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Closing down

2021-07-12T10:47:15+00:00

The �� Transmitter Control Room at Brookman's Park, 1931

The �� Genome blog is no longer being updated, as we complete the process of updating �� Genome into the �� Programme Index. At the same time, we have discontinued our social media feeds.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the pieces we’ve published, whether written by the in-house team or by our amazing guest bloggers. We’ve enjoyed sharing these eclectic musings on aspects of broadcasting history; but all things must pass, and �� Archive Content and Partnerships, our parent department, is shifting the focus to new projects.

The �� Programme Index is still part of the mix, marrying the �� Genome database with new listings from the PIPS system which take the trail of �� programmes up to the present day.

You can access the database at genome.ch.bbc.co.uk as usual, and get more archive updates by following @��Archive on Twitter or Facebook.

The Programme Index (formerly �� Genome) team

International Football at the 1948 Olympics

2021-06-08T16:09:05+00:00

As Euro 2020 finally kicks off, guest blogger Paul Hayes sees parallels between this year’s championship and the first tournament broadcast on British television. �� Genome helps to tell the story of football at the 1948 Olympic Games.

This summer, the �� will televise a major international football tournament which is being held across a scattering of disparate venues, culminating in semi-finals and the final at Wembley Stadium. It’s a tournament which has been delayed due to a long-lasting, major international crisis. In these respects, Euro 2020 – as it’s still being called – strikingly parallels the very first international football tournament ever to have been broadcast on British television: the one held as part of the 1948 Olympic Games in London.

Those Olympics were an important landmark in the history of �� TV. They may not have had the same mass audience or widespread cultural impact as the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II five years later, but for the team at Alexandra Palace the success of the coverage gave them a sense of pride and self-belief, and a real appreciation of what they could achieve. Television’s then-Head of Programmes, Cecil McGivern, wrote to staff at the end of the Games that: "There is no doubt at all that our televising of the XIV Olympiad has been a very great success and has brought considerable credit to British television both in this country and abroad."

A �� Television camera follows the action in the 1948 Olympic football final between Sweden and Yugoslavia at Wembley Stadium

Television had begun broadcasting in high-definition – on 405 lines – in 1936, but closed down during World War Two when TV was still in its infancy. TV broadcasts resumed in 1946 and the Olympic Games was an early and ambitious outside broadcast for the developing service.

In 1948 the number of those watching was still relatively small, as the �� had only one television transmitter – at Alexandra Palace itself, in north London – although the Corporation’s official report on the Games estimated that the average audience for each broadcast was around half a million viewers. Coverage did not officially expand until the opening of the Sutton Coldfield transmitting station, serving the Midlands, in December 1949. In practice, however, the Alexandra Palace broadcasts could, given the right conditions, be received a great deal further away than intended: the official report also states that: "The ��’s faithful viewer in the Channel Islands (180 miles), where reception is inconsistent, was able to get pictures which were of excellent entertainment value."

So successful was the televising of the Games that the �� showed more live coverage than they had planned. Radio Times told readers that "Times of Olympic programmes may be varied," and that certainly turned out to be the case for the football; more than double the originally-intended amount of action was shown.

Television’s live coverage of the Olympics was entirely centred around Wembley, showing events at the stadium and the pool there. This meant that the televising of football could only begin towards the end of the tournament, because the two semi-finals and the two medal matches were the only games held there. The Radio Times listings indicate that it had originally been planned to show the second halves only of the first semi-final and the two medal games. But we know from documentation held in the 1948 Olympic files at the �� Written Archives Centre in Caversham, Berkshire, that in fact the entirety of both semi-finals and both medal contests were televised.

This resulted in some notable firsts in the history of live football on British television. The first semi-final, held on the evening of Tuesday, 10 August 1948, was pioneering for two reasons. With Sweden playing Denmark, it was the first time ever that a football match between two non-UK teams was shown by the ��. And with the game starting at 6.30pm, it was also the very first match with an evening kick-off to be televised.

A glimpse inside the �� Television control room for the Games at Wembley’s Palace of Arts

Light, or the lack of it as winter afternoons wore on, was often the enemy of football broadcasts in those early days – it didn’t stop play, but it could stop the cameras of the time from being able to show an acceptable quality of picture. A Radio Times billing from January 1950 contains the disclaimer that “Light permitting, the whole of the match will be televised,” and we know that on more than one occasion the television service had to either abandon coverage altogether or else lapse into a sound-only commentary.

This being the summer, however, there appear to have been no such issues. The evening after Sweden had beaten Denmark, the second semi-final was also televised live in full, as the Great Britain team – coached by Manchester United manager Matt Busby – lost to Yugoslavia. Two days later, on Friday, 13 August, there was one more footballing first from the Olympic coverage. In the afternoon the bronze medal match between Great Britain and Denmark was broadcast, followed in the evening by the final between Sweden and Yugoslavia, with the Scandinavians winning both encounters. This was a television milestone because it was the very first time that two full football matches had been shown live on the same day – something we’re now well used to, of course, particularly whenever the World Cup or the European Championship rolls around.

At the microphone for all of these games was the man who was then the voice of television football – former referee Jimmy Jewell. Jewell had led a pretty extraordinary life: in World War One he was one of the very early pilots to fly from an aircraft carrier, and after becoming a top-level referee in the 1930s he officiated at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and took the 1938 FA Cup final, the first to be televised, awarding what turned out to be the winning penalty in the dying moments of extra time. In an unusual switch, in January 1939 he then became the manager of Norwich City, and there is some evidence that he may even have managed the England team in one of their wartime internationals.

Jimmy Jewell at the microphone for the 1948 FA Cup final, a few months before his Olympic TV work

A few other people were tried before Jewell took up the microphone for �� Television in 1947, but he went on to be the commentator for five successive FA Cup finals and almost all the other live matches of the period. The �� experimented with various others alongside Jewell, including former amateur footballer Norman Creek and future ITV commentator Peter Lloyd, but never really found anyone else they liked until they struck upon a certain Kenneth Wolstenholme in 1950.

For the Olympic tournament, Jewell had producer Barrie Edgar joining him on-air, with athletics specialist Pat Landsberg and water polo commentator Harry Getz also being given try-outs alongside Jewell and Edgar on the semi-finals. Jewell, though, remained �� Television’s main voice of football until his sudden death from a stroke in October 1952, which propelled Wolstenholme into the top job.

Like almost all of his other commentaries, Jewell’s Olympic football broadcasts are lost forever; never recorded and seen only by those viewers who watched them live. In fact, for all the games he worked on, only one tiny fragment of Jewell’s live commentary still exists. His is the voice on the earliest surviving live television football coverage in the �� archives – a few minutes of an experimental telerecording of England v Italy at White Hart Lane in November 1949.

With the process of preserving television broadcasts having still been in its earliest days, football was far from the only 1948 Olympic sport to be beamed out live and then never seen again. Indeed, the only existing live television coverage of the games at all is a section of the opening ceremony, although there are also many filmed reports from the Television Newsreel programme.

Despite this lack of material in the archives, the coverage of the Games overall has been justly celebrated ever since as an important milestone in the history of British broadcasting. But the fact that this included the televising of an international football tournament – some six years before World Cup matches would first be brought live to British screens – has perhaps not been so well remembered.

What's in the Studios?

2021-01-28T21:09:21+00:00

A detail from the �� Current Studio Arrangements form for Week 4, 1976

The above piece of paperwork is one of the unsung documents of the ��'s administration, the form on which are logged the programmes which were scheduled to be produced in the ��'s electronic television studios in one week of January 1976. In this blog we take a look at what was being made that week, where it was being made - and see how the broadcasting landscape differed 45 years ago.

On the face of it, this is a fairly typical production week. There are a mixture of live shows and pre-recorded programmes, which might be going out later the same day, or days, weeks or months in the future. The studios listed are mostly at Television Centre, the main location for making �� programmes at the time, located in west London. In this era when there was very little independent production, and most programmes which were not made in the ��'s electronic studios were films from a variety of sources, including those made by the �� itself, and those bought in from abroad. This form does not include those, or purely outside broadcast programmes; also not listed are news bulletins, which had their own dedicated facilities.

The form is laid out as a grid, taking each studio along one axis and the days of the week on the other. As well as TV Centre productions, there are columns for Lime Grove studios and the �� Television Theatre, and for brief details of networked shows made in other parts of the country.

In the studios

The various studios listed begin with TC1, as Studio 1 at Television Centre was known for short. Studio TC2 is missing from the list – this studio, which in its 60s heyday hosted shows including That Was the Week That Was and Juke Box Jury, was no longer in service by the 1970s. Together with studios TC5 and TC7, it was a smaller space, which while it could accommodate a modest studio audience, had not been converted to colour production along with the other TVC facilities (TC5 was the last of the working studios converted at that time, the previous year, before which it had mainly been used for those Schools Programmes still made in black and white).

