Life Without ITV

Forty Five Years Ago this week, Britain was reduced to a 2-channel TV nation. However did we manage?

Television was a different country back in the 1970s. Across Britain, viewers had a choice of three channels, two of them operated by the BBC. But for almost three months during the summer and early autumn of 1979, a different situation held sway. If we could travel back in time forty five years and switch on any television set, we’d find only two channels to choose from. On the third we would discover the following caption: ‘INDEPENDENT TELEVISION. We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted. There is an industrial dispute. Transmissions will start again as soon as possible.’

ITV was off the air, the victim of industrial action by members of the EETPU and ACTT trade unions. Nobody knew how long the strike would last, so that wording ‘as soon as possible’ gave false hope to viewers who, not unreasonably, must have expected a resolution within hours, if not days. Indeed, the apology caption racked up a viewing figure of close to one million, as sets were left on in the hope of normal service being resumed. That, after all, was the norm. Viewers had experienced industrial action on previous occasions, the worst instance coming in 1968 when an emergency national ITV service was mounted to cover a walkout by technicians lasting a mere few days. There would be no such quick fix in 1979. The ITV companies, headed by Thames, dug in and the unions refused to budge. By the time a resolution was agreed – in the unions’ favour – it was estimated that the ITV operators had lost £100 million in advertising revenue. Across the network, only one station maintained a service. Channel Television, ITV’s smallest operator, would not have survived the loss of its income from advertisers, and maintained a local emergency service for the duration of the strike. No network programmes were available, and only ‘off the shelf’ film items and regional news bulletins were broadcast.

For any ITV addict, then, Jersey or Guernsey would have been the place to spend your summer holiday in 1979. Definitely not Weston Super Mare, which is where I’d gone on holiday with my parents and my brother for just a few days in the second week of August. It was on the evening of Wednesday 8 August that we turned on the set in the guest house to find the regional operator HTV was off the air. By Friday, the blackout had spread to the whole independent Television network, and my diary entry for Sunday 12 August reads ‘ITV totally blacked out. BBC is rubbish programmes’. I think we need to delve a little further here. In fact, the BBC gave viewers a day of classic Hitchcock: The Thirty Nine Steps on BBC1 at 13.55, To Catch a Thief on the same channel at 20.05, and Psycho at 23.00 on BBC2. Not a bad effort, and definitely not rubbish (but I had yet to discover the genius of Mr. Hitchcock).

Like everyone else at the time, I’m sure I expected ITV to be back in a matter of days, a week at the outside. But no. My diary entries for Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 August both read the same: ‘ITV still totally blacked out’, with Tuesday’s entry adding the ominous caveat: ‘and will probably remain so.’ I had been following the situation via the BBC news and our daily paper, The Express. I’m sure I discussed it in earnest with my friend Tim Beddows, who was a regular visitor at the time. Whatever we expected to happen, we did not envisage ITV remaining off air for eleven weeks. So what were we, as confirmed ITV fans, to do in the meantime? If nothing else, we needed our nightly dose of Reginald Bosanquet on News at Ten. In fact, there weren’t that many ongoing ITV series that we were missing out on. According to my diary for the week immediately prior to the strike, Monday night meant Spooner’s Patch and Rumpole of the Bailey; Tuesday, Mind Your Language and Get Some In!; Wednesday Benny Hill, Mumfie and Cloppa Castle(which Tim and I watched in a spirit of irony) while Thursday meant a date with those elemental investigators Sapphire and Steel. My diary records no ITV activity for Friday, Saturday or Sunday, although Tim and I were now able to watch a kind of ‘alternative ITV’ in my bedroom on my 8mm sound projector, meaning that on the evening of Friday 3 August we were probably the only people in the UK watching the 1967 Avengers episode Return of the Cybernauts.

That projector would do good service during the weeks that ITV remained off air. But Super-8 aside, how did we fill our evenings with a third of Britain’s television network blacked out? For the first few days, it hardly mattered, as I was still on holiday. On Wednesday 8 August, a day of continuous heavy rain, we went to see Moonraker – the last Bond I would ever see on its original cinema release. The following evening, my mum and myself went to Weston’s Playhouse Theatre to see the comic farce Shut Your Eyes and Think of England, with a cast that included Bernard Bresslaw and John F. Landry, whom I recognised from the ITV serial Turtle’s Progress.

