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The Sunday Post: David Rose

2017-02-17T17:14:51+00:00

David Rose (1924-2017) was the first producer of Z Cars, the first head of �� English Regions drama, and first Commissioning Editor for Fiction at Channel 4

Three years ago, I had the pleasure of a long talk with the pioneering television producer David Rose, who died at the end of January, aged 92. During his long career he launched the iconic police series Z Cars, headed �� English Regions Drama, and was the first head of drama for Channel 4.

One of Rose’s earliest productions was 1959 drama documentary Medico, about doctors on call for medical emergencies at sea. It was thought to be lost, but a copy was retained by the RNLI, who had provided technical advice to the programme. Classic television organisation Kaleidoscope arranged a screening in the West Midlands and invited Rose to introduce it. I had the opportunity of meeting him there and talking to him on the car journey home.

After wartime service in the RAF, Rose had worked in theatre, before joining �� television. In the mid-50s the �� was recruiting new staff to cope with gradually increasing broadcasting hours, and to counter the exodus of personnel prior to the launch of ITV. Rose was promoted to director, then producer, working mostly on drama documentaries.

Technical hazards

Making documentary programmes at this time had its difficulties. The modern option of filming on location was problematic, as the standard 35mm film cameras of the time were unwieldy, with film reels lasting only 10 minutes. The cameras were also noisy, making sound recording difficult. As documentaries tended to have a lot of dialogue, it was often considered easier to make them in the studio, albeit with sequences filmed on location to add atmosphere.

Drama documentaries were made by the drama department, whose other output consisted of single plays, or serial adaptations of novels and original thrillers. Drama documentary pioneered the making of series, with discrete episodes centred round one or more regular characters. One early example was Pilgrim Street, about the work of a London police station, which pre-dated Dixon of Dock Green, the long-running police drama (1955-1976).

During camera rehearsals for an episode of Z Cars, Chief Inspector Barlow (standing at back) interrogates a suspect - we think this episode might be On Watch Newtown from September 1962...

David Rose joined producers like Robert Barr, Elwyn Jones, Colin Morris and Gilchrist Calder, making such single drama documentaries as Black Furrow, Crime Report, and of course Medico. In 1960 he produced a 13-part series Scotland Yard, written by Robert Barr. Its style now seems dry and old-fashioned – but most depictions of the police at that time were fairly respectful.

A real stylistic breakthrough had already been made with the documentary play Who Me?, written by Colin Morris and produced by Gilchrist Calder in 1959. It was based on the techniques of Detective Sergeant William Prendergast, who used his native Liverpool wit to break down intransigent criminals. Who Me? was more convincing than other police dramas, and led to a short series, Jacks and Knaves, in 1961.

Enter Z Cars

Rose and his team began developing Z Cars, which adopted the emerging, more dramatic style. It would be set in the newly fashionable North of England, setting for many of the new wave of British films. Writer Troy Kennedy Martin developed the idea, inspired by the US series Highway Patrol, and by listening to police radio messages, to get a real flavour of police work. He researched the characters and situations, and with colleagues such as Robert Barr and Allan Prior, rode with the police in the fast, radio-equipped crime cars then being trialled by Lancashire Constabulary.

However, when the first episode was transmitted on 2 January 1962, Lancashire’s chief constable was said to have been unhappy at the portrayal of the police, and the on-screen credit for co-operation from the Lancashire Constabulary never appeared again.

Z Cars was an immediate hit, with credible characters, fast-paced stories and no overt moral being hammered home, as always happened with Dixon of Dock Green. However, Troy Kennedy Martin soon felt that the essential truthfulness of Z Cars was being diluted – the police could not be made to appear too scallywaggish if so many people were watching – and left the series.

New talents such as writer Alan Plater were brought in to take up the slack, with script editor John Hopkins helping to make Z Cars one of the most successful series of the 1960s.

Thora Hird as Councillor Sarah Danby in drama series The First Lady, produced by David Rose in 1968-9. It was devised by Alan Plater from an idea by himself and Philip Levene

The programme was almost always broadcast live, though this could cause problems if an actor dried, a prop failed to work, or just because of the cumulative effect on people from the sheer stress of it. But Rose felt it gave Z Cars a raw quality unmatched by recorded dramas.