Three productions recording in one week in 1976 made the cover of Radio Times - Our Mutual Friend (photo Dmitri Kasterine), The Chester Mystery Plays (photo Tony Evans, painting Tom Taylor) and The Onedin Line (artwork Nigel Holmes)

Many of the programmes listed on the form were regular series which went out all year round or for long runs, often in the documentary, arts or current affairs genres. These included Panorama, broadcast live although usually based around one or more pre-filmed reports, The Money Programme, and the arts strand Omnibus. There was also the science magazine Tomorrow’s World, the consumer slot That’s Life, and regular pop music programme Top of the Pops, presented this week by Tony Blackburn.

Dramas produced in the ��’s London studios during the week were The Onedin Line, set in the world of sailing ships during the 19th century, an dramatisation of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, and an episode of the final series of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green.

It's a Mystery...

The main production in TC1 was The Chester Mystery Plays, a technically complex adaptation of the medieval folk dramas starring Tom Courtenay as Jesus. It made heavy use of blue screen electronic effects (then called CSO or Colour Separation Overlay by the ��, and Chromakey elsewhere) which allowed backgrounds and other special effects to be created cheaply – although it required careful alignment of picture elements and lighting to be effective. Often, non-naturalistic dramas like this one were better suited to the technique than conventional plays.

An aerial view of Television Centre in the mid-1970s, when lots more people drove to work and there was still a stadium at White City

Daily current affairs took the form of two strands, Nationwide in the early evening and Tonight, which was often the last programme before closedown on �� One. Nationwide’s unique selling point was linking up the nations and regions of the ��, both through the daily local programmes which formed the first part of each edition, and by including local stories of national interest, or a local perspectives on a national issue, in the networked part of the show - it also often included humorous items from around the country. In this particular week, Nationwide featured a special series of reports from Belfast.

Lime Grove and the Television Theatre

Grandstand, Match of the Day and Nationwide were all broadcast live this week from Studio E at Lime Grove, which was the only studio in that building in operation at the time. Normally the workload would be shared with Studio D, amongst whose many claims to fame was as the original studio used for Doctor Who, but it was out of action between the beginning of the year and the late spring. Lime Grove had been a film studio originally, acquired by the �� at the end of the 1940s to help with production space as television began to expand. It was located on the street of the same name not far from Television Centre.

Also nearby was the �� Television Theatre, formerly the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a variety theatre built in 1903. It was bought by the �� 50 years later and saw service for them until the start of the 1990s. With built-in audience seating it was ideal for light entertainment series, game shows, chat shows and music concerts. Four shows were hosted there in this week: Nana Mouskouri, Crackerjack, It's Cliff - & Friends, and Ancestral Voices – the last of these being an educational series about musical instruments.

English regions output - Birmingham's Pebble Mill at One with Marian Foster (top left), The Brothers (top right) and Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan (bottom left); and Manchester's Screen Test

The penultimate two columns on the form are for the Presentation Studios A and B, which were originally designed for continuity announcements by �� One and �� Two respectively, when these were done in-vision. As a very small studio, "Pres A" was used this week for Weather Forecasts and Promotions (i.e. trailers) while "Pres B" was employed for the �� Two current affairs series Newsday, and various other small productions including Film Night – one of the two surviving spin-offs from Late Night Line-up, the �� Two review series that ran from 1964 to 1972. The other was The Old Grey Whistle Test, not listed on the form as this week’s edition was a pre-filmed concert by Supertramp from Hammersmith Odeon.

Nations and Regions

Finally, there is the column showing productions in other studios – Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, with Broadcasting House also squeezed in here – the small TV studio maintained there listed this week for Drama Auditions. Each of the regions had their own specialities, as did the Nations – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Natural History shows typically came from Bristol, for example, while Birmingham was the home of English Regions Drama – its current big hit being the family saga The Brothers - and they all produced a range of material for their local audience in addition to their network commitments.

So, that was the week that was Week 4, 1976: a typical week in the history of �� TV production, and a cross section of �� TV output the best part of half a century ago. �� Television had come a long way since the days of two small studios at Alexandra Palace in the 1930s; it had a long way to go still…

When is a Listing not a Listing? When it's a Gag...

2020-12-22T16:15:13+00:00

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue's Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer and Humphrey Lyttleton, with a couple of their inventive listings...

Let's face it, Radio Times billings are supposed to tell you what a programme is about, who is in it, when it's on, and that kind of useful information. But sometimes, they veer off course...

Of course sometimes a programme is changed at the last minute, but by and large most listings describe what is going to be transmitted.

But once in a while, usually for comedic reasons, the billing has nothing to do with the programme - or it subverts the format and accepted customs. So for a bit of pre-festive frivolity in these difficult times, we're taking a brief look at some of the shows that have indulged in comedy listings over the years.

The first of our favourites accompanied the iconic I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue - Radio 4's "antidote to panel games" which is still going strong, despite the sad deaths of some of its finest contributors: including former regular panellists Willie Rushton and Jeremy Hardy, legendary chairman Humphrey Lyttelton and, earlier this year, founding-panellist Tim Brooke Taylor.

Another disappointment for dedicated 'Clue' listeners in this 1986 billing (the painfully modest producer was Paul Mayhew-Archer)

"Clue's" listings were always slightly off-centre, but by the 80s they went off the scale, often in affectionate mockery of the cast and producers. Sometimes the show's billings could be downright misleading as in some of these cases: giving fans of The Archers and Clint Eastwood opportunities to tune in to something guaranteed to disappoint! Other billings baffled Radio Times readers in other ways - by being upside down, having the words in the wrong order, or being in French...

"Clue"'s ancestor, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, while not indulging in the full-blown comic listing, was not above inserting references to not altogether real contributors, with the unholy presence of Angus Prune regularly credited (impersonated by Bill Oddie to sing the theme tune in the show itself), later joined by I.T. Briddock.

In 1982 Not the Nine O'Clock News parodied the previous autumn's Radio Times cover for historical drama The Borgias (photomontage by Michael Bennett, hand-tinting by Amanda Currey

Not the Nine O'Clock News was the product of a later generation of satirists, and was an amalgam of current affairs and comedy influences. As such there were two producers: Sean Hardie, who had a news background, and John Lloyd, a graduate of the Cambridge Footlights, one-time flatmate of Douglas Adams and former �� radio producer, who would go on to help create Blackadder, Have I Got News for You and QI.

Plans for the programme got off to a bad start. The show was scheduled for the spring of 1979, but the announcement of a general election meant that the first two billed episodes were never shown, although some of the material was used in later episodes. Not the 9 O'Clock News eventually saw the light of day in the autumn of that year, and was quickly a cult success, if only with people who didn't want to watch the news...

Joke billings for the series soon began to appear in Radio Times and fans looked forward to seeing what the team would come up with next: as with I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, these ranged from the mildly misleading to the blatantly obscure: a title in Korean and a whole listing in Welsh. Their finest hour came with the Radio Times cover for the final series in 1982, parodying the previous autumn's cover for the lavish historical drama The Borgias.

Burkiss Way performer Jo Kendall and sometime producer David Hatch were both part of the team of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and also worked on early editions of "Clue"

Cult Radio 4 series The Burkiss Way, which ran from 1976 to 1980, is another of our favourites. It was the development of a short-lived Radio 3 comedy called The Half-Open University, and its main writers David Renwick and Andrew Marshall also contributed to Week Ending and The News Huddlines. Their later work included Alexei Sayle's Stuff (another show whose Radio Times listings subverted the genre) and each went on to create a successful TV sitcom (respectively One Foot in the Grave and 2 Point 4 Children), while Renwick also wrote Jonathan Creek.

Billings for the Burkiss Way played on the idea that the show was a correspondence course, in an era where adult education series were commonly found on the ��. Each episode was described as a "lesson" in "The Burkiss Way to Dynamic Living", supposedly overseen by Professor Emil Burkiss, and played with the conventions of Radio Times, as well as the conceit of being able to pursue an actual course of learning...

Other spoof Radio Times billings we love include those for Victoria Wood's TV series: the synopses for editions of Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV in 1985, and her eponymous series of short comedy plays in 1989, had elaborate descriptions of programmes which bore no relation to the contents of the programmes themselves.

While there is, for the aficionado, a reassuring familiarity to the recurring tropes of the classic RT billing - and we could rhapsodise about those at length - we also can't help revelling in the mischievous delights of the spoof billing, and that feeling of inclusion in a dash of irreverence...

The spoof billing is a rare occurrence now - with the proliferation of channels there is little enough room for each programme's details in any listings magazine, and so none for the extravagant flights of fancy these whimsical entries involved. They're just another missing link to a bygone era, like fountain pens, ten bob notes and Spangles...

(If you've spotted any great comic billings in Radio Times, please post a link to your favourite examples below...)

