Christmas Minus Fifty: Part Two

 

BBC and ITV square up to win the ratings battle for Christmas Day... fifty years ago.

Last time, we visited the TV schedules from fifty years ago, and found both ITV and BBC in reasonably traditional form. Films, stage spectacles and musical items dominated on both networks, while the only offering that would endure to the modern era was one of the most traditional: a ghost story. Not a single sitcom was in evidence, and soap opera had still to make its undesirable entry to the BBC schedules. On both networks, the big days for populist festive fare were Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Although television was already firmly established in most British homes, it’s interesting to reflect that, for many people, family activities were probably still favoured over the television at the festive season. By 1974, in that year’s edition of The Likely Lads, Bob Ferris reflects that on ‘Christmas night, full of food’, all he wanted to do was to ‘sit down and watch the box’. Times were changing, and Christmas TV would become an increasingly dominant part of the whole festive experience during the 1970s and onwards to the present day.

On BBC1, Christmas Day 1972 got started at 9.30am with an item called This is Christmas Morning, about which the Radio Times compiler waxed lyrical without actually telling us very much. At 10.00 Mr. Benn popped up (he did, after all, live in Festive Road), followed by a news summary. A Christmas Service and Christmas Appeal were followed at 11.30 by A Stocking Full of Stars, a comedy and cartoon compilation for children, co-hosted by avuncular favourites Roy Castle and Michael Aspel, and broadcast from the National Children's Home at Harpenden. Nothing so far in the schedule to offend modern sensibilities… but not so fast, because at 1.30pm came the unaccountably popular Black and White Minstrel Show. Now as then, we’ll skip very quickly on to the next item, Top of the Pops 72, but we can’t linger long here either. By this time established as a Christmas tradition, TOTP would always feature a round-up of the year’s hits during the festive season, most often on Christmas Day afternoon. Unfortunately, one of the two presenters is even more unwelcome in the modern era than the George Mitchell Minstrels…

At 3.00pm came the traditional Christmas broadcast by the Queen, a broadcasting tradition that was then in its fortieth year, having started on radio in 1932 before television took up the baton in 1957. I was never specially interested in the Royal Family or the Queen (other than as a piece of philatelic iconography), but our mum always liked to watch the Queen’s Speech, so I’m sure we left the TV on after Top of the Pops. It was almost certainly turned off or turned over before the next item, Billy Smart’s Christmas Circus. I wouldn’t have been tempted back for the next item either, a televised version of the pantomime Dick Whittington, recorded at the Wimbledon Theatre and starring the unlikely combination of Dick Emery and Peter Noone… to say nothing of Stratford Johns. The news at 5.45 was followed by a new Christmas Day TV tradition in the form of Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game. By this time on Christmas Day, our mum was usually poised to unveil a huge cold collation that would see us through the evening. I well recall filling up plates at the table and taking them into the front room to eat in front of the telly.

If the stars of comedy and variety had been notable by their absence up to now, then the next item on the schedule would make up for it. Christmas Night With the Stars was a well established TV tradition, dating back to 1958, and this year’s instalment, hosted by the Two Ronnies, featured specially recorded festive snippets from current comedies including The Goodies, The Liver Birds and Dad’s Army. It was to be the last such compilation until the tradition was briefly revived in 1994. The big draw of the day was undoubtedly The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show at 8.15.

A big movie was, of course, inevitable, and this year’s offering was neil Simon’s comedy, Barefoot in the Park, in its 1967 adaptation for the screen starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. This ran until 11pm when tradition reared its resistible head with a festive edition of old-time music hall nostalgia in the form of The Good Old Days. Finally, to round off the day’s viewing, Z Cars and Kelloggs Special ‘K’ stalwart John Slater told viewers A Christmas Story (the Radio Times offers no clue as to what it might have been).

Over on BBC2, the Christmas Day schedules found room for  Play School, kicking off broadcasts at 11.00am, before a cartoon film with music, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, The Point. Other items during the day included the documentary film strand Look, Stranger, and a retrospective of the year’s golfing action which had been dominated by names including Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino. The Queen at 3.00 was followed by Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Technicolor production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Going into the evening, we find an edition of Call My Bluff and a wordless film, The Stallion, relating the adventures of an escaped horse on Dartmoor, before the mid-evening schedule settled into full-on BBC2 mode with La Sylphide, a film from French television of a romantic ballet.

Arguably the best item on offer across all three channels this Christmas was another ghost story, albeit one dressed up in modern garb. Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape would go on to acquire legendary status, and provided a notable TV role for Michael Bryant who had just guest starred in a memorable episode of Colditz (see my earlier blog for more detail). Athough to modern viewers the story is marred by mysogyny and stereotypical characterisations, the core idea of traumatic happenings being somehow ‘recorded’ in their immediate environment still has resonance today and is often revisited by similarly paranormal productions.