The live production was balanced, and enhanced, by generous location filming, showing the eponymous cars in action, and the mean street of the series' fictional location, Newtown, an overspill from Liverpool (though much of the location filming was actually in West London).

The series made household names of many of its lead actors, such as the Z Car crews James Ellis, Brian Blessed, Jeremy Kemp and Colin Welland, and their bosses Frank Windsor (Sergeant Watt) and Stratford Johns (Chief Inspector Barlow). Watt and Barlow graduated to the spin-off Softly Softly in 1966, which Rose produced for a couple of seasons. He then moved on to produce The First Lady, starring Thora Hird as a local councillor.

English Regions Drama

In the early 1970s, the �� addressed criticisms that it was too London-centric by founding an English Regions drama unit in Birmingham. As the man behind many regionally-set series, though they were usually produced in London, Rose seemed a natural fit. (At this time he stopped using the middle initial, E., which he had adopted in the 50s to differentiate him from the actor David Rose.)

�� Birmingham was given new life in 1971 with the opening of Pebble Mill studios, replacing the dilapidated Gosta Green premises occupied since 1955. Birmingham had previously only made occasional small-scale plays, and networked soap operas like United! It now contributed a swathe of drama to be seen nationwide, including episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre, whose successor, Second City Firsts nurtured new talents like Mike Leigh, Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell.

Other English Regions drama highlights that Rose produced were Alan Plater’s Trinity Tales, a comic parody of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where the pilgrims became Rugby League fans going to Wembley, and Philip Martin’s hard-hitting Gangsters, set in Birmingham’s underworld, showing the violence, racism and drug addiction among the strip clubs and criminal empires.

David Rose's production of Gangsters starred Maurice Colbourne as Kline and Ahmed Khalil as Khan

Towards the end of the 1970s there was much talk of a fourth television channel, mooted since ��2 began in 1964. The mid-decade Annan Committee looked at several options, and it was finally decided that Channel Four should be a publisher-broadcaster of alternative programming. Content would be mainly provided by independent producers (though it also relied on material from established ITV contractors, archive repeats and imports).

Rose was appointed Channel Four’s Commissioning Editor for Fiction before its November 1982 launch. He was pitched the idea of Brookside by Grange Hill creator Phil Redmond, so Channel Four would have a soap opera as ITV did, but with more realistic language and themes, and using real houses as the set.

Legacy

One lasting innovation at the channel, however, was Film4. With the trend since the 1960s to make single dramas on film, it was decided to go further and try to get cinema releases for them. By the late 1980s Channel Four was investing in half the feature films made in the UK, and when Rose left his role in 1990, half of the films he had overseen had achieved a cinema release. The �� followed Film4's example with its own �� Films releases, starting with Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1990.

With pioneering work from Z Cars, to English Regions Drama, to Film Four, David Rose’s long career in television and film is almost a potted history of innovation in British television of the last 60 years.

That he came across, on my one meeting with him, as so easy to talk to, and happy to discuss his career, is for me just another reason why his passing is to be mourned. I already appreciated his work, but will never forget my encounter with David Rose, the man.

The Christmas Sunday Post: Festive Episodes

2016-12-25T11:00:00+00:00

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without... Christmas Night with the Stars? Dad's Army had already earned a place in the 1968 edition after one series

Television and radio schedulers have always given special attention to the festive period, and pull out the stops to come up with a range of programmes that will keep the family entertained when they settle down to watch the box, after the annual avalanche of turkey, sprouts, pigs in blankets, Christmas pudding and too many chocolates (not to mention more tiny oranges than you can shake a stick at).

There are a plethora of Christmas episodes to consider, from all periods of broadcasting and in all genres. Last year we picked out the schedule of fifty years ago for special attention, but one programme which was absent from the line-up that day was the variety show Christmas Night with the Stars. First seen in 1958, this was a successor to previous years' all-star pantomimes and Television Christmas Parties - one difference being that Christmas Night with the Stars featured pre-recorded sketches and short episodes of popular entertainment series rather than being a live, continuous show.