The View from the Top of the Form

2020-11-11T12:22:46+00:00

This title sequence from the 1970s was accompanied as ever by the familiar theme tune "Marching Strings"

Television Top of the Form, which began in 1962, pitted teams of school children against one another in a challenging weekly quiz show. Ken Lindsay, a schoolboy at Elgin Academy in Scotland, remembers the excitement of appearing as a contestant in 1973.

"I was in the sixth year at school when we were approached to be on TV Top of the Form," says Ken. "It was great – we were all really competitive and very into the whole thing."

Host Geoffrey Wheeler had taken the helm of the Television Top of the Form from the beginning, but had been the sole presenter since 1970 (earlier versions had been co-presented with David Dimbleby, among others). Wheeler was the question-master when Ken and his team-mates took part.

The programme was recorded 'as live' in front of the whole school. So was it nerve-wracking for Ken to be up in front of his peers, and under pressure to find the right answer? "You did get a bit of stick if you didn’t have a good round," says Ken. "But generally speaking people were very good to us." The Elgin Academy team won all their rounds and went on to be crowned winners at the end of the series.

The programme was recorded in colour, but few people had colour sets at that time, so Ken and his team-mates watched the programme back from a teacher’s house.

When Ken and his team-mates emerged victorious, the reward for their success was a trip to Hong Kong for another exciting quiz show. In 1967, Television Top of the Form had branched out with an international version called Transworld Top of the Form (later Transworld Top Team), initially with UK teams playing Australia. Satellite communication still being relatively new and expensive, the programmes were originally made by playing the game 'live' in sound only, with proceedings videotaped separately in each country, then assembling the programmes from these elements later.

Recording the 1973 Television Top of the Form final between Derby and Elgin, with �� outside broadcast cameras.

This version of the show continued until 1973, with teams from Canada, Hong Kong and the United States taking part, although by the time Ken took part the teams were sent overseas. The Elgin Academy team was flown out by the RAF on a VC10 transport plane, stopping off in Cyprus and the Maldives on the way.

"Back in 1973, kids didn’t go anywhere," says Ken. "It was really quite a thing to travel thousands of miles across the world."

That summer, the team disbanded and headed off to University. But there was one more surprise in store, when they were contacted again by the �� to take part in a one-off special quiz show hosted by Frank Bough – Use Your 'Euro' Loaf. "We thought it was all over," says Ken, "so to be asked to come on again and go to Television Centre, that was a bit of a thrill."

The programme was filmed on Ken’s 18th birthday and ended with the surreal spectacle of Frank Bough cutting up a loaf of bread and handing a slice to the contestants. "Unfortunately we lost the competition, but the hospitality in the Green Room afterwards was excellent. It was a good laugh!" says Ken.

Nearly 50 years on, Ken and his team-mates stay in touch, although they have yet to organise an online quiz! As for Television Top of the Form, it was nearing the end of its run when Ken was involved, with the final series being shown in the summer of 1975. The original radio version, plain Top of the Form, soldiered on, finally coming to an end in 1986 after a run of 38 years.

In its day though, Top of the Form and Television Top of the Form were a great opportunity for children to show their knowledge and quickness of reaction in a not-too-serious quiz format.

The Derby and Elgin teams pose for a photo at the recording of their Top of the Form appearance, with questionmaster Geoffrey Wheeler. Ken Lindsay is pictured on the right.

Life on Earth: How electronic music helped us 'see' nature

2020-10-01T15:47:11+00:00

Sir David Attenborough during filming for the 1979 Life on Earth series.

David Attenborough's landmark 1979 series Life on Earth brought the story of the evolution of life on the planet to TV audiences in glorious, vivid detail. The �� Music Library looks back at how a new style of music, by composer Edward Williams, was crucial to telling the story.

In reflecting on his personal history recording music around the world, Sir David Attenborough noted the singular power and immediacy of music to transport and transform: "music takes me back to those places 50 or 60 years ago… visual images don’t… but hearing the music takes me right back."

Before we see the stunning visuals of Attenborough's Life on Earth (1979), we hear composer Edward Williams' music. It is awesome - in the true sense of the word - and signals that something momentous is happening. The opening titles are as if Strauss were refracted through the lens of British post-war modernism. It is an invitation to imagine the world anew, from the very dawn of civilisation. It seems unthinkable that there’s not at least a small nod to Kubrick in there.

Born in 1921, Edward Williams studied music under, amongst others, Ralph Vaughan Williams before becoming a composer for film and television. With �� credits as far back as 1949, it was his experimental style and early adoption of electronic music that marked him out for a new and ambitious project - �� Two's landmark natural history documentary series - Life on Earth.

Edward Williams 'otherworldly' music - composed for David Attenborough's Life on Earth series

Edward Williams combined electronic music and orchestral instruments. To create the sound-world for the series he fed recordings of orchestral instruments through an early analogue synthesiser (the now iconic VCS 3), sculpting and transforming the sound of the acoustic instruments into electronic spectres as he did. The results remain magisterial, unique, and vivid, like the images for which they were created. They are also strange, almost "otherworldly."

When the series Life on Earth first appeared it was immediately recognised for what it was - a seismic shift, different from what had come before and shaping what would come next, in the output of natural history broadcasting.

Sound Pictures

"It began with birdsong and now it sends David Attenborough around the world" was Roy Plomley's summation of the first 25 years of the �� Natural History Unit. While you’d be forgiven for thinking that the stunning visuals of the natural history documentary are indispensable (along with, of course, David Attenborough), the origins of the �� Natural History Unit lie, surprisingly, in the distinctly 'non-visual' medium of radio.

The long-running radio series The Naturalist was a huge popular success, running for almost two decades from the mid 1940s and was key to the foundation of the �� Natural History Unit in Bristol. The series brought natural history to life using what were called "sound pictures" in the 40s and 50s. Many of these field recordings were created by legendary sound recordist Ludwig Koch, a German refugee who - despite being interned for a time as an "enemy alien" - had become a famous �� personality by the end of the war. His "sound picture" of the song of the curlew became the signature tune for The Naturalist. This technological advance allowed the �� to broadcast Nature directly into people’s homes for the first time, using nothing but sound, and people loved it.

Like The Naturalist before it, one problem for Life on Earth was how to deal with the "non-visual." For Life on Earth, this meant particularly the rather "small, insignificant and non-visual" start to the story of human evolution. The solution for both was the same - sound and technology.

Meet the Ancestors: Radio Times celebrated the start of Life on Earth with this cover showing eight single-cell organisms

The music for Life on Earth - like the footage - would have been unimaginable were it not for the profound technological advances of the preceding decade. Attenborough famously quipped that Life on Earth could not have happened were it not for the advent of computerised airline schedules. Likewise Williams could not have made its music were it not for the revolution in electronic music that was the rise of commercial portable synthesisers like the VCS 3.

That decade also brought a shift towards a more cinematically informed and ambitious approach to the natural history documentary at the ��, a place (and genre) where the enthusiastic amateur had long driven production. Life on Earth was both the arrival point of that development, and the origin of a recognisably modern form. Like its soundtrack, the series is at once familiar and strange.

Special sounds

Edward Williams was enlisted for Life on Earth because of his experience and skill in writing for "combinations of electronic and conventional musical instruments." While, during planning, it was thought some "special sounds" for the series might have to be made in the ��’s own experimental sonic laboratory - the Radiophonic Workshop - their eventual involvement appears limited.

Edward Williams' hand-written score for Life on Earth part 4, with notation matching music precisely to the pictures (at top)

Life on Earth had to blur the lines between our familiar lived experienced of the world, and the strange scientific reality of natural history. Edwards Williams, by combining his "special sounds" with "conventional musical instruments", took up this challenge, and transformed the soundtrack of science fiction into the music of scientific fact.

For a series characterised by effortless cuts from one part of the globe to the other, it’s also perhaps ironic to think that part of Edward Williams’ appeal as composer would have been his specific geographic location. Based in Bristol himself, Williams worked closely with the creative team. The score bears witness to this collaboration. On one characteristic page, from the 4th episode, Williams has scrawled non-musical indicators in fractions of seconds, wedding sound to image with scientific precision: "STEP CUT FOOTUP FOOTDOWN FOOTUP LANDS LANDS." The music masterfully scores both the edit and the visual dance of the insect.

It might seem a paradox that in this series, technology should bring us closer to Nature’s marvels, but the stunning visuals of the nature documentary do not conjure marvels alone. The "invisible" work of the soundtrack might be just as important, and even more enduring. In the end music takes us "back to those places 50 or 60 years ago…"

Coming to You Live - The Origins of Outside Broadcast Television

2020-08-16T08:45:00+00:00

�� technicians set up one of the three cameras used to cover the 1937 Coronation procession - the first true �� television outside broadcast

Television outside broadcasts began with a bang on 12 May 1937, with the Coronation procession of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Although the coverage was limited to a group of three cameras on Apsley Gate, at the corner of Hyde Park, it was a start – and was followed by an ever-widening range of outside broadcasts over the next two years, before television closed down on the eve of the World War Two.

