Hold Your Hand and This Boy on a Daily Echo newspaper set, and had a conversation with Gay Byrne and Ken Dodd – their off-the-cuff humour was so refreshing and infectious that Granada, rather than losing the sequence completely, broadcast it as a one-off Late Scene Extra on 27 November 1963 at 11.45pm. Famous quote: Ken Dodd says that he would need an earthy name to be a pop star, Paul suggests “Rock” or “Cliff”, John suggests “Sod”!

In 1976, George Harrison was interviewed by Granada Reports about his new LP “Thirty-Three and a Third”, and part of that feature was that he was seen sitting at a Steenbeck machine watching the November 1963 film of the Beatles, shaking his head in time with the “whoos”.

Michael Wale’s book Vox Pop includes an interview with former Beatles press officer Derek Taylor. In it, he said had been asked by Peter Eckersley to come and work on Scene at 6.30 after Taylor and Brian Epstein fell out whilst touring with the Beatles in 1964. Taylor, having worked for the Beatles in the US, was much in demand there and set up his own business, representing the Beach Boys and many other bands, and working on the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, after which he went to work for Apple [the music people, not the computer people], again as Press Officer.

Recalling other guests, Joan Riley remembered a sixteen-year-old Scottish girl who was very loud, rehearsing her song Shout – Lulu – and Vanya Kewley who assisted Desmond Morris with a baby chimpanzee in a demonstration. She held the chimp up to the cameras, and it peed in her face, but she laughed it off. Joan was on the phone in her office, and discovered that there was a young lion sitting next to her – luckily she didn’t scream…

News reporting on Scene at 6.30 was more broad than the cliché of “warehouse fire in Leeds”. While accepting that, as Mike Scott said “the London end [was] dominated, not dominating”, he understood the need for a London studio, so that anyone based there could be interviewed for the programme. This had the advantage of enabling debate on issues affecting the North. David Boulton did recognise a problem within the North: “Considerable efforts were made to take the programme outside Manchester itself…particularly there was quite a lot of political pressure to do items in Liverpool because [the city] always felt left out and always second-rate compared with Manchester”. In years to come, this was a recurring theme, and at one point it threatened Granada’s ability to retain their franchise.

The London-based presenter was Dennis Pitts. By using regular inserts from Pitts in London, Michael Parkinson in Leeds and, of course, the whole team in Manchester, Scene at 6.30 invented an innovative format that would later be used by the BBC in Nationwide.

Since 1956, Granada had always been inclined to challenge the accepted wisdom. Mike Scott stated that a new type of current affairs programme was evolving, whether in programmes such as Under Fire, where MPs had to face blunt questions from the audience, or in covering the February 1958 Rochdale by-election (which Granada had been told would be illegal) to covering political party conferences. News actuality of the Ringway air crash in 1957, to the hurricane in Sheffield in 1962 had set some precedents as regards what should be reported and brought to the public’s attention. This was an approach which was a major part of Scene at 6.30.

Granada received a call on 22 November 1963 from CBS in New York, stating that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. It was just five minutes after the beginning of the programme. The senior executive on duty, Denis Foreman, called ITN, who told him that they were “not going to break into the schedules with the story until they had it from [our] own reporter in America”… and there was a standing rule that individual ITV companies should never pre-empt ITN on big stories. Foreman impulsively went ahead, and Mike Scott broke the news to the Scene at 6.30 audience first, before anyone else in the country.

David Boulton was Granada’s Public Relations Officer based in their London office in the early sixties. By his admission, he wasn’t that good: Sidney Bernstein sent for him, told him he was useless, but sent him to Manchester to work on Scene at 6.30. Producer Mike Murphy gruffly greeted him on his first day, and assigned him the task of a three-minute profile of Frank Cousins, completed with the help of a lady who later became Mrs. Boulton. After a short while, David Boulton became the producer, taking over from Mike Murphy. There was a three-minute bulletin produced by the then little-known Bob Greaves, and David decided to put him on Scene at 6.30, where he became a welcome fixture and part of the northern identity of Granada.

Another personality who put his stamp on everything he did was Michael Parkinson. In his autobiography, Michael Parkinson was asked to come and produce the programme by Barrie Heads, who told him that he wanted the programme to be “irreverent, funny and seditious”. Parkinson also mentioned that the Scene at 6.30 ethos was that any of the production staff who could write and present an article could have a go at presenting, and he chose to go on air with Bill Grundy for his very first time in front of the camera. Grundy advised Parkinson to slow down his delivery, and lean forward as if engaging the viewer in conversation: he also said that if anything went wrong, “look pleadingly in my direction”. Grundy also reminded Parkinson, at the end of the show, that he should say thank you to the studio. Less seriously, Michael was also seen with a “From the North Granada” logo drawn on his back, as if it was a tattoo, and extolling the virtues of licorice.

There is a 1965 film from Scene at 6.30 in which he narrates the story of sixteen children living at Ockenden Venture Home for Refugee Children in Wetherby, Yorkshire, with their house parents Mr. and Mrs. Lovell. An emotionally challenging tale of twelve German children and four English orphans who are, to quote Parkinson, “not simply cared for, but grafted into the family”. It isn’t known whether it has been broadcast outside the North, but the film was donated by the charity to the Screen South East archive.

Bill Grundy was regarded as one of the best presenters, but not without his particular problems: he once slipped from the newsreader’s chair whilst reading a story, the worse for wear, although he could not be seen because of the unmanned, locked-off camera. He was an important part of the presentation team, and really came into his own during trades union congress and election broadcasts, with a direct and forensic questioning style.

A further development was the establishment of Granada In The North, a kind of news bulletin and preview of the evening’s entertainment fronted by one of the Scene at 6.30 team. It was a way of establishing the station identity from the moment viewing began, and acted as a promotional vehicle to keep the viewers tuned in throughout the night. The sequence even had its own ident. It lasted from 1964-1968.

Changes were being made to refresh the format of Scene at 6.30 to maintain its pace and vitality. A major reinvention came in July 1966 when the programme became a late-night feature called Newscene (an amalgam of “news” and “scene” coined by Brian Blake). Johnnie Hamp wanted to make it more controversial than Scene at 6.30. One of the new elements was that a studio audience of youngsters would engage in debate with the musical guests on issues of the day. (With the benefit of hindsight, the idea was very similar to BBC-1’s A Whole Scene Going – a rare example of Granada following a trend rather than leading.)

Courtesy of elenarendezvous

As regards archive status, the only complete edition that survives is the Scene Special shown at 10.25pm on 7 March 1967 in the North only. Entitled “It’s So Far Out, It’s Straight Down”, it focussed on the burgeoning London underground movement and psychedelic music scene. Paul McCartney was interviewed and so were leading underground figures connected to the International Times and Indica Bookshop, such as Barry Miles; a Legalise Pot rally in Piccadilly with John “Hoppy” Hopkins and Suzy Creamcheese; Pink Floyd performing at the UFO Club; and footage of the International Poetry Incarnation, which took place at the Royal Albert Hall on 11 June 1965 featuring Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell and Laurence Ferlinghetti amongst others (this became a film in its own right – Wholly Communion). It would be correct to state that Scene Special produced such a balanced and definitive picture of that time. As a snapshot of the counterculture, it’s an invaluable time capsule, and excerpts have been included in many programmes including Tony Palmer’s All You Need Is Love in 1977.

Scene made its way back into an early-evening slot in June 1967, and Late Scene was a late-night feature as before (this writer recalls that Sgt. Pepper (Reprise) was used as a closing theme at least once during the summer of that year). Change was coming though…

The franchise awards on 11 June 1967 allowed new contractors into the system: London Weekend TV, Harlech, Thames (itself a new company formed by ABC and Rediffusion jointly) and Yorkshire. The last of these was a challenge to Granada: their
franchise was now a seven-day contract, broadcasting to the North-West (“West Of The Pennines” according to the TVTimes) only. Granadaland, the proud concept driving the company’s approach, looked forlorn and defeated. However, the company was down but not out – a rethink was needed to redefine their region, and to serve the viewers with the same devotion and fervour as before.

Scene continued into 1968, with the same features and news coverage as before. According to one account, Mr. Sunshine by Barclay James Harvest was featured in a short documentary shown as part of the programme – this was the B-side of the single Early Morning which came out in April, the same month that Scene was finally laid to rest.

The replacement was Six-O-One, mostly fronted by Bob Greaves, as were the successors Newsday and Newsview – yet again, there was music, sport, news, human interest but not as vital as before. Yet, the assemblage that was essentially Scene at 6.30 was taken apart to form several strands – three examples being Put It In Writing, On Site (featuring Ray Gosling) and It’s Trueman (Brian Trueman in search of miscellany) – all of which quickly registered with the viewers. The fact was that there was so much talent in Scene that it was sometimes difficult to contain it.

There was a feeling that Granada were still trying to recapture the glory days of Scene at 6.30 in the early seventies, featuring specially shot features (I remember seeing the Flirtations perform Give Me Love on a clip shown on Newsday or Newsview in 1971). Eventually the format became one of the longest-running magazine and news programmes, Granada Reports which started on 1 October 1973.

Scene at 6.30 set a high standard in the sixties, and the team who worked on it became well-known to the viewers, and eventually a wider audience.

Michael Apted became a film producer in Hollywood, and is still highly regarded for the Up series of documentaries; Brian Trueman not only was an actor (he was in BBC radio’s The Clitheroe Kid) but wrote many children’s programmes such as Cockleshell Bay and many books; Michael Parkinson, after a time at LWT, established himself as THE chat-show host; Chris Kelly presented Junior Criss-Cross Quiz, Clapperboard and Food and Drink for the BBC; Gay Byrne went back to Ireland and RTÉ to present the long-running The Late Late Show.

Johnnie Hamp went on producing music and entertainment programmes, notably The Comedians and The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club, and left Granada in 1987 to form his own production company. He is now retired.

In terms of drama, Philip Casson produced or was involved in many productions from EastEnders to The Man in Room 17. Peter Eckersley was involved in production, then became Head Of Drama, commissioning Victoria Wood to write a play for Granada.

Leslie Woodhead became involved with World in Action, and is still working at 83, as a director/producer on documentaries and Hollywood films.

Bill Grundy continued in presentation and journalism of all shades, such as Afternoon Edition, A House For The Future and Thames TV’s Today – he is remembered more for the December 1976 encounter with the Sex Pistols, which led to his sacking, and a low-key career in the media until his early death in 1993.

David Plowright was Controller of Programmes 1969-1979, and then managing director and later chairman of Granada TV from 1987. Always a staunch supporter of Granada’s programming, quality and integrity, in 1992 he came up against the new Chairman of the Granada Group, Gerry Robinson who forced him out. He passed away in 2006.

In 1979, Plowright was succeeded as Programme Controller by Michael Scott. His career took him from presenting Cinema, The Nuts and Bolts of the Economy and many discussion programmes. In 1987 he returned to presenting with The Time The Place, and was warm, witty and incisive as ever. A character with many fine talents, he passed away in 2006.

Granada in the nineteen-sixties was an exciting place to be for those working there, but the face of the television channel to its public was friendly, warm, informative and Northern… all qualities that apply to every programme, but especially to Scene at 6.30.

The post Seen at 6.30 appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

The latest Granada show, Scene at 6.30, which is 2½ hours a week long, has successfully passed the dangerous early days. Now the infant is strong enough to bear some examination of its pedigree. It is a pedigree which stretches back seven years to Granada’s first days as a television station and my first assignment as a floor manager for them.

In 1956 Granada plunged into the North with, I would guess, the heaviest outside broadcast plans ever. Lifeboats at Fleetwood, docks at Liverpool, a Salvation Army hostel in Manchester, cheese in Cheshire, Guy Fawkes night in York — the Travelling Eye units hardly stopped for the whole year.

While they were working, a new type of current affairs programme was evolving in the studios. It was criticised as brash and vulgar, the studio audiences who asked the questions condemned as uncivilised. Members of Parliament who were asked to take part found a hard fight on their hands. Under Fire was on the map.

Granada’s coverage of the Rochdale by-election in February, 1958, established a new involvement of television in politics that later developed into our coverage of the last general election.

The first live TV reports of a Party Conference came from Granada. Our cameras entered the Labour Party’s conference hall at Scarborough in 1960 to record Hugh Gaitskell’s famous “Fight, Fight and Fight Again” speech. This led to the first live coverage of Party Conferences and the TUC — again by Granada.

The Ringway air crash in 1957 posed a question of television ethics. It was possible for a Travelling Eye team to get to Ringway quickly and give us live television coverage of a tragedy that would normally have been reported for us on film.

The unit went out and in a remarkably short time we were transmitting to the network pictures of the Viscount airliner that had swung off course in the last moments before landing and slashed part of a terrace of council houses into obliteration.

The pictures spoke for themselves, our talk at the scene was muted. It was a depressing job to work on and at the time I wondered if we were right to do it.

On a practical level, I was afraid that our bulky equipment might obstruct the rescue workers. On this point I was immediately proved wrong; in fact, our television lights were an aid to the rescue operation.

And, on reflection, I think we were right in principle to do it.

There have been other examples of this kind of news story. The most recent was the hurricane that swung into Sheffield at four o’clock on the morning of February 16, 1962.

It left a trail of roofless, shattered buildings and as the first reports came in, our Travelling Eye unit, by now refined into a highly mobile and compact set-up, left for the scene. By late afternoon live TV pictures from Sheffield were on the air.

The Northern face Granada has shown to the national network has not just been one of politics and news. It wasn’t our political programmes that made actors frantically try to re discover the Northern accents their drama school teachers had so carefully ironed out.

On the crest of a wave of novels about the North and films about the North came a television serial about the North. I doubt if Tony Warren, the original creator of Coronation Street, realised the full significance of the moment when he put the first sheet of paper in his typewriter.

He started a serial that rose steadily through the ratings to a consistently dominating first and second position. A programme that made people experts about the North who previously had known only that “it always rains in Manchester.” A programme that even managed to combine great popular success with unheard-of praise from some of the egg-head weeklies. A success indeed!

Now we have Scene at 6.30 – which we hope embodies all the best from what has gone before. A magazine programme for the North and of the North. But not simply about the North. We make gracious acknowledgment that there is another large city in the South of England by having a studio there.

The Scene at 6.30 London studio exists because it is foolish not to recognise that many of the people we want to talk to are for one reason or another in London. If they haven’t the time to come up here, then we. in the interests of good coverage, must go there.

But if you know Scene at 6.30 you know that the London end is dominated, not dominating. Our cameras travel farther and farther across the Granada region. If there were places that had not been visited by a Granada unit before Scene came along, their number diminishes every day. In fact, we’re beginning to hear complaints that we’re never in Manchester!

Pop artists presented in an original way, news and interest stories from the North, subjects national and international that affect the North.

I suppose the next Scene at 6.30 milestone will be when one of our camera units goes abroad to cover a story. Why not?

The post And the SCENE is all set at Granada appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

SCHIZOPHRENIA — believing you are two different people — is not something to wish on anyone.

But 48-year-old Jack Woolgar quite enjoys his own particular form of split personality. And he gets paid for it.

Jack is a well-established Northern repertory actor. A sensible, sane chap, busy with theatre and television work and living comfortably and quietly with his family in Huddersfield.

But when he enters the Granada studios an alarming transformation takes place. He parts his hair in the middle, dons steel-rimmed spectacles and becomes Albert Sowerby, the crackpot chicken farmer and inventor who will be making more “scientific revelations” in Granada’s People and Places on Monday.

I asked Jack to introduce me to his other self — and it was Albert who answered.

He told me he lives on a lonely, windswept farm at Salaithewaite on the slopes of the Pennines, with his Chinese wife Lotus Blossom and several hundred hens.

“We have two cottages,” he assured me, solemnly. “My wife and I live in one and the hens in the other.”

Lotus Blossom is Albert’s second wife. “My first was blown over the cliffs in a high wind at Scarborough,” he said.

He and Lotus Blossom met when he was supplying chickens to the local Chinese restaurant. They fell in love over a chicken chow mein.

Now, on the moors, they enjoy an idyllic existence, supplying eggs to the Egg Marketing Board — and dreaming up fantastic inventions to keep up payments on the television set.

Albert has a problem, though. The world still hasn’t recognised his genius.

“But they will,” he told me confidently.

His “dream-machine” had half the West Riding agog.

“It was an armchair with a bucket seat and a steering wheel,” he explained.

“There was a tape-recorder playing recordings of car noises on one side, and a packet of sweets on the other.

“You could sit in it and dream you were going anywhere. And I like sweets. Very convenient.”

The world hasn’t yet seen the best of Albert, because he is working on a system of engendering poetic inspiration in the layman.

“You lie flat on your back, gazing at the fleecy clouds,” he said.

When this has been marketed, he will be tackling the problem of runners who jump the gun in sprint races at the Olympic Games.

“I’ve got it all worked out,” said Albert — “sprung traps like those in use at greyhound tracks.”

Mercifully, Jack Woolgar never lets Albert out of the studios.

The post Egg-head among the hens! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

MR. KRUSHCHEV’S face was split in an amiable grin — and he reached across to shake hands enthusiastically, president Kennedy accepted the handshake cordially — and slapped Mr. Krushchev on the back for good measure.

“You see,” said Chris Bryant, blandly picking up Mr. Nehru, and gingerly stepping over President de Gaulle, “we’ve been in England for only four months, and already we’re making history.”

It was the sort of crazy situation I might have expected to find, dropping in unexpectedly on satirists Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, who provide another droll commentary on life in Granada’s People and Places on Wednesday.

Allan and Chris were rehearsing. And the international gentlemen were hand-puppets they had brought with them from Canada.

“We’ve been in Canada for years,” said Chris.

“But we aren’t Canadians,” said Allan.

“He was born in Scotland — near Gordonstoun.” said Chris.

“And he was born in Bolton,” said Allan.

“Why Canada?” I asked.

“It was the strong Empire-building streaks in our nature,” said Allan.

“We were young men so we decided to go West,” said Chris.

“To seek our fortune,” said Allan.

They are still young men. Allan is 23, Chris is 26. Allan is the one who plays the guitar.

“He carries it to impress people,” said Chris.

“It helps to cover up my inferiority complex,” said Allan.

Chris is probably the only comedian in the business with three university degrees.

“He graduated from Cambridge and studied law at McGill University in Canada,” said Allan. “He graduated from McGill and studied law with the Canadian Government in Ottawa. He graduated from there and became a comedian.”

“That’s life,” said Chris.

Chris is still retained by a leading legal firm in Canada — and he does regular long-range research work for them over here.

Allan manages to keep two careers running simultaneously, too, punctuating his comedy work with what he describes as his “serious writing” — criticism and review.

The cross-talk act I had interrupted started at McGill University some years ago.

“We didn’t know each other at the time,” said Allan

“I’d heard about him and was trying to avoid a meeting,” said Chris.

The featured act of a show was the West Point Glee Club — “One hundred and forty odd American Army cadets,” said Chris. “They were on a goodwill tour of Canada.”

“As they filed into the theatre I sat in a dark corner chanting ‘Yankee, go home’,” said Allan. “Suddenly I heard a still small voice coming from the other side of the theatre chanting ‘Yankee, go home, go home’.”

“The still small voice was Chris Bryant,” said Chris Bryant. “And a mutual taste was established ”

After leaving university, Chris and Allan toured America appearing in elegant nightclubs, but returned to Montreal to do their own television show.

“It was a sort of souped-up, personalised, late-night version of People and Places,” said Allan, “with interviews, jazz, sketches, film clips and free-wheeling discussions.”

“There was that well-known Canadian gangster who was going to tell us all about his — and others’ — criminal activities,” said Allan.

“On the night of the show he turned up sporting a black eye,” said Chris.

“He had not only forgotten what he was going to talk about, but he assured us, when reminded, that he didn’t know anything about it to begin with,” said Allan.

“However, the show was eventually saved.”

“He recited some of his own poetry for us,” said Chris. “Stuff he had written on an ‘extended vacation’.”

Which, for some inexplicable reason, took the boys back to where they were when I interrupted.

“I understand you’re writing a biography,” said Allan.

“An autobiography,” said Chris.

“Your life story?” said Allan.

“No — it’s about a car,” said Chris …

So I took the hint, and left.

The post Duet for drolls appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IN the surgery of the People and Places doctor, not a stethoscope was in sight. His desk was covered with photographs of sporting celebrities — and some of them you can see here.

“These are for Granada’s Evening Surgery next Friday,” he said. “I shall be giving a doctor’s eye view of some of the giants of the world of sport. All have in common one remarkable quality, which I think will be a surprise to many viewers.

“I don’t want to say what it is in advance, but these pictures might suggest the link they have between them.”

As we went through the photographs, discussing the achievements that have made world headlines, I discovered the doctor is a sportsman.

Since he was given his first cricket bat at the age of five, he has tried his hand at most sports. But, as the picture of Ben Hogan reminded him, golf is the one he took up late.

All the same, he has done well at it. In two years he got his handicap down to three, and then went on to win a top Northern tournament.

Sam Langford’s photograph recalled his interest in boxing and the time he was President of Manchester University Boxing Club. That phase came roughly between the lacrosse period, when he was picked to play for Lancashire schoolboys, and the rugby period, when he played for the university. But of all the sports stars we talked about, Fleetwood-Smith, the Australian bowler, was obviously the one admired most by the doctor, and cricket the game he loved above all the others.

By the time he was a medical student he was captaining the combined English Universities team. At 42, he has just stepped down as captain of his local eleven.

Today his sport is divided between cricket — he plays once and sometimes twice a week throughout the summer — and golf — two or three rounds a week in the winter.

“Golf,” he said, “is particularly suitable for a doctor, because it can be played at any time. Cricket is different. Someone has to be found to look after things for me.

“Fortunately, I have a good arrangement with another doctor who likes football just as much as I like cricket. In winter I stand in for him so that he can go to his football matches. In summer he stands in for me so that I can go to my cricket.”

And the result of all this exercise? Well, the doctor may be going rather bald on top, but he can still put in a half hour session on his bagpipes without losing his breath and he hasn’t had an illness since his schooldays.

Which isn’t bad for a man on the wrong side of 40.

The post Sporting doctor finds a link 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.

The post The Adam Faith Show appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

One Man’s Music, a new Granada series featuring songs of the world’s great popular composers, starts on Monday with the work of Jerome Kern. Cleo Laine sings each week, backed by her husband, Johnny Dankworth, and his orchestra. Here David Griffiths writes about one man’s music — Johnny Dankworth’s

THE year was 1944, the number was Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo, the band rejoiced in the name of Freddy Mirfield’s Garbage Men … and the occasion was the finals of a national dance band contest.

At the microphone: a 17-year-old clarinet player with the lean good looks of a juvenile Frank Sinatra.

A trade paper review said of the show: “Most credit goes to the youthful clarinet player who thought out an original solo for himself instead of using the conventional one of Barney Bigard’s. (Bigard was Ellington’s star clarinettist.)

“He played with a taste and technique that would have been a credit to a professional instrumentalist.”

So began the professional career of Johnny Dankworth, who later confessed: “The truth is, I just didn’t know Bigard’s solo. I had to improvise!”

By 1949 Johnny was himself a judge at music contests, and he was described as the “noted alto sax and clarinet player of the Ambrose Orchestra.” Ambrose was then playing at a London night club.