Some good news for vintage telly addicts like ourselves was delivered by Tim Beddows on Monday 13 August: it had been announced that the BBC was to screen twenty episodes of the vintage US anthology chiller The Outer Limits. On Tuesday, the projector, fresh from an overhaul, was put through its paces screening 8mm prints of Fireball XL5, Stingray, The Pink Panther and Laurel and Hardy. Thursday evening’s television consisted of Citizen Smith and The Persuaders – before you ask, the latter was a BBC documentary about the advertising industry rather than the better known Curtis+Moore playboy fest.

The following week saw Tim turn up with a vintage and rare item: nothing less than the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour on 8mm. Neither of us had seen it on its original broadcasts, and it had been gathering dust in the BBC archive ever since. Ironically, it would get an airing on BBC2 less than six months later as part of a Christmas season of Beatles films. But Tim and I were, on this occasion, ahead of the curve.

Aside from such 8mm entertainments, it was left to the BBC to keep us entertained for the duration. On Friday evenings, we got repeats of Star Trek and All Creatures Great and Small, whilst Saturday late nights brought a season of horror and sci-fi double bills. A memorable pairing was It Came From Outer Space followed by Quatermass and the Pit on Saturday 25 August. This was my first look at the third Quatermass film and I was impressed.

On Sunday 26 August, I watched televised motor racing in the evening, which was decidedly out of my wheelhouse. Bank Holiday Monday brought a Laurel & Hardy double bill (Way Out West and Fraternally Yours [the British title of Sons of the Desert]), to say nothing of Trumpton or The Magic Roundabout. The evening’s big film was The Great Escape. By this time we might well have been forgiven for thinking ‘who needs ITV anyway?’

By Saturday 1 September, with ITV still blacked out, the BBC began to roll out the big hitters for its autumn season, getting in so far ahead of their commercial rivals that the independent network stood no chance at all if and when normal service was resumed. Larry Grayson was back fronting The Generation Game which this week presented a compilation of the past series’ highlights. Also returning this evening was Dr. Who, a series I’d given up on a few years previously, when it had clashed with Space:1999. Now, with no competition from the other side, it was time to give the Doctor a second chance, and it was a Dalek story after all. What’s less easy to explain is why, that same evening, I subjected myself to Junior That’s Life. I can’t remember anything about it, which is probably for the best...

The first week of September saw me in listening mode as I worked my way through a tape of Gerry Anderson goodies that came courtesy of fellow enthusiast Theo De Klerk. Other highlights included The Lavender Hill Mob on Tuesday evening, Top of the Pops, Tomorrow’s World and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. On Wednesday 5 September, BBC1 had scheduled an episode of Star Trek, The Galileo Seven, but it went unbroadcast, the evening’s programmes having been pre-empted by the televised funeral of Lord Mountbatten, following his murder by the IRA on 27 August.

By now, ITV had been off air for a whole month, an unprecedented situation. It was beginning to look as if the situation might never be resolved, and the blackout wasn’t even halfway over. ‘Nothing much on TV’ reports my diary for Monday 10 September, although I contradicted myself a few lines later by recording that I’d watched the 1973 movie That’ll Be the Day (BBC1, 21.25). A step forward in Tim’s and my enjoyment of 8mm films came on Wednesday 12 September when I finally got myself a screen. Prior to this, we’d had to resort to watching films projected onto the cardboard lid of a posh birthday card (which was, it must be said, most effective). Home movies occupied a fair chunk of this week, with telly highlights including one of Star Trek’s most effective episodes, The Enemy Within, and, on Sunday evening, the first part of the well remembered BBC adaptation of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Alec Guinness.

Monday 17 September saw a minor setback, with the projector returned for ‘minor repairs’ (it had a tendency to run slow). No matter: Tim and I resorted to records. He turned up that evening with an armful of current chart singles including Roxy Music’s ‘Angel Eyes’, ELO’s ‘The Diary of Horace Wimp’ (horrors!) and Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Get it Right Next Time’. Some new bedroom furniture occupied some of my time midweek, sorting out books and stuff, and on Thursday I put a new ribbon in my portable typewriter. Those early autumn evenings were fairly flying by...

Monday 25 September saw the ITV strike enter its seventh week, with still no sign of a resolution. Tim and I watched Return of the Cybernauts again, while the evening brought episode three of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Two Ronnies. Wednesday night saw Michael Parkinson return with a new series, displaced from its customary Saturday slot. My diary offered an exclamation mark by way of a raised eyebrow. But the most memorable evening of the week came on Saturday. Tim had procured an episode of The Champions on 8mm, Project Zero (the only known copy). I hadn’t seen the series for nine years, and never in colour, and just to hear the music again was a properly nostalgic experience. That mild autumn evening has stayed with me ever since. But change was imminent. Monday 1 October was my first day in higher education, as I embarked on a degree in Communication Studies at Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic. As a degree, it was worthless, as a passport to any kind of future career less than useless, and as an opportunity to fly the nest and get away from the family home, it was squandered. I commuted there for three years.

