The timing couldn’t have been better. 1976 was the year in which I first began to take a keen interest in archive television, scarcely realising that some thirty years later I’d be making a living from it. Early in the year, I’d picked up on repeats of ITC’s criminology series Strange Report, and our local commercial station, ATV, had run a short Saturday night series of vintage American series including Rawhide and 77 Sunset Strip under the umbrella title ‘Play it Again.’
Now it was the turn of the BBC to open up their archives. The television service was celebrating forty years since its inception in 1936, and a season of archival material was presented on BBC2 spanning the month of August. This was a rare treat for viewers – in the mid 70s, it was rare to find vintage programmes in the schedule, especially material from the days of black and white broadcasting, and some of the series shown over the coming weeks had not been seen in over a decade. I immediately took an interest – but Festival 40 was far from being a populist celebration of television. It was, more to the point, a celebration of BBC television, and almost from the outset, one could sense that this was no mere retrospective – this was a season with an agenda.
Of the thirty-two archival items presented under the Festival 40 banner, nineteen were serious documentaries or arts programmes. There were just four comedies, two light entertainment items, two single plays and, rather bizarrely, the World Cup Final of 1966. With such a preponderance of heavyweight material, Festival 40 tells us a lot about how the BBC saw itself back in the mid 70s, with the Reithian philosophy still very much at the forefront – a public service broadcaster with a duty to inform, educate and entertain, maintaining a haughty distance from the populist, lightweight alternative of ITV.
It’s almost more instructive to consider those programmes that were omitted from Festival 40 than those that made the final selection: there was no Dixon of Dock Green, no Doctor Who, no Quatermass – although clips from all of them were shown in a compilation, Forty Years, that kicked off the season – no Morecambe and Wise, no TW3, next to nothing of the corporation’s prolific drama output, and absolutely no children’s television. As a summary of the BBC’s first forty years, this was an extremely partial selection. But it was, after all, going out on BBC2 – and BBC2 had standards to maintain.
The celebrations got started on on Sunday 1 August with Forty Years, described by the Radio Times as ‘a raid on the archives of BBC Television.’ Spanning two and a half hours, Forty Years afforded an entertaining flypast of the BBC’s television output that boded well for the coming retrospective, packed as it was with rare archival material. I was particularly intrigued to see the famous piece of continuity that had preceded an episode of the serial Quatermas II, with the announcer’s grave warning that the programme was ‘not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition’. This was all new to me – I’d never even heard of Quatermass before. What did it mean, anyway? The mere word was enough to send you behind the sofa, nervous disposition or not.
From this taster, it was on to the main course of complete programmes from the archive, as over the coming four weeks one or two items were served up each evening on BBC2. First on the menu was a 1964 episode of Michael Bentine’s surrealist sketch comedy It’s a Square World, a series of which I held no recollection whatsoever. Speaking to the Radio Times, Bentine said, in all modesty: “Looking back I suppose the series was a pioneer, containing the essence of almost every comedy show that followed it - Monty Python, The Goodies and Ronnie Barker have all acknowledged their debt.” Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? I watched out of curiosity but found it mostly forced and unfunny. Of all the programmes the BBC could have chosen to begin a festival of television, it was an odd choice.
Odder still was Tuesday night’s selection – the entire World Cup Final from 1966, running from 9pm till 11pm. A sporting highlight maybe, but hardly the kind of thing one expected from a festival of television. This was not the colour film record of the event, but a telerecording of BBC’s own black and white presentation, with commentary from Kenneth Wolstenholme, who recalled the event in a Radio Times feature.
On Wednesday evening, we were served up two of the BBC’s drama successes. From 1965, came an episode of Dr. Finlay’s Casebook; but of more interest to me was the 1963 Z Cars which followed it. Neither episode had ever been repeated, nor have they been seen since. Today, there are a good many vintage Z Cars to be found on YouTube, but the episode chosen for Festival 40, Police Work, isn’t one of them. It was a hard-hitting and surprisingly violent example of the series: constables Smith and Weir, in Z Victor One, are dispatched to bring in a witness at the demand of the coroner. Arriving at an isolated cottage, they are attacked by a deranged individual weilding a shotgun. With Jock wounded and Fancy having twisted his ankle, their only hope lies in Z Victor Two (it was unusual for both patrol cars to feature in a single episode).