In those five years the musical outlook of the young Dankworth had undergone a profound change.

He had become a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music, and worked in “Geraldo’s Navy” — the bands operated by Geraldo on Cunard liners.

Johnny worked on the Queen Mary. Between voyages he spent days in New York listening to the giants of modern jazz, particularly alto saxophonist Charlie Parker.

“I marvelled at his genius then, as I marvel now,” said Johnny.

“Everything I had heard up to that time was involved with Benny Goodman. Parker changed my thinking.”

Such thinking, in those days, was considered dangerously avante-garde among the entrenched musicians of the swing era. Dankworth found few commercial outlets for his kind of jazz.

But his big chance came. One day he had a call from Ted Heath. “I could hardly believe it,” said Johnny.

At the time Ted had a highly successful series of Sunday afternoon swing sessions at the London Palladium.

“I think Harry Parry was to be that Sunday’s guest star, but was taken ill. Somebody suggested me as a replacement.

“I was deliriously excited. I had to borrow one of my father’s suits.

“Jack Parnell — then playing drums for Ted Heath — was very kind. He offered to lend me one of his.

“Ted introduced me as ‘the young clarinet star’! Within a couple of bars I made the most ear-piercing squeak!

“But Ted was very nice afterwards, and suggested I form my own band.

“So I signed on six young musicians and asked Ted about bookings. All he had was one Palladium date! Not Ted’s fault, of course. I had been misled by my own youth and publicity.”

The Johnny Dankworth Seven made its debut at a 1950 swing session. Fellow musicians were delighted, but the paying public were apathetic.

“FANS BAFFLED BY DANKWORTH’S MASTERPIECES,” said a trade paper. A zealous agent stuck the item in Johnny’s cuttings book … leaving only the last two words of the headline.

But after 10 weeks Johnny called the boys together. “It’s all over,” he told them. “No jobs, no money.”

“We won’t let that bother us,” they replied. “We’ll stick together.”

The Seven survived, even made a little money. Then in 1953 Johnny took the step that often spells disaster. He formed a big band.

What’s more, he made money. Not much, and not often, but just when things were looking black, something always turned up. One example was Johnny’s hit recording of Three Blind Mice.

Today, a reasonably prosperous Johnny Dankworth lives with his wife Cleo Laine at Nether Hall, Bletchley — an hour and a quarter’s drive along the M1 from London’s Tin Pan Alley.

“Cleo and I always wanted to live in the country,” he told me. “And we could do so much more with our money there than we could in the centre of London, where a flat would cost as much as our Bletchley house. And we wanted to bring up our family away from our centre of business.”

It was Johnny who discovered Cleo when he reluctantly agreed to give her an audition with his Seven. He could hardly believe his ears — and his good fortune — and promptly hired her for the group and, subsequently, for the orchestra.

Though they often pursue separate careers (she as an actress as well as a vocal star) they join forces when possible, as in this series.

The post It started with the garbage men appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THEIR fans see them as the symbolic success story of all the boys-next-door.

Their co-stars recognise them as a slick professional trio who have been swinging “standard” pops and making feet tap since they started singing together 10 years ago.

But how do the King Brothers, featured in Swinging Along every Tuesday, see themselves?

They share the same parents, the same address, and the same friends. They bump into each other at the breakfast table, in the rehearsal room and before the TV cameras So they know each other pretty well.

And when I talked to them at rehearsal they gave me their verdicts. First on Dennis:

Dennis, the pianist, is 22 and the baby of the trio. He picked up his musical talent from his father, a planning engineer for a car firm who used to be a semi pro pianist with a dance band. At six, Dennis played the banjo. At 10, he turned to the piano. At 16 he left school to join his brothers in a professional group.

Michael: If it hadn’t been for Dennis, none of us would have got involved in show biz. He is the one with the real musical knowledge. Whatever we know he taught us.

Tony: Michael and I are just intuitive about music. We go for the regulars — Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and so on — but Dennis has a wider taste.

Michael: Let’s face it, he has a livelier mind than we have. He gets enthusiastic over everything that directly concerns us.

Tony: All his money goes on clothes — £40 [£720 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] a suit is nothing to him. He has more suits than Michael and I put together. He’s always trying to outdo us with smart ties, striped shirts and fancy waistcoats. We let him.

Michael: He’s trying to become a man about town. It’s a phase we all go through.

Tony is 25, has fair ginger hair, a wry smile and a habit of not joining a conversation unless he has something worth saying. As a teenager, he was, musically, the odd boy out, while Michael and Dennis were winning talent contests as a guitar and piano double act. Then a friend found a double bass in a cellar, gave Tony lessons — and the trio was born.

Michael: He’s the odd one out in personality, too. He’s much quieter than Dennis or me. When he does speak, it is usually a crack against one of us.

Dennis: His habits aren’t like ours, either. He’s a real homebird. He’d rather stay in to read, or practice his golf swing, than have a night on the town.

Michael: He saves his money. We share a joint bank account out of which we allow ourselves a regular weekly amount for spending money. Dennis and I get through ours in a flash. Never a 6d. [2½p in decimal, 45p now after inflation] left at the end of the week. But not Tony.

Dennis: He’s got a thing about security. And woe betide you if you borrow 5s. [25p in decimal, £4.50 after inflation] and forget to pay it back.

Michael: His main hobby is keeping fit. He looks after himself. He goes to bed at the same time every night. Believes in plenty of sleep and plenty of fresh air.

Dennis: Take it from us — one of these days be is going to make someone a steady, quiet, responsible, healthy, wealthy husband!

Michael, the 27-year-old guitarist, is darker and more forceful than his younger brothers. He is used to speaking for all of them.

Dennis: We still regard him as the leader. A sort of leftover from when we were kids. He influences us a lot. He sees himself as the organiser. He ploughs ahead gets things started and expects us to follow.

Tony: Usually when we’re busy with something else.

Dennis: Mike’s very conscientious about our turning up for rehearsals on time, and seeing that we practice. If we don’t give in he gets upset. He gets worked up over lots of little things. I think his big fault is that he’s…

— “Sensitive?” suggested Mike, unable to keep silent.

Tony: Irritable?

Dennis: No, I was going to say excitable. If he’s worried or nervous then he picks on one of us because we’re always the nearest. Sometimes he feels he’s against us. But when he’s happy then he’s generous and gay and wants everyone to have a good time with him.

Tony: The trouble is that his idea of a good time may not be everybody’s.

Dennis: I think he’ll be the first one off us to get married. I hope it won’t split the trio if he does.

Tony: At one point we were sufficiently worried about this to take out an insurance policy against it happening. But I don’t think there’s any need now. For as long as the public want us, Mike, Dennis and I intend staying just as we are — a singing threesome.

But the three boys admitted that the idea of sticking to the image they have created of singing, swinging, homely boys down the street, has its drawbacks for all of them.

Mike feels that three joint singers can never fully become individual personalities.

Dennis feels that to continue their style of steady singing (which ensured them a safe passage through and beyond the rock age, and will guarantee them a safe voyage through the twist era) they must sacrifice the chance to experiment musically in any extreme form.

Tony feels their future as a trio will necessitate a continuance of their closely-knit life with its limitations of mental independence and privacy, which he, at least, is beginning to demand.

But when I asked them to weigh these against the advantages of their joint fame and joint income, their choice was unanimous:

The Kings see the Kings remaining the Kings.

The post 3 swing along to a King size success appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

ON Wednesday Granada brings the spectacular modem Belgian stage show Four Brothers to British television.

I came to Brussels to see the show recorded, travelling with the 40 technicians — and three big vanloads of equipment — whose job it was to get the show for Britain.

And as the crews worked all out to convert the gigantic circular stage of the Cirque Royale in Brussels into a temporary television studio I discussed this remarkable show with some of the men responsible for it.

The story of Four Brothers? Let Herman Closson, the author, tell you.

He wrote the original play during the war, when Belgium was still under German occupation. The play went on tour but it came to an abrupt end — when some of the actors were thrown into gaol.

“It is a patriotic play, you see,” said M. Closson. ‘It tells the story of the four sons of Aymon — heroes of Belgian legend — who ride to the court of the Emperor Charlemagne to be knighted.

“The eldest of the brothers, Renaud, falls in love with a lady of the court — but has to fight a duel with a courtier.

“When he kills the courtier the soldiers of the Emperor turn on him and his brothers — but the magician Maugis sends Bayard, the flying steed, to their rescue.

“They flee to their father’s castle, pursued by the Emperor, and eventually are besieged there.

“Maugis helps them to kidnap Charlemagne as he sleeps, but they later repent and return him unharmed, and the Emperor forgives them their crimes. But Renaud has to go on a nightmare pilgrimage before he is allowed to return to his beloved.”

M. Closson spread his hands expressively.

“The German authorities did not like the play — they recognised it as a gesture of defiance.” he said. “Do you think the British will like it?”

I think they will, but having said that, my difficulty is in describing this show that really does defy adequate description. It fits into no theatrical category in my previous experience.

You like ballet? This is a ballet, then — dynamic and amusing — performed by the Twentieth Century Ballet of Brussels, one of Europe’s leading ballet companies.

“The ballet has no stars. We work as a team,” said Pierre Dobrievech, who plays Renaud. Teamwork, and no stars … but the dancers include some of the best in Belgium.

Vittoria Biaggi, Franco Romano and Jacques Saussin play the other three brothers. And Duska Sifnios and Tania Bari play the two principal female parts.

You don’t like ballet? Then don’t be put off.

Because you might like Westerns, or medieval horse-opera, or verse-speaking, or Japanese classical drama, or Edgar Rice-Burroughs, or theatre in the round … and it is all of these things as well.

Maurice Bejart, producer and choreographer, who has been a principal dancer with ballet companies all over the world, describes it this way:

“Four Brothers is not just a ballet. It is so many kinds of theatre rolled into one. With this production we have tried to do something entirely new.

“It is a fairy tale for people of all ages. We dip in and out of fantasy when the occasion demands. Our dancers dance to music — but not always to recognised music. They might be moving to 14th-century music. Or percussion. Or everyday sounds electronically distorted on a tape-recorder.”

Spectacle and surprise are the keynotes of M. Bejart’s production.

No effect is too technically difficult to achieve. Ten-foot giants stride the stage. A 40ft tower rises magically out of nowhere. A flying steed thunders into the centre of a courtyard. And, as a fitting climax to one of the court scenes, the hero and his rival, the courtier, play a game of chess with real people as pieces!

The man with one of the biggest problems in the show was Fernand Schirren, who was responsible for translating all of this into modem musical terms.

M. Schirren provides the percussion for each performance himself.

“The music has never been written down.” he said. “It is planned — but it comes out differently every performance. It is like jazz perhaps?

“I try to do with classical music what jazz musicians do with popular music. This way, it comes out fresh and exciting every night. The audience responds to the music, we respond to the audience, and everyone is satisfied.”

The post A fairy tale for all ages appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Head On, the first of an occasional Granada series this Wednesday, uses television to present living portraits of people in their own image … and out of the candid opinions and recollections of friends and others. The subjects can reply to criticism and, in so doing, enrich their own portraits. The first subject is Randolph Churchill. Lord Birkenhead and John Spencer Churchill recall Randolph the boy; Sir Fitzroy Maclean recalls Randolph the soldier; Michael Foot recalls Randolph the political opponent. Whatever Randolph Churchill is today he was moulded by happenings in his early years. Here he writes of those happenings

I WAS born in London on May 28, 1911, at 33, Eccleston-square, of poor [sic: the Churchill family were anything but poor – Ed] but honest parents. Born within sound of Bow Bells, I was a Cockney and, until I was 40, was destined to spend more than half my life in London.

I have no recollections of Eccleston-square where my father and mother had lived from their marriage in 1908. When I was born my father was Home Secretary in Mr. Asquith’s famous Liberal administration, and when I was only a few months old my father became First Lord of the Admiralty and we all moved to Admiralty House overlooking the Horse Guards Parade. “We all” were my father and mother and sister Diana, who was nearly two years older than myself.

I remember looking out of a window at Admiralty House and seeing a large parade of soldiers on the Horse Guards Parade. I asked where they were going and was told: “The Dardanelles.” This must have been in 1915 when I was four.

I didn’t know where the Dardanelles were or what the war was all about, but the Dardanelles hung like a storm cloud over Admiralty House, and I used to end my nightly prayers: “God bless Mummy and Papa. God bless the Dardanelles and make me a good boy. Amen.”

I also used to pray for a Mr. Jones at this time. I was taken, I suppose by my father, to the House of Commons. Among other sights I was shown the pegs on which Members hung their hats. Pointing to the first peg I saw, I enquired who hung his hat there. I was told “Mr. Jones.” He rated almost as highly in my prayers as the Dardanelles.

One other thing I remember at Admiralty House, Diana and I used to be taken for a daily morning airing in the Green Park in a double pram. This must have been just before World War One.

There were people called Suffragettes who wanted to get the vote for women, which I later discovered was a proposal to which my father and Mr. Asquith were strongly opposed; so the Suffragettes tried to kidnap me in the park.

I have a memory of being pulled out of the pram and of the nursery-maid catching hold of me and pushing me back.

More strongly etched in my memory is the detective who thereafter discreetly accompanied us on our morning outings lest this half-hearted attempt should be repeated.

I think I remember the coming of the war in August 1914. We were staying at the seaside. I think at a place called “Pear Tree Cottage.” There was a lot of excitement and my father had to keep driving to London and coming back.

One day when he was in London we were told that war had come. We looked out to sea expecting to see German ships approaching the coast, hut nothing happened except that we all had to pack up and go hack to London. We children were rather disappointed.

When we were turned out of Admiralty House we all went to live at 41, Cromwell-road. We doubled up with my Uncle Jack and my Aunt Goonie and their two children, Johnnie, who was two years older than me and Peregrine who, I suppose, had just been born.

The house was almost opposite the Natural History Museum. On wet afternoons Diana, Johnnie and myself would be taken there.

We did not spend much time looking at the exhibits. We preferred to run along the corridors playing hide and seek and since hardly anybody seemed interested in the specimens which had been collected in this fine building, we seldom got into any trouble. While we were at Cromwell-road there were Zeppelin raids on London. These were tremendously exciting, since we children would be woken up in the middle of the night, wrapped in blankets and carried down to the basement where there would be a lot of grown ups having supper and drinking champagne.

We liked Zeppelins very much indeed and thought it a great treat to mix with grown ups in the middle of the night.

Another memory of Cromwell-road is of one of my father’s birthdays. We children had our luncheon up stairs and were always brought down to see the grown-ups finishing theirs.

One day, when it was my father’s birthday (November 30, St. Andrew’s Day), we came down, and for some reason or other the grown-ups had only just started eating.

My mother had arranged a treat for my father — oysters. When we children came in there was only one left. My father said: “Would you like to try one?” I naturally said: “Yes.”

The oyster was put into my mouth. I was horrified and went and spat it into the fire. I suppose this was in 1916 with food rationing so very strict.

Everyone was aghast at my act.

I am glad to record that this episode left no permanent scar on my palate, for I have eaten scores of dozens of oysters in later years, with the greatest enjoyment.

A little later, I suppose at the end of 1916 or the beginning of 1917, my father bought a little place in the country, Lullenden, near East Grinstead. I imagine to get us away from the air raids.

We were very happy there and used to go to school at a place called Dormansland in a pony-trap. I think we went there only in the morning.

The lessons ended with a short religious service and the final hymn was always O God Our Help in Ages Past.

It was at this time that I first discovered in a rather macabre way that my father was different from other fathers and was a great man.

I was about five years old at the time and I said to a little boy at school (it makes me blush to recall the episode): “Will you be my chum?”

He said: “No.”

I said: “Why not?”

He said: “Your father murdered my father.”

I said: “What do you mean?” He said: “At the Dardanelles.”

So when I got home I told my mother who was naturally distressed and explained to me about the Dardanelles.

I am sorry to say it made me feel immensely proud and I realised my father was a boss man who could order other fathers about. My discovery that my father had exceptional powers was reinforced in a more mundane matter.

Often my mother and father were not at Lullenden tor many weeks. He was making munitions and she was running canteens for munition workers.

One day we heard that my father was coming down that afternoon at tea time. We had run out of jam. My father has never had tea as a meal in his life. He always said: “I don’t believe in eating between meals.” However, we thought he would come and sit with us while we had our tea.

So with a precocious sense of propaganda I collected 10 or 12 empty jam pots and put them on the tea table. My father is not particularly observant about these sort of things, but a collection of 12 empty jam pots caught his eye. He was horrified to learn that we had no jam. The next day several jars arrived.

He seemed to me a very powerful man. He could order the fathers of other boys into battle and could produce jam.

Under my father’s encouragement I learnt by heart “Ye Manners of England who guard our native shores…” When my father and mother and their important friends came down for the weekend. I was invited to stand on a stool and recite this poem.

I particularly enjoyed the last verse: “The meteor flag of England shall yet terrific burn, till England’s troubled night be passed and the star of peace return.”

I remember this vividly and I always thought that I had enjoyed these recitations.

But it seems that I bore some resentment against my father in the matter. For my mother has since told me that I used to refer to my father as the “meteor beast.”

One last recollection of Lullenden. A splendid old man with a white beard who looked like King Edward VII came to stay. He was Sir Ernest Cassel and I understood that he had been a great friend of my grandfather’s as well as being a friend of my father and mother; also that he was rich.

On the morning he was due to leave, my sister Diana was summoned to see him and came back with a £1 note.

The nanny said: “Now Sir Ernest wants to see you.” I said. “Do you think he is going to give me £1 as well?” “No,” said she, “I think he’s going to give you something bigger.”

I was not aware that there was anything bigger than a £1 note so I approached Sir Ernest with lively excitement.

He gave me a £5 note. I did not know that such a thing existed. It seemed more than all the money in the world.

I saw him once more about a year later. Again he gave me a £5 note. I have seldom been solvent since.

I discussed Sir Ernest’s generosity with my governess, Miss Kinsey. She said: “Well, you see, he is a millionaire.” This was the first time I had heard the use of this magic word.

She explained to me as best she could what a millionaire was. I asked whether we knew any other millionaires. She said: “Yes. Colonel and Mrs. Spender-Clay who live nearby at Ford Manor. I used to work for them. They are certainly millionaires because Mrs. Spender-Clay was an Astor.” “Don’t we know any other millionaires?” I asked.

“Well, your father’s friend Sir Phillip Sassoon is certainly a millionaire.”

I had not then met Phillip Sassoon; later I often did, but neither he nor the Spender-Clays ever gave me a fiver.

Shortly before I was eight I went to a boarding school, Sandroyds, which was then at Oxted in Surrey.

There was a gang of bullies at the school organised by two boys who held the whole school in awe.

They would send their minions to arrest any small boy like myself whom they did not like, and frighten him by swinging and cracking whips around their heads.

Many other small boys less uninhibited than myself were terrorised and enslaved by this process. So I formed a counter-gang to resist these outrages.

My gang consisted of a very tough boy called Benn, who I think was a nephew of a Member of Parliament called Sir Arthur Shirley Benn, and three Spanish princes, Alvaro, Alonzo and Atalfo of Orleans-Bourbon.

Benn was my chief of staff and the three Spanish princes were my bodyguard. We got the better of the old bullies and demoralised them.

My greatest friend at Sandroyds was a boy called Rattigan. He was a member of my counter gang and in the holidays he would ask me to lunch at his mother’s home and we would go to see a matinee, usually a Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes.

In the next holidays my mother would ask him back and we would go to see another play.

When we left Sandroyds he went to Harrow and I went to Eton, and I didn’t see him again for 25 years. Meanwhile in the early thirties I began to read in the papers about a clever young playwright called Terence Rattigan who had written a play called French without Tears.

I wondered often whether it could have been my boyhood friend but it was not until many years later, just after World War Two when I met him on the liner Queen Elizabeth in Beatrice Lillie’s cabin, that I discovered he was.

One of the things I remember very well about my four years at Sandroyds was that Queen Marie of Rumania came down to inspect the school.

We were all drawn up in two lines on the cricket field. Accompanied by Mr. Hornby, the headmaster, she inspected all of us.

She naturally embraced her three nephews, the Princes Alvaro, Alonzo and Atalfo; she also embraced me.

I was flattered but surprised, and supposed that she had done this because I was the son of a famous man. I had been indicated to her by Mr. Hornby as the son of Mr. Churchill.

What made us giggle very much was when she also embraced Rattigan, for this could not have been due to relationship or the fame of his parents, but to his charm and good looks.

When I was about 12 my father asked me whether I would like to go to Eton or Harrow. I thought it was very civilised of him to give me the option.

We had been an Etonian family for many generations. My father was sent to Harrow only because it was quaintly thought at the time that he suffered from lung trouble and that Harrow on the Hill would be better for him than Eton in the smog.

Lack of lung power has never subsequently been detected in my father, but perhaps it was the climate of Harrow which rid him of this complaint.

My father had not been happy at Harrow. I doubt if he would have been much happier at Eton, but I was greatly complimented that he gave me the choice.

I inspected both institutions. It seemed that there were many fewer rules and much less discipline at Eton than at Harrow; accordingly I opted for Eton and joined Colonel Sheepshanks’ House in October 1924.

I remember very little about Eton except that I wanted to escape as soon as possible and get to Oxford, an ambition I achieved well before I was 18. When I got to Oxford, much as I enjoyed it, my ambition was to escape into the outside world, which I did after four terms, by going on a seven-month lecture tour of the United States, at the age of 19. Now I was grown up. So this concludes the story of my childhood.

The post My life with father appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

HENRI SALVADOR’S formula for show business success is lots of sleep. “I like nine hours sleep a night plus another three hours in which to wake up properly,” he said.

Stocky, dynamic Henri is one of two French acts giving a Continental flavour to Granada’s Chelsea at Nine on Thursday. He has been a top-liner on the continent for more than 10 years, and a star in South America before that.

It is only in the last couple of years that he has become known in this country but the Queen saw him in Paris a long time ago.

“When she was Princess Elizabeth,” said Henri, “she came to the Carrere club. I ran the band and was the cabaret. She must have enjoyed herself. She was to stay half an hour. She left after five hours.”

Everything Henri does is polished. He sings romantically or skittishly, dances expertly, and has few equals as a mime comedian (usually with a background of noises he has made and recorded beforehand).

Henri, aged 42, is a native of the French West Indies [French Guiana – Ed]. When he was three, his parents moved to Paris. He spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood. Often the family moved — suddenly. He made money at an early age, shining shoes or selling newspapers (“usually second hand ones”).

At school he could not concentrate. He decided to learn to play an instrument and become an entertainer.

“I liked drums, but they were too bulky to carry round. Clarinet tickled my lips. Trumpet bruised them. Guitar. I fell in love with the shape — like a woman! Light to carry, too.

“Soon I found I could play the guitar well, and got a job with Ray Ventura, a leading French orchestra leader.

“I used to fool around at rehearsals and make everyone laugh. Some of the boys suggested I become a comedian. I worked up some “business” and Ray Ventura let me do it when we went to South America on tour.

“I became a star there. I left the band,” he told me in his breathless, enthusiastic way, using good English, which he says he learnt phonetically.

