The Angry Buzz: This Week and Current Affairs Television

257 Pages·2006·1.48 MB·English

by  Patricia Holland

the angry buzz
This Week and Current Affairs Television
Patricia Holland
Published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fi�h Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave
Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, 175 Fi�h Avenue, New York,
NY 10010
Copyright © 2006 Patricia Holland
The right of Patricia Holland to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmi�ed, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior wri�en permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 1 84511 051 X
EAN: 978 1 84511 051 2
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Palatino Linotype by A. & D. Worthington, Newmarket
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
contents
Preface v
Acknowledgements ix
Author’s Note xi
Introduction: Democracy and Public Service Television xiii
1. More Fun than Panorama: Current Affairs in a Frivolous
Medium 1
2. The Pilkingtons Take Over 35
3. Into the ‘Golden Age’? 60
4. Moments of Excess 87
5. This Week and Northern Ireland, Part 1: Five Long Years 111
6. This Week and Northern Ireland, Part 2: More Than We
Wanted to Know 139
7. Passion or Sensation: TVEye 168
8. More Drums: Death and the Rock 190
Postscript: Next Week: Citizens Still? 215
References 221
Index 227
‘We need the angry buzz of current affairs’
Professor Sylvia Harvey
preface
This Week was launched by Associated-Rediffusion Television in
January 1956, three months a�er the beginning of independent
television (ITV) in Britain. It was continued by Thames Televi-
sion, which took over the commercial franchise for London week-
days in 1968. For eight years, from 1978 to 1986, Thames’s main
current affairs series became TVEye. The name This Week was
reinstated in 1986 and the series finally closed when Thames lost
its franchise in December 1992. For ease of reference, in this book
I shall o�en be using ‘This Week’ as a shorthand for both series.
The book is part of a broader project on the history of the
series, which began when Rediffusion had its licence removed
in 1968. In 1971 Vicki Wegg-Prosser became documentary acqui-
sitions officer for the National Film Archive (NFA) and found
herself checking the Associated-Rediffusion materials which the
new company, Thames, was clearing off its shelves. The collec-
tion included scripts and original film material – some complete
programmes made on film, and some short sequences which
were inserted into live studio broadcasts. The film was put into
the Archive’s store in Beaconsfield, where its cans rusted and it
was largely forgo�en.
In 1989 Vicki was invited to give the Ernest Lindgren Memo-
rial Lecture, which each year focused on different aspects of the
Archive, at London’s National Film Theatre. She chose This Week
as her topic and showed extracts retrieved from the early days,
including such gems as the Happy Wanderers New Orleans style
street band cheering up the drabness of 1950s London, and the
scoop interview with Archbishop Makarios in exile from Cyprus.
It was the beginning of a long project to rescue and preserve the
This Week material. The task was far from straightforward, as film
decays over time and formats change. In particular the techni-
cians at the Archive had been warned not to handle the magnetic
v
vi ��� ����� ����
sound film, as it gives off poisonous vinegar fumes as it decays.
Vicki had to rewind it cautiously or the rescued items would have
had no sound to go along with them.
Next she persuaded Thames Television to restore some of their
own filmed programmes. These were stacked away in Thames’s
vault, where, from time to time, they were dredged up by film
researchers when producers wanted to re-use sequences, or when
a repeat was needed to replace a programme which was delayed
or not ready in time for transmission. Some programmes had
become familiar through frequent re-use, some had had second
lives through overseas marketing, but some cans had not been
opened since the film had been neatly rolled up and packed away.
As a result of Vicki’s initiative, a number of key programmes
were preserved on master tape, and Vicki’s company, Flashback
Productions, arranged with Thames to re-broadcast some of the
more notable of them – ranging from the short sequences of the
1950s, to programmes that had become celebrated, such as ‘The
Unknown Famine’ (1973), or notorious, such as ‘Death on the
Rock’ (1988). The first transmission of ‘Twenty-Five Years on the
Front Line’ was delayed by another front line. It was scheduled
for 15 January 1991, the day American planes bombed Baghdad
in the first Gulf War.
That same year Thames Television itself lost its licence to
broadcast and, in January 1993, was replaced by Carlton as the
franchise holder for the London weekday schedule. I had been
helping research the retrospective series and was aware of the
wealth of printed information that was held in Thames’s wri�en
archive, guarded by librarian Bill Parker. I was lucky enough to
get permission to spend a couple of months tucked away in that
basement filling 20 A4 notebooks with densely wri�en notes on
the programme scripts and a wealth of other background material
stored away in the files. Every programme has its own file, which
contains the post-production script (the record of the programme
that was actually transmi�ed), the PSB forms (‘Programme As
Broadcast’ – the form filled in by the programme secretary which
gives details of production personnel, the people who appeared
in the programme, music used with its precise lengths, and
other copyright details which are necessary for any future trans-