The schedule was rounded off by a repeat of yesterday’s America, and a special edition of The Dick Cavett Show featuring legendary song-and-dance man Fred Astaire.

Meanwhile, over on the commercial channel, Christmas Day had got started with a concert of carols from the Royal Festival Hall, followed by a festive edition of the long forgotten cut-out cartoon series The Enchanted House. At 9.30, viewers were treated to the sight of ‘Leslie Crowther in a children’s ward’ (as referenced in the 1974 Christmas edition of The Likely Lads). ‘A Merry Morning’ was something of an ITV tradition, and this year’s programme came from the King Edward VII Orthopadeic Hospital, Sheffield, where ukulele man Alan Randall added to the festive fun. A Christmas edition of film magazine Clapperboard was followed by a Christmas Morning Service, taking programmes up to twelve noon, when the 1939 cartoon film Gulliver’s Travels was given an airing.

There was to be no escape from circuses, with ITV offering The Big Top at 1.15, with Billy Smart’s big rivals, Chipperfields, providing the acts under the ringmastership of David ‘Diddy’ Hamilton. A wildlife film, The Flight of the Snow Geese, straddled the hour from 2.00pm till 3.00pm when the Queen’s Speech also appeared. Afternoon entertainment was provided by the Morecambe and Wise 1966 cinema vehicle That Riviera Touch, which I remember being promoted quite heavily (ITV would finally bring the duo up to date when they decamped to Thames later in the decade). We certainly watched this before bailing out at 4.50 when Opportunity Knocks presented a 45-minute Christmas special. Hughie Green on top of turkey and christmas pudding was really too much to stomach.

Things took a turn for the better after the ITN News at 5.35, with ITV presenting its own comedic line up, with the All-Star Comedy Carnival. Scheduled deliberately to clash with the BBC alternative, viewers could watch one or the other, or perhaps shuttle between the two (this was, of course, before the days of the remote control). At 7.30 came the one and only soap opera in the Christmas schedules, in the form of Coronation Street, of which the TVTimes listing says: ‘at last the 1940’s (sic) show’. I’ve no idea what that might have been, but it sounds a far cry from the life-and-death-drama and shout-fests that the soaps currently insist on dishing up on Christmas Day. A festive Comedians followed at 8.00 before the evening’s big film, 1966’s Khartoum starring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. The ITN News cut into it at 10.15, while the evening was rounded off with The Love Goddesses, a film documentary about some of the iconic females of cinema.

It’s interesting to reflect that, of all the festive offerings on television this year, very few have endured into the modern era. The most often repeated (albeit mostly in truncated or clip form) must be The Morecambe and Wise Show, whilst the two comedy carnivals have, miraculously survived. The BBC edition was rebroadcast in recent years, whilst ITV’s is available on DVD. Other years are much less well represented in the archive. The compilations were never repeated, and seem to have been considered as disposable items, good for one year only, perhaps explaining how so many of them came to be junked. Back in 1972, full-length festive episodes of contemporary comedy series were much harder to find, and it’s notable to see no such examples on repeat as would increasingly become the case in later years. One should also reflect that, despite the preponderance of colour movies in the schedules, many (including ourselves) were still viewing in monochrome. The cost of a colour set in 1972 was £225, equivalent to over £3,000 today, and such expensive luxuries were well outside the budget of many families.

Those old schedules also tell us that Christmas television was a long way from being set in stone, and both networks were still very much feeling their way into the future, propping up their festive line-ups with reliable entertainment staples like films, circuses and variety. I would argue, though, that despite the huge array of channels available to modern viewers, there is less choice and diversity of content, and far too many formats and programmes look to have come to stay, seemingly forever. Could the BBC conceive of Christmas today without the obligatory staples of Strictly Come Dancing, EastEnders, Call the Midwife, Michael McIntyre et al? I doubt it. Programmes like these have become the schedulers’ crutch and will likely endure for however long ‘real time’ broadcast television has left to live. Personally, I’ll give it less than ten years. Who knows what we’ll be watching by then… or even how.

Next time, we’ll move onto 1972’s Boxing Day highlights.

Christmas Minus Fifty

 

A look back at the pop cultural highlights of Christmas 1972

As we clock up yet another Christmas, it’s interesting to reflect on how many of the old chestnuts still roasting on the open fire of popular culture weren’t around this time half a century ago. Oft-repeated Christmas episodes of The Likely Lads, Porridge, The Good Life, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em and even Steptoe and Son had not yet been produced. On the radio, Christmas music lay as thinly on the ground as powdered snow: no Slade, Wizzard, Wham, Band Aid, Jona Lewie, Macca, Greg Lake, Pretenders: absolutely nothing existed from what has since become the default pop soundtrack to Christmas. So what, then, were we watching, and listening to on that long ago Christmas of 1972?