“When I got back to Paris, I went to a music hall owner and told him I was a star in South America. He said so what. I said I could become a star in Paris. He shrugged. I asked him for a chance — only 30 minutes to close the first half. He laughed. But in the end he gave me my chance.

“I kept my promise. I became a star overnight. That was in 1946. Since then, my job is to stay a star. That is why I work 12 hours a day, rehearsing and thinking up new material.” Unusual sounds inspire his songs and comedy. He memorises them easily (“That’s how I learn languages”).

His noisy diner sketch was a product of keeping his ears open in a restaurant, and imitating what he heard on a sound recorder.

English audiences have thrilled him. “So quick, so complimentary. They feel like flying over London without an aeroplane.”

When he can sneak away from business for an hour or two, he likes fly fishing. “I am a natural lazy man, coming from the Indies,” he admits. “Sitting by a river is fine with me. If I catch a trout, I’ll be so happy. If not, maybe I catch a tan.”

Actually, Henri is not lazy as he tries to make out. He burns up a great deal of energy when he is entertaining and replaces it with plenty of sleep and by sucking glucose and sugar.

“I wouldn’t be able to get on a stage without a sugar lump,” he told me.

Also from France come Les Ballets Modernes de Paris with one of their hits, Dans la Rue. It is the tale of a night in a big city, complete with a street-corner fight applauded by “shady ladies” and high-spirited night clubgoers returning home.

The ballet is run by a married French couple, Francoise and Dominique Dupuy. Last year they triumphed at the Edinburgh Festival with the ballet The Seventh Sacrament.

Francoise says: “That was a serious ballet but this time we will give a lighter show.” She adds: “I am very happy to go to London, since I like the town and I know the people appreciate good dancing. Also, I want to buy a lot of cardigans and cashmeres. And have a good time.”

The seven dancers in the troupe come from all over the world. A new recruit is an 18-year-old Swiss, small and shapely Marie Aubert. From Germany there is Karin Waehner; from Uruguay, Paul Darnot, and from France, Michele Andren and Roger Ribes.

Their choreographer is British — Deryk Mendel who worked in English ballet before the war and afterwards settled in Paris with the Champs Elysées Ballet before joining them.

Says Mendel: “Our technique will be new to British audiences, it may shake a few old people who are not used to modern dancing.”

Music for Dans la Rue comes from America composed by jazz genius Duke Ellington. It is part of his A Drum is a Woman which he recorded, and presented on US television, in 1957. One singer was Margaret Tynes, and she is coming to Chelsea at Nine next week to recreate her part.

Margaret Tynes has had a distinguished career both as Broadway show singer and serious operatic soprano. She was in more than 200 Broadway performances of Finian’s Rainbow and was leading lady to Harry Belafonte in another show, Sing, Man, Sing. She has sung in Moscow in a show presented by Ed Sullivan, played Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth with the Montreal Opera Company in Canada, worked for the NBC TV Opera Company, and had five and a half years with the New York City Centre Opera Company.

Two other Americans, both comedians, also appear in Chelsea at Nine: Orson Bean (a return engagement) and Jack Wakefield who was born in Brooklyn, New York, but who made his name in Canada before returning to triumph in New York

Talking of Canada, the show will be compered by Canada’s Bernard Braden.

The post The Continent comes to Chelsea appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

SONG-WRITERS have been making music and romance synonymous for thousands of years. And three people in Granada’s Chelsea at Nine week provide excellent evidence that the two really go together.

Xavier Cugat and Abbe Lane have happily married for seven years. Tony Martin — here on his own while his wife, Cyd Charisse, rehearses for a new spectacular in America — is heading for his 12th wedding anniversary.

“You can say,” Xavier Cugat agreed, “that rhythm was responsible for our romance. I was looking for a vocalist and I saw Abbe in a Broadway show. She was everything I had in mind. That was nine ago and we have been together ever since”

Abbe was not quite 17 at the time, and they were married two years later. More than 30 years difference in their ages has not mattered in the least.

“The trouble with so many married couples,” said Abbe, “is that they go dancing before marriage, but they don’t dance together after marriage. I believe they ought to go on the dance floor as much as they can. Cugie and I are always seeking out places where we can dance together and forget about everything else.

“You can’t quarrel when you’re dancing. And if you have been out of tune, you soon find yourself in harmony again.”

Cugie chuckled. “When I was at the Waldorf in New York recently,” he said, “someone said my music must have been responsible for a lot of marriages — but one fellow added that it was also responsible for a lot of alimony!”

Barcelona-born Cugat and American-Spanish Abbe Lane might not quite add up to A to Z of show business, but at any rate they represent from A (for Abbe) to X (for Xavier), and that’s quite a lot. Theirs is an ideal combination, with Cugat providing the music and his wife providing the visual and vocal appeal.

The last time Cugie worked in this country was as a violinist with the Vincent Lopez orchestra at the old Kit-Kat Club in London, in the early 1930’s.

“I was learning rhythm with one or two bands before setting up on my own,” he explained. “Up to then, I was a classical musician.”

When he did strike out, he set a new pattern in dancing by forming the first big-time dancing orchestra in America and popularising Latin-American music.

He would have been back to London more often — but for our quarantine laws. His love of chihuahua dogs is well-known.

When I saw them, both he and Abbe were anxious to get back to Paris, where they left their chihuahua, Pasquilina, and their French poodle, Susie. “We hate to go anywhere without them,” Abbe said.

The association of Cugat and chihuahuas began when he made his first film, Holiday in Mexico, and carried one around with him.

“The chihuahua received far more fan mail than I did,” he said. “Since then, I have had one with me in all my 14 films, and the same thing has happened every time.”

Tony Martin, the singer who married the dancer, is always more willing to talk about his wife and two sons than about anything else.

He and Cyd Charisse, of course, work independently, “but TV is bringing us together,” he told me. “We are going to co-star for the first time in a spectacular.”

Tony has been a singing star for nearly 25 years — with the accent on the word “singing,” using a good, straight, no-gimmick voice.

“A fellow asked me for my advice on how to keep going as long as I have,” he said. “I told him: ‘Sing good, make a series of come-backs, and don’t let people down.’

“Those of us who have managed to stay at the top for a long time — Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Frankie Laine — have two things in common. We’re singers, and we always try to give a good show.

“Good singing will always outlast freak performances. When I think back on the equivalents of today’s rock n’ rollers 20 years ago, I can’t even remember their names. They’ve disappeared completely.

“I might never have caused quite such delirious fan-worship, but I am earning more today than at any time in my life.”

The post Keep dancing for a happy marriage appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

HUFFING, harassed Mr. Swindley of Coronation Street has always tickled viewers pink. Only right, therefore, that he should be given a comedy show of his own – the Wednesday programme Pardon the Expression. Arthur Lowe’s portrait of a funny little man reminds us of Charlie Chaplin of old-always coming to grief. Still, Swindley is Swindley, upon my soul. And setbacks in business – whether in the small-time shop of Gamma Garments or the big-time store of Dobson and Hawks just spur him on … if you’ll pardon the expression

The post Pardon the Expression… that’s business appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A COUPLE of super-intelligent master sleuths are caught up in a web of international espionage, violence and corruption in The Man in Room 17 which starts on Friday.

The series runs the gamut between comedy thriller and pure adventure. “What it definitely is not,” director-producer Dick Everitt told me. “is neurotic or kinky.”

“The Man” is an immodest ex-Oxford type with a superior IQ whose mind is trained to devour information like a computer. He rose to eminence during the planning of the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day. His name is Oldenshaw.

His partner — a man in his forties — is Dimmock. Dimmock is more direct — Oldenshaw’s red-brick equal. Together they pull the strings which make the undercover world dance.

Answerable only to the Prime Minister, they use their power ruthlessly and are generally accepted as infallible in the held.

Room 17, situated somewhere in Whitehall, is the secret centre of operations for the Department of Special Research. Oldenshaw and Dimmock handle cases which have baffled the security services.

Each case is treated by Oldenshaw as an intellectual problem. It is purely mental deduction that allows the two men to reach their conclusions. But they can also call on a legion of friends on the “old boy” network.

Richard Vernon, who plays the bearded Oldenshaw, told me: “We’re a couple of sparkling English amateurs. Our reasoning powers are almost limitless, and our knowledge is like two halves of a vast reference library ”

Dimmock is played by Michael Aldridge, and another regular in the series will be Willoughby Goddard, as Assistant Commissioner Sir Geoffrey Norton.

Because Oldenshaw and Dimmock are never seen outside Room 17, the series has been made using a split drama technique. One team of actors, writers, directors and designers produced the stories outside the Room, and a second team produced the scenes inside it.

Dick Everitt said: “There arc two distinct ingredients in the series — Room 17 and the world outside. Therefore, the mood has to be different.

“The most effective way to sharpen the contrast between the two was to separate them. The Room is fantasy. It is the remote, analytical centre of operations which exerts its influence on the outside world.

“The action takes place out side the Room, but I think viewers will come to relish the humour in Room 17 as much as the colour outside.

“Men like Oldenshaw and Dimmoek could not exist in real life, but the outside scenes certainly could.”

The post Spy-catching by remote control appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

I WOKE up in a hammock in the middle of a funfair wondering where I was that lovely May morning. Nearby, my 15-year-old son Joe and other Ramsgate boatmen were preparing for a normal day’s work.

But it was a bit of a mystery why we had suddenly been told, the day before, to “kip” at the funfair, instead of going home as usual.

And I wondered even more when an Admiralty messenger arrived, as we were unloading mail from a foreign ship, and warned us: “Stand by for a special job after lunch. Have your boat at the east pier.”

We were told to lay in extra fuel, although we were going to be towed out.

There was a tug out front with a Naval Commander on board, and four or five drifters, each of them making ready to tow a boat like ours.

“Take as much drinking water as you can,” someone said.

Another puzzle. The Navy boys brought us stacks of tinned corned beef, biscuits and cocoa, so I knew now we must be going on a long trip. But no one told us where.

The next thing they produced properly foxed us … a batch of ladders.

Along with the mystery was the suspense. It was now four hours since the “stand by” order, and I sent Joe briefly back to his mother, telling her that we might not be home that night.

Then, at 4.30, we got the signal, and the “mystery” trip started. The tug led the way, the drifters left the harbour with our 23 ton boat, and others like her, in their wake.

The tug led us steadily on, until it grew dark, and the Kent coast had vanished.

Finally, well past midnight, we anchored near a destroyer. In the distance there were heavy rumblings. Yet our “patch” of sea seemed still and quiet and, a bit tired, we wondered what the next day would bring.

It was not until dawn broke that we had an inkling of the mission we were on. For, on the beach, barely 150 yards away, there were thousands of khaki-clad soldiers.

They were waiting, helpless, starving, bewildered, for our little convoy to take them home.

My boat, the New Brittanic, is licensed to carry 120 passengers. But the tug sent out a row-boat, we threw those ladders across; and, in half an hour or so, about 200 tired, hungry men made us look like a floating sardine can.

We gave them all the food we had — then transferred them to the destroyer.

Again and again, we ferried survivors to the waiting warship, and we saw screaming bombers dive so low you could pick out their swastikas.

Our rescue operation lasted two long days.

Then, in the early hours of Friday, May 31, 1940, we rounded the Goodwins and anchored back in Ramsgate.

We were home safe. And, thanks to our boat, so were nearly 3,000 soldiers.

– WALTER READ, as told to Bill Evans

That was one man’s view of the miracle of Dunkirk, 25 years ago this week. Monday’s edition of All Our Yesterdays will show film of those history-making days between May 27 and June 4, 1940, when 299 British warships and 420 other vessels brought off 335,490 officers and men, despite constant enemy attacks. Here now is another man’s view of the great life-saving operation

… but first — ‘Find the boats’

THE finding of the little ships for the Dunkirk armada is one of the little-known sides of the story.

The operation was code-named Dynamo — and caught up in it was Mr. Ian Christie, now landlord of The Oak at Surbiton, Surrey.

He told me: “I was working for a boat firm at Teddington when, one May evening, I — and others — were summoned to the private office.

“We were handed a list of river craft to be commandeered immediately, and told it was top secret. There wasn’t written authority for seizure, but we were not to take ‘No’ for an answer.

“We started at Maidenhead and worked downstream. I was amazed how smoothly it went. Some people were aghast — but no one argued about giving their boat. No one asked for authority. We stripped the boats bare, took them to the assembly point, formed a convoy of up to 30 craft and started for our destination, Sheerness.

“At Gravesend, we stopped to pick up iron rations. At Sheerness, the Navy took over, and we went back by train to Teddington to assemble another convoy. It went on, round the clock, for about 15 days. I think I made eight journeys. The round trip took about two days.”

During this time Mr. Christie received three sets of call-up papers — but was told to ignore them until Operation Dynamo was completed. “It is that important,” he was told.

Mr. Christie continued his story: “The most extraordinary thing about the whole operation was the way people just gave up their boats.

“There was a wonderful spirit from everyone. One man left a bottle of whisky on the cabin table with a note: ‘To the future commander of the Scheda — best of luck, and may he have as good a time as I have had!’

“But one ship I took — the Barona – broke my heart. The owner had just finished painting her. She looked spanking new.

“Sometime later, I saw her off Brightlingsea — burnt out. I could have cried my eyes out. But it was nothing to do with Dunkirk.

“I learned that the crew had started to make a cup of tea and were then called away suddenly. They left the gas on — and she blew up.”

– RICHARD POLLOCK

The post Fine day for a sail… appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOR at least 10 people out of the millions of regular viewers, All Our Yesterdays will become a heartbreak programme on Monday.

Ten more widows, mothers, sisters, brothers and friends will see their loved ones wave farewell and give the thumbs-up sign in one of those cheery newsreel films of 25 years ago. Laughing troops who were later to die in action.

Every week on average, 10 people write to the All Our Yesterdays office asking for pictures of their dear departed.

Brian Inglis and producer Bill Grundy are aware of the heartbreak this weekly peep into the past can bring. They have weighed the cost and decided that this is one of the penalties that must be paid for the privilege of telling the story of Britain’s part in the Second World War.

Bill Grundy told me: “People are always writing to say I got a terrible shock last night when I saw my husband. Please try to let me have a picture of him. After that newsreel shot he was never seen again.’

“And, of course, within reason, we try to satisfy these requests. We have to confine ourselves to outstanding cases. Widows who ask for photographs of their husbands naturally get priority.

“It calls for a weekly picture hunt and a bit of detective work. We have to identify the face, track down the exact frame from thousands of feet of film, and get the picture enlarged.”

As the programme bites deeper into the war, Bill and company are preparing for more photo requests.

Going through the All Our Yesterdays postbag, I found the letters strange as well as nostalgic. A Welshman living in Oxford wrote to say that the war years were the happiest of his life.

He asked for a newsreel picture of his friends singing in the N.A.A.F.I. He wrote: “I am an invalid who has been desperately unlucky in life as a child and as a postwar adult.”

One of the most moving newsreel sequences showed a British European Forces platoon tramping through the snow in France. All Our Yesterdays received a request for pictures of every man in the platoon.

Not one of them had survived. But not one had been forgotten.

An infantryman wrote for a picture of a French farmyard near Gorre. “While I was sheltering from an air-raid,” he wrote, “a jagged chunk of shrapnel ricochettcd off the cobblestones and killed the man next to me.

“He was a Roman Catholic padre from Birkenhead. I want the picture to send to his sister.”

Often, it’s an innocent, cheery looking newsreel shot that brings the memories flooding back. Former RAF Flight Lieutenant Harold Perry, of Thornber Grove, Blackpool, saw himself and his crew clamber out of a battered bomber at Villeneuve, France.

The film was shot in March, 1940, after a typically hair-raising war incident. Mr. Perry takes up the story: “I was a wireless operator in the Whitley Mark V bomber. We had been on a fact-finding mission over Warsaw and landed by mistake at Saarbrucken, 15 kilometres behind enemy lines.

“The bullets began to fly as we tried to take off again on a very short runway. Luckily a drainage trench had been dug across the fields, and when the old Whitley hit it, we literally bounced off the ground.

“The Germans threw everything at us, but we managed to get away by some very fine ‘grass-cutting’ 3ft. above the ground.

I wrote because I am the only survivor of the crew of Old Queenie. We got back safely, but the rest of the boys were killed or reported missing on subsequent missions.”

And so the letters go on. Behind almost every incident and every face in the crowd featured in those newsreel films of 25 years ago is another story to match it in courage or sadness.

The post Pictures from the past appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Wednesday’s third programme in the series A Slight White Paper on Love is titled “Honouring the Contract”. The programme will examine some of the eccentricities of marriage and a divorced couple will meet again for the first time to discuss what went wrong with their marriage. (Male escape mechanisms from the pressures of marriage include a New York Club where men throw crockery at female effigies and a British Henpecked Husbands’ Club.) TV Times invited
ARTHUR DICKSON WRIGHT
noted surgeon and wit, to cast his analytical eye at the whole subject

HE is the man pitied by all, except his wife, who is deterred by none, least of all by the object of her nagging.

It is one of the strangest developments of the married state where the lady stands before a minister and makes declarations of loyalty and obedience to the man of her choice.

Then almost as soon as the ceremony is over and the covenant signed and sealed, starts on her life’s work of making the life of her husband as miserable as possible.

She starts upon his premarital behaviour, especially any slight straying from the paths of virtue or courteous behaviour during the period of engagement. But she was cunning enough not to complain before the final capture of her victim.

She planned to start as soon as the ceremonies were completed and even to mar the honeymoon with discordancies which the unfortunate man never expected in the idyllic days of his engagement.

The nagging generally works up in intensity — even the arrival of children does not mitigate — and very soon he gets accustomed to it.

If the psychologists are to be believed, it shatters personalities and leads on to neurosis.

The illogicality of it is not apparent to the lady, because, as a rule, the object of her jealousy is quite well behaved morally, otherwise he would leave her.

It may be said that he behaves himself because of his wife’s behaviour and she believes this to be so and keeps it up.

The picture of the henpecked husband walking slightly be hind his mate and listening to her remarks over her shoulder is a great gift to the cynical playwright.

Especially to French authors, who have taken great joy in this truly English spectacle, because I believe that only in England and America does this phenomenon exist and the pathetic, bedraggled figure of the henpecked husband is so well known.

The passage of the years does not ease the burden and her reproaches and recriminations do not cease when baldness, grey hair or fatness place him in a less dangerous situation vis-a-vis the opposite sex.

She seems to have no sense of the ridiculous as she continues to upbraid him when he is long past active wanderings. She will recount stories of so-and-so, who ran off with his secretary at the age of 70. No gifts, no flowers seem to be of any service in stemming the torrent of words.

Indeed, they often seem to be a stimulus to more nagging on the part of the lady, who feels they are a camouflage to cover other clandestine activities.

The really bad man, with drunkenness or immorality in» his nature, seems to escape the nagging.

The lady feels that it is hopeless to alter him and resigns herself to it and turns a blind eye to his shortcomings.

I feel that it is the good man who is henpecked. He settles down to his life in harness and becomes punch-drunk with the abuse constantly showered upon him.

He seeks the joy of his life in the company of friends outside his own home, not daring to bring them home for fear of losing them after they have witnessed him “catching it” from his wife’s tongue.

The victim sometimes comes to accept the constant abuse and will miss it when it stops. This is a great psychological mystery, because in the strife of daily malediction the husband finds a sort of happiness?

This was brought home to me once in a remarkable way. There was a wealthy, childless couple who never had a kind word for each other and had nothing in common except the front door.

The wife, whose nagging exceeded anything I have ever heard, had to have a minor operation and, while going under the anaesthetic, she died.

The husband was inconsolable and within seven days had committed suicide.

When, after years of persecution, the nagged husband gives up the struggle and leaves his troublesome partner, then the lamentation that breaks out has to be endured by all around her.

Her description of the departed husband to the Bournemouth boarding house makes one puzzled to know if there ever was such a wicked man in the world and makes one wonder why she ever married him.

I suppose that murder may enter the head of the nagged man as a way out of his desperate position.

An example is the wife thrown into the sea by her irate husband at the height of a fierce argument as to which was best to use for a certain purpose, a knife or scissors.

As the wife came up for the third and last time, the last thing the husband saw as she sank were her two fingers making a scissors movement.

The queerest thing of all is the fact that the henpecked husband may come to enjoy the nagging as much as the wife enjoys giving it—and the two are not as unhappy as they seem.

SSSH! THEY’RE OFF TO THE CLUB…

by RAY JOWETT
who visited Britain’s most secret society
— the Henpecked Husbands’ Club

IT’S the most secret society in Britain. For sheer “Sssh” it makes M.I.5, Mau Mau and the Mafia look like specialists in public relations. The society is the Henpecked Husbands’ Club.

For one day a year its secret meeting spells freedom for men who have reached the end of their tether; men exhausted under the weight of dog walking, dish washing and decorating.

They meet in secret to talk about their tormentors and plan and scheme for a better deal. The meeting place, changed every year to avoid detection, is nearly always in a remote part of Yorkshire, where the movement began.

“You see,” said the club’s vice president, Mr. Fred X, of Halifax, “we must have this one day away from our wives. It not only means a day without chores, it means we can swop ideas on how to make life more bearable in the next 12 months. Why, at the last meeting, I found out about instant mashed potato. An’ y’know, the missus still doesn’t suspect. She just thinks me cooking’s improved.”

President and Mayor are resplendent in fur-trimmed regalia. The Keeper of the Peace stands by the door to look out for marauding wives. Newcomers are dealt with first. The Medical Officer (a retired chimney sweep) checks their physical condition. “Got to be sure they’re suffering from housemaid’s knee or dish pan hands.” he said.

As the day goes on, the henpecked exchange recipes and other culinary information. One or two, driven to the brink of despair by nagging wives, have been known to throw all caution to the winds and sneak out to the local pub.

The annual bolt from domestic tyranny began 70 years ago. Six Methodist ministers (all henpecked, it seems), decided to get away from it all and spent a whole day together in a disused cottage in Yorkshire’s Cragg Vale.

Soon, the local laymen got wind of the retreat. Now the club has over 70 members including an Austrian languages professor.

What is a woman’s view of the club? “It’s just an excuse for dressing up.” said a wife, “a little bit of make-believe while they wallow in their self pity. They’re just like sheep.

“They don’t seem to realise that we wives encourage them to play their silly games for one day in the year.”

Only once has the conclave been disturbed. A Yorkshire lady, particularly adept with tongue and rolling pin, discovered her hubby’s intention of joining his downtrodden brethren. She followed him to the meeting and, just as he was about to take the oath, burst in on him.

“Thar’s no ’enpecked,” she roared. “Thee can coom on ’ome.” He went.

The post Henpecked, but happy! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A SERIES of six one-hour plays, each with savage undertones and a bitter twist in its sardonic tale, starts on Friday under the over-all title Six Shades of Black.

The plays are based on an intriguing new drama technique exploited by author-producer Peter Wildeblood. The hero of one play will be the villain of the next.

You will see the character’s good and bad sides and be able to draw your own conclusions on which is the dominant side of their personality.

The first play, “The Good Woman of Chester Square,” at 9.40 on Friday, shows social reform worker Lady Masterman (played by Pamela Brown), being toppled from her public pedestal.