�� Television had been transmitting as a full service since 2 November 1936, and until that point, broadcasts emanated from the studios at Alexandra Palace or its grounds - from the terrace of the Palace and parts of Alexandra Park. The Coronation was the first time a transmission was achieved at a real distance from �� TV's headquarters.

To be strictly accurate however, even these experiments were not the first television outside broadcasts. As with many innovations, it comes down to "it depends what you mean by..." John Logie Baird’s experiments with 30-line television, beginning in the early 1920s, included several attempts to televise outside the studio. In 1928 he produced a closed-circuit image of the musical comedy star Jack Buchanan on the roof of his premises in London’s Long Acre, and by 1931 a mobile transmitting van had been developed, allowing Baird to transmit from the finish line of the Derby.

Some of the Arsenal team of 1937 inspect a television camera, in the days when it would have cost more than they did...

Sport was an obvious candidate for outside broadcasts – with tennis from Wimbledon the first to be seen, just a month after the Coronation. Cricket, rugby and football were also shown in time – although there was resistance from the Football League from the start to televising games, and apart from practice matches, the only football matches seen pre-war were the F.A. Cup Finals of 1938 and 1939. This, however, led to other events being covered more fully, including unusual sports like polo, archery and water sports, from locations such as Roehampton and Hurlingham.

The 1937 Coronation was also not the only national event that television covered, and many of the pioneering subjects are still represented in the present era. For example Trooping the Colour, the Lord Mayor’s Show, and the Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph were seen on the small screen in the 1930s – and the latter was probably the first time the present Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, was seen on television.

Stage productions were another novel use for outside broadcasts. Most pre-war TV plays were remounted theatre productions, and most involved the cast of a current show coming into the studio to perform extracts. The first play to be televised from an actual theatre was Magyar Melody, on 27 March 1939, while Me and My Girl, the famous show that gave the world "The Lambeth Walk" was seen on 1 May. However, managements were nervous of the possibility of television taking away the potential audience for a play, and only a few shows were broadcast in this way.

One early 'interest' outside broadcast came from the bus depot at Chiswick in West London

Apart from sport, drama and national events, outside broadcasts were also used to show gardening, from the ��’s own garden in the grounds of Alexandra Palace and at the Chelsea Flower Show, farming, with a series of broadcasts from a working farm at Waltham Cross, and the workings of bus depots, the Post Office, the railways, the police, aerodromes – and many other locations. Quite early on came the first broadcasts from London Zoo, and this became a regular feature of the summer months.

One of the more notable occasions (albeit unbilled) which outside broadcast television witnessed came in September 1938, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain began the modern phenomenon of shuttle diplomacy, flying between London and Germany to negotiate the Munich Agreement. On two occasions �� television cameras were at Heston aerodrome (not far from the present-day Heathrow airport) for his return.

Other outside broadcasts anticipated the impending war. As early as 1936 a "local" OB from the terrace of Alexandra Palace showed anti-aircraft guns in action (to the alarm of local residents), while in July 1939 a large display by various military forces and civilian auxiliaries was televised from Hyde Park.

Singer Adelaide Hall made several appearances at the RadiOlympia exhibition - this is from 1947, but her first was in 1939

By 1939 another tradition that had been established was television’s relationship with the RadiOlympia trade show. This exhibition, which was open to the public, was the showcase of the radio industry. It had received a shot in the arm in 1936 when it staged the first demonstrations of �� high-definition TV, organised at very short notice to help sell stands at the event. The first primitive programmes by the Baird 240-line and Marconi-EMI 405-line systems were rushed into production, although at that year’s RadiOlympia, and 1937's, all content emanated from Alexandra Palace.

By 1938, facilities were put in place so that programmes could be transmitted from a temporary studio at Olympia itself. One of the most popular features was Come and Be Televised, a regular morning programme during the exhibition. This was an early talent show in effect, a kind of Britain’s Got Talent of its age. There weren’t many big stars discovered as a result, though at least one 1939 contributor went on to have a career in showbusiness – at the time listed as Bruce Johnston, he became better known under the surname Forsyth.

Come and Be Televised was almost the last programme shown before the closedown of television on 1 September 1939 – it was followed by a Mickey Mouse cartoon before the unceremonious switch-off. When television returned nearly seven years later, it began on an outside broadcast as well – with a 'local' OB of announcer Jasmine Bligh arriving at the doors of Alexandra Palace. And one of the first major television events post-war was also an outside broadcast – the Victory Parade.

Trooping the Colour has been a regular outside broadcast on television since 1937 - our picture shows part of the 1971 ceremony when the colour trooped was that of the 2nd Batallion Grenadier Guards

Television outside broadcasts became one of the major elements of the medium through the next 20 years, with sport and events, including the 1948 Olympic Games and the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the latter of which is generally recognised as the great turning point in the popularity of television. That event was also one of the highlights in the career of the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, who became the go-to man for commentary on state occasions, and many other outside broadcasts great and small.

In the years since, outside broadcasts have become a standard part of the television palette, with sport and great state occasions featured alongside concerts from the Proms to Glastonbury. Arguably however, outside broadcasts reached their zenith in the 1960s – with satellite broadcasting allowing everything into our homes, from the Tokyo Olympics to the coverage of the space programme – live pictures from the moon must be the ultimate OB – as well as occasions like the 1966 World Cup and the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.

In the early days of television when most programmes were live, the outside broadcast was the epitome of television’s great selling point – that it could show you something happening far away, at the moment it was happening. That ability is something we rarely appreciate nowadays – but it still has to be admitted that some of the most compelling and world-changing events of recent years would have been very different in our memories had television not been there to share them with us.

Patrick Troughton at 100: A Television Actor

2020-03-24T11:37:04+00:00

Patrick Troughton was the Radio Times cover star in January 1968, in a still taken from the recent Doctor Who story The Ice Warriors

Patrick Troughton is perhaps best remembered for a role he played originally for just three years – Doctor Who. However, he had a successful career that lasted over four decades, encompassing radio, TV and film.

Troughton, who was born 100 years ago, on 25 March 1920, was much-respected character actor. The bulk of his work was in TV, but he also worked in radio and films. He was less keen on the stage, referring to theatre acting as "shouting in the evenings".

Troughton’s interest in performing began while at school, inspired by hearing actress Fay Compton on the radio. After drama school he won a scholarship to study in Long Island, New York State. When war broke out in September 1939, he was nearly an early casualty when the ship in which he was returning to England was sunk. In 1941 he was called up into the Royal Navy and spent most of his war on motor torpedo boats patrolling coastal waters.

In the 1948 production of RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), Troughton played the rebellious robot Radius - the original 'robots' were organic, not mechanical...

Although radio continued broadcasting throughout the war, television had closed down in 1939. It resumed in June 1946, and Troughton’s first credit in the medium was in October 1947 in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and the following year he played the robot Radius in RUR – Rossum’s Universal Robots, the play which coined the word 'robot'. While his television appearances became fewer when he joined �� radio’s drama repertory company in 1951, the next year he was cast as Alan Breck in the 1952 TV adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped, and his television appearances became more and more frequent.

In 1953 Troughton was given his first major television lead, as Robin Hood for Children’s Television – which is also his first role for which any material exists. Many other TV credits followed, including the 1956 remake of Kidnapped. When ITV started transmissions in 1955, he appeared in many filmed series for them – including parts in The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene.

An important break for Troughton was the title role in Paul of Tarsus, the 1960 sequel to 1956’s Jesus of Nazareth – a well-remembered production which was still being referenced when he was cast in Doctor Who. The early 1960s saw Troughton take recurring roles in the �� soap opera Compact, as schoolteacher Mr Miller in Dr Finlay’s Casebook, and as the villainous Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop. Other parts were one-offs, in series like Z Cars and Adam Adamant Lives!, but he was rarely off the screen.

Troughton helped Blue Peter presenters John Noakes, Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves judge the entries for the 1967 Design-a-Monster competition

Troughton's most prominent role however came in 1966, when he was offered the lead in Doctor Who, replacing the original star, William Hartnell. Doctor Who began in November 1963 as an attempt to find a regular family programme for Saturday teatimes between Grandstand and record review series Juke Box Jury. Previously a mixture of imported series, comedies (like Billy Bunter) and adventure stories (Garry Halliday, The Chem. Lab. Mystery) had filled the gap. In 1963 the �� transferred children’s drama to its main drama group, whose head, Sydney Newman, commissioned research into this problem, ending up with a very successful answer.