By 1958 pre-recording of inserts was more easily achieved, and so the necessity of getting all the performers together at the same time was avoided - the sketches might be recorded during the studio session for a normal episode in fact. Those appearing in Christmas Night with the Stars that first year included Tony Hancock in his Budgerigar sketch, Billy Cotton and his Band, Jimmy Edwards, Ted Ray, the George Mitchell Singers and the cast of Dixon of Dock Green - a regular presence in the show for the next few years since Dixon was made by the light entertainment department, not the drama department, at that time. With occasional breaks, Christmas Night with the Stars continued until 1972.

However, not all programmes shown at Christmas are stand-alone specials: sometimes the series in question was going on anyway, and there just happened to be an episode on Christmas Day or nearby, that acknowledged the event one way or another.

PC Jock Weir (Joseph Brady) auditions to join The Swinging Blue Jeans! The first Z Cars episode of Z Cars to be shown on Christmas Day, 1963

One example of that would be the Z Cars episode It Never Rains…, shown on Christmas Day 1963. The main plot is about a garage robbery, and there is a thief dressed as Father Christmas, but there is also a special guest appearance by the Merseybeat group The Swinging Blue Jeans (also appearing on the Light Programme the following day). Though Z Cars was usually live, a custom was established to prevent the cast and crew having to work through Christmas itself by pre-recording an episode about half way through the autumn on a scheduled transmission day, with that date covered by pre-recording another episode before the start of each season.

Z Cars, from its inception until the mid-1970s, was on for long periods of the year, so there were plenty of other episodes around Christmas time, although only one other on Christmas Day itself. The same applied to many other long-running series, though with shorter and shorter episode counts for all but the soap-operatic drama, it’s no longer so common now for series to co-incide with Christmas except by appointment.

Casualty is another drama series which has tackled the perils of Christmas time on a regular basis, and now tends to go on through most of the year, so there is no escape from Christmas editions. Since the early 90s there have been a series of notable Christmas adventures, with sister show Holby City joining in as well, sometimes even in a combined edition Casualty @ Holby City.

Another medical drama joining in the Christmas spirit was Dr Finlay’s Casebook, the 1920s set series originally adapted from the stories of A.J. Cronin. Fifty years ago to the day came the episode The Gifts of the Magi, in which Doctors Finlay and Cameron, and housekeeper Janet, are called on to perform their party pieces for the cottage hospital Christmas party. Other popular series however have generally eschewed the seasonal special, perhaps considering the festivities would get in the way or compromise their hard-hitting edge.

The Doctor and Rose battled robot Santas and the alien Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, 2005, the first of a run of regular Christmas episodes of Doctor Who.

EastEnders has established a firm tradition of saving some of its more spectacular plot twists for Christmas Day, from the first event-episode in 1986 which saw Den serving Angie with divorce papers in one of the biggest rated episodes in the series’ history (anyone out there who doesn’t know who Den and Angie were, congratulations, you have now made me feel very old). There have been a number of high profile storylines at this time of year, and presumably 2016 will go out with a similar bombshell… But perhaps surprisingly, the first Christmas during the run of EastEnders, 1985, was comparatively low-key, and there wasn’t even an episode on 25 December itself.

For the last 11 years Doctor Who has also always had a Christmas episode, though they have not necessarily involved the series' most spectacular turning points. That said, David Tennant had his first full episode in that first modern era Christmas episode, and bowed out in 2009 in a two part Christmas and New Year double episode story.

As I discussed this time last year, the only time, before Doctor Who was revived, that there was a Christmas Day episode was in 1965, and in other years the programme went out of its way to avoid transmitting on the big day, even if that involved a big gap in the series, as in 1976. This year, 2016 having been without a full series, we will get in The Return of Doctor Mysterio the first new episode of the show since last Christmas Day.