The following day’s offering was a double header of material from well before my time: the panel game What’s My Line, followed by an edition of the landmark interview series Face to Face, featuring WML panellist Gilbert Harding, who famously broke down in sobs when interviewer John Freeman asked a question about his mother. This was the kind of stuff to get your mum and dad misty eyed, but for me, it was too far before my time.
So far, the season had concentrated on comedy, drama, and light entertainment, but more serious items were waiting in the wings. Friday 6 August’s offering was Your Life in Their Hands, an episode from the medical series that took viewers into the operating theatre for the very first time. The Radio Times listing gave some background to the series which had run from 1953 until 1964, describing how, at the outset, it had been the cause of no little controversy, debated in the House of Commons and criticised in the British Medical Journal. It also described a moment of ‘unintentional comedy’ captured during the filming of a gall bladder operation. I think I’ll take their word on that…
Saturday evening offered up a performance of Benjamin Britten’s two-act opera Billy Budd, originally broadcast in a strand called ‘Opera 625’ back in December 1966. It was precisely the kind of thing one would never have expected to see on ITV – or, for that matter, on BBC1. Festival 40’s ‘agenda’ was beginning to emerge...
What else lay in store? Thus far, the season had been comprised entirely of black and white material, but Sunday evening’s selection, A Walk in the Sun, was a mere six years old, and in colour. The film profiled death-defying high wire walker Karl Wallenda, whom I’d seen some years earlier on Blue Peter. Two years later, he would be killed attempting to walk between the two ten-storey towers of a Puerto Rican hotel.
It was back to black and white for Monday evening’s offering, the original Comedy Playhouse pilot The Offer, which had spawned the series Steptoe and Son. I’d become a fan of Steptoe over the last few years, and I watched with interest, although I found the 1962 original tame by comparison with the more raucous tone of the 1970s episodes. Tuesday evening served up a documentary called Dispute, which, according to the Radio Times, ‘used new techniques to follow for the first time a Trade Union dispute exactly as it happened…’ Groundbreaking, certainly, but it was hardly the kind of television that had kept viewers glued to their sets.
On Wednesday 11 August, with commendable logic, the season presented an iconic example of The Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home. I’d seen clips of this dour misery fest during the introductory evening, but as an evening’s entertainment for a fifteen-year-old, it really wasn’t my cup of tea. The following evening’s selections comprised an Omnibus exploration of William Blake’s poem ‘Tyger Tyger’, followed by an intimate portrait of everyday life in Sheffield, Morning in the Streets. I tuned in for neither of these – I was over on ITV watching the movie The Flight of the Phoenix. Friday 13 August brought a Horizon film examining the work of the BBC’s natural history film makers, in complete contrast to Saturday’s offering of The Billy Cotton Band Show. I was less interested in this, but made sure to be tuned in at 9.50 for a vintage edition of Frost Over England which included the now legendary sketch about class distinction, performed by Ronnies Barker and Corbett and John Cleese.
Sunday evening’s selection was, for me, another turn off – ‘three weeks in the life of eight riflemen bound for a routine four-month tour of duty in Belfast’ as the Radio Times described it. This, undoubtedly, was television documentary at its most challenging, but in the mid 70s, we were getting enough of that kind of thing on the nightly news. It wasn’t all doom and gloom: Monday evening brought a ‘special edition’ of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
We were now into the middle of August, and the season had a fortnight left to run. Tuesday 17th looked back to a Malcolm Muggeridge profile of the work of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and although I had a relative in a convent in France, I wasn’t of a mind to watch this kind of worthy offering. Neither was I tuned in on Wednesday 18 August for Harold Pinter’s Tea Party. Dr. Who fans might have taken a passing interest for the involvement of producer Sidney Newman, but on the whole, Festival 40 was proving to be a much more highbrow season than I’d been expecting. No matter: that day’s edition of the TV Times brought the welcome news that Patrick McGoohan’s mind boggling series The Prisoner would begin a repeat run commencing next week. That was much more my kind of thing…
Festival 40 maintained its elitist tone with an episode from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on Thursday evening. According to the Genome listing, this episode, which can be viewed today on iPlayer, is ‘available for years’: I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or depressing…. Also available to watch on iPlayer is the next Festival 40 offering, which was taken from the Man Alive documentary strand and told the tragic tale of a teenage drug addict.
