After Hours

Stanley Allen

Well… where else would you interview a swimming champion? Olympic Gold Medallist Judy Grinham gets the John Freeman treatment from Michael Bentine

Tuppence in the slot will wind up Mr Bentine and other ‘mechanical footballers’

The ample charms of blonde Heidi Erich are a gift for Bentine and guest star John Bentley, taking the mickey out of African Patrol

Commonwealth heroes

African Patrol, the popular film series about East Africa’s police force made on the actual locations, stars John Bentley above as Inspector Paul Derek. 

Below Richard Denning, Jill Adams and Alan White play the central characters in Flying Doctor, the story of Australia’s famous airborne medical service, specially filmed for television by the Associated British Picture Corporation

White collar cops

Television is gradually changing the public image of the ‘private eye’; increasingly he is becoming a businessman rather than a lone operator.

The hour-long 77 Sunset Strip series and the half-hour International Detective (made at Elstree by the Associated British Picture Corporation) both belong to this new category

Efrem Zimbaiist Jr and Roger Smith left, reading downwards play the partners whose office address gives 77 Sunset Strip its name; their youthful assistant, ‘Kookie’, played by Edward Byrnes, is the glamour boy whose comb and breezy line of patter have become a signature of the series

Based on true stories from the files of the world’s largest detective agency, International Detective takes its star Arthur Fleming right to many interesting locations

What you saw… and how it was photographed

This intimate scene between Isa Miranda and Roland Brand in Light from a Star was a lot more romantic for the viewers than for the actors, who had to sustain their moment of emotion against the intrusion of microphone and camera

As Isa Miranda harangued her fellow guests at dinner, director Philip Saville and his camera circled the table like ghosts at the feast

Gilding the lily

George Varjas

The weekly task of dreaming up exciting settings to illustrate and enhance the contents of Armchair Theatre plays is one of the most stimulating creative challenges to ABC’s lively young designers, whose work under the direction of Timothy O’Brien above, right has been widely acclaimed for its high standards and imaginative vigour. For Light from a Star, O’Brien built most of the superstructure of a luxury yacht in one of ABC’s studios and filled a 20-foot swimming pool with six thousand gallons of water. Philip Saville above, left one of Britain’s most exciting and lyrical TV directors, pushed his cameras through portholes and swooped them around the decks like wheeling gulls

No Tram to Lime Street

John Timbers

From luxury yacht in the Mediterranean to a cargo boat in Liverpool docks, Armchair Theatre wrenched viewers back to contemporary Britain with Alun Owen’s first play for television, a warmly rumbustious story of three young seamen on shore leave which was one of the outstanding critical and audience successes in the history of the programme.

William Kotcheff directed, with designs by Voytek; Jack Hedley, Alfred Lynch and Tom Bell were the sailors and Eynon Evans the tough old father who triggered off Lynch’s drinking spree

Two views of Liverpool

John Timbers

No Tram to Lime Street, with its celebrating sailors and a brief but warmly realistic love affair between one of them, Jack Hedley and the girl he picked up, Billie Whitelaw, drew some protests from local papers that the play gave a distorted view of Liverpool

But the other side of the picture was seen across the ITV Network when ABC’s Outside Broadcast Unit took TV cameras into Liverpool Cathedral for the first time to televise Holy Communion.

A recording of the service was later presented to the Cathedral

Bedford Studios

Television on wheels

Church services and sporting events are only two of the subjects covered by the most mobile outside broadcast division in ITV.

Under the direction of ABC’s Chief of Outside Broadcasts, David Southwood, and his assistant, Andy Gullen, the Company’s camera teams range the North and Midlands every weekend to bring an astonishingly wide variety of local activity into ITV homes throughout the country

One of the advantages of televised sport is that it can give viewers a close view of the players which the ordinary spectator must do without.

Above is the normal view of the Yorkshire v Lancashire cricket match at Leeds, and right the ABC camera team which brought it at close quarters into ITV homes. Director Andy Gullen stands by the camera and commentator George Duckworth sits beside the cameraman

An ABC camera catches Marston Gregory as his Cooper-Maserati comes out of Woodcote Corner on three wheels in the International Tourist Trophy race at Silverstone

All-in wrestling has proved the most popular of all sports on ITV

ABC telecasts have greatly increased the popularity of motor cycle scrambles, notably through visits to the famous Bentley Springs course in Yorkshire

Willoughby Gullachsen

The celebrated Black Arrows, their squadron now disbanded, were televised by ABC at the Coventry Air Pageant

TV for the farmer

The Other Man’s Farm, established by ABC three years ago under the direction of Andy Gullen with Geoffrey Gilbert as editor, was the world’s first live outside broadcast farming series.

The programme, not seen in London, visits farms throughout the North and Midlands on Sunday afternoons and has been widely praised by farmers for the high degree of technical information it imparts.

Farming expert Jim Hall and programme host Franklin Engelmann are seen here by their mobile control room

Mobile feeding units take grain and water to the poultry on this Leicestershire farm

Controlled grazing for sheep is practised on this Northampton farm by use of a movable fence

This Landrace sow on a Yorkshire farm was part of an experiment in washing sows before their litters arrive, to increase hygiene and productivity in pig-farming

Franklin Engelmann discusses a grain extractor and mixer which speeds up the loading of mobile feeding units

A new type of potato-lifting machine is demonstrated for Geoffrey Gilbert extreme right, editor of The Other Man’s Farm

These huge silos were imported from the USA by a Yorkshire farmer to store fresh mown grass

Teenage religion

Stanley Allen

Another pioneer ABC programme was The Sunday Break, established three years ago under the guidance of adviser Penry Jones, which presents the Christian religion to young viewers on the ITV Network every Sunday in terms of their own way of life, and which now has the largest audience of any religious programme

Television’s first visit to an approved school was made by ABC cameras when Mr C. A. Joyce above invited The Sunday Break to his famous Cotswold School, where boys work on the farm in surroundings as close as possible to normal home conditions

Student nurses from the Wellgarth Nursery Training College visited The Sunday Break to talk about their work with children of all races

The Little Sisters of the Assumption at Langley are trained nurses who use scooters to go about their work of tending the sick over a wide area around Manchester. The Sunday Break cameras went with them on their rounds one day

Bedford Studios

Traditional religious symbol of Christmas for children has always been the crèche. Among the special programmes presented each Christmas by The Sunday Break was the re-creation in three dimensions of The Adoration of the Magi. The model was presented to Coventry Cathedral

1960 // THIS IS TRANSDIFFUSION