WERE you one of the viewers who last night switched over for your first look at commercial television when Granada TV, who provide the week-day programmes, opened the North’s commercial programme?

Reception, let me say first of all was excellent on my set, but not on all, I understand. There were no vision breakdowns during the evening, but some little trouble with the sound from Liverpool during the Stadium boxing.

To launch the new service Granada brought in from America commentator Quentin Reynolds, who introduced some of the men who have helped to create Granada Television.

The first commercial “plug” — a chocolate advertisement — came after 15 minutes — and was followed by Arthur Askey, who quipped: “It’s not all as bad as this.”

Few Celebrities

This opening half-hour in the Granada Studio was not particularly original, but it was casually bright and was aimed fair and square at the very ordinary viewer. Few celebrities! Just ordinary men in overalls and pullovers who told how they did their various jobs to bring the studio into being.

The lion’s share of the first programme, Parnell’s “all star” variety from London, went to comedians Bob Monkhouse and Dennis Goodwin. They played energetically to the gallery, but as laugh-raisers took second place to Sid Millward and his eccentric orchestra.

And, since it seems traditional that no big Lancashire occasion is complete without Miss Gracie Fields, there was a short film of her in Dallas. Texas, telling us a funny story with whiskers on it a foot long.

By this time the “plugs” were coming thick and fast … soap flakes, self-raising flour, tea … and, after the admirable Lena Horne, cheese, beef-extract, and a cake-mix.

Sound Defect

Liverpool Stadium maintained its reputation for always giving viewers a good fight when Granada’s “Travelling Eve” unit brought us the featherweight bout between Hogan Bassey and Aldo Pravisani. It was good television, marred only by a brief sound defect (“We’ve lost the sound” is the I.T.V. equivalent of the B B.C.’s “Normal service will be, &c.”) But it will probably take usa little time to become accustomed to seeing the fighters stagger back to their corners to be followed by some such announcement (as last night) as – “To-night you must rest. To-night you must sleep like a child. Drink so-and-so.” Then back into battle again.

I liked the Douglas Fairbanks play, “Blue Murder,” although the margarine advertisement in the middle of it interrupted the flow of the very slender plot. But even that could not spoil a typically smooth Fairbanks performance, with a good supporting cast. Our old friend Roy Rich was the producer.

Tribute To B.B.C

The most provocative programme of the evening was Granada’s tribute to the B.B.C., presented by Aidan Crawley, a man who left the B.B.C. for ITV and is now going back to the B.B.C. The B.B.C. won lavish praise in this item and in return TV’s Sir George Barnes warned ITV that the B.B.C. could compete with them on any terms.

Then came Mrs. Unsworth, of Atherton, Lancashire, to detail some of her likes and dislikes in the matter of TV entertainment. She doesn’t like opera and she doesn’t like “Look.” “It’s about birds and animals,” she remarked suspiciously.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who earlier in the evening had been entertaining B.B.C. viewers in “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?” was seen on film extolling the merits of television, and Gilbert Harding, who is on B.B.C. contract, added a few encouraging

The evening ended with a rather dull news bulletin, presented by Chris Chataway, another man who is leaving ITV to join the B.B.C.

Everything considered, it was a very modest first night. Did you find the advertising spots irritating? Or did you find them entertaining? For the life of me at the end of the evening couldn’t remember more than a couple of them.

The post Opening of Commercial TV in The North 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.

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.

THE basic aim and concept of all Denis Mitchell’s unique television documentary work — Chicago, The Intruders, Morning in the Streets, Grass Roots — has been to get as close to real life as possible.

With The Entertainers (Wednesday, 9.40 p.m.) the first of two consecutive programmes for Granada, he may have got closer still with a study of the private lives and problems of club entertainers in the North of England for two reasons:

☆ He used a mobile videotape installed in a Travelling Eye vehicle (instant vision and sound recorded on tape) to get a direct transcript of events as they happened. This is the first time that this method has been used to obtain a continuous record for TV documentary purposes.

☆ The whole story was shot entirely “off the cuff” and unplanned, in an empty house specially rented for the purpose.

Let Denis Mitchell himself explain: “The behind-the-scenes lives of club entertainers, their struggles, their day-to-day life, their relations with each other and their background, is a subject that has always had a great fascination for me.