Let’s start with Christmas Eve, on BBC1, where broadcasting did not begin until 10am. Programmes kicked off in traditional festive flavour with a Christmas Eve mass from, of all places, Kings’ Heath, Birmingham. This was followed by a cartoon rendition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (illustrated, according to the Radio Times, ‘in the style of the original … by “Phiz”’. So far, so festive. 

Next up was a travelogue to Jerusalem (try finding anything like that in this year’s schedule), followed by a concert by the Vienna Boys’ Choir. So far, the day’s television could easily have hailed from several decades earlier, as did the next offering, Robert Youngson’s silent movie compilation, The Golden Age of Comedy. Unfortunately, my 1972 diary had fizzled out during the summer holidays, so I have no record of whether we sat down to watch this, but I suspect we probably did. We may have left the set on for Mary, Mungo and Midge: at eleven years old, I was rather too old for such nursery fare, but I adored Johnny Pearson’s theme music. At the time, I imagined it to have been written specially for the series: only much later did I discover that all the music cues were selections from the KPM library.

We certainly didn’t stay around for the next offering, Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. The BBC always tended to include Disney items in their Christmas schedules, but they bored me rigid. I can well remember a subsequent year’s Christmas Eve television including Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase, which was promoted so heavily you’d have thought it was a Hollywood blockbuster. As if this wasn’t enough, there was still more Disney to come at 5.20, in the form of Disney Time. I found this kind of clip compilation somewhat more digestible, but history has not dealt kindly with its antipodean presenter. Between these two festive wedges of Disney was sandwiched another travelogue item, Around the World in Eighty Minutes, described in the Radio Times as ‘a Guided Tour of our Spectacular Planet with Joyce Grenfell, Kenneth Allsop, David Attenborough and Tony Soper’. 

The news at five past six was followed by a twenty-minute film about children with muscular dystrophy. Again, it’s hard to imagine anything like this featuring on prime time Christmas BBC1 these days, where the likes of EastEnders and the merit-free Mrs. Brown hold sway. A respectful mood was maintained across the next two items, namely ‘the story of Jesus told in pictures’ and the obligatory Carols with Kings’ College Choir (almost the only item on offer that can be found in this year’s schedules).

Having done its festive public service duty, the BBC then kicked back and devoted the bulk of the evening’s viewing to a broadcast of the 1961 movie West Side Story, almost certainly its first outing on British television. The main news summary at 9.50pm was followed by an Omnibus profile of Judy Garland before what was for me the highlight of the evening, A Ghost Story for Christmas. Lawrence Gordon Clarke’s film of A Warning to the Curious was only the second in what would become a recurring strand of festive adapatations derived mostly from the works of M.R. James. I definitely stayed up to watch this, having seen the very atmospheric promotional trailer for it which had been aired several times in the run up to broadcast. This demonic offering was offset by the Midnight Eucharist, followed by closedown.

So much for Christmas Eve on BBC1. But what did the other two channels have to offer as alternatives? On BBC2, programmes didn’t start until 4.30pm, with an hour long film, Money at Work: The Poverty of Nations, examining how British aid money was being spent in under-developed countries. Other items during the evening included a festive quiz, Christmas! What’s It All About?, an episode from Alastair Cooke’s ongoing series America, the panel show Face the Music, a play, a Spike Milligan offering, and best of all by a very long way, Alan Bennett’s film A Day Out. This elegaic offering focused on a cycling club outing on a summer Sunday before the First World War, and featured fine performances from a cast of established and up-and-coming character actors. A very young Anthony Andrews appeared briefly, in a cast that included James Cossins, Brian Glover, Fred Feast and Philip Locke.

Christmas on ITV was, inevitably, a much more populist affair: one has only to glance at the cover of the double issue of TVTimes to get a flavour of what was in store. Christmas Eve started traditionally enough, with a Service of Lessons and Carols at 9.30am, followed incongruously by a repeat of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. I was never one to miss an episode, so I can say with certainty that I saw this. I’m not sure if we hung around for the festive edition of pop show Lift Off that followed at 11.00, but if we did, then the next offering was a definite cue to switch off the set: Stars at Christmas With Songs at Christmas featured an eclectic line-up of mostly venerable performers including Frank Ifield, The Beverley Sisters, Bob Monkhouse, and someone called Leila Khalil Utshant (who was neither a terrorist nor a song by the Teardrop Explodes). The archives were raided for the next item on the bill, the 1952 feature film Ivanhoe, which in spite of its age, boasted a production in Technicolor. 