After three years, despite the huge success of the Daleks, ratings for Doctor Who started to struggle, and the ill-health of William Hartnell posed a quandary – to end the series or reinvent it. Perhaps in part because of Newman’s affection for the programme, the latter choice was made. Shaun Sutton, head of Drama Serials, and producer Innes Lloyd, agreed to offer the part of the Doctor to Troughton – who despite misgivings, accepted.

Troughton worried that being the new Doctor might typecast him and limit future work, especially if the recast series failed to win over viewers, but he decided he could not turn down a regular star salary. He began recording Doctor Who in October 1966, firstly in a brief glimpse at the end of Hartnell’s swan-song The Tenth Planet, as the Doctor regenerated on screen for the first time.

In preparing for the role, Troughton toyed with the idea of wearing outlandish costumes and heavy make-up, so people might somehow not recognise him. Sydney Newman vetoed the more extreme ideas, insisting on what he called a “cosmic hobo” guise. The new Doctor’s costume was a kind of dishevelled parody of Hartnell’s, with loose fitting check trousers, an oversized tailcoat, and spotted bow tie – though both the costume and Troughton’s performance were toned down as he got used to the new role.

The Troughton era of Doctor Who was known for its memorable monsters - pictured, a Yeti, an Ice Warrior, a Dalek, a Cyberman (behind Troughton) and a Quark

Patrick Troughton’s years in Doctor Who showed that it was feasible to change the lead in the series, and he enabled it to survive far beyond his era - in fact for another half century. His time in the show was also famous for its monsters, like the Cybermen, the Yeti and the Ice Warriors. However Troughton also demonstrated his range in a monster-less story called The Enemy of the World, in which he played a dual role.

In all but one of his stories Troughton was partnered by Frazer Hines, playing Jamie, a Scottish highland warrior rescued from 1746 – Troughton got on well with the actor, with whom he had previously worked in the 1964 historical drama Smugglers' Bay.

From the off, the pressure of work on Troughton in Doctor Who was great. At that time the series was broadcast most of the year round, and episodes were recorded individually a few weeks in advance of transmission. By early 1967 the gap between recording and transmission had shrunk to a week. Even allowing for summer breaks, a similar punishing schedule prevailed throughout his time in the role. Being the star of a high profile series which, while not broadcast live, had few allowances for error, was hard to cope with.

One of Patrick Troughton's most memorable later roles was as Cole Hawlings in John Masefield's The Box of Delights (1984)

By 1969 Troughton had decided to leave Doctor Who. His worries about typecasting were thankfully dispelled as he was immediately offered the major part of the Duke of Norfolk in the prestigious historical drama The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

Troughton reverted easily to his former existence as a character actor. He appeared in programmes like A Family at War, Doomwatch, Colditz, Z Cars and Angels, and even turned up in Doctor Who’s 10th anniversary story The Three Doctors. He made occasional films – notably The Omen – and continued to perform in radio plays. Later TV roles included parts in Treasure Island, The Feathered Serpent, Nanny, and as the mysterious Cole Hawlings in the 1984 children’s serial The Box of Delights.

After suffering a heart attack, he had to drop out of reprising his role as Quilp in a 1979 production of The Old Curiosity Shop. In time he recovered and resumed his career, returning to Doctor Who in another anniversary show, 1983’s The Five Doctors (and two years later in the story The Two Doctors). In 1983 he was persuaded to attend his first Doctor Who convention – the massive ��-run celebration of the show’s two decades held at Longleat House. Essentially a private man who previously resisted publicity, Troughton now discovered that he enjoyed attending such conventions, often alongside his successor in the role, Jon Pertwee. While visiting the United States for an event in 1987, Troughton suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 67.

Patrick Troughton’s legacy as one of the first great exponents of television acting is secure. For a generation, Patrick Troughton was their Doctor – but for many others, within and outside the acting fraternity, he was a consummate and admirable performer, who never gave less than his best.

References:

Patrick Troughton: The Biography of the Second Doctor Who – Michael Troughton, Hirst Publishing, Andover, 2012

Doctor Who: The Complete History Vol.9 – ed. John Ainsworth, Panini UK Ltd/Hachette Partworks Ltd, 2016

Tales from bohemia: The making of Arena’s Chelsea Hotel

2020-02-28T14:30:00+00:00

For five decades, the ��’s flagship documentary series Arena brought to light unheard stories from outside the mainstream; tales of avant-garde artists, LGBTQ icons, feminists, civil rights activists and more. We spoke to Bafta award-winning Anthony Wall, who - as Editor between 1985 and 2018 - was instrumental in shaping the series. Wall talked to �� Genome about his favourite Arena episode: Chelsea Hotel.

The historic Chelsea Hotel in New York City has been a magnet for creativity since its construction in 1884. Some of the 20th Century’s most acclaimed artists, musicians, and writers have called the Chelsea Hotel home, including Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Mark Twain, and Stanley Kubrick, among many others.

Anthony Wall went on a fact-finding mission with then series editor Alan Yentob to the United States in 1979, and returned with the concept for an Arena film about the Chelsea Hotel. By coincidence, director Nigel Finch had had the same idea. As then-researcher on the film, Wall, with Finch, hand-picked the film’s idiosyncratic cast of characters. The most memorable for Wall, a peculiar interview with long-time Chelsea Hotel resident, Nico…

Nico sings in a scene from �� Arena's Chelsea Hotel

On a grey, miserable autumn day in 1979, film-maker Anthony Wall waited in an Irish bar in New York City for his next interviewee – the 1960s pop icon Nico. She was to feature in the next film he was planning about the legendary Chelsea Hotel.

Nico, a singer, songwriter, model and actress, rose to brief prominence in 1966 after starring in artist Andy Warhol’s well-known film - Chelsea Girls - about women living in the hotel. "The most amusing thing", says Wall, "was that Nico had just been thrown out (of the Chelsea Hotel)".

Wall had arranged to meet her in a New York City Irish pub just next door to the Chelsea Hotel. "I walked in," says Wall. "The Jukebox was blaring a version of Night and Day, and there was a woman at the bar." Wall was disappointed. He thought she hadn’t turned up. "In my mind Nico is this stunning angel from the cover of the Velvet Underground and Nico album, and [there was] this slightly overweight woman. And then," he says, "I hear: 'I would like a piña colada.' And it was unmistakingly her."

The conversation that ensued was "spectactularly off the wall", he says. "[She] explained that she was in the Blarney Stone because at the bottom of the Chelsea there is a restaurant… and she’d said she’d been banned because she’d complained that the piña coladas weren’t strong enough. God knows what other misdemeanours she was responsible for…"

Wall continues: "So Nico was in the Blarney Stone (pub), where the piña coladas were strong enough, and probably a lot cheaper, and she pointed to the Jukebox and said: 'put on 166', and it was God Bless America, by Kate Smith.

"She said ‘I love national anthems. I love the rhythms.'"

And so the interview commenced.

Scene from “Arena: Chelsea Hotel” William Burroughs and Andy Warhol having dinner in the room where Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey

Wall researched numerous artists, performers, and writers for the Chelsea Hotel Arena film, all of whom were living in the hotel at the time. However, there were many other residents clamouring to secure their 15 minutes of fame.

"For every Nico…there were 10 guys who decided that being a bank manager in Omaha Nebraska was not for them, that they wanted to realise the true artist inside themselves. So the place was largely full of people who weren’t very good at art but had decided that that’s what they were going to do with their lives. A lot of the art in the lobby was done by these people. And their wives would phone up and demand to know why they weren’t in the film…"

Why was this his favourite film?

"Sometimes it happens [that] there’s a kind of magic that seems just automatically to come out of the sprinklers onto a project", says Wall, "and [this] had it in spades. It’s a long time ago but it’s still my favourite Arena, it was definitely Nigel [Finch’s] favourite as well."

Roy Plomley in Arena: Desert Island Discs, directed by Anthony Wall. A look at the affection for and obsessions inspired by radio

Anthony Wall and Nigel Finch (Director of Arena: Chelsea Hotel, and co-editor of the series with Wall until his passing in 1995) were 28 and 30 years old (respectively) when they filmed Chelsea Hotel. He cites his youthful disposition as inspiration for many of the themes in the earliest Arena films. By leading with their interest in the beats and wider alternative culture, Wall and the Arena team were making space for disenfranchised voices in cinema long before those stories were included in the canon.

Wall says, "A lot of it is in the Chelsea: LGBT, identity, feminism, race, Windrush, national identity, all of these things we were doing when…you were not rewarded for doing those things…" Wall’s approach resulted in a collection of timeless films that feel as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

Wall’s advice for emerging filmmakers beginning their careers today: First, a quote from his former Arena collaborator Alan Yentob, who went on to serve as �� Creative Director until 2015: "Oh just make it interesting."

Second, make it visual, says Wall: "whether it’s about a big famous thing or whether it’s about something else, something no one’s ever heard of, the essence of it is to realise it visually, in terms of its atmosphere, and the attitudes of people.