mission), as well as an unpredictable lucky dip of other mate-
rial. The files were particularly rich for the period of the 1970s,
stuffed with internal memos, technical requirements lists and,
������� vii
perhaps most fascinating of all, le�ers from viewers. These were
especially numerous – and especially abusive – following contro-
versial programmes such as those on sex education and the
Middle East conflict. Vicki and I supplemented our various notes
– her card index on the 1950s and 1960s, my notebooks on the
1970s and 1980s – with interviews with the main protagonists.
FremantleMedia, who eventually came to own Thames, allowed
us to obtain rough VHS copies of many of the programmes for
research purposes. All this educational material is now lodged in
the Bournemouth Media School archive.
Through Bournemouth University and the British Universi-
ties Film and Video Council we have now been able to transmute
our scribbled notes into a comprehensive database which records
not only the topic of each This Week edition, but also the reporter,
the producer and the names of most of those who appeared in the
programme. It also indicates the style and technology used and
adds extensive researchers’ notes on many of the programmes. In
this way, it has been possible to trace changes and developments
over the 36 years of This Week’s existence, in topic and approach as
well as personnel, and to make this documentation widely avail-
able to those who are researching political and social history, as
well as the history of a television genre close to the centre of UK
political culture.
In this book I shall focus on the issues and debates that chal-
lenged the series over its lifetime, rather than on personalities and
anecdotes. So the book moves between the broad and abstract
and the detailed and concrete, from the wider picture to the
minutiae and the intimate close-up. I have decided to give some
very detailed examples – in particular that of Northern Ireland –
while keeping a wider impression of the series as a whole. I know
I will have le� out some remarkable programmes, and I regret
that very much. And I apologize in advance to the many indi-
viduals who have made substantial contributions to the series,
but whom I have not been able to mention by name – reporters
and producers, as well as cameramen, sound recordists, picture
editors, researchers and the ever supportive and hard-working
production assistants and secretaries – the whole team that keeps
a series going. They have all been deeply commi�ed to the final
product.
I would like this book to make sense to at least two audi-
ences, but I am acutely aware that the interests of the two are not
viii ��� ����� ����
necessarily compatible. The first is an academic audience, for it is
the writing of academic historians and theorists that has informed
the ways in which I have formulated the problems I want to
consider. But the book is not intended only, or even mainly, as an
academic text, as I also want it to make sense to television prac-
titioners – those who have been involved in the making of these
and similar programmes and are all too aware of the accidents,
the clashes of personality and the sheer contingency of the busi-
ness of programme making. All too o�en the abstract analysis
that theorists find so exciting seems like so much irrelevant self-
indulgence when you have lived through the day-to-day muddle,
arguments and pressures. As a practitioner it is virtually impos-
sible to perceive a programme as a smooth and finished product,
since every frame has a story behind it, and you are always aware
of ways in which it might have been different. I want the book
to reflect something of the texture of programme making – not
just from the perspective of those with the influence to shape the
direction of the series, but also of the whole programme staff.
acknowledgements
So many people have helped with this long-running project that
I am bound to have forgo�en some in these acknowledgements,
so I apologize to them in advance.
I am deeply indebted to Dr Vicki Wegg-Prosser whose brain-
child this project is. It draws on her extensive research, including
her work in making the materials available in the first place, the
contacts she made amongst programme makers and others, the
careful interviews she conducted, and also her unfailing support
as I took the research forward and undertook to write it into a
book. Her historical precision and understanding have tempered
some of my wilder speculations.
Some of the material is developed from conference papers
I have delivered in the decade since I first studied the archive,
and articles I have published elsewhere. I would like to thank
Thames Television, which became Pearson and is now Freman-
tle, for access to the archive and permission to quote from the
programmes and background materials. The essential finan-
cial backing was given by the Harold Hyam Wingate Founda-
tion which generously supported the first phase of my research,
Bournemouth Media School which took it up, and the Arts and
Humanities Research Council which gave two substantial grants
for the construction of the database. Finally the Shiers Trust gave
a grant towards the writing of this book. I am deeply grateful to
all of them.
Many of the programme makers and other practitioners
generously gave their time for interviews or informal conver-
sations with Vicki and me – a list is appended. Special thanks
go to Peter Taylor and Peter Denton for their comments on my
Northern Ireland chapters, and Peter Denton for giving me
access to his collection of photographs; to Phillip Whitehead for
his comments; to Jeremy Isaacs and Peter Morley for le�ing me
ix