Comedy too has its Christmas episodes, though given the shorter length of comedy series it is rarer for their yuletide editions to be an integral part of a series. In fact it is not unknown for a Christmas special to be the only outing in a given year for a particular programme – as with the 1976 Porridge special, or the Dad’s Army episodes in 1971 and 1976. As with The Good Life’s one and only Christmas special, these programmes are among those which are revived to fill out the Christmas schedules on a regular basis - which probably tells you something about how to make a comedy that stands the test of time.

Another series which became a Christmas fixture, was the 1980s monster hit Only Fools and Horses...., though it wasn't until its third series that the Christmas episode was seen on the big day itself, and then in a somewhat dark story about Del and Rodney's father turning up (but was he really Rodney's father...?) The 1990/1 series of Only Fools, of which the Christmas episode was an integral part, turned out to be the last full run of the show, with only Christmas episodes until 1996 when the series ended - or so it was to be at the time - with the Christmas trilogy that saw Del becoming a millionaire at last. A further three episodes were made, but they two were spread out over Christmas Days from 2001 to 2003 (on the same day, co-incidentally, as a one-off revival of Christmas Night with the Stars).

It’s Chriiiiiiiiiiiistmas!!! (to quote the song, written by Noddy Holder and Jim Lea) The original caption to this photo pointed out helpfully that there were �� cameras in the shot. Really? Where???

Top of the Pops of course has now become a traditional part of the Christmas season, even though it stopped being broadcast as a weekly show ten years ago. The Christmas special has gone out every year since 1964, the first year of the programme’s existence, though at first at least it did not always go out on the Christmas Day itself. The Christmas edition is now the only chance for artists to say they have been on Top of the Pops.

Of necessity, the programme was always live, or recorded very close to transmission, and though there is now a little leeway with the Christmas edition, they are still taped fairly shortly before transmission. There was also a tradition for many years of having two editions at Christmas, so that the programme could become an in-depth look back at the whole year’s music, rather than just covering the Christmas chart and the (admittedly important) Christmas number one.

Radio is perhaps more prone to continuing existing series at Christmastime, as much of its output is generally very regular. Radios 1 and 2 tend to continue with the same programme slots, with occasional special programmes, and sometimes there are different presenters in the normal slots.

On Christmas Day 1967, the first under the new regime of Radio 1 and 2, when they still shared many programmes, regular shows like Tony Blackburn and Jimmy Young were interspersed with specials like Kenny and Cash with Kenny Everett and Dave Cash, and The D.J.s’ Christmas Party hosted by Pete Murray. Radio 2, when not sharing Radio 1’s programmes, had special editions like a Christmas episode of Round the Horne and Cotton’s Christmas Knees-Up starring Billy Cotton.

Ernie and Eric (unlike Ant and Dec, they don't always stand in alphabetical order) appear in their 1972 Christmas Show - the sketch featured a guest appearance by Bruce Forsyth

Of course, the concept of special Christmas episodes only really came to fruition once the actual concept of series of programmes gradually had developed in the early decades of broadcasting. The first Radio Times Christmas edition shows that the early programmes on offer for December 25th were modest enough.

Children’s Hour is one of the earliest regular programme strands, though there were different regional versions of it, often under different names, rather than one centralised networked edition. The London edition on 25/12/23 was mostly concerned with a play, On Christmas Eve. The evening schedule consisted of a programme of music played by the Wireless Orchestra (forerunner of all �� orchestras), the News, a talk on Wit and Humour and more dance music, this time by the Savoy Orpheans direct from the Savoy Hotel itself.

Of all the myriad seasonal shows that have been created since those early days, one institution that seems never to disappear is the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, one example of which always seems to be shown on or around Christmas Day. This has become the archetypal Christmas special, though to be fair in its day it was responsible for some of the highest ratings of any programme.

When Morecambe and Wise returned to the �� in 1968 after many years on ITV, it was partly due to the fact that the �� could offer them colour television, although it meant their programme would be on ��2 at first. Eric Morecambe was sadly victim to a heart attack after the first series aired, but had recovered enough by the end of the year that he and Ernie Wise were able to host the annual Christmas Night with the Stars. 1969 saw the series return with a new writer, Eddie Braben, and longer, 45-minute episodes which allowed them the room to expand their characterisations. The hour-long Christmas episode gradually became a showcase for even more elaborate staging and more impressive guest stars.