"[Chelsea Hotel] was a slightly difficult film to cut because it was a series of episodes, as opposed to one obvious narrative. But each individual sequence was absolutely as Nigel envisioned it. And it was just instinctive - you make that first proposition, then you make a second one. It’s got to gather the first one into the second one, and gather them both into the third one, gather all three into the fourth one. You’re keeping that going and maybe not giving away too much information because… you don’t really want the penny to go all the way down to the slot, you want that to happen at the end."

Third, some advice from Wall’s own personal hero, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who when asked “What advice would you give to young filmmakers?” answered, “Never do anything that goes against your conscience.”

“That is very sound advice,” says Wall.

This article has been updated to include other contributors and update a quote.

You can watch the full Arena Chelsea Hotel film on �� iPlayer.

From Band Waggon to Barnacle Bill - a short history of theme tunes

2020-01-14T11:32:25+00:00

Programmes don't always stick with the same signature tune. After running six years, Match of the Day introduced a new theme in 1970...

They’re rarely mentioned in the programme schedules, but theme tunes are a vital ingredient in programme-making. We take a look at the evolution of signature music, and think about some best-loved examples.

So you’ve got a new television (or radio) series to produce. You’ve got the scripts, the performers, the studio and the designs for sets and costumes. But hang on – what about music? You may want a score to run through the whole production, or not – but what about a signature tune?

Most programmes have a theme tune, whether it’s the news or a soap opera, a documentary series, a sitcom or a costume drama. These pieces of music have been a feature of broadcasting since its early days. They predate it, in fact, from the time when dance bands, singers and stage comedians had a piece of music or a song that identified them and distinguished them from their rivals.

Broadcasting brought its own reasons for signature music. With the constant demand for content to fill the airwaves, it made sense to find formats that would provide series, and that led to using theme tunes to announce them to listeners. Theme tunes "both identify and put you in the mood," stated a Regional Programme listing in 1934: "…nothing [could be] more suitable to In Town Tonight than the exciting Knightsbridge March from the London Suite by Eric Coates."

The Band Waggon production team work on the script with star comedian Arthur Askey (second from right)

The early days

Even in the 1930s, radio drama serials such as Paul Temple made use of catchy music (originally a piece from Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Scheherezade", later and more familiarly "Coronation Scot") and comedies like Band Waggon (1938) and It’s That Man Again (1939) employed the same device. The music was often performed live by an orchestra, and in both the comedies the theme was a song with lyrics setting up the series concept. Indeed the use of a specially composed song has become a staple of theme tune writing over the years, as a way of setting up the show's content - think of Only Fools and Horses.... for example.

The trend for memorable themes continued into the 1940s, with thriller serial Dick Barton – Special Agent, and popular comedy shows like Take It from Here. The 1950s brought Hancock's Half-Hour, with its memorable signature tune by Wally Stott, and of course "Barwick Green", the theme to The Archers, which became, and remains, instantly recognisable.

Television also employed theme tunes from its earliest days - with series such as Picture Page and the light drama Ann and Harold, while most outside broadcasts in the 1930s were heralded by the record "The Eyes of the World are on You" by Louis Levy and the Gaumont British Symphony Orchestra.

The theme for The Sky at Night is from Sibelius's incidental music to Maurice Maeterlinck's tragedy, Pelleas et Melisande

I’ve heard this one before…

A number of successful programmes relied on library music and made certain off-the-shelf tunes synonymous with their brand. Neil Richardson’s "Approaching Menace" is inextricably linked with the famous black leather chair of quiz show Mastermind, while Blue Peter made "Barnacle Bill" a staple of children’s TV through a number of versions. Some series even successfully recycled another programme’s theme tune – for example, the school drama Grange Hill used the library track "Chicken Man", another version of which later introduced the ITV game show Give Us A Clue. More recently the �� satire W1A employed "Las Vegas", a piece of stock music well-known as the original theme of Animal Magic.

Television has often breathed new life into classical tracks. Monty Python’s Flying Circus brought John Philip Sousa’s "Liberty Bell" to a new audience, while the period drama The Onedin Line used part of Khachaturian's "Spartacus" to great effect. The atmospheric "At the Castle Gate", from Sibelius’ "Pelleas et Mellisande", is now instantly recognisable to viewers of the long-running astronomy series The Sky at Night (although it had previously been used for the 1955 series The Modern Universe).

Made to measure

Much incidental music is composed especially for a particular programme, and so a specially composed theme can be part of that package. It is a more expensive option, but one that produces a tune uniquely associated with the show. Of course, this approach can provide inspiration, with one 1937 programme playing on the idea of the programme title - The �� Presents the ABC - to produce a perfectly apposite composition: "The signature tune, specially composed by Reginald Foort and Claude Ferring, will be introduced in an ingenious way - a march founded on the letters of the scale…"

One early idea for the Doctor Who theme was to use the French group Les Structures Sonores, who used glass instruments to make ethereal, unearthly music - some of their records were later used for incidental music in the series

Ron Grainer - the theme master

Some composers are most remembered, not for their standalone music written for its own sake, but for how they’ve influenced popular culture through the theme music for a favourite television programme. One of the great theme tune composers was the Australian Ron Grainer, whose �� career began in 1959 as a musical associate for comedian Tommy Trinder’s series Trinder Box. Grainer composed the music for the police drama Maigret in 1960, which resulted in the tune being released as a record, both on a single and on an album of the incidental score. He was thereafter in demand for television themes, becoming the composer for Steptoe and Son and That Was the Week That Was, before, most famously, writing the signature tune for a new science-fiction series - Doctor Who.

Radiophonics

They had already produced a number of theme tunes, when in 1963, Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert approached Ron Grainer to produce a signature tune for Doctor Who. He dashed it off at top speed and it was handed over to the �� Radiophonic Workshop to realise - in the hope that they would produce something suitably futuristic and mysterious.

The �� Radiophonic Workshop had been established in 1958 to provide music and effects using untraditional means, such as white noise generators, tape machines (altering the speed of sounds, playing them backwards, overlaying and re-recording) and an assortment of junk and random objects to produce new kinds of sound - this was several years before synthesisers became available. When the finished Doctor Who theme was played back to Grainer by the Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire, his reaction was: "Did I write that?" – but it has become one of the best known theme tunes of all time, and after several arrangements over more than half a century, is still in use today.

Some people can't get to sleep unless they have heard the mellifluous tones of "Sailing By", the tune which precedes the Shipping Forecast...

Earworms

Sometimes theme tunes take on a life of their own. One 2016 poll identified the theme tunes to Match of the Day, EastEnders and Benny Hill as among the top 50 “earworms”, while another 2009 survey saw the theme tune to The Shipping Forecast, "Sailing By", among the most requested funeral music. A good theme tune can become part of popular culture, and as with the Maigret theme a record of it can become a hit.

The theme tune has almost become a genre of music in its own right. Getting a theme that is memorable, that instantly reminds the viewer or listener of the show it is associated is a difficult art, and one that has challenged composers and music consultants and editors down the decades.

Do you have a favourite theme tune? Let us know in the space below…

Radio Times - the 1950s pages

2019-12-22T09:00:00+00:00

The Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was celebrated with this rare 1950s colour Radio Times cover, designed by Eric Fraser

Following the release of the magazine pages of Radio Times from the 20s, 30s and 40s, the full pages from the next decade, the 1950s, are now available on the �� Genome website.

The 1950s was a time of expansion for broadcasting, especially television. The decade saw a wide range of new �� programmes and technological innovations which took television throughout the UK and beyond. The scope of radio broadened and it was a fertile time for new comedy, drama and features.

Radio Times reflects these changes on its covers and in the rest of its contents, including articles, photographs and artwork, and in the letters pages. �� Genome users will now be able to read this material from the 1950s. We hope this will help our users to correct some of the errors in the listings, caused as a result of the original scanning of the magazine - as well as learning more about the changes to broadcasting during the decade.

Television from the Midlands began at the end of 1949 with the opening of the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, and the North of England, Central Scotland and other regions followed. By Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in June 1953 the largest population centres of the UK were covered, and for the first time the television audience for an event outstripped that of radio. The Radio Times magazine brought news of these developments to its millions of readers.

This February 1957 Radio Times cover heralds the end of the "Toddlers' Truce" when television closed down for an hour between six and seven p.m.

Outside broadcasting was perhaps the most adventurous aspect of television in the 1950s. TV first reached overseas in 1950, with a live broadcast from Calais, and in 1954 the Eurovision network was established. Two years later the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast, which the �� relayed.

Although television in the 50s was mostly live, filmed programmes became more common. David Attenborough presented his first wildlife documentaries in the series Zoo Quest, and favourites for younger children like Andy Pandy, the Flowerpot Men and the Woodentops were made on film, so they could be repeated for years to come.