Christmas Eve being a Sunday, ITV’s generic football offering, Star Soccer, filled its customary slot at 2.15, ahead of a song and dance revue, Christmas Company, with a bill that managed to find room for the Mike Sammes Singers, Jack Parnell and his Orchestra (ubiquitous TV performers of the era), and current pop chart one-hit wonders, Lieutenant Pigeon, whose hit 'Mouldy Old Dough' had been roosting at number one during October and November. Sunday also meant The Golden Shot, which by this point in its run was being compered by comedian Norman Vaughan, whose inept handling of contestants has to be seen to be believed. This was followed by Sleeping Beauty On Ice (whose TVTimes listing mysteriously includes Police 5 presenter Shaw Taylor!). Further spectacle followed with a staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I’ve always hated musicals, especially those with Biblical storylines, so I think it’s safe to say that we were either tuned to BBC1 or, more likely, visiting relatives, since I distinctly remember seeing part of the evening’s big feature film, Gigi (1958), on our aunt and uncle’s colour television. Elsewhere in the schedule, ITV’s evening line-up found room for a children’s carol competition (hosted by Alan Partridge inspiration Fred Dineage), a musical special presided over by comic entertainer and pianist Victor Borge, and an Aquarius looking at the Christmas story. In common with BBC1, ITV also featured a midnight mass as an end to the day’s programmes.

What’s remarkable about the line-up on both channels is the lack of festive specials from the big comedy and entertainment names of the era, which both channels were keeping in reserve until the following day. And contrasting today’s schedules, where brand-new drama and comedy tend to dominate prime time on Christmas Eve, both ITV and BBC1 took the ‘easy’ option of filling their mid evening schedules with feature films. Of the two networks, it’s BBC’s offerings that have fared best down the years, with A Warning to the Curious having been broadcast in relatively recent years, as well as featuring on a DVD collection; Alan Bennett’s A Day Out would also enjoy several repeat broadcasts and is still available to view as part of a DVD collection. Of ITV’s schedule, pretty well the only items one could select to watch today are Captain Scarlet, Ivanhoe and Gigi.

Next time, we’ll consider what Christmas Day had to offer.

Tweedledum at Fifty

 

It was Colditz's best episode: could it be the best episode of any series?

In all the pantheon of television, spanning over eight decades, can there possibly be a ‘best ever episode of everything?’ If there is, then it must be a matter of personal choice and, inevitably, selection. No one can have seen every episode of every series ever produced. For me, though, there has long since been a clear candidate, an outstanding example of hour-long drama that beats pretty well anything else I can put up against it. It’s an episode of the BBC’s Colditz, and it turns fifty this week. After half a century, it is still staggeringly impressive.

Tweedledum was episode ten in an initial series of fifteen, and was first broadcast at 9.25pm on Thursday, 21 December 1972. It tells the story of an RAF officer’s attempt to escape from the infamous POW camp by achieving repatriation. In order to do so, he decides to feign insanity. John Brason’s script was based on genuine (and successful) attempts to do the same thing by actual POWs in the real Oflag IVC, better known as Colditz. The story relates how Wing Commander George Marsh (Michael Bryant) uses his student experience working in an asylum as the raw material for an audacious and dangerous escape attempt. With only the British medic (Geoffrey Palmer) and a select few fellow inmates in on the secret, Marsh duly sets out to present himself as a paranoid schizophrenic, knowing that once he embarks on his deception, he will have to live the role twenty four hours a day, convincing not only his German captors, but his fellow prisoners.

Suspecting that Marsh may be faking, Security Officer Ullman (Hans Meyer) details one of his men with personal experience of insanity to keep close watch on Marsh as his mental state unravels.

The episode also finds room to depict another genuine escape attempt, by a French officer who audaciously ‘leap-frogged’ over the wire in the exercise compound, scoring a ‘home run’ (a feat achieved in real life by Captain Pierre Mairesse-Lebrun). But it’s Marsh’s feigned insanity that is the heart of the story, and Bryant’s BAFTA-nominated performance in the role that make this such an outstanding episode. Tweedledum is arguably the finest piece of acting Bryant ever gave on screen; he ends up convincing not only the Germans and his fellow officers, but the audience. I’d stick my neck out and say that if there has ever been a better piece of acting anywhere in the history of television, then I’ve yet to see it.

As the German officer detailed to keep watch on Marsh, Bernard Kay is almost equally impressive: his character, Hartwig, has a brother in an asylum, and at first he is convinced Marsh is faking. His conversion from scepticism to total empathy provides a moving contrast to Bryant’s study in psychosis. Kay, whose own father died in an asylum, must have felt a special resonance with the storyline.

Despite having only a handful of lines of dialogue, Bryant walks away with the show, stealing it wholesale from the series’ nominal stars Robert Wagner and David McCallum. As McCallum’s character Simon observes, Marsh saves ‘the best for last’: for when he is finally accepted for repatriation, he stages an emotional last stand, refusing to leave the castle which he now insists is his home. This is perhaps the strongest scene in the entire 50 minutes.

A recurring musical motif crops up throughout the episode, as Marsh persistently plays a 78rpm record of JS Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, an elaborate, intricate piece of harpsichord virtuosity that memorably symbolises his inner turmoil. It also serves to illustrate the manic, obsessive quality of Marsh’s ‘illness’ as he repeatedly plays the record over and over, to the annoyance of his fellow inmates.