Given concerns for Eric’s health, the �� was careful not to overtax the duo by demanding too many shows, and eventually in 1977 the only programme they made was the Christmas show. Even so, it was Eric who took on the stress load, with his perfectionism meaning he worried about whether each year’s show would be good enough - if it wasn’t, he thought it might spoil people’s Christmas.

But they didn’t. The classic shows from 1971 (Shirley Bassey and the army boot, André Previn and 'all the wrong notes') to 1977 are full of classic moments and stand many many repeat showings. Angela Rippon dancing, South Pacific performed by a chorus of �� presenters and newsreaders, Glenda Jackson as Queen Victoria… and Ernie’s ‘dry’ version of Singin’ in the Rain – the list goes on…

John Noakes, Lesley Judd and Peter Purves, with schoolchildren and the Chalk Farm Salvation Army Band, look forward to Christmas 1974 in Blue Peter

In the field of current affairs, there was naturally less by way of Christmas editions, other than the Money Programme looking at its financial side, but the early evening magazine Nationwide contributed to the festivities from the mid-70s, until its demise in 1983, by organising a Christmas carol competition, which was carried on with afterwards by the likes of Breakfast Time and Pebble Mill at One. Carol competitions on the �� go back at least to one held by Children's Hour in 1936, and survived until the 1980s A Song for Christmas.

And who could forget the Blue Peter Christmas celebrations, in the 1970s especially, with the studio full of well-behaved kids singing carols, led by the band of the Chalk Farm branch of the Salvation Army? The run-up to the big day was also trailed with present-making ideas and the ceremonial lighting of the Advent Crown.

Other popular children's series have also done their bit for the cause of festive fun - from Jackanory to Crackerjack to the Rentaghost special Rentasanta (a programme that had the misfortune to miss its original transmission slot in 1978 due to industrial action and only turned up the following year).

So there you have it – some samples of the kind of fare available for our Christmas entertainment and edification. All it remains to do now is go off and enjoy (hey, why are you looking at your computer anyway – go and indulge in some festive frolics…!) A Merry Christmas from the Genome Blog - we'll be back next week (aka Next Year...)

Missing Believed Wiped

2016-12-13T12:30:00+00:00

The late Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett in a 1972 episode of Till Death Us Do Part. Mitchell was cast only after several other actors, including Peter Sellers, had turned the role down

Last week I attended the annual Missing Believed Wiped event at the National Film Theatre on London’s South Bank. This event, which has been going for over twenty years, always feels a bit like the AGM of British archive television fans, with many familiar faces from the community of those who appreciate archive television. The event was established over twenty years ago to show and celebrate programmes which were missing from television companies' archives, but have now been recovered.

This year’s event was dominated by a selection of programmes recovered in the last few months. ITV was represented by an episode from the first series of The Avengers, the top and tail of an edition of entertainment show Stars and Garters, and an excerpt from Gone Fishing, a series presented by Jack Hargreaves, better known for Out of Town and How.

The �� material consisted of one of three recently recovered editions of Whack-o!, starring Jimmy Edwards; a complete Till Death Us Do Part (only part of which had previously existed in the archives); and Family Feud, an episode of Z Cars from 1962 – which, since a hoard of episodes was found in Cyprus in the early 1990s, had been the oldest missing edition of the series.

This last was part of a haul of material recently acquired by the archive television organisation Kaleidoscope, which included another first series episode of Z Cars, Affray, the pilot episode of Z Cars' spin-off Softly Softly, an edition of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, and one of Terry Scott sitcom Hugh and I.

It had been planned to show a recovered edition of The World of Wooster, but it turned out at the last moment that this already existed in the archive... But that’s life I suppose.