Children’s television was becoming a more important part of the schedule, and the ��’s new Lime Grove studios became the home of children’s programming, with a wide range of programmes both factual and fictional. Blue Peter was launched in 1958, arguably the ideal children’s magazine format – certainly the longest-lived. Radio was still a destination for children however, with Children’s Hour and the new pre-school series Listen with Mother.

With the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, music that appealed to teenagers made its way onto the air in Saturday Club (originally Saturday Skiffle Club), Six-Five Special and Juke Box Jury. Other musical tastes were not neglected – the Third Programme featured the more challenging classics, while its frequency also hosted the more mainstream Music Programme in the daytime from 1957. Jazz, dance and light music were featured.

Current affairs took a step forward in 1953 with Panorama, originally a broadly-based magazine, which gradually focussed more on political and social matters. Daily topical magazine Tonight joined it in 1957, offering a lighter take on events. General Election coverage began in 1950, and 1954 saw the first live television news bulletin. Other innovations included the first prime ministerial broadcast by Sir Anthony Eden at the height of the Suez crisis and in 1957, the first television broadcast of the Queen’s Christmas Day message.

Tony Hancock appeared on the cover of this 1959 edition of Radio Times to promote the latest series of Hancock's Half-Hour

Drama continued to be a major part of �� output. In 1950, �� listeners first tuned in to the goings on in Ambridge, with the advent of The Archers. The first television soap opera, The Grove Family, appeared on �� TV in 1954 and featured on the front cover of Radio Times the following year. The 50s was also a golden age for radio comedy, with the arrival of The Goon Show (originally "Crazy People"), The Navy Lark and Hancock’s Half-Hour.

Technology was making leaps and bounds, sometimes more behind the scenes than to the viewing and listening public. In radio, the first experiments with stereo were carried out, while in television the use of recording increased, at first by filming from a TV screen, and later on videotape. Colour television test transmissions began.

The 50s were still an era where sound broadcasting had a major impact, but it was a time of consolidation rather than expansion, and one where the traditional �� of sound radio had to face up to the fact that it was television that would dominate in future. This unfolding story can be read about in detail now, in the pages of the Radio Times magazines that are available on the Genome website.

It's... Genome's Monty Python 50th Anniversary Quiz

2019-10-05T10:00:00+00:00

Picture quiz question: Palin and Jones's 1976 pilot show Tomkinson's Schooldays led to which series?

To celebrate half a century of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Genome indulges in a little light quizzing - how well do you know your Pythons?

1. Which Python presented a Radio 1 series called Radio 5?

2. Which Python wrote linking material for the 1967 series This is Petula Clark?

3. Which Python co-founded the training film company Video Arts with Yes Minister’s co-writer Anthony Jay?

4. Which Python was married to �� make-up artist Maggie Weston, who worked on the series?

5. Which Python was the first to appear in the series?

6. Which Python presented the April Fool’s Day 1986 edition of Woman’s Hour – retitled Man’s Hour?

Answers below...

Picture quiz answer: Ripping Yarns

1. Eric Idle – assisted by Lyn Ashley, aka Mrs. Idle. Fun fact – she was a regular in �� soap opera Compact and appeared in the 1965 Doctor Who story "Galaxy 4" as a Drahvin.

2. Graham Chapman – working with Robert Gray. Most of the Pythons did bread-and-butter writing of linking material for assorted light entertainment shows. Among John Cleese’s first professional writing was material for Yule Be Surprised, a 1963 Christmas special starring Brian Rix and Terry Scott.

3. John Cleese – Cleese and Jay first worked together on The Frost Report (1966-7), to which Chapman, Palin, Jones and Idle also contributed scripts.

4. Terry Gilliam – they’ve been married since 1973. "Mrs. Idle" (see above - but she's actually credited as that) and Connie Booth, then married to John Cleese, both appeared in Python episodes.

5. Michael Palin – playing the “It’s…” Man.

6. Terry Jones – one of a smattering of episodes broadcast over the years under that title. Jones also hosted programmes such as Paperbacks, Friday Night... Saturday Morning, and documentaries about the weather and the Crusades.

Stars of Genome: Norman Bailey

2019-09-30T09:52:12+00:00

Norman Bailey is a dramatic baritone singer of international renown, who has headlined in the most famous opera houses of the world – including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London. In �� television performances in the 1970s, he brought the magic of opera to living rooms around the UK. He spoke to �� Genome about his career.

A cursory glance through the �� Genome listings reveals that Bailey made nearly 100 �� appearances on radio and TV, in both performances and interviews, from the 1960s onwards. But it was for his dramatic studio performances in the 1970s that he earned a coveted Radio Times cover and reviews in the magazine.

Bailey was born in Birmingham, UK in 1933 but spent much of his early life in South Africa. As a child, he showed an early interest in the dramatic arts, first performing in amateur productions at school and then acting and singing in light musicals. In South Africa, he began to sing more seriously. He took lessons with a famous Viennese singer who asked him, after his second lesson, if he had ever thought of becoming a professional. “I thought – yes – that really fits into my personality,” says Bailey.

Bailey studied singing at Rhodes University and then moved to Vienna for further training, where he sang with the popular Vienna Kammeroper and the Vienna State Opera. He went on to Linz and then to Wuppertal and Dusseldorf, where he built his reputation as a powerful bass singer in an array of top-class opera houses.

In 1967, Bailey returned to the UK to take the part of Figaro in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in Manchester with Sadler’s Wells – which was then the home of the English National Opera (ENO). It was only a matter of time before Bailey was recognised as a versatile vocal talent, and he made his way to �� TV screens in the early 1970s. He had built a reputation as an interpreter of Wagner’s works and he took the title role in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in 1975.

Filming on the set of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman in 1975

The �� Two recording made television history as the first studio production of an entire Wagner opera. It took nine days to tape and was broadcast in its entirety with no intervals – as the composer had originally intended it. It was also the first time Bailey had performed an opera in a TV studio. The programme was a bold undertaking, presenting both artistic and technical challenges.

The accompanying Radio Times article gives an account of Bailey singing through a 14-minute take atop the Dutchman's ship – in itself, no mean feat. He was dissatisfied with his performance, and repeated it – to the acclaim of the crew. “For the take to be usable,” explains the article, “it is not just Norman Bailey’s voice which has to be right: it is the costume, the make-up, the lights, the cameras, the sound booms – even the ventilation controls…”

Two years later, Bailey received top billing in Radio Times for his 1977 interpretation of Macbeth in Giuseppe Verdi’s tragic opera, and featured on the cover of the magazine with co-star Patricia Johnson.

This dark and brooding image set the scene for two-and-a-half hours of musical drama in another broadcasting first – a simultaneous transmission of a studio opera on radio and TV, recorded in stereo.

The fashion was to record in very long shots, and this wasn’t without its pitfalls, as Bailey explains: “In Macbeth there was a panic, because Macbeth is meant to start with his hat on and I forgot to put it on… it broke the continuity – but by then they had recorded the take.”

The theatre of opera is known for its grandiloquent gestures – designed to reach the farthest audience members, so how do opera singers translate their technique to the small screen? “With filming, it’s a different type of acting,” says Bailey. “On the operatic stage, you try and embrace the whole audience at once, but in filming the gestures are cut right down. The grand gestures that read on the operatic stage are not going to read on the small screen.”

But TV certainly promised to bring opera to a broader audience than ever before - “We expect to reach, with one transmission, as many people as Covent Garden would play to if it performed Macbeth non-stop, every night of the week with matinees Wednesdays and Saturdays, for four-and-half-years,” producer Brian Large explained to Radio Times.

This view was echoed by Bailey in the same article: “The nearest people can usually get to opera in their own home is a gramophone record, and… television is a good way of going one better…"

With his early experience of acting, Bailey enjoyed the challenge of performing to camera. His one regret is that as a student he was unable to accept the part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for stage: “I would like to have been able to say that I had done Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Verdi’s too!”

Listen to Norman Bailey's 1976 Desert Island Discs.

On Your Own - One-person dramas

2019-07-26T08:00:00+00:00

Dot Branning (June Brown) records a message to husband Jim in her 2008 EastEnders solo performance

The number of performers in a drama can vary from the cast-of-thousands to the two-hander, but one of the less frequently used forms is the solo drama or monologue, where only a single actor is present.

Perhaps the best known example of single character plays is the Talking Heads series by Alan Bennett, itself inspired by his 1982 play A Woman of No Importance. The two series of Talking Heads, six episodes each, were broadcast in 1988 and 1998, and the first series especially was celebrated, with particular praise going to the episode A Cream Cracker Under the Settee. Looking back on the series Bennett said "In television terms a monologue is something of a departure, but it is also the oldest form in the world: one person telling a tale."

