Programmes

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

Youth and music

Beford Studios

▲Modern music has always been an integral part of The Sunday Break. The current season of the programme featured the Sunday Break Songsters, a choral group formed by ABC from teenagers in the Midlands.

Janice Willett is one of the young directors who have worked on this programme.

Bob Fuest designed the set and also the riverboat below.

▼ In Light Entertainment, the Summer 1960 season ended with Steamboat Shuffle, a light-hearted musical programme for young people, networked across the country from a specially constructed riverboat moored on the Thames beside ABC’s London studios at Teddington Lock.

The director was Ben Churchill, who was also the first director of The Sunday Break

Ronald Hart

Heroes…

Willoughby Gullachsen

ABC’s Drama Department found an infallible idea for contemporary children’s entertainment in Target Luna, whose intrepid young explorer circled the moon in a rocket, and its successor Pathfinders in Space, whose Moon explorers are all set to investigate other planets.

Written by Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice with the guidance of Mary Field, OBE, international expert in children’s programmes, with Guy Verney as director, this science fiction series is the subject of much careful research to combine information with the thrills of space exploration

Bedford Studios

…of the wide open spaces

Even in the space age, the Western maintains its grip on audiences of all ages.

Some TV Westerns have broken new ground with writing that delves as deeply into character and situation as does legitimate drama, and the hour-long series lend themselves particularly to this treatment.

Among these are Maverick, starring James Garner and Jack Kelly as the brothers Bret and Bart, and Cheyenne, with Clint Walker. One of the best of the half-hour Westerns is Law Man, whose John Russell is a popular figure on the ABC Network

from TRANSDIFFUSION
1960 // THIS IS TRANSDIFFUSION