The film vaults at the ��'s former Windmill Road archive, now demolished (but don't worry, the films were removed first)

As we’ve discussed before in this blog, at the beginning of broadcasting there was no way to record programmes, although sound recording - the gramophone etc - precedes broadcasting by some decades. An economic way to record programmes took some time to achieve. With television the problem was different, with first film, and then electronic tape being used to record programmes.

Even once videotape was widely used, there was a long period when film was still used to make copies of programmes for foreign sale (and sometimes, usually with live programmes, for domestic repeat, or for reference purposes), partly because of different line standards used in foreign television services, and also the expense of videotape.

When television programmes from the 50s to the early 70s are recovered, it is as often as not in this format, as unlike videotape, film cannot be reused (other than by recycling it to extract the silver content), and film copies were often passed round to various countries in turn (known as bicycling). At the end of their contractual life they were supposed to be destroyed or returned to the distributor, but this did not always happen. In some cases the final official recipient has still had the material, in others the copies have come into private hands.

Copies could then be passed on from one collector to another – and sometimes they come into the possession of collectors who are willing to return them to the producers, or bodies like the BFI. At this point, it can become possible for programmes to be seen again...

Public access to old programmes is now far easier than it was a few decades ago. Firstly, the agreements with talent unions have loosened up considerably since the 1970s, and many more programmes can be repeated on television and radio than used to be possible. There is also now a market for release of programmes, on CD and DVD, or by download. Some programmes (and you can see links to these on Genome) are also available free online.

Guest Patrick Troughton and star Gerald Harper in the Adam Adamant Lives! episode, D for Destruction. Rediscovered in 2003 in the �� Archives, it was shown at Missing Believed Wiped

However, there is a still a lot of material that is not available, and it may be a long time before it is. With popular forms like drama and comedy, a lot of people are willing to pay to see them again, though the numbers can vary widely depending on the particular show. With these genres, actors, writers and others need to be paid for the exploitation of their work beyond what was originally contracted.

At Missing Believed Wiped only a certain proportion of all the programmes that have been returned can be shown, and of course this is to a tiny number of people, although occasionally some have gone on to be released or broadcast. The amazing thing though is that every time a programme is returned, people say to themselves that it could be the last time anything turns up – except that year after year more material is unearthed. How much more missing content is out there?

The host for Missing Believed Wiped was Dick Fiddy, television consultant at the BFI. In his introduction he pointed out that if the programmes that day had linking any theme it would be that they could be regarded as politically incorrect. The way in which, and the extent to which that was true varied from programme to programme.

'Professor' Jimmy Edwards in Whack-o!, his sitcom which ran from 1956 to 1960, with a revival in colour in 1971/2

Till Death Us Do Part is an interesting, but controversial programme. It was criticised by the likes of Mary Whitehouse when it was originally transmitted for the swearing (comparatively mild by today’s standards, even creative in its way!) but what really jars to modern ears are the racial epithets. It can be quite an uncomfortable experience to hear frequent use of racist language – even though it never uses the ‘N word’.

The great irony of the series of course is that it was intended to satirise racism and intolerance – Intolerance was even the title of this recovered episode – but in doing so it broke the boundaries of acceptable language, and arguably made racist terms less taboo. Speight and star Warren Mitchell were constantly surprised when people told them that they sided with Alf Garnett, not realising they were supposed to pity him – but perhaps they did pity him, in a different way, since Alf always seemed to lose the argument. Alf’s few triumphs were when he got the better of authority figures.

Of the other programmes shown, Whack-o! depicts a world in which corporal punishment was a normal event, which might surprise some young people, although the stage headmaster with mortarboard and ever-ready cane was a caricature even in the 50s. The episode had some imaginative sequences involving special video effects, and a typically sharp script by Frank Muir and Denis Norden.

The Avengers showed how much the early 1960s owed to the 1950s, with the thriller clichés of the past rubbing shoulders with the stirrings of the new decade, in an episode made in 1961. The Avengers would transform itself over time into the epitome of a swinging 60s surreal spy drama, and Patrick Macnee’s effortlessly humorous performance was the catalyst for its evolution.