I came a few weeks late to the Colditz series – having been recommended to it by a school friend with an abiding interest in World War II – and Tweedledum was amongst the first episodes I saw on that original broadcast. It was also one of just six episodes from Colditz’ first series to be given a repeat broadcast, six months later. Curiously, whilst the entire second series was repeated in 1975, it was not until the 1990s that the first series would be repeated in full, on UK Gold. In 2010, the series finally made it onto DVD. During that first run, Colditz quickly became a must-see, and I even went so far as to read Pat Reid’s original books, republished to tie in with the broadcasts. They were, in fact, the first ‘grown up’ paperbacks I ever owned.

Tweedledum would eventually come to stand apart from the rest of Colditz: in 1981, it was chosen for a one-off repeat broadcast in a midweek slot that was given over to random repeats of unrelated hour long dramas (other examples included Softly Softly: Task Force and The Man from UNCLE), and it came up for an unprecedented fourth broadcast during a retrospective season of archive television in 1986. I’d managed to record the 1981 screening, and for many years, Tweedledum was the only example of Colditz I had available to watch. Accordingly, I have probably now seen it more than ten times, yet for all those repeats, it never loses its power.

Michael Bryant would become a favourite actor of mine, albeit a face rarely seen on the small screen, and perhaps more at home in the theatre. He can be glimpsed in the latter context in an uncredited appearance in the film The Deadly Affair, a 1967 adaptation of John Le Carre’s Call For the Dead. But after Tweedledum, my personal favourite Bryant performance was in the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas of 1974, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, which cast him as a curious academic delving unwisely into the tale of a reputed alchemist. Just this year, viewers had a rare chance to see Bryant starring in the BBC adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, a series that had been unbroadcast since the mid-70s. In the central role of troubled existentialist lecturer Mathieu, Bryant is coolly impressive; but Wing Commander Marsh remains a career best performance, for me at any rate.

I wonder how much of today’s desperate-to-impress, big budget series will similarly stand the test of time? There aren’t many other episodes of television that I’ve lived with for half a century, and none in all that time that has had the lasting impact of this single example. On that basis, I rest my case. For me, there is no better episode of a television series, and there probably never will be.

A Radio Times at Random

16-22 May 1970

Any vintage edition of the Radio Times or TVTimes is an intriguing snapshot of the era in which it appeared – not merely for what it tells us about the televisual content of the week in question, but the wider context provided by advertising, editorial and the inevitable letters page. This one, featuring the boardroom/oil exploration drama The Troubleshooters on the cover, turned up recently on ebay for a very reasonable £8 (good quality RT copies are usually listed at upwards of £15). So what, if anything, does this random edition reveal about life in Britain in the spring of 1970?

Radio Times had undergone a facelift in the autumn of 1969, replacing its austere block-serif title font with the fancy swash caps that would endure, with modifications, for over thirty years. To modern readers, this 52-year-old example would feel strangely cheap, printed for the most part on newsprint pulp, with only the covers and four internal pages in colour, on a dull, matt coated paper (TVTimes used this superior stock throughout the whole magazine).

The Troubleshooters was the biggest new thing that week on the BBC, and accordingly scores another cover (there had been at least four previous examples during the 1960s). The series was taking over the Monday evening 9.10pm slot from which Doomwatch had exited with a bang (non nuclear) the previous week. In common with most videotaped BBC drama of the period (and a fair amount of comedy), The Troubleshooters is mostly missing from the archive. Taking its lead from ITV’s immensely popular boardroom drama The Power Game, the series played off the management shout-outs against sweaty dramatic action ‘out in the field’. Many episodes sound intriguing from their plotlines, but it’s safe to say that its arctic or desert settings would mostly have been realised in the studio. Like its timeslot predecessor Doomwatch, The Troubleshooters followed the standard BBC drama production formula of filmed sequences inserted into a mostly VT studio-based production, and this 1970 series was its first year in colour. The Troubleshooters endured into 1972 when, along with Doomwatch, it passed into history. Despite having scored the RT cover this week, the series did not make the ‘big colour feature’, usually placed towards the back of the magazine. This week, it was given over to a new ethnographic BBC2 series The Family of Man, contrasting lifestyles in New Guinea and 1970s Britain.

On the reverse of the cover we find an advert for the ‘Baxi Bermuda Plus’, a gas fire with back boiler (a popular combination at the time). Mid-May may seem a strange time to be promoting such a product, although it was clearly aimed at far-sighted householders who would get their central heating systems fitted during the summer months in order to be ready for the autumn and winter (we certainly did in our house). There are only two other colour ads in the magazine, both aimed at the same demographic: the inside back cover promotes Axminster and Wilton carpets (which look pretty much the way you’d expect a carpet to have looked in 1970), while the back cover splashes Sanderson wallpaper, also looking determinedly of its time.