The success of Talking Heads inspired the Single Voices strand, which followed in 1990. In that, six different authors contributed monologues, for example Roy Clarke’s opener The Chemist, performed by David Jason, Carla Lane’s The Last Supper, with Michael Angelis, and Barry Humphries’ self-penned Sandy Comes ��.

The solo piece is a sub-genre that has also been done in soap opera, with the 2008 episode of EastEnders in which Dot Branning (June Brown) records a message to her husband Jim while he is in hospital after a stroke. Previously there had been a number of two-hander episodes of EastEnders, but this was the first and only time to date when a single actor has performed a whole episode of any soap.

Patrick Magee, a frequent interpreter of Samuel Beckett's works, created the title role in Krapp's Last Tape on stage in 1958, and in this 1972 Thirty-Minute Theatre production

In contrast, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape might be said to belong to a more highbrow iteration of the solo drama. Like Dot’s monologue, it uses a tape recorder as a dramatic device to allow one actor to convey the action (and the EastEnders episode’s writer, Tony Jordan, cited the play as his inspiration). Krapp’s Last Tape has been produced by the �� several times – Cyril Cusack took the role in a 1963 television production, Patrick Magee performed the role in a �� Two Thirty-Minute Theatre in 1972, and Corin Redgrave played Krapp on Radio 3 in 2006. Only a year later Harold Pinter gave his interpretation in a television relay of the Royal Court Theatre production.

Pinter had written his own contribution to the genre in the early 70s, and his play Monologue was performed by Henry Woolf in a 1973 �� television version, the year after its stage debut. Pinter returned to the form in his 2008 radio play The Examination, in which Michael Gambon starred, based on Pinter's own short story.

A tape recorder was also an essential part of the 1980 play The Lad Himself. Star and writer Peter Corey did a convincing impersonation of Tony Hancock, in a downbeat play set in Hancock’s dressing room in 1961 as he prepares to perform the famous episode The Blood Donor. Corey, who had been obsessed with Hancock since he was a child, had also performed a one-man stage tribute to the comedian, Heads Down for a Full House. He told Radio Times that The Lad Himself was recorded in the same �� studio as The Blood Donor, and he was even given the same dressing room as Hancock had nineteen years earlier.

Tony Hancock relaxes with some light reading in The Bedsitter, the first episode of his 1961 series Hancock

Hancock himself performed alone in the first episode of his eponymous series in that year: The Bedsitter, aka Hancock Alone. He had stopped working with comedy partner Sidney James, and his desire to be seen as a solo performer was taken literally by writers Alan Simpson and Ray Galton. It wasn’t quite a solo performance, as Michael Aspel appeared on a television set during the episode. There was also another performer during rehearsals - Hancock’s Half-Hour regular Mario Fabrizi came in to help block the camera movements, to give Hancock some respite and to help him visualise his performance.

While a prop, such as a tape recorder, might allow a solo performance to seem naturalistic, at other times no such tactic is used. Some monologues are addressed to the audience, breaking the fourth wall – although perhaps they can be seen as the character talking to themselves. However, another recurring device in one-handed drama is the telephone. This was indeed used in the above Hancock episode. In Sammy, a 1958 play by Ken Hughes billed as "a television play for one character" Anthony Newley plays the title character, who, alone in his room, desperately attempts to raise £200. Hughes reworked the play five years later as the feature film The Small World of Sammy Lee, which he also directed. Newley reprised the title role, but the story was opened out and featured a conventional-sized cast.

Tony Webster, who wrote the Studio 4 episode Call Me Back, was mainly a contributor to US productions - this seems to be his only UK credit...

Another solo drama using the telephone was Call Me Back, in which Alec McCowen gave a "remarkable performance", according to Radio Times, in an hour-long piece by Tony Webster. He plays a man in a New York apartment trying to make contact with someone – anyone… The play was broadcast in the series Studio 4 – so called because it was made in Television Centre’s Studio 4, and involved McCowen learning more than 30 pages of script, rehearsing over 2½ weeks, and then carrying the whole hour – outnumbered massively by the production crew! “The main problem was concentration” he recounted to Radio Times, “I didn’t dare take a second off for the whole sixty minutes, because the cameras never left me.”

One actor surrounded by cameras and production crew may be a dramatic contrivance of solitude, but as a convention it is perfectly naturalistic: after all, there can be few people who have not found themselves alone – with or without a telephone or a tape recorder to act as interlocutor – mulling over their lives…

What are your memories of these one-person dramas? Do you have any favourites we haven't mentioned? Leave your comments below:

Apollo 11: Listening to the landing

2019-07-15T15:18:45+00:00

A clip from the ��'s Moon Special radio simulcast, which began on the evening of 20 July 1969. Presenter Arthur Garratt and studio guests Professor Lionel Wilson and Eric Burnett discuss Buzz Aldrin's re-entry to the lunar module. Source: �� and NASA.

�� Genome looks back at the nail-biting hours before the lunar module successfully landed on the surface of the Moon. Professor Lionel Wilson of Lancaster University was one of the broadcasters relaying the events as they happened, to a radio audience.

On 21 July 1969 the world was watching as US astronaut Neil Armstrong descended from the Eagle lunar module and made his “small step” onto the surface of the Moon. It was a truly global television event. But not everyone was able to watch a television set, so �� radio reported for listeners, explaining the events as well as listening to and relaying the conversations between the astronauts and mission control.

The Moon landing in July 1969 was the culmination of “the Space Race” between the US and the USSR. The Soviets had won the early stages, launching the first satellite in 1957, landing the first unmanned spacecraft on the surface of the Moon in 1959, and in 1961 sending the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space. A month later President John F Kennedy pledged that the US “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” NASA spent the next eight years aiming to achieve this goal. On 16 July 1969 Apollo 11 launched, carrying what would be the first men to set foot on the Moon.

Guiding radio listeners through the events of the Moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin were presenters Arthur Garratt and Colin Riach with lunar experts including Eric Burnett, Dr Lionel Wilson and Dr Frederick Latham. Listening to the broadcast today, it’s difficult to disassociate the sounds and voices from the images which are so familiar to us now and to imagine what the experience of relying on the commentary and sound alone was like to listeners in 1969.

One of the experts in the �� Radio studio that night was Dr Lionel Wilson, who got in touch with �� Genome to tell us about his experiences. At the time Dr Wilson had recently completed his PhD and was continuing his research into the texture of the surface of the Moon. Previous Apollo missions had taken photos of the Moon’s surface in preparation for the landings, and Dr Wilson was one of the scientists who thought some of the shapes in these photos were lava flows. His specialist interest in the Moon’s landscape made him ideal to join the ��’s team of experts for the Apollo 11 landing. While others were more familiar with the spacecraft and the technicalities of landing, Dr Wilson explains: “my job was to talk about what was happening on the surface”.

Professor Lionel Wilson pictured here (left) with presenter Patrick Moore on a Sky at Night broadcast in 1985

The ��’s radio coverage of the Moon landing began at around the time the lunar module, containing Armstrong and Aldrin, undocked from the orbiter and began its descent towards the surface of the Moon, late on the evening of 20 July. It continued overnight, including the landing, moonwalk and ascent back to join the orbiter. In the end the broadcasters spent more than 24 hours in the studio as events unfolded.

“The way it was organised was that the exchanges between the astronauts and mission control were broadcast as they were happening,” says Dr Wilson. “We, the people in the studio, had headphones in which we could hear those exchanges. And then at any stage when there was a lull in proceedings we discussed what was going on and commented on it. […] We were reacting in real time to what was going on.” He recalls that they were working only with the audio which was being transmitted from NASA, but they had a good idea of what was due to happen and the sequence of events so they were able to describe to listeners what was happening without seeing the famous footage of the Moon landing.

Radio Times celebrated the Apollo 11 mission with this cover, published on 10 July 1969.

The atmosphere in the studio was a mixture of nervousness and excitement according to Dr Wilson, “definitely exciting. I mean, what else could you be!”. He recalls: “Even though we had a reasonable idea of what to expect to happen, there's always the unexpected.” A danger for any live broadcast, this was particularly acute for the Moon landing. Dr Wilson was aware that at the back of everyone’s mind were the inherent dangers of the Apollo mission which could cause the loss of the spacecraft or the astronauts, “We didn't dwell on them, we were just aware that if we suddenly lost the connection then that was one of the things that might have happened.” Fortunately all went well and the broadcasters remained cheerful throughout the hours of the unfolding events.

When asked what it felt like to take part, Dr Wilson explains that “I was aware that it was a momentous occasion, but I didn't feel stressed by that. I think I'm fairly notorious for not getting overly excited about things.” He went on to say he remembered thinking “This is just something we should be doing. It's not something to get excited about”. But he was glad he took part.

Fifty years later, as we remember the events of Apollo 11 and the first men on the Moon, we should also acknowledge the men who sat through the night, talking into their microphones and helping listeners to understand the extraordinary events which were unfolding thousands of miles above the Earth.

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