“But I could never quite see how to get to grips with it the way I wanted — truthfully and genuinely — until I had this idea, about the house.

“Yes, I thought. Get a house. Then get a half-dozen or so entertainers, put them in the house, and see what happens.

“No plan, no script. Just turn on the cameras, and let the videotape take over. Let the machines record life exactly as it unfolds.

“And that’s the way it was. It wasn’t quite a simple as that, but it worked.”

The house was in Whalley Range, not far from Manchester’s city centre.

He went on: “I got the design department of Granada to furnish it in the style of a decayed boarding-house — the regular background of the people whose lives I wanted to explore.

“Then I did a round of the Lancashire clubs to find the types I wanted. The idea fascinated them as much as it did me. They moved in, bringing their essentials with them. If they wanted, they could sleep in the house. Sometimes they did.

“There was Archie Tower, 60 years old, an old-style comedian — one of those who’d always just missed the big time. Shirley, 22, a professional singer for only a year. There was Bridgette, a strip dancer. She was married, and brought her baby along.

“Arlette was a strip dancer, too. She’d been taking a degree course in English literature at Manchester’s College of Commerce when the club offer came along. She’d settled for the cash.

“There were Bob and Dave, two boys from Openshaw, with their guitars and their dreams. And there was Johnnie Kennedy, 24 years old and a singer, with ambition bursting out of him. Always, there was Johnnie.

“In the film, you can see how he gets an audition — in an empty Manchester club — and how this leads to a booking at a leading London night spot. This is the way it happened. No fake.

“Naturally, I had to compress the action. The way I’ve told the stories of these young people (and Archie) is by showing a typical 24 hours in their lives.

“Their day really begins in the afternoon. so I started from there. Often, they sleep until 3 p.m. (They usually work until around 3 a.m.)

“You see them shaving, gossiping, cooking, dressmaking, phoning their agents, making tea. Just as it happened. Then the videotape follows them to their evening engagements in, the clubs.

“The story ends in the morning. Actually, it ended with a party which came about in the house, at mid-day.”

Cheshire-born Denis Mitchell is 52, and made his first TV film, On The Threshold, 12 years ago.

Since then, for his varied, but always highly individualistic work, he has received the Prix Italia (1959) for Morning in the Streets (his own personal favourite), and the Vancouver Award for Main Street, South Africa, and Soho Story.

He is a man who thinks entirely in terms of television; believes that the medium holds endless possibilities for development.

In the presentation of his subjects, his approach is invariably laconic — letting the facts and the pictures speak for themselves. Nevertheless, he stresses that, if you look for a social commentary, you will always find it.

“I am disturbed by poverty, loneliness, old age, people in the backwaters of life,” he says frankly. “If I have pictured these things in the North of England mainly, it is because that is my background. and that is what I understand best.”

Before making TV films, Denis Mitchell spent many years in South Africa. He went there at the age of 20 and worked as bank clerk, cheese salesman, cattle hand, and journalist, “remarkably badly,’’ he says.

But while there he got the job of chief script writer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Returning to England, he finally joined the BBC’s staff as a radio features producer based in Manchester. There he made his mark with “People Talking”, which developed an entirely new kind of interview technique.

The post Life behind the lights appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WATCH out … People and Places is coming your way. From next week, thousands of Northerners on holiday at seaside towns in the region will be able to see how this Granada show goes on the air.

Twelve on-the-spot editions, under the title “Pier to Pier,” are planned for a four-week tour of the resorts.

The tour begins on Tuesday at Skegness. There, the 50 strong production and technical staff will work at top pressure to set up their mobile studio and put over the show before moving on to Mablethorpe and Cleethorpes on Wednesday and Thursday.

Then on to Bridlington, Filey, Scarborough, Morecambe, Blackpool, St. Annes, Rhyl, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno.

This meet-the-people series of outside broadcasts aims to provide something for everyone.

Holidaymakers will see and hear the programme personalities — interviewers Bill Grundy and Gay Byrne, singer Marion Keene and the Derek Hilton Trio — as the show goes on the air.

Viewers will also see show-business stars appearing in the seaside summer shows, a film of the town from which the programme is transmitted and they will meet some of the interesting people who live and work in the towns.

Cameras will be perched on piers and promenades, in pleasure grounds, on harbour walls and beside boating pools.