Lady Masterman, a parliamentary beauty, is celebrated for her humanitarian principles. A leading Queen’s Counsel, she refused to become a judge because of her opposition to capital punishment.

But young reporter B. J. Skipwith (played by Barry Warren), thinks her reputation is too good to be true.

You’ll have to wait until next week to see Wildeblood’s new drama technique at work. Then it will be the reporter’s turn to face moral disapproval.

In Friday’s play, Thorley Walters plays Lionel Sparrow, an ex-prisoner looking for a job, and Fredric Abbott plays Swithin, Lady Masterman’s chauffeur, who holds the key to this week’s intrigue.

The post Drama break-through appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BURT BACHARACH… the name is almost certain to mean nothing to you. Yet I’ll wager his works have been buzzing around in your brain for the last 10 years.

Bacharach is one of the most talented and prolific songwriters of our time. A few hawk-eyed pop pickers may have spotted the name in fine print on the label of their latest record.

But outside Tin Pan Alley, few recognise this 34-year-old New Yorker for what he is — one of the greatest one-man influences on popular music this century. He is hailed by international artists, musicians and composers as a trend-setting genius.

On Wednesday night at 9.40, Dionne Warwick — Burt writes all her numbers — heads a star-studded cast who pay tribute to America’s Mr. Pop in The Bacharach Sound.

Bacharach “winners” include “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “I Just Don’t Know What to do with Myself,” “Message to Martha,” “Tower of Strength,” “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” and dozens more.

There to sing them with Dionne Warwick will be Dusty Springfield, Chuck Jackson, The Searchers and The Merseybeats.

Bacharach, who began to learn piano at 10 (“I hated it, I wanted to be a baseball player”) wrote his first hit number “Magic Moments” for Perry Como, in the mid fifties.

He wrote the “Story of My Life,” for Michael Holliday, and never looked back. Four years ago he teamed up with lyrics writer Hal David.

But it was not until early last year that the Bacharach Sound was born — a lush sound created with an exciting orchestral backing like 15 strings, a drummer plus two percussionists, and brassy French horns.

Immediately arrangers, composers and singers rushed to copy him. Artists such as Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw have been deeply influenced by Bacharach.

From his luxury suite on the 18th floor of a New York apartment block, Bacharach told me: “If I have helped to make pop music a little better I couldn’t be more delighted.”

I asked him if he thought today’s pop was worth preserving. “No,” he said, “the average song is so very fragile — 2½ minutes long — it is exposed to saturation. I don’t think any of my numbers will survive the next three years.”

There’s a legend in the music business that Marlene Dietrich won’t work without Bacharach. “Not strictly true,” said Burt modestly. “But whenever I can, I fly to her anywhere in the world. We work well together.”

The post The genius behind pop appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

This is Anne Reid (left), a carefree, eager little girl with her mum. And the hasn’t a worry in the world. The woman above it also Anne Reid. An actress now. But as Valerie Barlow in Coronation Street she looks a little anxious, a little worn. And no wonder. As Valerie, she’s waiting for a taxi to take her to the maternity home. Which would be reason enough for her to look anxious … she’s expecting TWINS … and on Monday a tired stork flies over Coronation Street

The post Woman in waiting 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.

IT was a moment that few but the brave would have relished. I was face to face with that impregnable fortress of the law, Chief Inspector Rose, in his own den.

“Why,” I began boldly, “are you such a swine to your subordinates?”

Expecting something like the lash of a kid glove across my cheek, I stepped back a pace. I needn’t have bothered.

The Rose mirage faded quickly and I was left with the actor. Jolly, home loving, family man William Mervyn.

Only similarity between William and the iceberg-cool Rose he portrays so majestically in Friday’s new series of the twilight thriller, It’s Dark Outside, is his careful attention to dress.

“Don’t be too hard on Rose,” he said. “He’s really quite an amiable fellow when you get to know him.

“People are always telling me to take it easy on those poor old sergeants of mine, but Rose niggles with a purpose — to draw people out.

“You have to needle some folk to find out what they’re really like. With policemen, you’ve got to see if they can take it.

“Rose is a pompous old thing, but he’s not a fool. He’s impeccably honest and on top of his job. His verbal duels are really for sharpening the wits.”

Well, Rose may not be the ogre we suspected, but he’s parted company with Sgt. Swift.

In the new series we find him searching for a new assistant and he has earmarked Det. Sgt. James McKenzie Hunter, played by 29 year old Anthony Ainley, a newcomer to television.

Will he get his man? Well, he doesn’t get off to the best of starts, because Hunter, a sort of wild colonial boy from Kenya, detests Rose and his pomposity.

New female lead in the series is Veronica Strong, a bubbling, vivacious redhead, who plays Claire Martin, a 24-year-old fabric designer.

Claire is engaged to Sgt. Hunter, but has a weakness for lame dogs like Fred Blanc (played by John Stratton), a hard-drinking, wild-living newspaper reporter.

Veronica, who started in rep 10 years ago at the age of 16, sees Claire Martin as a very “with it” bachelor girl, rather like her own life, I gathered.

She comes from Brighton, has a flat in London, drives a mini, but would love a big Bentley. Veronica has a passion for classical music and spends most of her money on records and going to concerts.

The post Rose blooms when it’s dark outside! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE six-seater “Dove” aircraft that whisks the World in Action team across Europe is once more standing by, ready to fly off at a moment’s notice.

For World in Action returns to your screens on Tuesday.

The pilot is Capt. Jack Walters — a 34-year-old veteran of some 7,000 flying hours in 50 different types of aircraft. He has been conveying World In Action for the last four years and has taken them as far north as the Faroe Islands, east to Copenhagen, and south to Rome.

But to come down to earth — to London’s Golden Square, to be exact. It is a Tuesday: the World In Action team are in real action—preparing one of their “panic” editions for transmission that night.

Directing operations as smoothly as a master mariner is Alex Valentine — a broad, forceful 41-year-old Scotsman in a black crew-cut sweater. He smokes incessantly, and fortifies himself with endless cups of coffee.

He told me: “There have been, and I’m afraid will be, many ‘panic’ programmes. They’ve become part of our life. Some programmes come out sub-standard, so we scrap them. Or topical programmes fall down overnight — like the time Cassius Clay had a hernia and couldn’t fight.

“So then, we have to think and act quickly. We have to do a week’s work in two days. It’s impossible, of course, but somehow it gets done.”

He pointed to two camp beds in the office. “Those,” he said, “are the most important properties here — and coffee!”

He went on: “Physically, this job is a backbreaker, for all 32 of us. I’ve never seen so many dawns in my life, I don’t mind telling you.”

Basically, World In Action has four producers with four units working on four different programmes, here and abroad. When “panic” time comes, everyone who is available drops whatever he is doing and comes to Golden Square.

World In Action has been in existence for 764 days. They have screened 80 programmes from 24 different countries, and shot over three-quarters of a million foot of film.

“The thing is,” Alex said, “that you’ve got to be prepared to shoot two programmes, to get one on the air. On any ‘panic’ story, you’ve got to get at least 5,000 foot of film out of our library as an insurance, as a stand-by, in case what you get on the spot doesn’t work. You may never use a foot of it. Like the ‘Man In The Trunk’ case — the suspected spy who was about to be flown, doped, to Egypt.

“When this story blew up, I decided it was big enough to justify a ‘panic.’ We scrapped what we were working on, and I took the first night flight to Rome.

“The co-operation I got from the Italian police was fantastic. In less than two days they had built me an exact replica of the trunk and they used all their resources to make up a complete and detailed reconstruction of all aspects of the crime.”

Assistant to Alex Valentine on World In Action is Peter Heinze. He is one of three “fixers” — the back-roomers who do anything from obtaining £500 [£8,100 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] in Vietnamese money at the flick of an eyebrow to getting 10,000 toy soldiers delivered by the next post.

For “The Great Train Robbery,” for example, they hired the privately-owned Bluebell Line in Sussex for two days.

The biggest “panic” of all?

“John Bloom, I should think,” said Peter. “At the time of his empire’s collapse, we didn’t start on the programme until Sunday, for Tuesday transmission. Somehow, we managed to recall all our four producers and camera crews.

“We shot ‘around it,’ as best we could. We had to think of every possible background angle, in case we didn’t get Bloom himself. Once we had committed ourselves to it, we had no alternative.

“We kept ringing Bloom day and night. He kept saying … ‘Well, I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it …’ We never got him. Well, that’s the way it goes.”

ABOVE is the team which brings you World In Action. Below is a key to the jobs they do.

1 and 6, Assistant cameramen; 2 and 9, Cameramen; 3, Recordist; 4, Driver; 5, Assistant recordist; 7, Co-pilot; 8, Pilot; 10, Assistant editor; 11, Editor; 12, Librarian; 13, 14 and 15, Production office staff; 16, Secretary to executive producer; 17, 18, 22, 26, Four researchers; 19, 20, 27, 28 Four producers; 21, Executive producer; 23, Projectionist; 24, Assistant dubbing editor; 25, Editor; 29, Dubbing editor; 30, Assistant editor; 31, Production assistant; 32. Commentator.

The post Panic stations – for World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WILLIAM JOYCE was brought up as an Irish country boy but by the time of his death at the age of 39 he had become — next to Hitler — the most hated man in World War II.

The grotesque mouthpiece of the Third Reich (as far as England was concerned, he was the only ‘German’ who spoke directly to us), was known as Lord Haw-Haw. His story is told in Monday’s All Our Yesterdays.

Joyce, an insular, home-loving traitor and the voice behind the “Gairmany calling” propaganda broadcasts to Britain, got under the skin of the British nation as few other men have done this century.

At first, no one took him seriously. His peak audience of 6,000,000 regular listeners and 18,000,000 casuals was achieved on pure entertainment value.

The Press urged the British public to listen “for light entertainment.” Another reason why he had an avid following was that radio played a far bigger part in the nation’s life in 1940, with no TV and the blackout keeping people indoors.

But after the Blitzkrieg and the fall of France, people began to take Lord Haw-Haw more seriously.

William Joyce, born in America of Irish-American parents on April 24, 1906, moved to Ireland with his mother and father when he was three. He came to England about 12 years later.

He joined the English Fascist movement under Mosley, but when faced with conflicting loyalties in 1939, went to Germany with his wife Margaret.

When war broke out he found employment as a broadcaster in the English language section of the German propaganda ministry.

In his first broadcast on September 11, 1939, he accused the British of hypocrisy and colonialism and scoffed: “England will fight to the last Frenchman.”

A poll showed that more than a quarter of the British public had heard him, and that he reached his radio peak 25 years ago this week.

Jonah Barrington, a national newspaper reporter, wrote: “A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen. He speaks English of the haw haw-damit-get-out-of-my-way variety.” A few days later Barrington bestowed on him the title Lord Haw-Haw and it stuck.

By May, 1940, the Germans were themselves using the title Lord Haw-Haw, but his “popularity” was already on the wane.

His last broadcast to Britain, the Commonwealth and America was in April, 1945. With Germany on her knees he described Hitler and Goebbels as “barricaded heroes in Berlin.” His broadcast ended: “You may not hear me for a few months. Heil Hitler and farewell.” He was captured in a wood while trying to escape to a neutral country, convicted of high treason at the Old Bailey and hanged.

The pompous propaganda peddler of the Third Reich was dead.

The post Gairmany calling! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A MILLION friends and neighbours make life bearable for each other every week in countless Coronation Streets up and down Britain.

And that’s the case in ITV’s famous Coronation Street, where two of the oldest neighbours and longest residents there are the beady-eyed Ena Sharpies and do-good pensioner Albert Tatlock.

Just how long they have lived in the district is uncertain except to say that Albert can tell you a tale or two about Ena’s schooldays.

Could. Would is a different matter, for even Albert has been around long enough to know that if he starts spoutin’ about Ena’s early life, he’ll feel the sting of that famous whiplash tongue of hers.

But though they are temperaments apart, they are still friends and neighbours.

Away from the Street, they are, of course, Violet Carson and Jack Howarth.

The post Neighbours appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BY any standards, the Claypole family of Mill Hill, London, is a large one. It numbers nearly 130 — bearing in mind, of course, that the family includes a “zoo.”

Richard, who is 16 and attends Mill Hill Public School, has been passionately fond of most things that walk, crawl or fly since he was five.

So much so, that his back-garden collection now totals something like 120.

Add to that his sister Jackie’s two ponies, Tippin and Jassamine, and Mum and Dad’s two Old English sheepdogs, Ming and Nana, and you have just about the full complement.

Richard can be seen in Zoo Time on Wednesday. When I talked to him it didn’t take me long to realise what a dedicated young zoologist he is.

He’s a member of the XYZ (Young Zoologists) Club, and a familiar figure to the keepers at London Zoo.

Most of his own collection are reptiles or amphibians, which he keeps in a heated greenhouse. But there is also a hairy armadillo and a badger cub.

How did it all start?

“When I was about five,” Richard said, “I became interested in insects. From there I went on to reptiles, including green lizards and a grass snake.

“Now I have 49 different species and about 120 items. And, of course, the collection is growing because there are always some of them breeding.”

For many people, the biggest problem with a zoo such as Richard’s would be feeding. But he takes that in his stride.

“The reptiles eat worms; my owls have chicken heads, which I get from the butcher; I breed locusts for the toads and frogs; Mr. Todd, the badger, gets horsemeat and breakfast cereal; and the armadillo has mincemeat, milk and chopped fruit.”

In most cases, the only thing standing between a boy and the pet of his choice — particularly if it happens to be a little offbeat — is Mum. But Richard has no trouble with his.

“She got used to seeing caterpillars wandering all over the place,” he said, “and eventually took the rest as a matter of course. Well almost …

“I don’t keep snakes any more, because she doesn’t like them.”

How does Dad react to the zoo? “Oh, very favourably,” Mr. Claypoie said. “It gives Richard a lively and real interest.

“And I would certainly far rather he did what he is doing than a lot of the things in which the modern generation indulges.”

Thirteen-year-old Jackie is more concerned with her ponies than with her brother’s collection, though occasionally she brings friends along to see the latest additions.

Most of her spare time is spent riding and show jumping, and a pile of rosettes is evidence of her success over the fences.

Mr. and Mrs. Claypole’s two sheep dogs appeared in a film with Richard Attenborough and have been featured in a number of TV commercials. Most families have their “black sheep,” and with the Claypoles it’s Mr. Todd, the badger.

He is only half grown, but already he weighs more than 20lb [about 9kg – Ed].

And he has decidedly destructive tendencies, even though some of them are unintentional.

“I’m afraid he may have to go fairly soon,” Richard said sadly.

What does Richard intend doing when he leaves school?

“I haven’t settled for any career yet,” he said. But I think it probably will be something involving animals.

“Either that, or I shall have animals as a sideline. You know, importing and exporting them.”

The post Boy with 120 pets appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A new ITV play series starts on Friday under the title It’s a Woman’s World — stories about women of different ages from teens to old age. But is it really a woman’s world we live in today? We asked the 54-year-old Earl of Arran a newspaper director and journalist, known to his Fleet Street friends as “Boofy.” Here, Lord Arran, who is in The Celebrity Game on Friday, explains why he answered “Yes”

OF course it’s a woman’s world. Here, like everywhere else, the plain truth is that women can get on without men. Men can’t get on without women.

It has nothing to do with sex or romantic love, or any of that nonsense. It is just that men are, by nature, dependent; women are independent. A man without a woman is a pitiful creature.

I am not talking, of course, about young men. The high-spirited young bachelor is the happiest thing on earth.

But later on in life, every man needs a companion. Someone to lean on and be nice to him.

And, oh, the sadness and loneliness of the widower! I know many merry widows, but I have never yet known a man who was not utterly lost when his wife died.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that in a marriage the man does not usually and rightly play the dominant role.

But though the husband is, or should be, the boss, he is always desperately dependent upon his wife. He gets fidgety if she isn’t around. I feel utterly lost without my wife. Women can make do quite well on their own.

Of course, I am speaking about happy marriages — and four out of five in this country are still happy marriages.

In unhappy marriages the man goes to the pub or the club, or becomes a politician. But even being in high political office doesn’t make up for the loss of a happy home.

In England we men successfully disguise the fact that we are run by women. The American men, however, who exaggerate everything, openly and ostentatiously flaunt their subservience to their wives. Theirs is an odious matriarchy.

Indeed, their only “freedom” is once a year to go to a business “convention” and commit adultery just to show they’ve got it in them.

I do not myself complain that this is a woman’s world.

Man is the racehorse; woman the cart-horse. She is the brood mare. She don’t think much, but she pulls her weight. She is reliable. I am sure that we are safe in her hands.

The post Yes, it’s a woman’s world… and I’m not complaining appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Temperamental, unpredictable and camera-shy. The stars of People Like Us, ITV’s new wild-life series, which begins on Tuesday at 10.5, have all these traits. Among them, also, are stars with a sting.

The series, filmed and directed by 28-year-old cameraman Norman Langley, will include shots of bumble bees building a home, jackdaws swooping on a herd of deer and swarms of ants at work and play.

But how, I asked Norman, do you film the life of an ant? Or a pair of jackdaws perched perilously 50ft. above the ground in an old priory?

Everything, he assured me, was achieved by a combination of logic, instinct and supreme patience. I would rather put it down to ingenuity and clever improvisation.

The series compares the animal society with the human society, hence the title. The programmes will be looking at various kinds of animal societies — from the insect to the ape — and will show how the individual fits into the remarkable pattern that nature has evolved.

The first programme deals with bumble bees. They will be seen flitting over the ground, house-hunting. Their site might be an old mouse-hole, a tussock of dead grass, a discarded sack, or an old tea-chest in a shed.

“We ran and crawled over fields and streams trying to shoot them,” said Norman. “To do close-ups I had to get within two or three inches with my 63 mm. lens.

“Of course, it takes time. Six months on and off to film the bumble-bee story.”

Part of the bumble-bee story was shot indoors, with the bees in specially constructed hives with glass fronts.

Here, for the first time, Norman encountered his biggest problem of the series. How to get the subject used to the powerful light needed for filming?

“After a while,” he said, “the honeycomb in our beehive used to melt. And the bees were buzzing around frantically trying to do running repairs.

“In the end we tried to cool them off with strategically placed fans.”

Norman and his team had to take several close-ups of clusters of flowers swarming with bees — and it was then that he discovered the sting in his “stars.”

“We were all a bit apprehensive,” he said. “More so after the technical adviser got stung!”

Norman — six years working on programmes like Animal Story and Breakthrough — found the trickiest subject in the six-programme series was the ant.

“They disliked the heat, too,” he said. “We could never get them used to it.” Shooting was divided between an ant-heap in a Surrey wood, and an artificial nest of plaster, sandwiched between glass.

In the programme dealing with the jackdaws the problem facing Norman was how to get up to them in their castle at Ripley, Surrey. In the end, the team built a scaffold and used a massive 600 mm. lens to get close-ups.

The jackdaws also provided one of the most unusual shots in the series. In Richmond Park — a few miles from Ripley as the jackdaw flies — they were filmed swooping down on deer, stealing tufts of hair from their backs to line their nests.

Oddly enough, the deer seemed resigned to losing their winter coats this way.

The post Stars with a sting appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE three of us — Sandy, Gordon and me — stood at the bar. So I ordered halves of bitter all round.

“It has to be bitter for Sandy,” said Gordon Rollings. “He won’t look at anything else, you know.”

And before anyone could dispute the point Sandy gulped down his drink, licked up a couple of spilled drops from the counter, lolled out a red tongue hopefully and gave us a cheerful wag of his tail.

“Thirsty work, acting,” said Gordon, pushing Sandy’s nose out of his own beer. “Even for whippets.”

Gordon plays Charlie Moffitt, Minnie Caldwell’s lodger in Coronation Street.

Sandy — alias Little Tich (his stage name), alias Dauntless Star or Dauntless Satellite (his professional racing names) — is that little whippet who steals so many scenes in the Rover’s Return.

‘The thing that bothers me,” said Gordon, looking at a sign which said no drinks would be served to young persons under 18, “is how the licensing laws affect whippets.

“I mean, Sandy is five years old. Does that mean he is drinking under age?

“He doesn’t belong to me,” said Gordon. “He is owned by Syd Roscoe, who has a garage just down the road from the studios.

“It seems that Sandy started drinking at a family party by helping himself to some beer.

“Never lost the taste for it. But it isn’t a problem with him, mind you. I mean, he doesn’t drink a lot.”

Sandy looked up at him winningly, but Gordon remained unmoved.

“One half of bitter is his ration,” he said severely.

In Coronation Street Sandy is a whippet with no talent for racing whatever.

“But he’s only acting,” said Gordon. “He has won more than 30 races.

“On one famous occasion they brought a ‘world-beater’ from Stoke-on-Trent to race against him. Sandy won by yards — and went home that night covered in lipstick from women who had congratulated him afterwards.”

“A bit of a gay dog,” I said.

Sandy looked at me appreciatively. Or was he just trying to get round me?

Gordon is no stranger to animals. He worked for a long time as a clown with a French circus.

At his home in London, Gordon keeps a cat, a dog, and a hamster named Rupert.

“The cat and dog are great friends,” said Gordon. “The cat washes the dog’s face every morning.”

The post A bit of a gay dog appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IF you are the kind of person who knows just when the Tolpuddle Martyrs were deported, and who wrote the book “John Barleycorn,” and how pumice is formed, then you are probably just the kind of person that Pat Lagone is looking for.

Because Pat is producer of Criss Cross Quiz, which returns on Wednesday. And according to her, it is the person with just this kind of flypaper memory who stands the best chance of success in this ever-popular quiz game.

“Specialists, we’ve found, don’t usually get very far,” explained Pat. “The brilliant schoolteacher, for instance, who knows his particular subject backwards, may well get annihilated by a taxi driver without a letter to his name, but with the time and the appetite for newspapers and reference books.”

The variety of occupations of the people already booked to compete in the new session certainly seems to bear out this theory. “We have everything from bank clerks to booksellers, from airline officials to housewives, from students to Customs and Excise officers,” she said.

Likely applicants for the programme are invited along to the studio to face a really stiff general knowledge test.

“But success in this isn’t enough,” said Pat. “They still have to have personality. They still have to be able to think quickly. And they still have to satisfy us that their nerves are strong enough to play this kind of noughts and crosses with cameras staring down their throats and a large section of the British public watching them.”

Also having to keep his wits about him, in the cut-and-thrust of the competition for the top prize of £1,000 [£17,000 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed], will be question master Bill Grundy.

The post All you need is a flypaper memory appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Coronation Street, sold to Australia last November, is already a tremendous success Down Under. Here ALISTER WILLIAMSON who is now a personality in ‘‘The Street” as club manager Gus Loman, talks to Brian Finch about the Australian audiences

JUST think of it. A big, fat, easy chair on the verandah, outlined against the sunset. The temperature hovering in the eighties.

An iced beer at your elbow. And the smell of the orange blossom slinking tantalizingly round the television set.

Not the sort of environment in which you would expect to watch this week’s episode of Coronation Street. But it’s the way thousands of my fellow – Australians must have been following the programme over the past few months.

And it’s to the “Street’s” eternal credit that it has been able to establish itself as one of the top shows on the Australian network, despite the fact that the sooty, terraced houses and the way of life of their inhabitants are about as familiar to most Aussies as mountains on the moon.