One thing the course had its favour was the occasional opportunity to watch bits of television. On Thursday 4 October, we got to watch an episode of G.F. Newman’s series Law and Order, the harrowing (for its time) A Prisoner’s Tale. The following day brought two colour films of Thunderbirds all the way from Amsterdam, but they were only five minutes long. And silent…

The BBCs programme planners must have been on a roll, as each new item in the autumn schedule was unveiled with no threat of competition, apart from themselves. Sunday 30 September introduced a strong Sunday evening line-up with the Penelope Keith comedy To the Manor Born and radio detective Shoestring both making their debut. That was my Sunday evenings sorted out for the forseeable future. Another new series arrived on Wednesday 10 October, with a short return for Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ Ripping Yarns. Although my diary pronounced it ‘V. good’ I remember being somewhat underwhelmed at the time. The following week brought still more new comedy to BBC2 in the form of Not the Nine O’Clock News. I missed the first week, but was tuned in for the second episode on Tuesday 23 October, which also happened to be the last full day of the ITV dispute.

The network returned, with due fanfare, on Wednesday 24 October, with a nationally networked service for the first two weeks. I could still sing you the celebratory jingle ‘Welcome Home to ITV’ that introduced that first night, but I won’t (the Mike Sammes Singers were more than up to the task). Programmes recommenced with the News at 5.45. We tended to watch the BBC’s early evening news in our house, but must have made an exception this evening. The network was, however, at a distinct disadvantage, with no new studio productions ready to roll. The evening’s big draw was a brand new Quatermass serial that saw John Mills donning the mantle of Nigel Kneale’s venerable crusty scientist, and this was only available as it had been shot on film, by the independent production base Euston Films. Viewers starved of ITV for the best part of three months must surely have tuned in to see it, but far from being the saviour of the network, Quatermass was something of a non-event, with disappointing reviews and ratings. ITV would continue to struggle for several months to come, as the various operators worked to make good the defecit in new programming. Another new, filmed series debuted the following Monday, in the form of Minder, Dennis Waterman’s big new post-Sweeney role (he even got to sing the theme tune). I tuned in, almost out of loyalty to ITV and Euston Films, and continued to watch for the remainder of the series; but I never became a true fan. Dennis Waterman’s performance was too much like George Carter, and I didn’t care for the light comedy drama style. Some years later I would recognise it for what it was – LWT’s Budgie, revisited.

For all that, ITV was back – we had The Professionals on Saturday nights , the rest of Quatermass, a new Jasper Carrott show (Carrott Gets Rowdy, Friday 2 November) and… and… well, frankly, not a lot else. In truth, ITV had become the poor relation in our house. Once, back in the 60s, we’d watched it all the time, but that had been the era of ITC, with a glamorous new series every autumn, and Gerry Anderson productions everywhere you looked. By the late 70s, ITV looked played out to me. Michael Grade’s attempt to annexe Saturday evenings with Bruce’s Big Night had failed, and the network was struggling to establish any really good new situation comedies.

The TV Times offered some small insights into how viewers had coped with the absence of ITV over eleven weeks, and the 27 October ‘emergency’ national edition included a small feature which concluded that the genre most missed by viewers was sitcom. 44% of those interviewed in a national survey said they’d missed the comedy shows, while 40% were feeling the lack of movies. 39% cited ITN news as their most missed item, 38% said sport, while 34% were left reeling from the absence of their favourite soaps. All of which provided an excuse to flag down some of the comedies featured in the coming week’s listings. With Freddie Starr and Bernie Winters getting namechecks, it was hardly the strongest of line-ups.

Highlights from the first full week of post-strike ITV included the movie Gold, blooper show It’ll Be All Right on the Night 2, new sitcom Only When I Laugh, George and Mildred, drearily incomprehensible gameshow 3,2,1, The Muppets and Cannon and Ball, big hitters all, but I wasn’t biting, not even when the bait was the long-delayed second adventure for Sapphire and Steel that the strike had interrupted.

It’s tempting to speculate on how the nation would have coped in the event of all three television channels going off air. Many viewers would still have remembered the days when the choice had been BBC or ITV, and the commercial network had only been on the scene for a little over twenty years. I’m sure it would not have been a catastrophe. ITV’s absence from the airwaves was probably more worrying to its executives and shareholders than to the average viewer at home.