Editorial content includes a feature on the famous Harlem Globetrotters, who were appearing that week at Wembley as part of a world tour. ‘We try to strike a balance between comedy and basketball’ said their manager George Gillette. Quite how that worked out is hard to imagine, although fancy ball-twirling and nifty footwork probably played a part. The team would be turned into a comedy cartoon series by Hanna Barbera, airing from September 1970 in the USA, and debuting on BBC1 a year later.

The following page focuses on Henry Darrow from BBC2’s High Chaparral series, whose interview shares a page with Bery Reid, appearing that week in a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals on BBC1. The mere idea of BBC1 airing an 18th century comedy of manners at prime time on a Sunday night says a lot about where the Corporation saw itself in 1970 and how far it has come (some may say sunk) since then… The same page also provides a tiny boxed-out corner highlighting the week’s pop and jazz music, including appearances from The Move, Fotheringay, The Soft Machine and, er, Sweet Water Canal (of whom the internet has nothing whatever to say…)

Page 10 looks at that week’s edition of The Wednesday Play – another indicator of where the BBC stood on drama at the dawn of the 70s – but somewhat more interesting is a coupon inviting younger viewers to vote in Jackanory’s ‘hit parade’: a chance to nominate favourite tales for a repeat run. The stories and their narrators provide a neat snapshot of the state of play chez Jackanory during this ‘classic’ era. I’m sure I saw all of them. Across the spread, what we must take for a typical 1970 housewife (resembling a less scary Mary Whitehouse) extols the virtues of her ‘Creda Autoclean’, an oven that, no kidding, actually cleans itself. Well, it was the seventies after all…

As I mentioned in the intro, it’s the adverts as much as the TV listings that add period colour to these vintage publications (albeit most of them are in black and white). Page 13 is given over to the ‘McVitie’s Treasure Trail’, with entrants invited to find the shortest way through a graphic maze for the chance to win prizes. Star prize was ‘a car for ten years’. No slouches, McVitie’s. The lucky winner would receive a Ford Capri 1600 GT, fully taxed and insured, and replaced in subsequent years with ‘its equivalent’ (presumably another Capri – the marque endured until 1986). Of course, you needed to eat some biscuits if you wanted to enter: ‘treasure tokens’ were included on special packs of Jaffa Cakes, Chocolate Homewheat, Rich Tea and Digestive (all of them still with us 52 years later). And while you were munching your way through that lot, you could be giving some thought to completing the obligatory slogan ‘McVitie’s Bake a Better Biscuit because’ (in no more than 12 words).

Page 15 features the Kodak Instamatic camera. I always got this confused with the Polaroid Land ‘Instant’ camera, but this was of the conventional point-press-take-the-film-to-Boots variety. The layout of this ad is a classic example of ad agency art directors’ work of the era, and it would be hard to improve on its clean lines today. Other advertisers include Gordon’s Gin, ‘New Calor Gas’ (propane cylinders providing a domestic gas supply), Lurpak butter, Diamond Paints and the nursing profession. Most redolent of the moment, on page 34, is a reminder to collectors of Esso’s ‘World Cup Coins’ that they still had time to complete their collections. These 10p piece-sized items commemorating that year’s England team players were given away at petrol stations at a rate of one coin for every four gallons. In 1970, a gallon of petrol cost six shillings and eightpence, so to qualify for a coin, you had to spend… well, you work it out (just a bit over £2). Adjusted for inflation, that six shillings and eightpence would be equivalent to £4 today, so each of those neat little coins would be setting you back £16. Of course, you also got a Tiger in your tank… but could you find Peter Bonetti?

So much for the commercial world, but what could consumers look forward to watching on the box when they weren’t eating biscuits, decorating their houses or filling up their Ford Capris? BBC television in 1970 consisted, of course, of just two channels, both now broadcasting in colour. Saturday’s programmes began at 9.35am with a raft of language courses lasting until 11.0, when the service closed down again. It was back at 1.10 with Jack Scott providing the weather forecast (almost certainly thunder… it was thunder all the way in May 1970). This led into the inevitable Grandstand, introduced by the inevitable Frank Bough. That took care of the whole afternoon until 5.15 when Dr. Who ushered in the evening’s entertainment with the second episode of Inferno. Evening highlights (I use the term in its loosest sense) included Dad’s Army, an adventure movie (Many Rivers to Cross), A Man Called Ironside and… oh dear. Page 18 reveals a photograph I dare not reproduce, promoting that evening’s edition of The Black and White Minstrel Show. Unbelievably, this dodgy old chestnut still had another eight years to run on air before continuing as a holiday camp entertainment until – gasp – 1989! I positively hated the B&WMS. Not because I was developing a precocious politically correct sensitivity at the tender age of nine: I just detested all that dressing up and poncing about whilst singing ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’… Of course, you could always turn over to BBC2 where Chronicle presented a film entitied ‘One People between the Alps and the Sea!’ followed by The Young Generation. Fortunately, there was good old ITV to fall back on.