Mind you, Australia does have its terraced houses.

But most Aussies live in bungalows with plenty of space in between and plenty or room to breathe. They have to — the weather is sb hot.

Australians have what they call their “backyards”, just like people do in Lancashire. But a backyard Down Under would be called a garden in Britain.

My backyard back home had lemon trees in it—and the lemons were so plentiful that anybody in the neighbourhood was welcome to help themselves.

Australia has its Rover’s Returns. But the licensing laws are very different there.

Up to a few years ago, for instance, the pubs closed at six o’clock in the morning [sic: evening – Ed] — and were almost the exclusive preserve of men. Ena, Minnie and Martha wouldn’t have gone much on that!

Even today in some areas the pubs close at six. But they usually open much earlier in the day than British pubs, so I suppose that compensates our hardened drinkers.

Maybe one reason why Australians have taken to Coronation Street is because most of their streets tend to be tightly-knit little communities, too, where everybody knows everybody else and folk are always ready to help each other out in an emergency.

But the social habits of Australia are completely different.

My country is a big, brawny open-air kind of place and cosy chats around Elsie’s living room fire don’t happen very often.

An Aussie family with a couple of hours on its hands is much more likely to pile into the battered old family car and shoot off to the seaside or the country for the evening.

Nobody seems to do much betting in Coronation Street and that would amaze most Australians.

A bob on the nags is the breath of life to most Aussies. And if Coronation Street was situated in Australia one of the focal points of local activity would almost certainly be the local bookie.

He would run his business — illegally — from his own front room and be raided about once a fortnight by the police.

But he would pay his fine with a smile and be right back in business the next day.

If Coronation Street was in Australia, Ena Sharpies would be very much in demand, too — as a pianist. My countrymen love to make their own entertainment and anyone who can play a piano is guaranteed plenty of invitations to parties.

Miss Nugent would be brought out of her shell and at a party even Mr. Swindley would have to provide a party piece.

At Australian parties everyone gives a turn. And the worse they are, the better they go over! You might think that the strong North of England accents in the programme would baffle most Australians. But I don’t think they are proving much of a problem.

Most of the people back home seem to know at least one Northerner. And Northerners never lose their dialect — even on the other side of the globe.

The most important contribution to Australian life that Coronation Street is making is educational.

In the mind of the average Australian, England is a green, moist country, choked with cute little churches, ancient abbeys and castle ruins.

The sombre and occasionally harsh portraits of life in Coronation Street have helped to shatter that illusion and provided a realistic picture of life in a large slice of Britain today.

The post The ‘Street’ goes Down Under appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

JEAN (“The Shrimp”) SHRIMPTON is a girl with an “international” face. A face which looks at the world from the covers of all the best magazines.

She is now regarded as the world’s top model girl, at 20 years old, and can earn as much as £20 an hour.

At the moment she is working in New York, where Dick Fontaine and a television camera team spent four days following and filming her every move for World in Action. which is why she is on our cover this week.

On Tuesday you can see the results of their work in “The Face on the Cover”, which in telling the story of Jean gives pointers to success for 50,000 other models.

“Jean Shrimpton is at the top now.” Dick Fontaine told me. “I think she’s overtaken Suzy Parker, for she is wanted all over the world by the best photographers, magazines, agencies.

“And she has achieved one of her ambitions — modelling the Autumn Collections for world – famous photographer Richard Avedon.”

Dick has been to New York three times but has always been too busy to see much of it.

“The first time I saw only the inside of the United Nations building; the second time, I saw the inside of the Plaza Hotel with the Beatles,” he said. “I’ve still no idea what there is in New York apart from taxi cabs and treble-deck sandwiches.”

American photographers are efficient and professional, according to Dick. Models are professional and used to working at speed—though most of them are German, English or Danish.

“They all work harder. They all get more money,” he said. “It was the top thing for Jean Shrimpton to go to America. All the best-known photographers are there, and they are not necessarily the best. ”

Jean Shrimpton was well established in Europe before she went to America.

“When I was in Paris a couple of months ago, I counted eight covers of different nationality magazines with Jean’s face on the front —on just one kiosk,” said Dick. “It’s becoming the same in America now. She’s so much in demand. People recognise her in the streets.

“She is the face of this year and last year, and every woman wants to look like her. They all adore her in New York. In fact, it’s ‘the thing’ to be English in America at the moment.”

While the World in Action team in New York followed Jean Shrimpton, their liaison girl and researcher in London, Jenny Isard, was talking to Jean’s parents for more facts on the world’s most sought-after model.

Dick was worn out chasing Jean Shrimpton in New York — “she moves pretty fast,” he said — but he would like to work there. “It’s a good place to work if you like working hard, and if you like cities, and. New York is a real city.”

The post The face on the cover appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A new series of Granada’s Men of Our Time begins on Wednesday. There are four programmes in the series dealing with Lenin, King George V, Stanley Baldwin, and Hitler. Here EARL ATTLEE assesses the lives and influence of the four men.

THE four personalities of whom I write today form a totally disparate group.

Two of them are characteristic British figures who exemplify in their careers and qualities that process of continuity and peaceful change which differentiates our island story from that of the continent of Europe.

The other two are dynamic figures whose careers have profoundly influenced world history, the one an anachronism, a throw back to barbarism, the other the protagonist of a new way of life, the ultimate development of which is of profound importance to the human race.

KING GEORGE V had the great advantage, which he shared with his second son, of not being born heir to a throne. Brought up to manhood as a serving officer in the Navy, he was somewhat alarmed when the death of his elder brother opened to him the prospect of succeeding his father to the British Crown.

He was reassured by his cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, that there was no better training for a high position than service in the Royal Navy.

Years later the same advice was tendered by his son, another distinguished admiral, Earl Mountbatten, to King George VI, and its wisdom is again illustrated in the Duke of Edinburgh.

King George had no easy time. He had to deal with a constitutional crisis in the clash between the Lords and Commons in 1910. Though fearing an undermining of the hereditary principle, he gave his assent to Mr. Asquith’s threat to swamp the Lords, if they proved obdurate.

He then had to face World War I and give the nation the example of steadfastness and sympathy in critical times.

A few years later he was faced with an unknown quantity, a Labour Government. A narrow reactionary might have tried to avoid this by trying to get the two capitalist parties to combine. Not so King George.

He acted as a constitutional monarch. I did not meet him often, being Postmaster General, but found him friendly and interested in the work of my department.

I would have described him as a good, commonsense man of average ability with a strong sense of duty to his people.

I understand that he was not very successful as a father, his sons being somewhat in awe of him. His son was the first of the Georges to break away from the unfortunate tradition of the dynasty in this respect.

STANLEY BALDWIN I knew well, indeed for some time I was his opposite number in the House of Commons. He was the son of a Midland businessman, but related on one side to the pre-Raphaelite painter Burne Jones, and thus in contact with the circle round poet and artist William Morris, and, on the other, to Rudyard Kipling.

With this background he naturally had a broad outlook.

Though half Scottish he was characteristically English in his love of compromise and his desire for peace at home and abroad. I always felt that, though he disagreed with Labour, he understood our outlook. There was nothing he liked better than having long talks with Labour members.

He did two great services to his country. The first was after the General Strike in which, not unsuccessfully, he sought to assuage the bitter class conflicts in the nation and did much to modernise the Conservative Party. The second was over the abdication crisis when he interpreted the real feeling of the country.

He consulted me at the time and I think I gave him the right advice as to the feelings of the majority of the people. He was less successful in facing the international situation.

He failed to bring about “the great alliance,” to use Sir Winston Churchill’s expression, which would have prevented World War II. Yet he also failed to rearm Britain, which was the alternative.

If he had shown the same courage in facing the dictators as he did the Press Lords, the course of history might have been changed. In other matters, notably India, he showed a forward looking view, thus serving the spirit of peaceful change.

LENIN, whose doctrines still inspire nearly half the peoples of the world, though a prophet of revolution, was essentially Russian. A devout follower of Karl Marx, he got his chance to apply Marxist principles to a great country.

Marx himself was apprehensive at the idea of his principles being applied by the Russians. I think that he had always thought of his principles being applied in a country which had already experienced the bourgeois liberalism which followed the industrial revolution.

A man of tremendous will power and personality, Lenin gave the leadership which the Russian revolution needed and without which it might well have failed owing to sectional and personal rivalries.

He was probably right in thinking that, in a country so backward as Russia, with no democratic tradition, violent revolution and a dictatorship were the only way.

On the other hand, his switch to the new economic policy showed a degree of flexibility and it is known that he distrusted Stalin for his narrow-mindedness.

I recall George Lansbury, telling me on his return from a visit that Lenin would have liked to have had advice from the Socialist thinkers, the Webbs and R. H. Tawney, on future policy.

His views on the minorities in Russia and the impossibility of applying the same methods to countries with a different history showed a wider outlook. It may be that Mr. Kruschev [sic: Khrushchev – Ed] is a better Leninist than Mao Tse-tung.

ADOLF HITLER was unlike Lenin in every respect except will-power. Only in a country such as Germany with a morally and mentally sick people could such a man have attained power. In Britain he would have been only a nuisance and a bad joke, like Oswald Mosley.

There is almost nothing to be said in his favour. A dosshouse loafer with a collection of prejudices which he thought were ideas, he had great powers as a mob orator and considerable ability as a Party organiser.

He was fortunate in operating among a people of no political sense and of encountering no man of character and will power, either civil or military, able to withstand him. Hence his success up to 1940.

I am told that Germans try to forget him and rightly so — for apart from his autobahns he left behind him only ruin.

He was, in effect, a destructive force, resolved to rule without regard to the welfare of any other human being. But for Speer, one of the other Nazi leaders, he would have liked all Germany to perish with him.

The post Four faces of history appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

The ancient art of falconry is the subject of “The Feathers of Death” in Granada’s Another World series on Tuesday. In the programme Douglas Fisher follows the training programme of a wild young Spanish falcon. Here is the story of a young man who has already faced this several times himself — Mr. Terry Pickford of Blackpool, one of the North’s leading falconers

KING HAROLD was an expert with falcons. In medieval times no thane or noble worth his salt would have been seen hunting without them.

But the eminent early aficionados of falcons and falconry couldn’t have seemed more remote as we strode out across the featureless stretch of heathland just outside Blackpool.

The gaudy painted face of the “Golden Mile” was only a few minutes away — as the hawk flies.

And the falconer I was accompanying had already spent the best part of his day at the drawing board in the British Aircraft Corporation works at Warton.

Only the elaborately reinforced glove he was wearing conjured up any of the romantic imagery I have always associated with this most ancient of British sports.

The Goshawk, with eyes like the Angel of Death, poised rigidly on his wrist.

“Some people will tell you that their birds have a genuine love for them,” said Mr. Terry Pickford, 19-year-old junior technician and modern-day falconer.

“I think that’s a lot of poppycock myself. The only thing that binds a bird of prey like this to its owner is the food that he provides for it.

“Love doesn’t enter into the arrangement at all — as far as the bird is concerned.

“Keeping a hawk or a falcon does have its commercial possibilities. Only recently I was invited to use the bird to scare away sparrows, which were proving a bit of a problem to several factories.

“And if you’re well known you get work with your falcon in films or by providing pictures for magazines. But generally the birds cost more than they make.”

Mr. Pickford, who calls his bird Blitz, got interested in falconry five years ago after reading a book about golden eagles.

“But getting a good bird is a lot more difficult than you would think,” he said.

“You can’t go into a pet-shop and buy yourself a hawk or a falcon. You can’t buy any British birds in Britain — it’s against the law.

“You have to send abroad for them, and it can be an expensive business.”

A Goshawk like Blitz costs about £15 [£260 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed]. Falcons can cost £40 [£680] or more.

And when the bird has been bought the problems are still only just beginning.

“It has to be trained to eat from you,” he said. “Trained to sit on your wrist. Trained to return to your wrist. And trained eventually to hunt.”

Food is another expensive item. A bird has to be fed freshly killed meat every day. And the traditional equipment of the falconer, the glove, the jesses, the leash and the perches all add more to the bill.

“My advice to a potential falconer is not to bother — unless he is as wildly enthusiastic as I am,” said Mr. Pickford.

“The more work you do with these birds, the more you realise what you have to learn.”

But with all its problems the sport which was originally the birthright of princes never loses its fascination for the young Blackpool engineer.

“There’s marvellous satisfaction in training a wild creature like this into such a superbly efficient hunting instrument,” he said.

A cruel sport?

“Only to the falconer,” he said. “In the course of a day’s hunting, you are likely to have to run about 10 miles through broken country and over all kinds of obstacles.”

And when I pressed the point:

“It’s much less cruel than a gun. If you shoot a rabbit and only manage to wound it, it may take days to die.

“If a falcon hits, it kills instantaneously. And if it misses, the quarry gets away unharmed.”

Falconry and a general study of ornithology doesn’t leave much time for any other kind of relaxation for Mr. Pickford. Like girl friends.

“Most of the ones I had didn’t really like the falcon,” he grinned.

“I suppose they were jealous.”

The post No love from falcons appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

ROUGH, tough Northern realism returns to Granada screens on Friday night with the start of the second series of The Villains. Authentic situations, accurately reported dialogue, and minutely detailed character studies of the criminal elements of Northern society were the factors which made the first series such a success a few months ago.

And they are the ingredients which producer Harrv Kershaw intends to maintain this time. The tone is set with this week’s story.

Much of the action of “Big Fleas Have Little Fleas” takes place in a factory work-room. So to capture the right atmosphere, five girl “workers” in the cast spent an afternoon in a garment factory in Salford with studio floor manager John Tiffin.

“The girls were machinists,” he explained. “We went along primarily to watch the workers at their job, and see how well we could copy their methods.

“The factory workers were so interested in us that they stayed behind — without pay — to make sure we got everything right.”

Friday’s story is about Cyril Battersby (Richard Butler), a small time operator and boss of See Bee Garments in Cheetham Hill, Manchester’s clothing mecca. He turns out a garment which catches the eye of a multiple store. He takes on a big overdraft, expands his business, and everything looks rosy until he finds himself in difficulties.

Harry Kershaw and his team will continue their policy of realism in later episodes. They will visit bars, greyhound tracks and dance halls in the North to get background for a story of a young boy whose father is cruelly assaulted in a robbery, and the uneasv romance of a young shop girl and a crook.

He said of the series: “We are sticking to our policy of localising stories in the North and its cities. If it is Deansgate, in Manchester, or Leeds, then we use these names and locations. We don’t invent place names.

“Our stories will be slanted towards criminal lives rather than crimes. We are, in fact, interested in that part of a criminal’s day when he isn’t engaged in his particular profession.”

There is a major breakthrough in TV series production in two later episodes. Both are being produced on location.

One, the story of a boy on the run from the Army, is being shot at a farm high up in the Pennines. The other will be produced on a caravan site and in disused copper mines at Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

“It is impossible to tell some stories in the studio because they are so closely bound up with a location,” Kershaw said “These episodes were written and developed after we had found a suitable spot.”

The post Proper villains! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE graveyard was sodden. And perched high on a bleak, windswept Yorkshire hillside.

Hardly the place anyone would expect to find Peter Adamson, better known as Len Fairclough, the jovial odd job man of Coronation Street.

“Aye, there’s the rub,” said Peter, playing around a little irreverently with Hamlet’s famous words as he took what he considers one of his most interesting gravestone rubbings with tracing paper and charcoal stump.

He had tracked down the curious half-ton stone slab in the corner of the churchyard at Uppermill on the rising slopes of the Pennines.

The Shakespearian soliloquy was very much in keeping with the drama chiselled into the black, weathered stone.

Peter rubbed and the legend emerged … “Lie interred the dreadfully bruised and lacerated bodies of William Bradbury and Thomas his son, both of Greenfield, who were together savagely murdered in an unusual horrid manner on Monday night Ap 21 1832. Wm being 84 and Thos 46 years old.”

The biting wind howled across the gaunt headstones as though nature was in sympathy with the dead. Peter rubbed on …

“Throughout the land where ever news is read
intelligence of their sad death has spread
Those now who talk of far fam’d Greenfield Hills,
will think of Bill O’Jacks and Tom O’Bills

Such interest did their tragic end excite
that ‘ere they were remov’d from sight
thousands on thousands daily came to see
the bloody scene of the catastrophe

One house one business and one bed
and one most shocking death they had
one funeral came one inquest passed
and now one grave they have at last.”

Peter called on the local historian, Miss Vera Winterbottom, who unfolded the gruesome story and his day was complete.

Said Peter: “Apparently, a sword stick, a horse pistol and a spade were used. The house was covered in blood, but the mystery was never solved.

“A couple of travelling Irishmen were suspected because William’s last words were ‘Pat, Pat.’ Some even believed it was a quarrel between father and son.”

Peter’s off-beat hobby is a legacy from the days when he was an apprentice engraver in a cellar in Knight Street, Liverpool, There, he engraved office name plates and coffin plates by hand.

At his home, 50 rubbings he has made from Scotland to Cornwall in the past 10 years are filed away.

Wherever he happens to be, he always drops in at the local churchyard and goes date hunting.

“You’ll be amazed at what you find,” he says. “Some of it is deadly serious, some humorous and some sociological.”

In the boot of his car there is always paper, charcoal and a wooden batten to hold down the paper on windy days.

His oldest find is in Latin — which he can’t understand — dated 1410 from a church at Finedon, in Northants. His oddest is from Bircle Dean, near Bury, in Lancashire, where two wives and the mistress of the same man are buried in the same grave.

And then there’s the one sent by his brother in America — concerning an Alabama negro who “died in chains.” He’s even got a rubbing of a stone with the tongue-twisting Welsh town of Llanfair PG. carved out in full!

Peter reckons he learns a lot about history and social conditions from his rubbings. “It’s not uncommon to see the names of four children from the same family who died within six months in the early part of the last century.”

The post Stories in stones appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

MISS ANGELA LLOYD is 21, has big, blue eyes and blonde hair that curls perkily at shoulder length.

She has rather unusual playmates, too, like Denise, a rheumatic Muscovy duck that can’t swim; Rebel, a rabbit that’s always on the run; and a gaggle of tame, baby sparrows that peck the grit from the soles of your shoes.

We all shared an interview in a backyard of the staff quarters at the Children’s Zoo, London, where Angela works and her off-beat animal chums live.

You can see Angela talking about rats and mice as pets on Zoo Time, on Wednesday. She is something of an expert on pet rodents, having kept and bred them since she was six years old. She talked to me about life in the Children’s Zoo … and the sort of things youngsters say and do when visiting this miniature Disneyland.

First, let’s introduce Denise and Rebel. Poor old Denise, aged about five — which I am assured is elderly for a Muscovy duck — has rheumatism in her webbed feet. As the affliction has dried out her feathers, it has upset her buoyancy and she can’t swim any more. A disastrous state of affairs for a duck.

But the girl helpers at the Children’s Zoo have adopted Denise as their personal pet. They even bath the old girl. She lives cosily in a bale of straw behind the staff quarters, growing old gracefully.

Rebel, the rabbit, is her bale-mate and keeps escaping from his pen in the Zoo. So he has been posted to the rear of the staff quarters, which are adequately enclosed but where he can roam freely.

“I’ve been working here for nearly three years,” said Angela. “Although I appeared in several TV plays and stage productions as a juvenile, animals have always been my first love.

“I adore the work. It gives me a chance to be near all the animals I’m interested in, mice and rats particularly.

“I look after and study rodents in the mornings. In the afternoons I take the children on pony rides. The children fail into two categories — the very shy ones and the super-confident, leave-me-alone-I’m-all-right ones.

“In fact, one little boy once told me: ‘Leave me alone. I know what to do. I’ve watched Rawhide!’ And he dug in his heels and almost managed to get a normally placid Shetland pony to break into a gallop.

“Hamsters, too, amuse the children. One day, two little boys watched fascinated for hours while a hamster chewed his way patiently through his hutch.

“Once he had escaped, they came and told me. ‘He’s super,’ they said. ‘Will you ask him to do it again?’

“And there was a sad scene when a little girl fed Hector, one of our mischievous goats, with a fresh loaf of bread.

“Hector left the bread … and gobbled the wax-paper wrapping. He loves that, although it’s bad for his digestion.

“But the little girl cried because she thought Hector didn’t want her loaf.

“I reassured her and told her he was a special goat who liked to eat paper and rags. Next time I looked around, sure enough, the little girl was feeding Hector her frilly handkerchief.”

Then Angela prepared to go and feed her mice. Mice? Weren’t girls supposed to be terrified of mice? “That’s silly,” said Angela. “They’re lovable little things.

“But I can’t stand spiders. Ugh. Even a tiny one sends me scampering away screaming.”

The post A duck that can’t swim! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Usually you find him sitting behind a desk, immaculately dressed and not a hair out of place, interviewing anyone from Cabinet Ministers and Archbishops to coal miners and artists. But this week Mike Scott, of Granada’s Scene at 6.30, has changed his lounge suit for sweater and slacks to bring viewers a breath of the great outdoors as he travels by canal barge from Lincoln to the Wash. And between programmes, as this picture shows, Mike shares the bargee’s chores with the rest of the Granada production team.

The post New role for Mike Scott appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

LIFE was so uncomplicated for Ken Nixon and his family. His bread-and-butter was pig-iron and copper.

His address was anywhere along the silver necklace of waterways between Liverpool and London.

His only major headache was fishing the kids out of the water whenever they went overboard.

Uncomplicated.

Until a certain Spring afternoon when the sun was shining with surprising warmth, and the wind was corrugating the chocolate brown surface of the water at Weston Point Docks, at Runcorn, Cheshire

And Granada’s Travelling Eye unit moved in and took over his life for a week!

Friday’s episode of The Villains tells the story of two bargees smuggling contraband from Runcorn to London.

In the process it provides a tender and tragic glimpse of a section of the community with an attitude of mind as anachronistic as the horseless carriage — the fraternity of Britain’s waterways.

Authenticity and realism are the twin – keynotes of the series. And to obtain these, producer Harry Kershaw moved both cast and production unit down to the Cheshire waterways, lock, stock and barrel to prepare a large slice of the show on location. Which was were Ken came in.

The producer needed two real working barges. And the know-how to handle them.

Ken Nixon, a 31-year-old bargee who has been working the waterways since he was ten years old, was in a position to supply both. So he was seconded to the Outside Broadcast unit by the British Waterways Board as a sort of temporary “technical adviser.”

He turned out to be a lot more than that — particularly to the actors.

Jack Smethurst and Derek Benfield, who play the bargee brothers who fall foul of the law, spent days trying to capture his accent.

“It isn’t anything you can localise exactly.” said Jack. “A bargee’s accent seems to be coloured by every county he passes through.’’

But, more important still, Ken was a key to the extraordinary character of the men who drive the narrow boats. Because the long days gliding through the lonely, rippling reaches of Britain’s canals seem to produce an attitude to life which has never been fully reconciled with the world of television, the telephone and the washing machine.

Ken Nixon and his wife have three small children — but live in a tiny cabin that would make a gypsy’s caravan seem spacious.

His philosophical delight in Britain’s languid water highways is something he inherited from his parents, who were bargees before him

“You leave it, and you come back to it,” he said quietly, manoeuvring boats into position for next scene. “Once it gets in your blood, you just can’t get rid of it. It’s such a free life.”

