Class of '73

 

'Ding-dong, what went wrong? ' Leslie Phillips prepares to trash his career in Casanova '73

TV Highlights (and Lowlights) of September '73

Last time, I looked back at the week I started secondary education, fifty years ago. Until this point in time, TV had tended to take out a sizeable chunk of my weekday evenings (although glancing through old schedules only seems to prove that I never spent as much time in front of the box as I remember). Now, with the accession to Grammar School education, there would be the obligation to do homework of an evening. TV would, increasingly, be taking a back seat... and it was probably for the best.

Coincidentally, the autumn of 1973 proved to be a fallow season on television – at least as far as I was concerned – with few big new series on offer from either BBC or ITV. Britain was sliding into economic crisis under Ted Heath’s Conservative Government, who faced pressure for wage claims from the increasingly militant NUM. By the end of the year, the infamous Three-Day Week would come into force, and the autumn would see fuel costs escalate alarmingly as new conflict kicked off in the Middle East. Belts were being tightened all round, and TV production budgets suffered accordingly. ITV had been clobbered with new rules on taxation of advertising levies, which would effectively shut down the lavish filmed productions like The Persuaders! that Lew Grade’s ITC had bankrolled since the early 60s. With ITV increasingly reliant on American imports and the BBC creatively treading water, there was very little to tempt viewers in the autumn line-up. New programmes were appearing in the schedule before the end of August, but big hitters were in decidedly short supply...

My clearest televisual recollection from September ‘73 is seeing Derek Nimmo’s new ecclesiastical comedy Oh Father! which began its one and only series on BBC1 commencing Wednesday 12 September. This largely forgotten series has, surprisingly, found its way onto DVD and episodes are available online for what they’re worth. I’m sure I only remember it on account of its launch coinciding with the new term, and just to hear the theme tune again would evoke a Pavolvian response to go into the back room and do my homework. The series followed on from Nimmo's popular late-60s comedy Oh, Brother! and saw his character Dominic leaving his monastic life to become a Catholic priest. It can't have been a success, as the series lasted a mere seven weeks and would not return. 

The BBC dominated the week’s schedules in our house, from Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game on Saturday evenings through to Jeux Sans Frontiers on Friday. On Sunday evening, two days before term began, I was tuned in for the first of a new science fiction series on BBC1. Moonbase Three offered a ‘realistic’ view of life on a lunar colony in the dizzying future of – wait for it – 2003. Back in 1973, with NASA’s Apollo programme still active, it seemed quite reasonable to assume that, thirty years hence, humanity would have established such outposts on the moon. The series, which ran for just six episodes, was frankly a bit of a dud. This wasn’t science fiction in the exciting mould of Star Trek or Doctor Who – it was more like The Brothers in outer space: a talky, stagey drama, with no aliens, explosions or any of the other futuristic trappings that Gerry Anderson was in the process of applying to the forthcoming Space:1999. We wouldn’t get to visit Moonbase Alpha for another two years, and in the meantime we’d just have to make do with Moonbase Three. It looked like a lot of plastic egg boxes. It probably was.

Moonbase Three meant we would no longer be tuned in to the sitcom Bowler over on ITV, but that was no great loss. George Baker played the titular character, who was a kind of social-climbing spiv, seen originally in Please Sir! spin-off The Fenn Street Gang. A spin-off from a spin-off. Like Oh Father!, it may be forgotten but found its way onto DVD a few years ago. I should know, I designed the sleeve. Comedy giants John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were the writers. Bowler may have been a dud, but The Good Life awaited them…

Returning for a second series on Wednesday evenings was popular Amsterdam detective Van der Valk. The jolly theme music (originally a library piece) was already on its way up the pop charts where it would spend no less than four weeks at number one. I didn’t watch Van der Valk myself, but that music, more than any other piece of pop culture, has infused my memories of that far off autumn…

Elsewhere on the commercial station, American imports held sway. You couldn’t turn on the telly on a weekday evening without encountering the likes of Columbo, McMillan and Wife or, um, Hec Ramsay (nope, me neither). Fridays brought Hawaii 5-0 and The Streets of San Francisco, while Gerry Anderson’s glossy but shallow offering The Protectors kicked off the evening schedule at 7pm. I didn’t bother with any of them myself.

Star Trek had, by this time, taken up almost permanent residence in the BBC’s evening schedule, and was usually to be found on Mondays around 7pm. 10 September’s episode was one of the worst. The Alternative Factor, despite belonging to the show’s first series, had been deferred in Britain and didn’t air until December 1971, making this only its second screening. The story started well enough, with a mysterious shock wave causing the whole of creation to ‘wink out of existence’ for a second. Unfortunately, it quickly descended into an impenetrable plot about an unhinged alien and his ‘anti-matter’ double who spent the rest of the episode beating each other up. Trek producer Robert H Justman was also behind a new offering this week on BBC1. Search Control followed Oh Father! on Wednesday evenings, with the Radio Times describing it as ‘a new film series starring Hugh O'Brian, Tony Franciosa, Doug McClure as three electronic space-age agents ready for action - anytime, anywhere…’ Known as plain Search in America (the BBC changed the title to avoid confusion with its own series of the same name), the show ran for only one season and from YouTube clips looks to have been typical ‘spy-fi’ hokum. Homework guaranteed I never saw it, but 30 seconds online is enough to be sure I didn’t miss anything…

One of few new arrivals that autumn was a series that, on paper, looked guaranteed for success: Leslie Phillips starring in scripts by Galton and Simpson. What could go wrong? It might be easier to ask what went right. Galton and Simpson completely misread the mood of the nation when they dreamed up this contemporary take on the Italian author and amorous adventurer Giacomo Casanova. Billed as ‘the adventures of a 20th Century Libertine’, Casanova ’73 featured Leslie Phillips as Henry Newhouse (his surname a literal translation of Casa Nova), a typical bawdy, chauvinist, womanising product of his era. The first episode was met with howls of outrage from the usual suspects, and by week two it had been bumped from its 8pm slot to a safely ‘post watershed’ 9.25. I most likely saw that first episode, but it’s the scandal I remember more than anything else. Viewers were tired of being patronised with smutty inuendo and the series did no one any favours. Leslie Phillips would be absent from the small screen for the next twelve years whilst his movie career would remain mired in cheap smut for the rest of the decade. As for Galton and Simpson, Casanova ’73 sunk what was left of their scriptwriting reputation at the BBC. A disappointing effort to revive the old Comedy Playhouse format at ITV lasted only one series and Simpson would retire just five years later.

Finally, a curiosity in the week's schedule that's worth mentioning: Monday afternoon on BBC1 included a series entitled The Fanatics, focusing on ‘people with unusual enthusiams’ to quote the Radio Times. The subjects of this week’s edition? The England Women’s Football Team…