Today, of course, we have an almost unlimited choice of viewing from satellite, digital and streaming platforms. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that something like a cyber attack or catastrophic system failure could take out a sizeable number of those channels, but would people miss them? Would they even notice? Take away their social media feed for more than thirty seconds and panic sets in, but television? I don’t think so. We live in different times.

The Collector – 3: Stamps

It may have escaped your notice – indeed, it will have escaped the notice of all but the most dedicated philatelists – but 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the commemorative postage stamp. The very first issue, marking the British Empire Exhibition, appeared in April 1924. It was a slow beginning: another five years were to elapse before the next commemorative issue, celebrating the Ninth Universal Postal Union Congress of 1929, and any budding collectors would have had to wait a further six years until the silver jubilee of King George V was commemorated by four stamps issued in May of 1936.

It wasn’t until the reign of Queen Elizabeth II that the idea of commemorative stamps really started to take off. A mere seven issues had spanned the era of her father, George VI, and even the Elzabethan age took its time to produce anything of serious interest to philatelists. These early commemoratives are quite dull by comparison with the colourful designs that would follow, and were usually printed in single colours. Two-colour printing arrived with 1960’s issue commemorating the European Postal and Telecommunications Conference. The design, in green and purple, was very traditional, looking rather like a banknote, and gave no hint of the radical ideas that would follow during the next decade.

I have never, in all honesty, been a bona fide collector of stamps. I own a couple of stamp albums, certainly, but my interest in philately has never been more than casual; occasional spurts of renewed enthusiasm in between decades of indifference. Like most collectors, I began by saving any interesting stamps that arrived in the post. Which is to say, my mum began saving them. She received regular mail from relatives in the Republic of Ireland, so those were probably among the first stamps I ever collected. Others were culled from postcards hailing mostly from mainland Europe, and the occasional letter from an aunt in America.

Besides steaming them off envelopes, you could buy packets of stamps in most local newsagents. In the late 1960s, during a mania for anything to do with dinosaurs, I spotted a set of prehistoric animal stamps in the window of Dillons newsagents in Mere Green, close to where we lived. Needless to say, these were not a British issue – no prehistoric reptiles would appear on our stamps until 1991. The stamps were of a kind produced specifically to appeal to juvenile collectors, and hailed from places I’d never heard of – Fujeira and Umm Al Quwain, both members of the United Arab Emirates. They were also very large – much bigger than any British stamps – and highly coloured. Although they all bore franking marks across their corners, these were faked for the sake of supposed collectabilty. The stamps had never genuinely been posted.

Although I’d watched Blue Peter for many years and seen the programme’s own stamp album regularly updated by Val, John and Pete, I took little or no interest in British stamps at this time. In 1966, the programme had run a competition to design what would go on to be the UK’s first ever Christmas commemorative stamps. I didn’t enter. The competition was won by Tasveer Shemza and James Barry, with their designs of a Magi king and a snowman respectively. Tasveer was in fact the daughter of a Pakistani artist and poet, Anwar Shemza, which probably gave her an edge over the other entrants. Her design quickly became iconic, and its journey from a child’s painting to mass production at Harrison and Sons, printers to the GPO, provided an interesting feature on Blue Peter (reproduced in the following year’s annual). This may well have been one of the first British stamps our mum steamed off an envelope for me.

Stamp collecting remained a now and then kind of hobby, one best saved for rainy afternoons on weekends and school holidays when all other avenues of interest had been thoroughly explored. I still have my first ‘Trans World’ stamp album, into which I would add occasional items. All nations were allocated a single page, and it is a wonder to me looking through it now that the best represented country should be the former Yugoslavia, a fact for which I cannot account.

In 1975, my collecting began to step up a gear and I began to buy packets of used stamps from an Oxfam shop in Sutton Coldfield. These were comprised of British stamps, both commemorative and definitive (the name collectors assign to ‘ordinary’ postage stamps). Each packet contained a completely random sample, culled mostly from the past decade and a half. Anything of value had been carefully weeded out, so there were no chance discoveries of Penny Blacks, although some of the more common Victorian stamps turned up frequently.

Before long, I removed the stamps from the British pages of my Trans World album, and began to compile a new collection, devoted specifically to British issues. This must have been in the summer of 1975, because the first set I went out and bought from new was released on 13 August of that year, marking the 150th anniversary of the steam train. The album is testament to the mercurial nature of my interest: many sets were bought but remained unmounted, and it fizzled out altogether some time in 1980.