For this particular barge family, however, it is an idyll that can’t last forever.

The children are approaching school age. “I could send them to the Waterways boarding school at Birmingham,” said Ken. “But we’d miss them being away for all those months between holidays.

“So I suppose eventually I’ll have to give up the barges and find myself some kind of a job ashore.

“Mind you, I want a job driving a lorry or something. You get used to moving around. And like I said, you always come back to the waterways in the end.”

The post Man of the narrow boats appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WITH some people, it’s first editions. With others, it’s stamps, or match boxes or cigarette cards.

With Johnny Hamp [sic], host and producer of Granada’s Wednesday Pop Scene, in the Scene at 6.30 programme, it’s television debuts.

As pop-chief of Scene At 6.30 he has assembled a bundle of them since the programme was launched 14 months ago.

“When we decided we needed a pop musical item in the show every night, we had a problem,” said Johnny, behind a desk covered with new record releases.

“Most of the big names launched their records in London.

“We decided that if we were going to get the teenage audiences we wanted, we would have to start scooping the London shows.

“That didn’t only mean getting established names to come to Manchester first with their records.

“It meant digging out new talent before it had been fully recognised elsewhere.”

One of the first charttopping groups to make a television debut on Scene was Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas.

“That was a relatively straightforward deal — a straight recommendation and transaction with the Epstein stable,” said Johnny.

But a much more zany new talent hit the television public for the first time on the programme a few weeks later — Mr. Freddie Garrity and The Dreamers.

“I was invited to see them playing at a Manchester club,” said Johnny.

“I thought their act was killingly funny. They threw everything into it in those days — including dust-bin lids and bicycle frames!

“Funny thing is, Freddie and the lads had been auditioned by Granada only 12 months before and had been thrown out on their ears because their act was considered absurd and stupid.”

The Dreamers have never forgotten their first television break. And they still launch all their new releases through the show.

About the same time, another crazy crew turned up at the studios for a first television appearance — The Hollies.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw them,” grinned Johnny. “They were dressed in jeans and shirts that didn’t match, and they looked more like rough kids than musicians.

“But we put them on, because they had a new kind of talent, and they never looked back.

“I still think they’re one of the greatest groups to come out of the North.

“When The Mindbenders did their first television stint,” said Johnny, “they were directed by Silvio Narrizano – who had just finished the award-winning production of War and Peace!

“Dave Berry? The first time I saw him I thought that he was wasted on television — and I still do.

“He thrives on audiences. He can work them up into a frenzy of excitement.”

The complete opposite, in fact, of those two cool kittens of British show-business — The Caravelles. Who very nearly didn’t make their television debut on the night they were booked to appear on Scene.

“They arrived at the studio at six o’clock and went in front of their first television cameras without any rehearsal,” Johnny explained. They missed their plane from London, and had to take one to Liverpool. We rushed a car to Merseyside to get them, but by the time they got to the studios there wasn’t time for a run through.

“You’d think if anyone could catch a plane it would be them, wouldn’t you — with a name like The Caravelles.”

The problems of producing nightly musical items for Scene have been magnified ten fold with Wednesday’s Pop Scene.

“On the new show we are trying to feature stars who are in the hit parade that week.” Johnny explained.

The performance of a new record usually coincides with the disc’s general release.

But occasionally, Pop Scene jumps the gun even on this.

“Take Millicent Martin,” said Johnny, “we had her on the show singing ‘Nothing But The Best’ three weeks ago. And the disc only goes on sale this week.”

Four scalps that don’t hang from Johnny the Collector’s belt are those of The Beatles.

“But there is some connection,” said Johnny. “They made their television debut in People and Places — the programme from which Scene sprang — on October 17, 1962. They have appeared in Scene a number of times — and we expect to feature them with their new releases in the months to come.”

The post Pop collector No. 1 appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IF Stanley Meadows ever runs out of work as an actor, he won’t starve.

He has the basic principles of half a dozen jobs at his fingertips.

And before finding his feet in the theatre he worked, among other things, as a barman, storeman, waiter and shipping representative.

“But I never worked as a theatrical agent,” said Stanley, referring to the part he plays as Laurie Frazer in Coronation Street.

“And I don’t suppose I ever shall. I just don’t have the temperament for it. To succeed in this business, an agent has to be ruthless.

“He has to be able to sell a thing really big, to project a somewhat exaggerated image of the artist he is pushing. And I just couldn’t do that.”

Smooth, polished and quietly accomplished, Stanley Meadows isn’t what you might call a conventional actor.

Many actors and actresses concern themselves almost exclusively with acting, on and off the stage. Stanley doesn’t.

“When I leave the studio in the evening, I forget all about my work. I have no special friends inside the business.

“All my close friends are doctors, or lawyers, or people like that. At home I want to meet new people — not talk shop.”

It was a lesson Stanley learned when he was odd-jobbing around London a few years ago.

“Every job I did brought me into contact with new people,” he said. “It was invaluable experience and grounding for an actor.

“There aren’t many kinds of people that you don’t get a chance to study first-hand if you’re working as a waiter in a restaurant, or serving drinks behind a bar.”

But then Stanley has always been a great one for mixing with a variety of people. He had to be.

The elder son of a sweetshop owner in one of the poorer districts in Stepney Green, he won a scholarship to Forest School in Epping Forest.

“The scholarship provided me with a double problem,” said Stanley drily. “When I was at school I was a Cockney trying to establish myself in public school company.

“When I was at home I was a public school boy trying to adjust again to life in Stepney.”

Stanley emerged singularly lacking in neuroses — which ought to prove something — and by the time he was 21 he knew the only thing he wanted to do in life was to act.

He has worked in a variety of rep. companies, under-studied Sir Laurence Olivier in “The Entertainer,” worked with Sir John Gielgud and Harold Pinter and most of the other top names in the business, and starred in a number of plays on ITV.

His direction at the moment?

“To return to the stage for a while,” he said.

The post An actor who hates shop talk – that’s Stanley Meadows appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

The singer who commanded the biggest “fee” of 1963 for a single appearance — £85,700 [£1.5m in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] — is in England to sing in the ITV show, Sentimental Over You, on Wednesday. Name? Frank Sinatra Jr. The sum, you will remember, was the ransom money Frank Sinatra Sr. paid out after his son had been kidnapped. Sinatra Jr. will be singing with the “new” Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It was with Tommy Dorsey that Sinatra Sr. learnt that not only did moon rhyme with June, but that croon went pretty well with swoon. This is a profile of Sinatra, Sr. and Jr., by singer and guitarist Clark Yocum, who worked with Dad in the Forties and will be working with Son on Wednesday. He talks here to TV Times

I’LL never smile again … until I smile at you …

The thin young man concludes the last phrase of the old song, the Pied Pipers vocal group blending softly in, and suddenly there is an overwhelming round of applause to fill the room.

The young man, still a bit lost in the song, bows: “Thank you, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I’m happy you enjoyed that.”

Somehow, the applause is always mixed with nostalgia, for Frank Sinatra Jr., who was 20 years old on January 12, brings back happy memories to fans of the great Tommy Dorsey Orchestra of the Forties, the band that used to boast another Frank Sinatra as vocalist.

But if the audience is nostalgic and in a happy frame of mind, it is no more so than a singer-guitarist named Clark Yocum, a member of the Pied Pipers who sang with Frank Sinatra back in the Forties and who will be blending his voice with Frank Jr.’s during Wednesday’s Sentimental Over You on ITV.

“I met Sinatra for the first time in April of 1940 when I joined the Dorsey band,” said Yocum. “I’ve always remembered our association with pleasure because I don’t know any more talented man…

“However, I’ll have to admit,” Yocum continued, “that another April, 23 years later, is equally meaningful to me.”

April, 1963, is when Yocum met Frank Jr., just signed as a member of the “new” Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, led by saxophonist Sam Donahue. “We rehearsed in Los Angeles, and it was great to be doing the wonderful Dorsey tunes again.

“And knowing that Sinatra’s son would be with us made it even better. He’s such a nice fellow, and so like his father. He has the same poise, the same intensity, the same way of moving, of gesturing…

“And, I believe, the same talent.

“Frank Jr. was more quiet and reserved than his father at first. But then he was only 19, and this was a pretty important step for a sheltered young boy to be taking. His father was three or four years older when he joined the band—was married and was used to being on his own.”

Yocum laughed as he added: “And then, too, Frank Jr. could hardly be expected to have as much confidence as his father. After all, look who he’s following – just about the most popular singer in the world!”

One thing young Frank definitely has confidence in, though, is knowing what he wants in a song. “He knows how he wants to sound, how he wants the arrangement to back him up, and he’s willing to work hard to make each number as good as possible. “His father was and is exactly the same way. Sinatra has high standards, and he is as much of a perfectionist as you can find. Temperamentally, the two Sinatras are very alike. However, Frank Jr. has far more technical knowledge of music, and that’s something his father is very proud about.”

Frank Jr. has studied music since childhood, is a talented pianist, has written a concerto and conducted and arranged two tunes which have been recorded on the Sinatra Reprise label.

“Frank Jr. spends most of his time working on his voice,” said Yocum. “He travels with a tape recorder, tapes some of his numbers and listens to them, trying to improve rough spots.

“This has paid off,” Yocum pointed out. “Frank’s much more at ease now, although he has always had an extra amount of poise. He loves to sing, and no matter how tired he gets he never complains. We’ve been working non-stop since last May, and it’s gotten a bit rough at times.

“For instance, when we appeared at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, we were through at midnight. When we worked in Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe, our last show wasn’t over until six in the morning. That’s a crazy schedule for a young boy.

“When he’s not working on his voice, he spends most of his spare time listening to his father’s records. But he does date occasionally during our engagements. He’s got no time to get serious yet, though he does have a picture of Hayley Mills hanging in his room at home.” Frank Jr. told me in a recent interview: “I don’t want to get serious with any girl yet.

“The sort of opportunity I have only comes once in a lifetime and I want to prove I can be worthy of it.”

He may not have much time for girls but they are devoting more and more to him. When he played in Phoenix, Arizona, local police cordoned off his motel to protect him from a besieging horde of girl fans.

How do the various audiences react to young Frank? “They love him,” said Yocum. “We’ve had good crowds every place we’ve been, and when it’s Frank’s turn to step into the spotlight, he impresses them.

“They like the old songs such as “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and “There Are Such Nice Things,” and they like hearing the old arrangements and the familiar voice. But more than that, they seem to like Frank for his obvious sincerity and lack of pretence.

“He’s a nice boy, and it shows.

“Sinatra and young Frank are very similar when they sing … even to using the microphone the same way. They move about the stage in the same way, and they both sing so that the song is directed to each member of the audience, and they sing as though they believed every word of the lyric.”

Some of Frank Jr.’s new fans like the way he handles a tune called “The Rules of the Road.”

“A song of a lost loser,” as Sinatra might say, it is written by the same team who composed “Witchcraft.” One critic termed it: “The kind of song Sinatra might sing, but hasn’t, a song that shows his boy has inherited all the Sinatra talent in making a lyric come alive.”

“Sinatra is justifiably proud of his son,” Yocum said, “and has often been a member of the audience when the Tommy Dorsey band was performing.

“Sinatra doesn’t like to take the spotlight away from Frank though,” Yocum added. “He tries to be as inconspicuous as possible, and Frank Jr. tries to be as good as possible.

“He is so proud of his father, and he’s always especially happy when he’s in the audience.”

Yocum revealed that Sinatra has quietly made a great number of expensive arrangements available to the band, including many highly praised Nelson Riddle backgrounds.

Despite the stories of Sinatra’s outbursts of temperament during his stay with the Dorsey band, Yocum’s reply to the question “did you ever see Sinatra ill-tempered?” was: “I don’t remember an occasion.”

“Sinatra seems to think well of this new Dorsey band,” added Yocum.

“In fact, he told Frank Jr. that this would be the best experience he could ever get if he really seriously wanted to make singing a career.

“And he definitely does want to be a singer. His experience shows already. He likes the singing, but also the fact that he has a chance to meet many of his father’s friends and fellow musicians. And Sinatra has friends everywhere.

“Frank Jr. has been looking forward to coming to England ever since he heard that we’d been signed to appear here. We’ve all looked forward to coming, I might add.

“And we’re especially happy that Frank came back safe and sound to come with us.”

There are those who doubt that anyone will ever be able to follow in the footsteps of Frank Sinatra, but Clark Yocum is one who believes if anyone can, it will be … Frank Sinatra Jr.

The post Sinatra Jr… the swinging image of dad appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Few monarchs enjoy as much affection and respect as our own Queen Elizabeth. A century ago Victoria, the subject of the Friday night series, Victoria Regina, was Queen. Here

A. S. A. BRIGGS [sic]

Professor of History and Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of Sussex, shows that life was very different for Victoria

THE morning of December 14, 1861. The Queen, in her dressing-gown, entered Windsor Castle’s gloomy sickroom and approached a damp bed. The castle clock struck a quarter to eleven. And the Queen screamed: “This is Death — I know it!”

On the bed lay the body of her husband. Albert, Prince Consort of Britain. The imperious Victoria was a widow at the age of 42. For the next 40 years, until her death in 1901, she was to rule alone.

“It seemed as though grief would kill her then,” recalled Mrs. Macdonald, a faithful servant, who was at Victoria’s side soon after the death-bed scene. “When the Queen did cry, she cried for days. It was heart-breaking to hear her.”

The public had mocked Albert while he lived: now it, too, mourned the little German. The tide of anti-royalist literature and songs (which had dubbed him “Lovely Albert” and promised to “send him home and make him groan”) was temporarily stemmed.

But not for long — and the obstinate Victoria had only her self to blame when the acid pens were taken up again. The private widow had public duties which she ignored; she was petulant and arrogantly disregarded criticism of herself and the Royal Family.

Londoners rarely saw their Queen. She spent most of her time at Osborne House (“Albert’s own creation” on the Isle of Wight), Balmoral and Windsor, carelessly inconveniencing ministers who wanted to consult her. “Victoria could do everything she liked and nothing she didn’t,” remarked Lord Clarendon.

The Press and Public reacted against her isolation. Delane, Editor of The Times, used one of the oldest tricks in the journalists’ notebook, announcing as fact what he hoped to accomplish with his story. He wrote, hopefully, that the Queen’s seclusion was coming to an end.

It didn’t. She simply spent part of it writing an indignant letter to the paper, perhaps the only letter a reigning sovereign has ever sent to the Press. She did not sign it, but the style was unmistakable.

Equally unmistakable was the style of a Punch cartoon which followed Delane’s campaign and Victoria’s rebuke. Published in September, 1865, it took up a full page. Britannia was featured unveiling a statue of Victoria, and pleading “Tis time! Descend: be stone no more!”

Crude anti-royalist tracts rolled off crude presses. Virulent attacks of the 1860’s make present-day satire and political invective seem like back-patting and hot air. Pamphleteers and cartoonists drew no line between the monarch’s public and private life.

“What Does She Do With It?” asked a famous paperback, demanding a breakdown of the Royal household budget. It warned her that “all the spirit of the English constitution is opposed to the possession of a great private fortune by the holder of the throne.”

The radicals, as Labouchere wrote later, were essentially practical. “They do not approve of the fuss and feathers of a court, and they regard its ceremonies with scant respect, for they are inclined to think that they conduce to a servile spirit, which is degrading to humanity.”

The scandal-mongers seized on anything and everything to malign Victoria. They found an irresistible issue in her relationship with John Brown, a Scots ghillie whom Albert had introduced to Balmoral as a pony-leader.

Her close companions thought she believed the red-bearded highlander had a mystic bond with Albert’s spirit. Some said the Queen was a spiritualist and John Brown acted as her medium. It was clear from his first months at Osborne House that he had a very special relationship with the normally unapproachable Queen.

Rumours spread. For a time the relationship between the Queen and her kilted courtier was more openly talked about abroad than in Britain. (Very much as they were when Victoria’s great grandson, Edward VIII, met the attractive American, Mrs. Wallis Simpson.) An American writer spoke of “gross stories” told at a dinner when he was visiting England.

“At a table where all the company were gentlemen by rank or position, there were constant references to and jokes about ‘Mrs. Brown’ … I lost the point of all the witty sayings, and should have remained in blissful ignorance had not my host kindly informed me that ‘Mrs. Brown’ was an English synonym for the Queen.”

The Continent was insatiably curious. (Even in those days people there were excessively interested in the goings on at Windsor and other royal haunts.) Cyphered despatches went abroad from London embassies to the dismay of foreign royalty.

Punch printed the following “Court Circular,” datelined Balmoral: “Mr. John Brown walked on the slopes. He subsequently partook of a haggis. In the evening Mr. John Brown was pleased to listen to a bagpipe. Mr. John Brown retired early.”

Nasty, but mild compared with what was to follow. The Queen and Brown were reported to have rowed over the Punch spoof. One version of the tale said she sacked him: another, that he dismissed her.

The trouble dragged on. Historians today convincingly deny that Victoria and Brown were lovers. There is no evidence to support the theory that she secretly married the ghillie. But there was certainly cause for concern among loyal officials that the relationship was socially and politically damaging.

Then, suddenly, in March, 1883, John Brown died at the age of 56. No one dared to tell the Queen, until her son, Prince Leopold, plucked up courage. The Queen cried.

She compared the shock to that which she had suffered in 1861 and she determined once more to live on her memories. Brown left her no great house, but she did have his personal diary. She proposed to publish it with a biography that she had written herself. But the truth never appeared. After much persuasion, she gave the manuscript to Henry Ponsonby (her private secretary, who later died of overwork) and he burned it.

And it was the end of the major attacks on Victoria. The republicans — there were never very many of them — continued sporadically to attack the throne. But their grounds were political, unsensational when compared to the violent personal vendettas carried on by the scandal-mongers.

The Elgin Courant described Brown as “a Highland ghillie, who has achieved a practical realisation of his compatriots’ wish for a Loch Lomond of whisky,” but they said “Brown’s fall has been more commonly ascribed to Mr. Punch than to any shortcomings of his own.”

The magazine Tomahawk pursued the scandal relentlessly, suggestive innuendo turned vicious and Victoria’s reputation reached its lowest ebb.

The first issue carried a cartoon based on Sir Edward Landseer’s famous painting of the Queen on horseback, with Brown at the bridle. His mistress’s widow’s weeds were emphasised, and the caption below said, “All is black which is not Brown!”

Then came “Where is Britannia?” a cruel caricature. It reviewed an empty throne with royal robes thrown across it. In a corner, under a domed glass cover, lay the neglected crown. The next cartoon took the theme a stage further. It was the most daring and ferocious anti-royalist cartoon Britain had teen.

Lolling against the empty throne was a coarse-faced, arrogant Scot in a kilt. His arm obscured the treasured crown — and he was sneering down at the British lion. It was a skilful porrait of John Brown.

If such an insult appeared in the Press today, M.P.s would want to know why. Victoria’s ministers and members of her Parliament were silent.

Victoria grew into old age and the affection of her people. Skilful stage managing by the artful Disraeli raised her above all previous monarchs. But few, as she no doubt remembered, had ever been subjected to comparable abuse.

The post Victoria, the stubborn Queen appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Sir Winston Churchill is 90 on Monday, when, as a birthday tribute, All Our Yesterdays will devote its entire programme to him. TV Times asked Randolph Churchill to write about his father. The result is a unique tribute, perhaps the most remarkable ever paid to this great man.

SEAHAM HARBOUR, November 30, 1964

TODAY, on what would have been the ninetieth anniversary of my father’s birthday (if only he had survived), I sit down to tell a tale of the sad state of what was once the free world.

Ever since 1940, when Hitler occupied our country, I have been prisoner in a slave-labour camp in County Durham and have been forced to work in the coal mines.

My readers are too young to remember the past — the golden, free world in which we used to live. Now the Swastika flies all over Europe — over the Louvre, over the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.

Over the White House itself, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Fort Knox.

People of my generation, if any survive, will realise the full irony of the fact that I have had to smuggle this story to the only country in which it can be published — the Chinese Peoples’ Republic.

All else has succumbed to Hitler. He is now a venerable and largely benevolent figure aged 75.

He administers his colossal empire — the largest since the days of Rome — in a paternal fashion from his palace in Potsdam. He does not condescend to spend more than a week at Buckingham Palace, or more than three weeks in the White House. He leaves the administration of these vast territories to his able but not so benevolent, gauleiters.

For the record we may as well know, now there is an opportunity of a free Press in the Chinese Peoples’ Republic, how these events came about. The year 1939 saw the culmination of the Baldwin-Macdonald decade.

During this time the English people were lulled into a sense of lethargy and apathy.

They were taught by their masters to place their reliance upon the League of Nations — a bogus absurdity which President Woodrow Wilson was not allowed by the American Senate to adhere to, and from which Germany and Italy were to resign.

The defence of the country had been scandalously neglected by the Conservative Party with the willing co-operation of the Socialist Party. Even the timid and tardy attempts of the Secretary of State for War, Mr. Hore-Belisha, to introduce conscription in 1939 were voted against, not only by the Socialist Party.

Sir Archibald Sinclair also led the Liberals into the Opposition lobby with this caitiff and recreant attitude.

All this, of course, is old history. Any of my readers who have not been permanently brainwashed will recall how in June, 1940, France was overwhelmingly defeated, and how Chamberlain called in Lloyd George to play the role of an English Petain and negotiate terms for surrender with the Germans.

They will remember how the Germans, to begin with, treated us with consideration because of our handing over our Fleet in good order to them; how the Germans used this Fleet, joined with theirs, to protect their convoys for the peaceful takeover of Latin America.

How the Americans were supine spectators of this flagrant breach of the Monroe Doctrine; How the Americans eventually in 1943 reacted; How they were defeated by the Germans and the Japanese.

It is too late to lament those events.

Of course the bravest of our race resisted. Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden made impudent and saucy speeches. Hitler indicated in the early 1940’s that London would be obliterated unless they were silenced. Silenced they were.

Now, nearly 25 years later, we are all so numbed by the slavery in which we dwell, where no revolt, no resistance is any longer possible without even a handful of people in whom a spirit of freedom still resides.

Can anything be better than to escape to the Chinese Peoples’ Republic? It is reputed that there, thousands of miles away, whither it is practically impossible to escape, a few breaths of freedom can still be drawn.

At the age of 53 I am too broken in mind and spirit to think of escaping myself. It is only through the kindness of a few friends, who have supplemented my rations, that I have been able to summon up the energy to write this brief account which a more adventuresome friend of mine hopes to smuggle to China.

I don’t suppose any Englishman or American will have an opportunity of reading this. But perhaps it will give a few Chinese comfort in their lonely freedom.

It is tempting to think of what might have happened if there had been a man who, in 1940, could have rallied the British nation to a sense of its duties and responsibilities.

A man who could have gained a breathing space in which the United States might have come into the war.

My father, Winston Churchill, who is little remembered today was, alas, killed in Flanders in 1915 on his 41st birthday. Is it fanciful to suppose that if he had lived all might have been different?

Could he, perhaps, have galvanised the British peoples, with the blood of Marlborough and Lord Randolph Churchill in his veins, into a heroic resistance?

More extraordinary things have happened than this in the history of the world.