Interviews by Bill Grundy and Gay Byrne will present current news stories against a background of yachts, sand, sea and fairground bustle.

Marion Keene gets a num her of unusual settings for her songs. At Mablethorpe they pop her on top of a helter-skelter and at Morecambe on board the schooner Moby Dick, the one that was used in the film.

Producer David Plowright told me: “The content of the show will be the same as it is in the studios. The difference is that all the items in ‘Pier to Pier’ will have a holiday flavour.

“We shall be doing all the shows out in the open — whatever the weather!

“We intend looking at the main sport in each resort — water ski-ing, sand yachting, and so on — and see some kart racing.”

The double decker, open-topped People and Places bus, which will be heading Granada’s Travelling Eye fleet, will become a familiar sight to holidaymakers.

Last year the People and Places team faced a number of hazards — including the bad weather — that they hope they will not have to cope with this year.

One was the gremlin that turned up at Bridlington in the shape of a gust of wind. It blew the programme caption cards into the sea minutes before the programme was due to go on.

They were retrieved, dripping wet, with only seconds to spare, by three men in a small boat.

When the show visited the Quarry Hill Flats, at Leeds, some of the intended camera shots were obscured by an army of children.

Closer and closer came the children until the camera crews and artists — among them singer Marion Ryan — were surrounded.

And at Carr Mill, near St. Helens, the Derek Hilton Trio went adrift. The anchorage of the raft on which they were playing broke and they began to float out into the lake as hydroplanes whizzed past them at speed.

The post People on the pier appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

They drank tea and broke biscuits together in a room away from the studio which was to be the scene of their ordeal and their opportunity. The Liberal Agent for Blackpool, in the manner of a trainer with an overweight boxer, declared he had got his candidate down to 55 seconds. A Conservative knight went off into one comer with his notes and pencil. In the centre of the room a big man with a rosette quietened a nervous conversation about television: “We’re going to win anyway; we’re not worried”.

All the candidates had been given caption cards to identify them and their parties for the viewers. They had balloted for order of speaking. They had been asked, too, to study a memorandum from Granada about television and the law, which said among other things: “There must not be any appeals to vote as such, and there must not be any offensive representation of or reference to a living person”.

It seemed to be narrowing politics a bit. Nobody, it is true, looked as if they would like to make offensive representations, though a production assistant was saying to a meek-enough candidate: “If you are going to say something rude you should say it through the chair”.

The candidates were assured that they need not worry that they might be cut off in mid-adjective — but, said the producer, “when the light goes steady, you must quit”.

At 4.38 the first three groups were taken to the studio. The three candidates for Birkenhead, the first to go on the air, took their places and sat stiffly side by side. They had no notes, but their eyes had a withdrawn look that suggested that well-rehearsed words were passing before them.

There was not much of an audience for them — just the usual technicians, a producer and a pressman. In the constituencies their appearances would bring smiles, handshakes, applause — anything, perhaps, but the busy silence they now faced as they waited for the starter’s signal and the 60-second sprint.

The other candidates sat around behind the cameras and the cables, clutching their name-cards. Make-up girls descended on them with brushes and powder-puffs (“just to take the shine off”). Mrs. Barbara Castle took her place with 10 minutes to go, and asked for a cushion. She explained: “You can see more of him than me”.

“Three minutes to go”, said the floor-manager, and there was silence.

“One minute” . . . “30 seconds” … A hand sawed sharply down and Mr. Graham Routledge was on. He is a 32-year-old bachelor and a barrister. He had been sitting upright like a guardsman. He spoke in a homely, straightforward, slightly formal way: “I am privileged to be the Conservative candidate for Birkenhead. I was born in Higher Tranmere. I went to school there, I live there. Probably I have met you. Consequently I am myself aware of the benefits many of you have received from the increased prosperity of the last few years …”

So they were off into the land of summits and price indices, pension tables and balance-of-payments crises, with not yet much of a smile or a spark to keep the viewers awake. But it was a fair start, and as the Birkenhead three went stealthily out of the studio to make room for the Blackpool North trio, Mrs. Castle could be heard talking about oysters and caviar for the few, and her opponent replying with wage statistics, and Marathon was well on its way.

It was all quite polite, so far . . . Mrs. Castle had to be interrupted by the chairman when she was going past the 60-second mark at Flying Scot speed: she gave way with a smile. The Labour candidate for Blackpool South said that his opponent had been a good MP: the MP said that he appreciated such kind personal remarks.