Sunday’s big hitters were Paul Temple on BBC1, and the aforementioned The Rivals; whilst BBC2’s line-up included Rowan and Martin (a scheduling fixture at the time), and what sounds like the 1970 equivalent of Coast – Bird’s-Eye View, an aerial tour from Montrose to London. Monday on BBC1 gave us Star Trek – well into its second BBC season, with Wolf in the Fold – along with The Troubleshooters at 9.10 and The Harlem Globetrotters at 10.00. Over on BBC2, the dreaded Pot Black was probably being recorded over last week’s Doomwatch. This isn’t as insane as it sounds: colour videotape was expensive, and routinely re-used after wiping. The entire 1970 series of Steptoe and Son, the first in colour, is known to have been sacrificed to the tedious snooker fest. Elsewhere in the same week, we find Z Cars now in its 2-part ‘soap opera’ era (best ignored), a forgotten spy drama series Codename on BBC2 (almost certainly wiped), medical soap The Doctors, eccelsiastical comedy All Gas and Gaiters, plus such schedule staples as It’s a Knock-Out, Sportsnight with Coleman, Man Alive and Tomorrow’s World. Curiously, a Frank Sinatra concert – which to me seems like a televisual big deal – was tucked away at 9.10pm on Wednesday on BBC2. Wednesday also saw Marius Goring starring in the popular forensic drama The Expert, whilst Friday night’s big 9.10 pm drama was a repeat run of the hugely popular The Forsyte Saga (made in black and white, this would be its last sighting on terrestrial television). In the head-scratching category comes Friday’s mid-evening comedy, The Culture Vultures, a totally forgotten comedy of business manners starring Leslie Phillips. Children were offered the likes of Banana Splits and a repeat run of Belle and Sebastian, alongside the ubiquitous Blue Peter. Occupying the prime slot ahead of the early evening news was Michael Bond’s Herbs spin-off The Adventures of Parsley. Parsley could also be glimpsed in cowboy guise on page 60, in a half-page promo for BBC books for Children. On the evidence, Parsley’s Last Stand looks like a must-have (a fine vintage copy will set you back £18, or six shillings if you own a time machine).

We’re almost done with our random week in May 1970, but there is still the letters page to consider. An attitude seems to prevail here, and it will be familiar to anyone who listens to Radio 4’s Feedback. Programme makers, taken to task over various aspects of content or taste will always defend themselves and explain why their creative or production decision was the only one possible. It’s rare for anyone to hold up their hands and admit to an error of judgement. In this issue, a reader takes Doomwatch to task for scientific inaccuracy in presenting a plastic-eating chemical as a ‘virus’, and for claiming that ‘fear of weightlessness’ (y’what?) is a symptom of paranoia. Series co-creator and scientific advisor Dr. Kit Pedler was having none of it, insisting that the fictitious plastic-eating ‘virus’ had been ‘tailored’ (but it’s still inorganic, so technically not a virus, a point he chose not to address), before going on to defend the other accusation, levelled at the episode Re-Entry Forbidden, whose script he claimed had been verified by ‘a group of psychiatrists’. Well, okay, Dr. Pedler, if you say so.

Sniffiest response of the week goes to the producer of Junior Points of View, answering a complaint that the viewers’ letters on said programme were dealt with so quickly as to be rendered unintelligible. ‘I suppose,’ writes a smug Iain Johnstone, ‘intelligibility can only be assessed subjectively.’ That’s telling you, T.A. Ayre of Bournemouth!

And finally, the award for most laconic reply of the week goes to John Howard Davies, producer of All Gas and Gaiters. ‘Do the ecclesiastics… exist in such a rarefied hierarchical atmosphere that they never encounter a solitary parishioner…?’ asks J.A. Timothy of Flint. ‘Yes,’ says Mr. Howard Davies.

You'll Catch Your Death: The Avengers as a Meterological Record

 

False Witness: a rainy day in July 1968 aboard Mother's omnibus

People watch vintage television for many reasons, most of them nostalgic: rekindling memories from childhood, or simply wallowing in the sight of street scenes, cars and fashions from half a century ago. That’s certainly the case with a series like The Avengers. But on recently revisiting series 6, the Tara King era, I found myself noticing something I’d never been aware of before. The episode in question was False Witness, and a sequence involving a visit to Mother (Patrick Newell), whose office on this occasion was installed on the top deck of a bus. Through the windows, we can see wind-lashed trees, and the panes are spattered with raindrops (the scenes were shot for real on board an actual bus out on the street, as opposed to being faked in a studio). External shots show a still more grim prospect of leaden skies threatening rain, while fully-leaved trees sway in what looks to be a brisk wind. I saw these scenes and I thought to myself: ‘I remember that day…’

Prior to this minor moment of revelation, it had never occurred to me to look at a TV series (or, indeed a film) as a meterological record. On the whole, film makers on location will wait for dry days, preferably with some reasonable spells of sunshine, although in England, even in summer, that’s far from being a guarantee. Dry weather on film lends a kind of meterological homogeneity to many filmed productions, particularly those of the pre-digital era. Conversely, when wet weather was required, it was seldom executed convincingly: scenes in the 1963 Brit-com Father Came Too depict a deluge shot through with the brilliant sunlight of a peerless summer day.