Perhaps he could have held the ring and formed a grand alliance which would have beaten hell out of the Hitlerian hordes.

Perhaps, at least, part of Europe, the United Kingdom, India and the United States might still be free if he, or some other equally audacious spirit, had been available, even at the age of 65, in the early summer of 1940.

It was not to be. And it is vain to make such speculations.

All resistance is now impossible, but some of the older ones like myself can still record their recollections and their fancies, writing on scraps of lavatory paper in cellars late at night by the light of improvised tallow candles.

The post The most unusual birthday tribute a son has ever paid to his father appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

CLANG! Yes. World in Action certainly rang the bell with Seven Up — that delightful keyhole glimpse of the men and women who’ll be running Britain in the year 2,000.

“Please,” pleaded thousands of viewers. “Please may we see it again?” And Granada is happy to oblige at 9.40 on Wednesday.

This 45-minute programme, which came out of the blue in May this year, had such a stunning impact that TV people have already come to recognise it as a classic.

Seven Up was derived from the fact that today’s seven-year-olds will be running the country at the turn of the century. And a famous quote that goes: “Give me a child of seven and I will give you the man “

The idea was put up by award-winning Canadian drama producer Paul Almond. And those journalistic “hard cases” who cover the world’s trouble spots for World in Action were unable to resist it.

The programme’s present executive producer Alex Valentine, told me: “Standards on World in Action are perpetually high, but now and again, a programme rings the bell. This was one of them.”

Almond interviewed dozens of seven-year-olds from all branches of society. A boy from Liverpool’s middle-class suburbs. A girl from the Surrey stockbroker belt. A boy from a children’s home. Two girls from London’s East End. A farmer’s son from the Yorkshire Dales.

Their views on life are not just sensational — they are of vital importance in taking the pulse of the next generation.

Their outlook is amazingly decisive for seven-year-olds. They speak frankly on love, leisure, marriage, education, money. The Beatles.

Like the young toff who had dabbled in stocks and shares but found the city page “frankly, quite boring ”

Other kids expounded, “I think The Beatles are mad.” “I have a girl friend but I don’t think very much of her.”

One seven-year-old wanted to be a jockey. Another a missionary.

The response from viewers was tremendous and immediate. A number rang the TV centre on the same night of the programme asking if they could adopt the little boy from the children’s home. “These calls were genuine and the people were very sincere,” said Alex Valentine.

A mammoth post arrived. Education authorities wanted to borrow the film to show in teacher-training colleges. A children’s hospital asked if they could show it to their student nurses.

If you missed this programme and your mouth is watering, you can judge for yourself on Wednesday.

The post Young World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

YOU could call them the ‘camera commandos’. But don’t call too loudly. The producer might hear and start getting ideas about sending them on a patrol in the Borneo jungle.

That’s how it is with Scene At 6.30. Three interviewers — Mike Scott, Mike Parkinson. Peter Eckersley — between them have had enough adventure in 18 months to make the Three Musketeers look like a trio of retired scoutmasters.

Take Mike Scott. Since the programme began he has faced fire and flood. He has balanced on a plank over a fast running river to interview a woman marooned in her bedroom. He has crouched behind steel plating on an artillery range with shells whizzing past him.

Last summer he took a barge down the Lincolnshire canals to the open sea. A week later he was perched up in a Hastings Bomber making a trip through an Atlantic storm.

A day later he sat astride an elephant telling it elephant jokes. And to cap it all, the next day he floated down less pleasantly odorous reaches of the River Irwell, Salford, in a gondola.

Stratford-upon-Avon and back in half a day to make a film about Shakespeare. Up a misty mountain in the Lake District to talk to a hermit.

It’s all in a day’s work in Scene At 6.30. And it’s all in a hurry. The task master (or is it slave driver?) is producer David Plowright. He’s also what they call an ‘ideas man’. Someone only has to pass his line of vision after having an ordinary short, back and sides, and David has Mike researching into hair styles.

While Mike Scott is facing up to his tasks, be assured that Mike Parkinson is no less busy earning a living in no less suicidal ways. He might be patiently waiting by a hole in a stall for a python to pop out, or tossing about in an open boat off Flamborough Head in rough weather talking about a giant crab.

Mike Parkinson is the man they send down coalmines, or put on a thunder-rock fortress in the North Sea, or haul up into the air on a giant crane. Earlier this year he faced loaded revolvers in the Zanzibar rebellion.

Some months later, he mixed with Isle of Man nationalists who boasted they would fight if ever Lancashire annexed the island.

As a reward for a job well done, producer Plowright made him a tinker and sent him trudging across the Emerald Isle with a caravan.

What the viewer never saw was the time when Mike was on horseback without the caravan and the rein snapped. The horse bolted and our hero galloped across County Kerry as if the ‘little people’ were chasing him.

About the time he was bringing his steed to a halt, Peter Eckersley was taking things peacefully, doing a spot of fishing—up to his neck in the treacherous Solway Firth, seeking a tussle with a 30lb. salmon and reciting Walter Scott for the camera.

Peter is the man who has to grab toothbrushes and catch planes. Last year he covered the late President Kennedy’s tour of Ireland. This year he flew the Atlantic with The Beatles. He likes the giddy heights. If a building is being demolished, where better to stand and describe it than on the huge ball which is knocking it down? What better view of Liverpool than the one obtained from the top girder of the Roman Catholic Cathedral?

His latest trip was the five mile voyage from Ramsey to Panama — that is, the Panama registered pirate radio ship Caroline.

In the night sea he had to climb a rung ladder from a tiny boat bobbing below, with a microphone between his teeth instead of a cutlass. Fortunately, he was recognized and didn’t have to walk the plank.

The people who work on Scene At 6.30 are trained to touch tigers. If there’s a phoenix up a gum tree, one of them will be sent to catch it. If there’s a geni [sic] in a bottle, somebody will crawl in and interview it.

The post Always on the scene appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IT was on December 12, 1960, that All Our Yesterdays was first presented. I came to it a year later when James Cameron, who had launched it, decided to go back to his old addiction—the life of a roving foreign correspondent.

I would get letters (as doubtless he did) pointing out how much better it would be for all concerned if he could be induced to return to the programme, while I went to Jericho.

But then, the Abdication came up. By the time we had got through that nostalgic period, the producer Jeremy Isaacs, now running This Week, in which he has since been joined by James Cameron, the director, Peter Plummer, and myself felt so much a part of the 1930s, we sometimes had difficulty in remembering that we were living 25 years on.

I still often find myself, particularly after writing the script, thinking that it is 1939 now, and feeling the same irritation with Kingsley Wood (or whoever it may be) and the same delight at some tune of the time, “Music Maestro’’ or “Indian Summer”.

Incidentally, we’re going to devote the December 28 programme to the music of the period, with the Derek Hilton Trio and singers Pat O’Hare and Chris Langford — on the lines of the August Bank Holiday show.

The other night it was suggested on another TV programme that All Our Yesterdays might skip a few weeks, from time to time, when nothing much was doing, in order to concentrate on the big events. We might compress the phoney war period, for example, to move on to the blitzkrieg and Dunkirk.

It’s a tempting idea, but in fact we have found that much of the pull of these old newsreels lies not in what they show of great events, but in the ordinary occasions — a football match with a glimpse of Stanley Matthews, a parade with King George VI making some wry aside to Queen Elizabeth. We saw that in the cinema! We remember, or we read about it. Just occasionally, we were there.

The war is a great stirrer-up of these memories. Most of us would be hard put to recall what we were doing in, say, June, 1939. But nearly everybody over 30 remembers vividly where they were and what they were doing three months later. And there is more chance of seeing yourself, or people you remember on wartime newsreels because they showed so much more of ordinary folk at their jobs — in the Forces, in A.R.P., in industry.

If only there were some way to give notice that you were going to see yourselves, or members of your family! We are constantly getting letters saying that there, third from the left in the front rank of a squad of A.T.S. was Aunt Mabel — but she happened to be out of the room at that moment, letting in the cat.

“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing and people stop me in the street,” Sam Costa wrote to us the other day when we had shown him at the piano. “The one person who didn’t see the programme was me.”

But of those who have seen themselves on the programme, and written to us about it, the viewer whose comments gave us most pleasure was Lord Avon.

For some of us, in the years immediately before the war, Anthony Eden represented the true voice of his country — even more than Churchill.

I even noted with regret in my diary — normally used only to record “dates” and other trivia — that Eden had resigned from the Cabinet in February, 1938; “Chamberlain blackmailed by Musso” was my diagnosis, which was not so far out. That Lord Avon should be appreciative of the programme’s handling of that black year was praise indeed.

The post Catching up with the past appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A GIANT yellow bulldozer squeals and rumbles its way along a slum street. It snatches at a steel cable girdling a derelict house.

The crumbling roof sags, rotten walls totter and the eyeless sockets of windows are swallowed up in a cloud of brick and plaster dust.

It’s the end of a street. The end of a lifetime. The houses were bad. So was the past.

For nine weeks these yellow giants fascinated director-producer Norman Swallow as he headed a team of 26 technicians following in their destructive wake.

He watched the heart being torn out of the slums at Oldham, Lancs, where 1,000 houses are due for demolition.

His recordings and impressions will be screened as The End of a Street on Wednesday.

The project started on June 1. Swallow went out into the slum streets and picked his “cast” from the people he met. And he talked to hundreds of people in St. Mary’s ward of the town.

You will meet people like Mrs. Ellen Cartwright — Nellie the waitress as they knew her — at the Canteen Inn which will shortly be bulldozed into a heap of rubble and memories.

Nellie wept when the bulldozer tore into her two-up-two-down at No. 27 William Street.

“I saw it go brick by brick … and I cried. All my children were born there,” she said. She vows she’ll return to St. Mary’s ward as soon as the new flats start going up.

The End of a Street is a kaleidoscope of fears and hopes, of crumbled wood and stifled sobs.

Like the man who tells: “I was married there. My father lived there, my mother. My children were born there. It’s like someone you love being hurt.”

A community spirit existed there that can’t be traced on the new estates. There was Alice Buckley. Plump, jolly and homely.

When a pensioner was made homeless across the street, she took him in. “Like a stray dog,” she joked. “And he’ll come with me and my husband whenever we move.”

The lodger is 72-year-old Billy Travis, a bright-eyed little man in muffler and cloth cap, who was known throughout the district as Billy Borndrunk.

“Beer? I thrive on it,” he roared. “And I take my nickname in good part. I’ve had some good friends in these parts.

“But I’ll survive. As long as there’s a pub, a dart-board and a box of dominoes.”

Norman Swallow said: “We found lots of old people who did not want to go but after they had got a new council house they agreed it was like being on holiday for always.”

The End of a Street shows how much the problem is one of age. In a forum of five teenagers, college girl Anne Greaves pointed out: “Some old people are snobbish. And I can understand their point of view when they have no roots in their new surroundings.”

Schoolgirl Christine Cottrill detests her home town: “I don’t want to stay and live in it. It’s a dirty grimy hole. There are too many mill chimneys.”

The youngsters long for coffee bars, dance halls and amusements that cannot be found on new estates. But they are 4-1 in favour of staying in Oldham.

You will also see the “planners” — the men at the town hall who govern the people’s fate.

Of his title, Norman Swallow said: “The word ‘end’ means not only the physical destruction of the houses but the deeper destruction of the society they represent. Friendships are smashed as well as buildings. It is a dramatic moment in their lives.”

The programme, which has taken six months to produce from the original idea to the final editing, considers the wholesale destruction of 1,000 homes and its effect on 4,000 people. Swallow calls it, arguably, the town’s second Revolution.

The post The end of a street appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BENEATH that blonde champagne bubble exterior Barbara Kelly has more driving force than a Blue Streak rocket after countdown.

As well as hostessing Criss Cross Quiz, she finds time to cope with the large demanding Braden flat in Knightsbridge and the demanding Braden family. To put the seal on her capabilities. she successfully stepped in for her husband, Bernard Braden, on The Braden Beat when he was on holiday.

But after working-hours, when she gets home and kicks off her shoes, how does Barbara Kelly relax?

When she’s comfortably settled in a chair, putting on a cigarette she’ll probably reach for a science fiction novel. “I love them,” she said. “For their sheer escapism. When I sink into the fantasy world of, say, a Bradbury book, all the cares and concerns of the day seem a million miles away.”

But this Canadian bom actress who arrived in England 17 years ago doesn’t stay idle long.

She’s soon out of that chair, pursuing her latest hobby, painting. Not houses, but pictures. Recently two of her oils were shown in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square.

Can anything stop this 5ft. 6in. blonde dynamo in her tracks? For a moment I thought so when I mentioned the prospect of her shortly becoming a grandmother. “It’s a bit shattering,” said Barbara, then she shrugged and finished. “But I’m sure I shall get used to it like anything else.”

The post Criss Cross Kelly has the answer appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the first attempt on Hitler’s life by the German underground movement — to be dramatically recalled in Monday’s All Our Yesterdays. The story of the German anti-Nazi resistance movement is told here

by TERENCE PRITTIE

Diplomatic Correspondent of The Guardian, 16 years a foreign correspondent in Germany, and author of the book “Germans against Hitler.”

IT was in November, 1939, that the first attempt was made on the life of Adolf Hitler.

A bomb exploded in the Buergerbraukeller, a beer-hail in Munich, where Hitler had just been addressing a rally of the “old comrades” of the Nazi Party.

Along with the Reichstag fire, this bomb-plot remains one of the two unsolved mysteries of the Nazi era.

A man called George Elser was later arrested by the Nazis and murdered by them in prison. Elser was a Communist, and he may have been the instrument of a Communist plot.

It is also possible that there was no genuine plot at all and that the explosion was engineered by the Nazis, and timed to take place after Hitler had left the beer-hall. The Nazis used the incident as a pretext to send armed men across the Dutch frontier at Venlo where they kidnapped two British secret service agents — Captains Best and Stevens.

The Buergerbraukeller incident is a reminder that active opposition to Hitler among the Germans did not begin with the July, 1944, conspiracy organised by Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and his friends.

There was opposition to Hitler from the moment he seized power in 1933. But his opponents were at first not able to visualise resistance in terms of physical force or in terms of killing him.

This was because generations of Germans had eagerly embraced the teaching of Bismarck, that the citizen must serve the State unquestionably if the State is to be strong.

To almost all Germans in the first 40 years of this century, a strong Germany was their ideal. To them the assassination of the Head of the State was unthinkable.

Yet in March, 1933, the Social Democrats voted against the Enabling Act which gave Hitler the powers of a dictator. They refused to dissolve their party, and many of their members went into exile in order to fight Nazism.

Others distributed illegal pamphlets, organised cells in factories or crossed to and fro between Germany and the surrounding countries bringing information and money.

The Communist underground movement was also active and more than 250,000 Communists were sent to prison during the first six years of Nazi rule.

Individual members of the Roman Catholic and Evangelical churches did not hesitate to speak out against evil doings, even if this brought them into conflict with the authorities.

The youth of Germany could scarcely have been expected to oppose Nazism, for they grew up in the first flush of enthusiasm for the material achievements of the regime. They found themselves pitch-forked into a war which they believed had been forced on their country.

Yet there is the shining example of the White Rose group in Bavaria, whose members were distributing leaflets as early as 1942. Long before the lost battle of Stalingrad and the consequent anticipation of Germany’s defeat.

There are lots of other examples, too. of individuals who showed their loathing of Nazism and paid the penalty for it.

It was particularly difficult for German Conservatives to focus their minds on active resistance to Hitler. They were bound to Bismarck’s creed of service to the State.

Those of them who were soldiers were bound to the cause by a personal oath of loyally to the Fuehrer and were susceptible to zenophobia [sic] — “our country, right or wrong.” Even so, the German Conservatives, largely because they were men of action, were behind the serious attempts to kill Hitler.

In 1943 and early the following year, there were at least four such efforts. In three of them, the conspirators were quite prepared to blow themselves up together with Hitler. They were foiled only by last-minute changes in his plans.

In March, 1943, a bomb was smuggled into Hitler’s plane, shortly before he boarded it. He might have been blown to pieces in mid air, had not a tiny part of the mechanism failed.

The German Conservatives debated a coup against Hitler in 1938 and 1939. They planned to kill him in 1941 as the Nazi armies drove deep into Russia and the war looked like being won. To me, this is at least as significant as the final drama in July, 1944.

The truth is that there were many Germans who did their best to oppose Hitler — even though their numbers were small in comparison with the mass of their sheep-like fellow citizens.

Their story should not be forgotten, least of all by the Germans of the post war era. For the memory of their courage and independence of mind will do more than anything else to help Germany to grow up self-reliant and self-aware. defenders of human liberties and rights.

The post Blind faith protected Hitler appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FIND film of typhoid germs wriggling around under a microscope.

Find film of baby boxes — new machines for the automatic handling of infants.

Get a shot of banknotes being burnt.

Those are typical assignments handled by George Lys, film librarian of Granada’s World in Action, on Tuesdays.

The germs — needed for last year’s programme on Zermatt — were eventually located after Lys had rung round most of the London medical schools.

Westminster Medical School had just the film.

The baby boxes film never did arrive.

As for the burning banknotes, they must surely be one of the oddest episodes in British television.

The World in Action camera team tried to stuff real notes down drains. They tried to chuck them off Westminster Bridge. But in both cases the authorities stepped in and said “Not Allowed.”

Lys tried to find film of banknotes burning.

He used to work on the Rank “Look At Life” cinema series, and remembered a sequence of Bank of Scotland notes being burnt, but Ranks said they had been forbidden to use this film, except in that original context.

The Bank of England had no such film.

So the World In Action team, tiring of this vain attempt to chuck their money away, decided to make their point (that money was being wasted on defence) in another way.

But the finished World In Action film has never been publicly shown – except for a brief excerpt screened by the BBC — because the ITA stepped in and banned it as lacking balance.

George Lys, a lean, keen, energetic 40-year-old, has seen many millions of feet of film pass before his eyes during the past 25 years.

His memory, he says is unexceptional. But stored in his head is invaluable knowledge of how to get shots of all kinds.

Any historical material, any sequence that the hard-pressed World In Action camera team haven’t time to go out and shoot for the next programme, it’s George’s task to get — fast.

Most helpful of all sources to him is the United States Information Service. The Russian Sovexport Films are also extremely obliging.

Car firms and the big airlines provide ungrudging assistance. “We asked TWA for a shot of a jet in flight,” said George. “They didn’t have one, sent a camera up within a few hours and flew the film straight to us.”

One of the oddest, most valuable sources, for last January’s programme on the Lakonia sinking disaster was a passenger.

“We sent a questionnaire to the victims asking if they’d had lifeboat drill, and so on.” George explaihed.

“One man had taken some 8mm. film of the abandonment of the ship. We had it enlarged to our 16mm. size and it turned out to be very good.”

George’s job also involved the cataloguing, for possible future use, of all film taken for World In Action.

“There may be 10,000 feet shot for a programme, of which about 950 get used. The rest is filed.

“When we use film crews in the States we sometimes get crazy guys filming everything in sight.

“For the feature on Jean Shrimpton modelling in America, we ended up with 22,000 feet, and 93 of them got on to the screen!”

So that he knows exactly what he’s got and where it is, George prefers to work without an assistant, though I should mention that, as part of World In Action’s policy of using the best available equipment, he does employ a robot.

It is “the world’s first fully automatic splicing machine” for glueing film together!

The most frustrating part of George’s job is having to work in an office from which his reporting and researching colleagues are constantly flying off to exotic places in search of news.

George, who’s just returned from a family holiday in Poole, said: “I haven’t been abroad for 15 years and you can imagine that this job makes me long to fly out to see the world in action for myself.”

The post Money’s not for burning appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOURTEEN stone of Memphis muscle stretched over a 6ft. 2in. frame is slumped lazily on the edge of a piano stool.

We’re in Granada’s vast Studio Six and Jerry Lee Lewis, at 29 an “old timer” from the rock ’n’ roll scene of the ’fifties, drives his audience to hysteria as he winds up the spectacular beat show Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On on Wednesday.

Suddenly the fans are unable to contain their emotion any longer. They cut loose from their seats and swarm on the platform, reaching out to touch their idol.

Three out of four cameras are useless now. Hemmed in by the crowd, Jerry, who has just given an extraordinary performance on the keyboard with his feet, seeks safety in the last place of refuge — on top of the piano.

Director Phil Casson’s lone camera just manages to hold out through the finale.

Afterwards I talked to Granada’s light entertainment chief, Johnny Hamp [sic – Johnnie], and asked him how a man who was at the top almost a decade ago is able to drive a new generation to hysteria.

Said Johnny: “Jerry has the gift of the real performer. Like the Judy Garlands and Frank Sinatras of show business, he knows everything there is to know about audience reactions and emotions.

“In his own field, Jerry Lee Lewis is just as great. He is capable of lifting his performance to that tremendous pitch where the fans are eating out of his hand.

“He’s typical of Tennessee, which today is America’s undisputed centre of popular music and has produced world names like Brenda Lee, Roy Orbison and the late Jim Reeves.”

As a successor to the Little Richard show, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On is one of the wildest musical spectaculars ever seen on television.

The build-up starts with the Animals. Then comes Gene Vincent, another pioneer of the rock ’n’ roll era, clad from head to toe in shiny black leather.

“There were 60,000 letters requesting a repeat of our Little Richard show,” said Johnny Hamp, “and I forecast an even bigger response to Gene and Jerry.

“As far as technique goes and knowing the business, they have no masters. Almost every modern beat group and singer have modelled themselves on performers like Vincent and Lewis.”

It was in 1957 that Jerry Lee Lewis sold a million copies each of two records called “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’” — a staggering sale in those days.

“Great Balls of Fire” sums up the story of Jerry’s career. He flashed on the scene like a thunderbolt, then disappeared just as rapidly when he incurred the rage of the British public for marrying his 14-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown.

Artists of the Lee Lewis calibre, however, are seldom down for long. His prolific performance at the keyboard and at the microphone would move the soul of most music lovers.

He’s a music machine who can take on any juke box.

But then enthusiasm never was a weak point with Jerry. Rather the reverse.

Like the time he studied as a youth at the Bible Institute in Waxahatchie, Texas.

He was asked to play the organ and was sent down the same day for jazzing up “The Old Rugged Cross.”

The post Memphis magic that rocks the fans appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

LIKE a snow-covered volcano that has fumed impatiently for weeks below the surface, World in Action could shake everyone when it erupts for the third time on Tuesday.

The six-week break between the last series and the new was meant to be a holiday for its globe-trotting team of reporters and cameramen.

Instead, World in Action‘s sensitive fingers have been on the pulse of every major international story that has broken since the end of July.

Some holiday! When the Vietnam crisis broke in the evening papers, a World in Action team flew out to Indo-China at midnight the same night.

In the hair-raising fortnight that followed, producer Mike Hodges and cameraman Mike Boultbee were ambushed in the jungle while on a river patrol and almost blown to pieces in their hotel.

I met the two Mikes the day they arrived back in London, sunburned and travel weary from their trip half-way round the world.

Hodges told me of their march through Vietnam to the 17th Parallel with an American jungle patrol.

“We were trudging down a jungle track,” he told me. “when suddenly we were met by a hail of bullets — right from nowhere. All we could see was trees and greenery.”