Not until the last constituency on Monday, Bolton West, was there any smell of gunpowder. The Labour man attacked the Conservative-Liberal pact he said existed there. The third seat in the studio was empty because of phoney politics, he declared, staring angrily ahead. But the Liberal turned his wrath elegantly aside, gave a neat puff for his own election meeting that night — and finished under time.

Over to Yorkshire

Marathon was being broadcast from Leeds as well as Manchester to save the time of candidates and of television. A crew of 35 and four Granada Travelling Eye vehicles had moved in to do the job.

On the day the invitations went out for Marathon, work had started to turn a 3rd-floor Granada office in the Headrow into a television studio. Cables were passed from the street vehicles through a 3rd-floor window. Noise had been the biggest problem, for the Headrow is a busy road; but that had been overcome by curtaining the office walls.

Extra telephones and lighting had been arranged and other Granada offices converted. One had become a make-up room. Another two became studio waiting-rooms, with water carafes, where it was thought the candidates might like to pace and declaim their speeches. Despite the preliminary warning against the declamatory manner, they did.

A night in Leeds went like this:

At 10.10 p.m. the camera crews begin to arrive in the studio for 11.30 transmission. They switch on the cameras to warm up. Outside in Wormald Street the director and sound and vision engineers take their positions in the Control Van and tune in to Manchester. They have three stop-watches to time the candidates’ speeches.

In the reception rooms the first two candidates have arrived — from Rotherham tonight, 60 miles away. The producer briefs them: ‘‘You are free to use your hands and you can read notes if you want to. The camera will not see them…. If you want to show anything like a poster you can, but the camera will not move for them. If we allowed production techniques for one, we must allow them to all”.

Someone asks the Labour man about his 11,500 majority in Rotherham. He recites the oldest safe-seat joke: “We don’t count the votes there, we put ’em on the scales and weigh ’em.” The Conservative, by diplomacy or accident, thinks the conversation is about weight and talks about slimming: they are both heavyweights.

At 11 p.m., with half an hour to go, they are waiting only for the Conservative candidate from York. One or two people begin to look anxious. Ten minutes later he comes in from the night with a flurry of party workers. He has been delayed by a car crash.

With 20 minutes to go they all troop off to the studio on the 3rd floor. The candidates are powdered, their eyebrows brushed, their ties straightened. They take the floor.

Ten minutes to Marathon and the chairman runs through his opening speech. The candidates put on their poker faces.

The producer sits behind a partition with a monitor set, and another stop-watch. Earphones connect him to the director in the control van outside. The producer will flash the studio light that tells a speaker he must come to an end. Elaborate precautions have been made against overrunning. A big card marked “I” stands ready for the producer to wave at the chairman if he wants him to intervene between two candidates, and another marked “F” which means that, as a desperate last resort, he is going to fade out the programme.

Then the cue comes, the Conservative smiles into the camera, speaks and takes his signal to close. The Labour man calls him “Ron” as they debate steel nationalisation and the Conservative starts back, “Let’s be fair about this, Jack”.

Now their minutes have gone and it is the York candidates who are sparring, with milder blows: “Sometimes, you know, I couldn’t agree with you less”. When the York candidate says that Socialism is “pie in the sky” the Rotherham Labour man looks as if he will break in. But he doesn’t, and the broadcast ends on time and in good temper.

The Labour man from Rotherham sums up the amiability of it all: “These fellows are all right on their own. It’s when you get dozens of them it’s different”.

The post Election Marathon: Marathon goes on the air appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE question I have been asked more than any other during the short time I have been in Britain is: what are the differences between Russian and British television?

I have not seen enough to give a balanced answer, but generally what surprises me is how similar they are.

In Britain you have programmes about serious subjects – what we would call social-political subjects – so do we.

You have dramas: so do we. You have quizzes: so do we. You have spectacular shows: so do we.

You have a programme called The Army Game, which laughs at Army life: we have humorous films in which army characters fall into comic situations.

Now I won’t say they are quite the same as The Army Game, but I should like to have a script of one of the programmes so that we could show it in the USSR.

It was easy for me to understand The Army Game, for its characters are international. I have had more difficulty with other programmes because of the language problem.