Saturday 21 August offered The Golden Ring, a documentary charting a gramophone recording of Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’. I was wrestling with the classics doing my music ‘O’ level, but I ignored this in favour of Starsky and Hutch over on BBC1. Sunday 22nd brought The World in a Box, a compilation of foreign programmes chosen by BBC producer Anthony Smith, which was rather stretching the remit of a season intended to celebrate the BBC’s own television output. The programme had originally been shown back in 1968.
More populist fare was the order of the day on Monday 23 August, which afforded me my first ever look at Tony Hancock’s television series. The Blood Donor has long been acknowledged as a classic, but unfortunately the Radio Times chose to draw attention to the fact that Hancock, having been in a minor car accident a few days prior to the recording, had been reading his lines from an autocue… armed with this knowledge, it was glaringly obvious what he was doing.
One of the very best items in the whole season followed on Tuesday evening, and I didn’t even bother to watch. Back in 1976, I had John Betjeman filed under ‘old buffer’. He was, after all, the poet laureate. His elegiac Metro-Land was hardly a vintage item, being only three years old at the time, but had been hailed back in 1973 as an ‘instant classic’. The film, featuring some imaginative camerawork from John McGlashan (who shot most of the BBC’s M.R. James ghost stories), was a celebration of suburbia, illustrated with visits to some architectural curiosities and other wonders to be found along the route of the Metropolitan Railway. I discovered it many years later and have revisited it on numeous occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, it is not currently available on BBC iPlayer.
No BBC retrospective could be complete without a contribution from Dennis Potter, and Wednesday 25 August saw a repeat for his 1966 play Where the Buffalo Roam. I had yet to learn that Dennis Potter was considered an important figure in the history of television drama, and wouldn’t get to see this play until another retrospective many years later. Today, I’m not as convinced by the Potter legend as I once was – much of his work was, to my eyes, solipsistic, tricksy and neurotically focused on a narrow field of vision. In case that sounds too judgemental, let me also mention that my diary entry for this particular evening records that I was watching Jeux Sans Frontiers and Are You Being Served (rolls eyes and exits stage left…)
Thursday 26 August was the big night, but not on BBC2 – over on ITV, The Prisoner was back for a repeat run at 11pm, and earlier in the day, I’d got to see a first run colour episode of Stingray. And did I mention The Time Tunnel? Small wonder I missed out on tonight’s Festival 40 offering, L.S. Lowry, RA, a film in which the recently deceased artist spoke about his life and work. As with Potter, so too with Lowry, an artist whose appeal I’ve never truly understood – and that dreadful pop song didn’t help matters either.
Festival 40 was by now drawing towards its end. Friday 27 August saw a repeat of the 1964 documentary reconstruction of the battle of Culloden, Saturday night offered up two terpsichorial items, and Sunday wrapped up the season with What Do You Think of It So Far, a brand new discussion programme presented by David Frost and examining the impact of television on people’s lives.
It would be interesting to know what the average viewer made of Festival 40, and I’ve no doubt there were a few letters to the Radio Times on the subject. For me, it provided rare chances to see early episodes of Z Cars and Steptoe and Son, and I’d have welcomed more of this kind of material, a season focused on entertainment rather than excellence. Looking back over the month-long retrospective, I’m rather more concerned about what it says about my own viewing habits then and now. Given the same selection of material today, I’d still make more or less the same choices. I think, frankly, it’s too late now to do anything about it…
No comments:
Post a Comment