“Our American friends fired back speedily while Mike Boultbee, risking life and limb — leapt in front of the soldiers to snatch the film we wanted.

“We didn’t give chase. There was no point when you consider it takes three days to cover a quarter-of-a-mile in jungle territory.

“On another trip into the interior with a river patrol boat, we were nearly blown out of the water by a mine.

“Lucky escape number three came when the cinema next door to our hotel was blown up by a home-made bomb. On all the occasions, both soldiers and civilians were lucky to escape death.

“The only time I felt safe was on a helicopter raid on Mekon Delta. At least we were in the air with the guerillas on the ground!

“Apart from that other occasion, I was expecting to be shot or blown to pieces at any moment. It was the most nerve-racking experience I have ever encountered.

“The Americans afforded us every protection, but if you stopped a bullet it was purely at your own risk.”

Next, I spoke to the programme’s executive producer, 40-year-old Alex Valentine, a rugged, good-humoured Scot of Italian extraction.

Alex graduated to the top of this go-anywhere, do-anything outfit after years in top-flight journalism.

“The programme thrives on a get-up-and-go technique,” he told me, “so this has been no holiday for any of us. The team was always on tap — never more than a telephone call away.

“Our lightweight camera gear — carefully weighed and packed — means that we can fly off to any spot on the globe at a moment’s notice.”

What will be in the new series? “It wouldn’t be fair to tell you precisely what our programmes will cover,” said Alex, “in case we disappoint you by throwing them out at the last minute.

“But I can tell you that World in Action cameras have whirled in Indo-China, Malaysia, New York, Chicago and Washington — all during the past four weeks.

“In Vietnam, we played a waiting game in case the situation flared up. We played it the same way in Cyprus and Zanzibar earlier this year and it paid off.

“Our team, which had been in Cyprus for four weeks, snatched some valuable material before they were kicked off the island by the authorities.

“This sort of situation calls for nerve and shrewd handling. Try bull-dozing your way in Cyprus and Vietnam and you’re likely to end up with a bullet in your back.”

I asked Alex for the ingredients of a typical World in Action programme.

He told me: “It should be topical — we did the Beaverbrook story in six hours flat. And it should tell, in an interesting way, a great number of things that are not known to the public.

“In particular, we set out to expose falsehoods and commonly-accepted assumptions that are not true.

“The golden rule on World in Action is to take nothing on trust and always try to find out for yourself.”

The same thing might be said of Alex himself. A favourite yarn spun in the team’s “local” in London’s Soho recalls his dynamic coverage of the Lakonia shipping disaster.

When the story broke, Alex was in Cyprus. He was immediately told to cover the Athens end of the Lakonia story.

Then came a cable urging him to interview the Captain of the rescue ship, the Montcalm, in the Adriatic just off Venice.

There is no recognised flight from Athens to Venice so, like a true newspaperman, he “jumped” a plane from Athens to Zurich; boarded another from Zurich to Rome; sped from Rome to Venice by car; then hired a tug to find the Montcalm.

He boarded the Montcalm, interviewed the Captain and got his report safely away, all within the space of 48 hours.

Spectacular progress, even by World in Action standards!

The post Always in action! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Jerry and Myra’s wedding day — TV Times captures the happy moment they will remember all their lives. Outside Broadcast cameras were on hand on Wednesday to show Jerry and Myra (Graham Haberfleld and Susan Jameson) arriving for the ceremony at St. Paul’s. In real life the church is St. Clement’s at Salford. The vicar, the Rev. Edward Forrester, gave the production team every co-operation. “As we are right next to the street which was the original model for Coronation Street I would have been disappointed if you had picked any other church for your wedding, he told them.

Here, for Coronation Street’s 20 million viewers, are the scenes following the arrival of the bride and groom — scenes recorded exclusively by photographer Warwick Bedford and pictured here and on the next two pages

The post The wedding album appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A FAVOURITE occupation as the year bows itself out is looking back over what has happened since January 1. And what a year this has been!

So spare some thought for the task facing producer David Plowright and his What The Papers Say team as they get down to preparing their annual end-of-the-year awards list.

This time they won’t need a newspaper file to remind them of the big stories of the year. They really have been big.

Choosing the outstanding features of the year’s Press, David and his collaborators will be working while they eat … for a dinner has been arranged “somewhere in London”

“It is over the dinner table that we shall go through the list and make our decisions,” said David.

“We all have our nominations to put forward, and our task certainly isn’t going to be easy.”

Dining with David will be Brian Inglis, Bernard Levin, Michael Frayn and Harold Evans. They have all been prominent in the programme, and they will all have ideas on who or what merits an award.

None of them may be expected to give way to a rival claimant without a struggle. They are an argumentative lot, especially on their favourite subject, newspapers.

Over dinner they will be sorting out the best cartoon, columnist, scoop, news reporting, background story and the best newspaper.

“Yes, it has been an amazing year for news,” said David. “You have only to think back to the beginning of January, then let your mind run over what has happened since. At home the year, of course, has been dominated by one big story — the Profumo affair, with all its implications and ramifications.

“Linked with that, you have the shake-up on the political front, the departure of Mr. Harold Macmillan to make way for Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and the death of Mr. GaitskelL

“With so little time left before the year ends we have another staggering change in the international scene with the assassination of President Kennedy.

David added: “Most of the events which have been big news in the year have been shared by every newspaper and every other news medium, but there is always ample scope for individual talent to reveal itself and win an award.

“In the sports field there have been racing and football scandals and the lighter side of our national life has brought us the Beatles, a great source of news stories and likely to hold their place on the front page for a long time yet.”

Brian Inglis said that, for him, the West Indians role in leading a real revival of interesting cricket was perhaps one of the brightest features of the year.

“It is particularly cheering to look at the cricket field when so much else in the sporting world goes on under a cloud,” he said.

“I am thinking of racing and the doping scandals, and of football with its rowdiness and vandalism, and the effects on the game of increased gambling.

“For the New Year we are looking with interest to the constitution of the new Press Council and wondering if it is going to be more effective than the old one.”

Michael Frayn put his finger on a trend which has become more apparent as the months have gone by.

“In a year when the papers have been almost overwhelmed by the volume of news, they have found themselves being outstripped by rumour,” he said.

“That is what happened in the Profumo affair, in the crisis over the Conservative leadership. It even happened in the assassination of Kennedy.

“I ask you, how did you hear of the death of Kennedy? Through the papers? Through television? Or did somebody tell you? Many people I know say ‘Somebody told me’.”

Harold Evans barely repressed a shudder when I asked him to look back on the last 12 months. “Newspapers,” he said, “have never had a year like this. I hope they never have another.

“There has been high farce — a Great Train Robbery and a Tory leadership mumbo-jumbo.

“There have been successes — the nuclear test-ban treaty was one of them.

“But it has been a tragic year with the death of Kennedy and Gaitskell.

“And it has been a squalid year with Profumo, Keeler, and Vassall. A busy year.” He added: “Our eyes have been on the stars and our feet iIn the mud.”

Last year the What The Papers Say awards went to: Picture – Daily Mirror (taken by a reader, Jim Meeds of Hutfield, Herts.); columnist -Peter Simple, Daily Telegraph; scoop — Walter Terry, Daily Mail (Cabinet changes); behind the news — Roy Jenkins and The Observer (I.C.I. — Courtaulds story); news reporting — Clare Hollingworth, The Guardian (from Algiers); paper of the year – Sunday Times colour supplement; cartoon — no award.

This year’s awards will be announced by Brian Inglis in a special edition of What The Papers Say on Boxing Day.

The post Choosing what the papers said BEST appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

HIGH in the mountains, a spring wells up and a little trickle of pure, icy water meanders down the slope.

Hundreds of miles away, the great muddy river with thousands of people living along its banks empties into the sea.

On Wednesday at 9.40, ITV are presenting a programme called I Hear The Blues. The artists are all Negroes from the Deep South, many of them elderly and by modern standards, obscure.

The viewers, apart from those who switch on at 5 p.m. and switch off after “The Queen,” will be a partisan group ranging from beatniks to bank clerks.

They will take in jazz musicians, poets, folk singers and anthropologists en route — but all united in their love and understanding of the blues.

Three days later, millions of teenagers will be sitting biting their nails with impatience as they wait for the week’s edition of Thank Your Lucky Stars, Saturday, 5.50. There’s the emptying into the sea.

A Mersey-type Thank Your Lucky Stars, with The Searchers, Cilla Black, Tommy Quickly, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Gerry and the Pacemakers and, wait for the squeals, The Beatles.

It’s unlikely that many of the teenage audience next Saturday have heard about Memphis Slim, who is appearing on Wednesday.

It is equally probable that most of the blues enthusiasts would reject out of hand the whole of Thank Your Lucky Stars. Both, I feel, are wrong.

The blues aficionado is wrong, because the Liverpool sound stems from the blues.

Its excitement is superficial, its poetry based on the cliche, but its excitement and cliches are felt and experienced. Also, and more significantly, this music is happening here and now.

It is not, as early British Revivalist jazz was, some 15 years ago, a reconstruction of New Orleans, but something that has grown out of American Negro rhythm and blues and which speaks with a local accent.

The tragic nobility of the blues is something else, and something infinitely more satisfying, but you cannot spend the whole of your life on a mountain peak.

There is no shame and much pleasure to be found in the streets.

The teenage pop fan is wrong, but in a sense less culpable, because he or she is a teenager — that is, a prisoner of the immediate and a slave to the momentary.

To suggest that it might be rewarding occasionally to listen to an elderly Negro in stead of a young boy with a dish-mop haircut is to invite incomprehension and ridicule.

Even so, things change, and often for the better. A few teenagers will become, and because of the music they like, not despite it, the blues lovers of tomorrow.

I have met some blues enthusiasts who admit, usually with shamefaced reservations, to a certain weakness for the Beatles.

There is no need here to describe in any way the artists in Thank Your Lucky Stars. Wednesday’s Blues package is another matter.

Here is the history of the blues. Not only a history in time (Lonnie Johnson, whom you will see, was born in 1889, pianist Otis Spann in 1938), but a history in stylistic development, too.

Big Joe Williams, blues shouter and nine-string guitarist, Memphis Slim, pianist and blues singer, and Sonny Boy Williamson, who sings and plays the mouth organ, represent the Mississippi or country blues style.

Primitive is the adjective often used to describe this tradition, but it has the grandeur and power to communicate of an African statue. That, too, is “primitive” art.

Lonnie Johnson, although older, belongs to a more sophisticated era. The blues, together with many other elements, fused to become jazz in the early years of the century.

Jazz, in its turn, changed the blues. It became more urban, more aware.

Lonnie played with Armstrong and Ellington. His voice is tender and witty, his technique absolute, but controlled by his impeccable taste. Incidentally, Lonnie Donegan chose his stage Christian name in admiration of Johnson.

During the 1920’s, the women blues singers, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, emerged to dominate the idiom. Victoria Spivey belongs to this period or at least dates from it.

Her singing, in which the Vaudeville tradition is transfigured by her blues feeling, forbids us to consider her as an historical curiosity. Her blues, like all real blues, are outside time fashion.

The work of Muddy Waters completes the cycle. He sings rhythm and blues, the most recent development in the music’s history.

The most recent in time, yet R. and B. has more in common with primitive blues than with the blues of the early jazz era.

It is less relaxed, certainly, full of the noise and violence of big city life, but it has the same direct approach, the same raw, emotional appeal.

It was from this music that the adulterated and synthetic rock ‘n’ roll of the 195O’s and the preferable, but still emasculated beat music of today derived their inspiration.

To listen to Muddy Waters is to cut our local idols down to size, as in fairness they would be the first to admit.

Bill Stepney on drums. Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy and bass-playing Willie Dixon complete the bill.

What are the blues? It is tempting to quote what Louis Armstrong said about jazz: “If you’ve got to ask you’ll never know.” Tempting, but unfair.

Technically, the blues are usually a 12-bar chorus repeated ad lib and divided into three lines, the first two more or less identical, the third providing a rough rhyme and completing an image or an idea.

The subject matter is usually misery or despair, yet the emotional effect is not gloomy.

W. C. Handy put it very well: “The blues came from the man furthest down. The blues came from nothingness, from want, from desire.

“And when a man sang or played the blues, a small part of the want was satisfied from the music.”

On Thursday at 10.10 p.m., there is a programme far removed from the raw, painful world of the blues or the adolescent excitement of the pop world.

In Buddy Greco Entertains, he’ll perform numbers like “Chicago,” “Around the World,” and his biggest success. “The Lady is a Tramp.”

Greco, like Sinatra, is the child of Italian immigrants. His voice, however, is more ingenuous, less edgy. When he sings, he makes you feel rich, witty and glad to be alive.

Did you guess who has his fingers on the strings above? It’s Gerry of Gerry and the Pacemakers

The post Beat of the sixties appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Almost 50 years after it began in August, 1914 — and despite another major war and the invention of atomic weapons — the First World War still exerts a compulsive fascination on men’s minds. High on the list of current best sellers are books about it; television plays are written round it; scathing shows, lashing the generals and the politicians who ran it, draw record-breaking audiences to London’s West End. Why is this? Primarily not because the First World War saw the most appalling casualties ever to have occurred in war. Nor again, because the whole social fabric of Europe collapsed and a golden world of wealth and privilege ended. But because, with the wisdom of hindsight, the whole thing is now seen to have been an utter waste — particularly of a generation of young men who were Europe’s greatest asset. On Wednesday ITV present 14-18, a new film report of the facts of that war. Here, for a more personal view of the holocaust, is a commentary by Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein whose experiences of the First World War, initially as an infantry officer, later as a brigade staff-officer, had an overwhelming effect on the way he conducted brilliant campaigns in North Africa and Europe in the last war.

TO have taken any part at all in the First World War a man would have to be at least 63 today. It ended 45 years ago and a man of 63 might have seen just the end, being then 18.

It was very interesting to note at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday that the only political personality wearing 1914-18 medals was Lord Attlee.

The Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was there, but he was 15 when the First War ended. Mr. Harold Wilson was there. He was two when it ended. Mr. Jo Grimond was there. He was five when it ended.

I served through both wars and when one looks back on the ’14-18 war one naturally compares it with Hitler’s War. It would be impossible to find two wars more different.

So I think we might have a look at the First War, and I suppose the dominant factor was that we formed great armies entirely from volunteers. That has not been done since and I doubt if it will ever be done again. You see, in Hitler’s War we had National Service.

Then I think the soldiers were different. They were, of course, the same British men as regards flesh and blood, but they were different because of the progress of education and science.

In the Kaiser’s War the soldiers did just what they were ordered. They put up with appalling discomforts and miserable conditions in the trenches. They were slaughtered in thousands on the Western front in battles like the Somme and Passchendaele.

Barbed wire and machine guns dominated the battlefield. The soldiers lived underground and the mud was frightful, and the generals on both sides tried in vain to smash through the opposing front.

But they were unable to find the answer; they merely lost more lives, and the casualties were appalling.

In those days there was no close marriage between political policy and military strategy. The politicians in Whitehall intrigued against the generals and the generals intrigued against the politicians and the soldiers accepted it all as inevitable. Now the leadership in the ’14-18 war, political and military, would not have lasted very long in Hitler’s War, and I think the reason is this: Between the wars men found their visual world being extended — cinema, radio, television, and so on.

The young man between the wars began to measure his everyday environment in a way that was impossible before 1914, and he became unlikely to accept conditions of work not in keeping with the ideas he was able to absorb.

He would not, as a matter of course, accept the dictates of those in authority over him. He wanted to know what it was all about. He wanted to see his boss. He wanted to know what was required of him, and why and when. In fact, the progress of civilisation, education, and science between the wars demanded a different type of leadership.

Now, I went out in the First War in August, 1914, as a young lieutenant in command of a platoon of 40 men, many of whom were reserves called up on mobilisation. They were all regular or ex-regular and I fought in command of the platoon until the middle of October, 1914.

I was then very seriously wounded and when I was mended I was posted to a brigade in the New Armies raised by Kitchener. All volunteers who had to be trained. And I remained with the New Armies in France until the war ended.

That experience made me realise that there was something very wrong in the army. The generals and the staff in the higher commands didn’t seem to me to understand that battles were won primarily in the hearts of men.

They didn’t realise that bottled up in men are great emotional forces that must be given an outlet. And that outlet must be in a way which is positive and constructive, which excites the imagination and warms the heart.

If these forces can be harnessed and made to pull together the result can be terrific. The soldiers have got to know that the generals really do care for them; that they will never sacrifice life needlessly; that what they demand of their men is possible.

There will then be built up the feeling of mutual confidence between the leaders and the led.

Now all this I learned during the First War, and it was pondered deeply by me between the two wars. I was in a position to put it into practice during the Second War.

It is very interesting to note that the comradeship of the First War has lasted and I think it will go on lasting, because it has been cemented by the British Legion. And in every town and village where we live in this country you see the War Memorial commemorating those who died.

It was, in fact, the spirit of service, service to the country entirely by voluntary means — and I think the young people today have got to realise this.

And I think the young people have got to understand that this country of ours is a great country and its decline would be a great disaster for Christendom, as was the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

And if all young people today would remember, and understand they must give voluntary service to the country, then I think all would be well with our country.

The post 1914-18: The lesson I learned appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

JERROLD ZACHARIAS, brilliant scientist, invented an atomic clock so accurate that in 2,000 years it will not be more than half a second wrong.

Yet he said to me: “My watch runs a little fast. This I like because I know it will never be slow, and I would rather be early than late for an appointment.”

This exemplifies the realism of Professor Zacharias in his two fold approach to the timeless problems of science and the day-to-day problems of life as we live it.

Prof. Zacharias, who is, among other things, a military adviser to the U.S. Government, is here in Britain to give the last of the Granada Lectures on Wednesday. His subject is “Teaching and Machines.”

He is a short, rather stubby Bostonian with iron-grey hair and dark bushy eyebrows. He is well-dressed. He deliberates deeply before talking and underlines his points with careful movements of his hands.

Listen to his comments:

On teaching: “If I cannot make people understand a subject then I don’t understand it myself.”

On nuclear weapons: “They have reached such a stupid stage that the human race can no longer continue to play with them. They must learn to live with them.”

On physicists: “He is a kind of chemist, only he doesn’t smell so bad.”

He told me, in a quiet voice with clipped American accent: “I am here to lecture because I feel I have something to say about what we are doing in the United States to make our schools good.

“There is a difference in making schools good, rather than just making them better. This applies to the whole world, not only America. This is why I feel what I have to say will particularly interest the British public.”

Dr. Zacharias first began to study physics at Columbia University.

During the war, he worked at the radiation laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on radar development. In 1944, he directed the engineering work on the atomic bomb, and later established a laboratory of nuclear science, studying nuclear-powered flights, undersea warfare, air defence, and the Distant Early Warning Line.

For his brilliant technical services, Dr. Zacharias was awarded the U.S. President’s Certificate of Merit in 1948 and in 1955 received the Department of Defence Certificate of Appreciation — its highest honour.

I asked him, as one of the leading boffins working on the A-Bomb, if he has conscientious qualms about the horrific effects the weapon has had on mankind. His reply: “No. People were killing themselves wholesale for hundreds of years before I was born.”

In 1956, Dr. Zacharias, with a number of other professional physicists, switched his attention to improving the teaching of physics in American secondary schools. Why?

“Because we realised the most important thing we could achieve was educating the young,” he said. “We wanted to raise the quality of science education, and, at the same time, try to stop the wave of anti-intellectualism that had sprung up in the post-war world.

“If humanity is not educated it is exposed to every evil that besets mankind. I trust an educated person. I do not trust an uneducated person. Why? Because an educated person has the power to react properly. He has the power to reason. Without this power, he can be swayed by demogogues and glib leadership.”

As a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, Dr. Zacharias originated the idea that film aids and special texts should be used to improve physics teaching in high schools.

His ideas led to a Physics Science Study Committee in America, which conducted a crash programme to develop an entirely new high schools physics course. Within two years, 20,000 students in 600 schools were taking the course.

Said Dr. Zacharias: “My principle is that in order to learn something, you have to participate in it. I learned more about London by driving around the city than any guide book could have taught me.

“It’s the same with any subject. You want to learn about the atomic clock? Right, come to the laboratory and I will show you. I don’t think you would understand if I tried to explain verbally.”

I asked Dr. Zacharias what sort of educated world he hoped to see in, say, 25 years time? He replied: “My aim is a world in which men are men and not mice. My world is a world of independent thinkers.” Now what of Dr. Zacharias, the man? “I am,” he admitted, with a quiet smile, “a very impersonal man. I have so many interests, so much work to do. I enjoy coming to Britain because it gives me the opportunity to argue with friends here. What do we argue about? The same as everyone: beliefs, science, humanity.”

Finally, how did Dr. Zacharias wish to be remembered — as an atomic physicist or pioneering educator? The reply typifies the man. He said: “I never worry how I might be remembered. There is a saying that you get some thing done or you get credit for it. I want no credit for what I can do, even from the eye of eternity.”

The post Time and Prof. Zacharias appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

“THIS,” said a member of the World in Action team wryly, “is not a show to work for if you like to sleep regularly and are fond of your family.”

“It’s the way newspapers used to be in the old days,” chipped in Alex Valentine (ex-Fleet Street) without a trace of nostalgia.

“It’s a dictatorship,” boomed Tim Hewat, the 35 year old Australian dynamo who heads the team as executive producer. “It has to be to get the right results.”

Youngest of all television’s current affairs programmes (it began only last January), World in Action has brought a new style of television journalism into existence.

There are no link-men or pundits. Stories break down into three categories — profiles, inquiries and exposes. “Tough, tireless noseyness in the best traditions of good journalism,” The Spectator called it.

Behind the scenes, it is the tirelessness that distinguishes the whole operation. On a story about airlines the team travelled thousands of miles in two days, passed through 19 customs posts in 58 hours. Sleep? “We snatched it where we could.” said [Bill] Grundy. “On the plane, on an airport seat, sometimes even in taxis.”

Stephen Peet, after working for several weeks on his sensational film of East Germany, saw it edited and cut and prepared for transmission. Then he drifted into the office the following Monday for what he thought would be “a quiet day to enjoy my triumph. I should have known better — I didn’t get home until 3 a.m.”

Alex Valentine had to get up at dawn every day for a week in order to film petrol tankers filling up with supplies for his story on the cut-price petrol war.

Hewat and another member of the production team (there are six producers including Hewat, aided by three researchers) sat up all night editing and cutting and writing the commentary for the story on gambling.

When the Zermatt typhoid story broke last March, Tim Hewat decided it was too hot to ignore.

Two camera teams flew to Switzerland and by train to Zermatt and Davos. On the advice of the Public Health Laboratory, they made them selves self-supporting. (“They mustn’t eat or drink anything while there,” warned an official. “They mustn’t even brush their teeth.”)

The team disembarked from the mountain railway at Zermatt with 67 pieces of equipment, to be met by hostile officials who refused their co-operation.

So while Hewat argued, his chief cameraman, David Samuelson, crept away with a silent camera and shot 600ft. of film. But by the time he returned, Hewat had talked the officials round. By Friday night, Hewat and his men were back from Switzerland and the job of cutting and editing began.

The post TOUGH and TIRELESS – that’s World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.