But the programmes transmitted by Independent Television in your country are obviously acceptable to the public. And that is the thing that counts. Television must give the people what they want.

At the same time, the tastes of the minorities must be catered for, and this we attempt to do in Russia.

In Russia we have no organisations to give us “ratings” for different programmes. So how do we find out what the people do want? We find out in a variety ways. Firstly, if a programme is liked very much – or is not liked very much – viewers telephone us as soon as the programme is finished, and sometimes in the middle. We also receive between 3,000 and 4,000 letters a month.

But we do not rely on views which are sent in: we hold regular viewers’ conferences at which both past and forthcoming programmes are discussed, and in addition we have a Council of Viewers, composed of about 100 people.

On this council we have factory workers and professors, doctors and housewives, all sorts of people. When they meet twice a month they give their views of the programmes as well as the opinions of people they know and work with. In this way, it is easy for the central studios in Moscow to get the opinions of a good cross-section viewers.

From my observations, one thing seems it is safe to say that no country has yet produced a programme which has satisfied everyone.

Which brings me to another question I have been asked: do you have television critics in the Soviet Union? This question was asked with feeling. My answer is: “Yes, indeed, we have critics, lots and lots of them; and they can be very stringent in their criticism.”

In the Soviet Union, television is looked on as a baby that is growing up and needs an occasional reprimand.

The critics demand good television. But I what is good television? That is the most difficult question to answer, but I would say this: whatever the type of programme, the aim must always be to keep the quality high. It seems to me that Granada is doing this, for I was particularly impressed by the way they handled coverage of the Trades Union Congress meeting. This was a model of how such a programme should be covered.

I have also seen rehearsals for a television version of Dickens’ “Old Curiosity Shop” (The Small Servant), and, as a former actor, I was struck by the high level of this production. This would be a popular play in Russia.

My visit has really been to study technical methods, and in some ways you are ahead of us, notably in the videotape field, in which programmes are transcribed into electrical impulses and recorded on tape.

The Granada Convertor was also most impressive, for it solves the problem of “translating” the British line system into the different systems used by other countries.

My colleagues and I were also interested in the “Travelling Eye” Outside Broadcast Units and other production methods.

However, we are ahead of Britain in the colour television field. Already, we are transmitting one and a half hours of colour television a week. Of course, the programmes can be picked up in colour only on special sets, but they can be received in black and white on normal sets. From the great interest shown in colour work, it is obvious that colour television is going to be developed quickly, but I do not think that it will ever entirely replace black and white, any more than colour has ever done in the cinema.

We also have two other black and white channels, both, of course, run by the State. There are 4,000,000 television sets in the Soviet Union, and this, considering the large population, is a small percentage. We are rapidly increasing production of sets, and this year we shall have made another million.

My visit has been short and, of necessity, much confined to technical matters, but it has emphasised how much television can be a common language.

Language barriers can be broken, but there have also been certain technical barriers. Now these, too, are falling to inventions such as the Granada Convertor. This sort of machine can play a great part in making television truly international.

The post British TV through Moscow eyes appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THE creation of a large organization is usually a slow evolutionary process. Small beginnings are nurtured by experience, guided by precedent and enlarged by expansion or acquisition. This is true of the industrial complex, the machine of government, the voluntary organization, and the commercial enterprise. It is not true, however, of the establishment of Granada tv Network.

In May 1954, Granada Television consisted merely of a decision. This decision was that Granada Theatres should enter television, and it was taken when the Television Bill, which was to embody in statute the scope, the duties, function and methods of Independent Television, was still being debated and amended in the House of Commons. The Bill did not become law until July 1954.

In May 1955, one year later, the contract was signed which laid on Granada the responsibility for providing a weekday television service for the North of England. At this stage, apart from a contractual obligation, Granada TV consisted of little more than a general idea of what the new television service should seek to attain. There were no tools with which to carry out this idea: no studio, no electronic equipment, not a single camera; no directors, electricians, camera-men, sound and vision mixers, typists, or designers. The craftsmen, technologists, administrators and creative workers who were to create Granada Television were working at other jobs in Manchester, Toronto, London, Liverpool and New York, many of them unaware that their future lay in television.