The more I looked at this specific Avengers series, the more I came to realise how certain episodes spoke to me of a dull, cloudy, thundery summer that I remembered vividly from childhood: the summer of 1968.

The Met Office Monthly Weather Reports paint a picture that is entirely consistent with what I recall of that year – May: Mostly cold and cloudy; June: Fine mid-month, otherwise unsettled; July and August: Dull and wet in the south-east. Using these as a starting point, I decided to look at the production dates for series 6 of The Avengers and see how these corresponded to the meterological records for the summer of 1968.

This first Tara King series was made in two production blocks, 6A and 6B, and it’s 6B that’s of interest here, beginning as it did on 1 April 1968, and running all the way through to March 1969. The episodes that interested me were: You’ll Catch Your Death/ 24 May; Super Secret Cypher Snatch/ 14 June; False Witness/ 11 July; Noon Doomsday/ 30 June; They Keep Killing Steed/ 29 August. In all of these episodes, there are a number of scenes that capture dreary, overcast conditions, days where there was sufficient light to allow for filming outdoors, but with a curious, shadowless quality to the light. Such scenes are often intercut with brighter, sunnier conditions, creating a kind of climatic discontinuity, most notably in Noon Doomsday, where T.P. McKenna and Ray Brookes while away the hours before their meeting with Steed’s would-be assassin in an abandoned railway station: one minute, it’s overcast – the next, bright sunshine. The production date, 30 June, can presumably be taken as the beginning of filming on this episode, which would have run into early July. Warm weather on the 30th broke down overnight with the arrival of thunderstorms. These spread into all parts on the 2nd and 3rd which would have made location filming impossible. The overcast skies seen throughout most of this episode are typical of the kind of conditions preceding and following any large-scale thundery breakdown, and it’s likely that most of the location work was achieved on the 30th, with the remainder completed when settled conditions returned, briefly, on the 6th (‘a fairly sunny day’ according to the Met. Office).

False Witness: a typically cloudy day on location from The Avengers series 6

The weather at this point in July 1968 became notably stormy, with ‘darkness’ being reported in parts of the North East as a so-called ‘Spanish Plume’ (a lofted column of warm air originating on the Iberian peninsula) carried Saharan dust far into the atmosphere. The dust assisted the formation of notably dense thunderclouds, in a system stretching northwards from the Midlands, and beneath the storm a kind of deep twilight prevailed. I remember it with surprising clarity: the storm came almost without warning, during afternoon playtime at school, and the light rapidly dwindled to that of a late winter afternoon as we waited for the teachers to bring us indoors. The rest of the summer kept up the same stormy, cool and cloudy scenario, illustrated for me most vividly in False Witness. By the time that episode entered production on 11 July, the cloudy, thundery conditions were set in, and there evidently wasn’t time to wait for the weather to clear.

Equally typical of that dull, oppressive summer is the episode that went before the cameras on 29 August, They Keep Killing Steed. Like much of series 6, the location work has a notably different look from what had been established during the Emma Peel era. Series 4 and 5 had stuck fairly rigidly to a bucolic background, creating an almost mythical version of southern England that some like to call ‘Avengerland’. By contrast (deliberate, one assumes), the Tara King episodes exhibit more variety of setting, with scenes shot in more urban surroundings (most notably The Morning After). In this case, Ye Olde Sun Hotel in Northaw, Hertfordshire, was chosen as the scene for a peace conference, and all the location work shot here shares the same oppressive, shadowless quality, looking, as was indeed the case, as if a thunderstorm were imminent. The Met Office records August and September 1968 as dull months, with many parts of south-east England receiving only 60-70% of their expected sunshine. Typical English summer holiday weather, in fact. The episode’s tag scene wherein Steed and Tara sun themselves under UV lamps indoors while thunder rumbles without might almost have been an in-joke, considering how the production schedule must have been distupted by thunderstorms.

For anyone interested in weather records, the summer ‘68 production block of The Avengers provides a unique glimpse of a notably dismal spell of English weather. Later in the Tara King era, weather would provide an episode in its own right, in the form of Fog – an effect realised, inevitably, in the studio, with typically unconvicing results (film makers have never managed to create convincing fog – it always swirls like smoke, while the real thing simply hangs in the air). But the dreary, cloudy, rain-threatened days captured in so many of that summer's episodes were the real thing.

For a series so renowned as an icon of Britishness, it’s somehow comforting to know that The Avengers has, in its own small way, captured forever that quintessentially English phenomenon – a rainy summer.