One name stands pre-eminent in the world of philatetly, and it was to this fount of knowledge that I turned when I began in a semi-serious manner to collect British stamps. Stanley Gibbons is the world’s longest established dealer in rare stamps, and their check list, costing just 30p, became my guide to the world of British stamps. I still have their 12th edition, illustrating, in colour, every British stamp ever issued, from the Penny Black of 1840, right through to the County Cricket commemorative set of May 1973. Every stamp was accompanied by its current market value in used or unused condition. An unused Penny Black would have left you £125 lighter back in 1973, whereas today even a heavily cancelled example can be worth four or five times that amount, and certain desirable variants are priced in the thousands. Elsewhere, however, it’s a different story. The commemoratives that interested me in that 1973 catalogue varied in price from a few pence up to as much as £1.50 for examples with phosphor bands (an optional type that was being trialled as part of the development of mechanical sorting offices). Today, the values of most such stamps have declined in real terms, and complete year sets can easily be obtained for no more than a couple of pounds (with only the phosphor issues retaining any level of rarity and value). In the early 90s, I wandered into a stamp fair at the local civic hall, and was surprised at how values had collapsed. Stamps that cost maybe £2 each in that 1973 catalogue were now available for pennies. A dealer explained the situation to me: following the stock market crash of 1987, many collectors cashed in their stamp albums, resulting in an oversupply. This situation has persisted until the present day. Any collector starting out could now buy virtually the entire decade of 1960s British commemorative stamps for around £30.

I decided this was what I would do: start again on collecting GB commemoratives, this time in mint condition, and compiling full year sets from the 60s and 70s. Once again, however, I did not pursue my rediscovered hobby with any real level of dilgence. From the fair, I bought a few year sets containing stamps I’d never managed to collect the first time around, and bought a new album with proper cellophane mounts to keep the stamps pristine. I soon forgot all about it. Something like fifteen years went by before I looked out my ‘new’ stamp album again, and decided to try and fill some of the gaps. A flurry of ebay purchases followed before, once again, philately and I parted company. 

One thing I decided long ago was to stop collecting new commemorative stamps. They just weren't the same any more. Back in the 1960s, with designs from the likes of prolific artist David Gentleman, a definite aesthetic held sway over British stamps. Many issues made use of only two or three colours, yet within these limitations some dynamic designs appeared, many of them reflecting Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ technological revolution: the Forth Bridge, the GPO Tower, nuclear reactors, the E-Type Jaguar… all of these had appeared on British stamps by the middle of the decade. Even the Queen’s image had been given a stylised makeover: David Gentleman, frustrated at having to include the monarch’s portrait in his commemorative designs, proposed a new, simplified silhouette which, through the offices of Postmaster General Tony Benn, was soon given the Royal seal of approval. That same silhouette would appear on all commemorative stamps until the end of the Elizabethan era. Meanwhile, advances in print technology saw the first full-colour designs (British Birds, 8 August 1966), and a new large format (British Paintings, 10 July 1967). Some sets were issued in continuous blocks – David Gentleman’s 1966 Battle of Hasting set imaginatively used imagery from the Bayeux Tapestry with the stamps issued ‘se-tenant’ in conjoined strips of six.

My appreciation of stamps fed into my apreciation of modern design history: comparing stamps from the early 60s with those of a decade later, I could see trends in design such as the lean towards traditionalism in the ‘Laura Ashley’ era of the late 60s and early 70s. Some years were better than others: for me, the years 1964-68 were the high watermark of commemorative stamp design, with a clean, unfussy and often minimalist approach exemplfied by the work of Gentleman and others. 1970 and 1971 by contrast, were strikingly dull, with drab and dreary colours and some dull subject matter. For me, the absolute worst set ever was 1977’s Jubilee issue, whose colour schemes strongly suggested the work of a colour blind designer. By now, a much more ornate look had come to dominate the stamp world, with many admittedly fine but perhaps over elaborate illustrations replacing the sometimes stark graphics of the mid 60s, and I began to lose interest in stamps as aesthetic objects.

The anniversaries and achievements commemorated on stamps had always been of a high order: explorers, technological innovation, historic moments, all of them good, sober, academic subjects to which any Mastermind contestant might aspire. Today, it’s a different world. Dinosaurs have finally featured on British stamps (more than once), as have X-Men, Dame Shirley Bassey, Paddington (the bear, not the railway station), Aardman Animations, The Spice Girls, Harry Potter and Peppa Pig. Alongside these (some would say) frivolous issues, there have been a few sets in the older manner, commemorating the Red Arrows, The Flying Scotsman, Windrush and, of course, Christmas.

Meantime, I still have my own album to complete. I doubt it will ever extend beyone 1980, and I’m stretching a point by including some of the ‘dull years’ that I’ve avoided until now: but all collections should have an endpoint, a moment at which they reach completeness. It’s only taken me forty-nine years...