Just a year after the contract was signed, the first Granada transmission went on the air from the most modern television centre in Europe — a building which is eight months had risen on a waste plot of ground in Quay Street, Manchester, the first building in Britain expressly designed for television. It was bright, spanking and shiny new, from the electric control lighting panel to the ash-trays; from the unique lighting grid in the studio (festoons of lamps hung on telescopic battens) to the smallest valve in the master control-room.

This year of construction and creation had been hard and difficult. The Quay Street site was bought in May 1955. It was 4½ acres in size. Only half an acre was needed for the first stages of building, but the plan was to build a compact, comprehensive television centre embodying studios and workshops and offices. The first problem was to build the first section of this centre on the half-acre site, and to build it to a tight schedule during the winter months of bad weather, when it rained for days on end and the ground was churned into a muddy morass.

The first thing built was a wooden hut: in this the newly appointed Northern Administrator of Granada set up office with a secretary, a desk, and a couple of chairs. Then the skeleton of the building began to rise under the direction and drive of the building foreman, an Irishman who hustled, cajoled, and struggled to keep to the time-table despite occasional setbacks.

As the building took shape the staff grew. Instead of the hut a warehouse opposite, with 30,000 square feet of floor space, was taken over to be turned into offices. The whole building had to be gutted and rebuilt inside; at first the only offices were on the third floor, where a handful of people coped with a hundred jobs.

More formidable even than the physical problem of building were the problems of public relations: Granada TV, itself a new community, had to be established, even before opening day, as a recognized feature of Northern life; public authorities, prominent citizens of the North, and the Press had to be contacted and their support — or at least their friendly interest — secured.

The background to all this was a somewhat confused general public reaction to independent television. The new services had opened in London in September 1955, and in the Midlands in February 1956. Many viewers were eager and receptive. Some sections of the Press were hostile. Advertisers, after the first few months, had begun to approach the new medium more cautiously. Rumours were publicized about losses suffered by the companies already operating; there were newspaper criticisms of extravagance. It was assiduously suggested in some quarters that independent television was a gamble without a future. All this shook confidence, and did not make it easy to work creatively on the myriad problems of planning, building, and establishing a new service in the North. But enthusiasm grew as the organization began to take shape. Programme planning went ahead; there were difficult and even tense negotiations for the networking of programmes with the companies already operating; and actual Granada programmes were scripted, rehearsed, and tested.

Granada’s policy was, and still is, not to publish a mass of advance information about the content of new programmes. Before opening day both the Press and the advertisers were persistent in their demands to know what was being planned. Rumour and speculation spread, but Granada insisted that realization was better than anticipation, and that the new service would speak for itself and must be judged by results not blurbs.

At the same time people had to be recruited and trained. Above all, methods, drills and systems had to be worked out, tried and rehearsed; for television is an association between technology and the creative arts, dovetailed and timed to a second.

When the day’s transmission starts, there are 25,200 seconds to go before the signing-off signal; for time, in television, is measured in seconds rather than in minutes or hours. The immediacy of the medium means that the instant an image is received by the camera it is seen on the screen in the home. There is no time for revision or second thoughts. In newspaper production or moviemaking. the finished product is seen by its creator before it is seen by its consumer. In television, creator and consumer receive an identical image at the same moment. If an actor fails his cue, five million viewers see him fail. If a scene-shifter drops a chair, millions of people hear it fall. The producers and technicians cannot say: ‘Stop. Now do it again.’

So the essence of television is pre-planning, the perfection of split-second drills so that everyone knows where he is, what he is to do, and why — and what to do in an emergency. In devising a technique and method of this fine degree of accuracy, there was relatively little experience and precedent to go by. It was not possible to create a system simply by adopting or copying rules and formulae well-tried elsewhere. So to the problem of recruitment was added that of training, and then that of coordination, of fitting the units into an effective whole.

The method followed was to decide, in outline, the various departmental responsibilities and functions, and then to engage for each department at least one expert whose job it was to recruit and train his staff and evolve the systems and methods by which they would work. The departments, roughed out in this way, were: Programming, Production, Engineering, Sales and Advertising, Film Operations, Network Operation, and Press and Publicity; managerial departments were responsible for Accounts, Personnel and General Administration. A short description of the main departments will give some idea of how a television service works; but the departments cannot be arranged in any order of priority, because each is integrally dependent on the others. It is simplest, therefore, to trace a new programme through its earlier stages.

The creative centre of a television company is its Programmme Department. Here ideas are conceived, shaped and developed into programmes by producers, directors and writers.

When a programme begins to take definite form, a period of rehearsal and experiment follows. A script is prepared and details of cast, costume, scenery, make-up and music worked out. At this stage, the Production Department adds its services to those of the Programme Planners and Directors. In co-operation with the Programme Department the Production Department is responsible for scheduling and equipping a programme for the cameras. This department organizes the construction of sets and provision of properties, wardrobe and make-up, and allocates studio space for rehearsals and final performance.

Even when a series programme is scripted, cast, clothed and rehearsed, it is still some way from transmission. Next comes a phase of assessment and appraisal. The Engineering Department transmits the programme on a closed circuit, so that it can be seen by executives as it may later be seen in millions of homes. The decisions made at this stage determine the future of the programme.

If it turns out to be altogether below standard, it will be scrapped or sent back for improvement.

If it seems right in content, casting and direction, it will be shown. This, however, is not just a matter of fixing a day and time and leaving it at that. The new programme, or series, will have to be fitted into the complex jigsaw of a programme schedule—and the details of this are arranged by another department, the Network Operations Department.

The programmes fed from the Manchester TV Centre to the transmitters at Winter Hill in Lancashire and Emley Moor in Yorkshire, come from several sources. Live broadcasts come, in the main, from the Granada Studios or from the Granada Travelling Eyes. Other live programmes come on network from the studios of other programme companies. National and international news comes from the studios of Independent Television News, a company owned collectively by all the programme companies. Local news comes from the Granada studios in Manchester. Film — which may either be a feature film, one of a series, a filmed advertisement, or an interview or exterior shot in a play or documentary — is prepared by the Film Operations Department and transmitted by the Telecine Department.

The Network Operations Department controls and co-ordinates all this material. This involves both technical and administrative work, the linking of one source with another — Granada studios with the network studios, with Telecine, and with Travelling Eye — and the preparation of precise time-tables.

The Film Operations Department is another important part of the machine. It collects the various film items from advertisers, film studios and film libraries, checks them for quality, content and length, and makes them up into continuous runs of film ready for transmission. Again, as throughout all television, timing is by the fraction of the second.

In one year this whole organization was devised, recruited, trained and set to creative work. Special training was needed in all departments. Eighty per cent of the engineers had never even been in a television studio before: they came from the workshops and assembly-lines of industry, from recording studios and from sound-broadcasting studios and control rooms. Production staff came from films, sound-radio and stage. It was not enough to tell these new-comers to follow instructions automatically. They had to learn to understand and appreciate the work of all the departments — the others as well as their own. They had to be as adaptable and flexible as the medium itself.

Studios in London, normally used for testing television equipment, were taken over by Granada for a nine-week training course which started in January 1956, fourteen weeks before the opening. Here operational studio conditions were simulated to give authenticity to training. Lectures were given on engineering and production problems. Trainees were taught the principles of lighting, scripting, designing, casting, programme-building, floor-planning, staging and the use of film and music. Then came the practical exercise: teams, each consisting of director, floor-manager and production-secretary, prepared and presented short plays, panel-games, musical programmes and interviews.

Camera-men were trained. Vision-control engineers mastered their new machinery and then studied the more personal task of making a good picture on the screen. Not one experienced microphone-operator was available: sound-crews were selected and trained to follow the sound action smoothly while keeping microphones and boom-shadows out of camera range. Vision-mixer/gramophone-operators learned their craft by constant exercise and practice.

At the end of the nine weeks, the trainees designed and produced their own original programmes and transmitted them on a closed circuit.

Meanwhile the Travelling Eye teams were being assembled and trained. Two units were designed and built for Granada. They were, in effect, studios on wheels, complete with cameras and microphones and linked to the transmitters by radio and visual lines of communication. They had also to be serviced by mobile power generators for occasions when it would not be possible to use the normal power supply.

The Travelling Eye teams were first trained in London in the techniques of handling and maintaining their equipment. After one month of this basic training they moved north to transmit ‘dummy’ outside broadcasts, from Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Wigan, from outdoor sites and from inside buildings, practising in every sort of situation which they would be likely to meet once Granada transmission started.

On May 3, 1956, only a few weeks after the course had finished, these newly graduated trainees brought Independent Television for the first time to the people of the North.

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