The other ITV contributions were the pleasingly rural charms of Gone Fishing and the bizarre pleasures of Stars and Garters. The latter was a variety show set in a pub, but recorded at Fountain Studios, which have recently closed. The copy was incomplete, but excited much comment in the interval between the two screening sessions.

PCs Bob Steele (Jeremy Kemp) and Bert Lynch (James Ellis) who appeared in the returned Z Cars episode Family Feud, are seen here in the cut-down Ford Zephyr used for studio scenes

The last programme of the evening session was the 1962 Z Cars episode Family Feud. Written by the series’ founding father Troy Kennedy Martin, this episode perhaps had more in common with his original concepts, rather than the slickly popular, but more conformist series Z Cars soon became (by which time, Kennedy Martin had moved on). The episode is also an interesting contrast with the melodramatic world of The Avengers: the drama in Z Cars is more prosaic, but ironically more action-packed, with a greater amount of location film and stunt sequences.

Family Feud is a Romeo and Juliet story where a boy and girl from of different branches of the same Irish family, the Madigans, who fell out forty years before, find their love affair threatens to cause an outbreak of violence which the policemen of Newtown station have to defuse. The episode features the crew of crime car Z Victor 2, PCs Lynch and Steele. The latter is also dealing with his own domestic crisis, when his wife, Janey, walks out on him.

I always enjoy watching these archive treasures, whether they are newly recovered or items that have been preserved in the vaults of television companies all along. We can learn about the society they depict, we can learn about the ways of producing drama, we can compare them with life and society nowadays and how they are depicted in modern programmes.

The forms of drama have changed, as have the production processes. Will what we are making now seems as exotic in another fifty years, or as entertaining – at least to those of us who can get past black and white pictures, mono sound and a 4:3 aspect ratio (if – dare I say it – those things really matter at all) – and enjoy them for themselves? We – or our descendants – shall see.

Share your thoughts about the evolution of television, below… What shows would you like to see repeated that are never seen now? Or what missing episode would you like most to see recovered?

Stars of Genome: Margot Hayhoe

2016-11-11T07:00:00+00:00

Margot Hayhoe in studio TC6

Margot Hayhoe joined the �� in 1964 as secretary in �� Enterprises – she then progressed to the Drama Serials Department where she worked up the ladder from Assistant Floor Manager to Associate Producer. She worked in Doctor Who, EastEnders, Silent Witness, Man in the Iron Mask, War and Peace and many other �� productions. She left the staff in 1994 and worked as a freelancer until 2005 when she retired for production work – she occasionally works as a background artist.

What was your first job in the ��? My first job was acting in the children’s drama African Holiday which was transmitted live from Lime Grove. It was telerecorded then transmitted again in April. I also appeared in Jack in the Box, The Thompson Family, Women of Troy, The Common Room, The Lady from the Sea and Champion Road for the �� plus Cool for Cats, Emergency Ward 10 and The Lonely World of Harry Braintree for ITV amongst others. These were whilst I was still at my school,The Arts Educational.

Were you ever mentioned on the Radio Times magazine? Or is there any particular magazine you have kept as souvenir? I have never been interviewed for the Radio Times, only had my name listed in the casts of the above productions. I have kept the front covers of the Radio Times for the programmes I worked on as part of the production team, such as Christ Recrucified, Prince Regent, War and Peace, The Old Men at the Zoo plus many others. I also kept the supplement that came for War and Peace.

How do you use �� Genome? And have you found any particular programme episode you are fond of? I sometimes look to Genome to jog my memory of which actors were in certain series. I was particularly fond of any of the Francis Durbridge serials which always had wonderful cliff-hanger end of episodes!

"When finding locations, the variety of places I have been to has added to my education: inside prisons, mortuaries, council flats then stately homes, hospitals, court rooms, the working end of crematoriums, factories, dock yards and airports."

Can you share any special memories you have of the programmes and features you worked in? It is very difficult to pick out any special memories from Doctor Who and many of the other productions I worked on, as they mostly have all been memorable. However a Dr Who I did with Patrick Troughton called Fury from the Deep gave me the chance to fly in a helicopter for the first time. As we took off from a cliff edge to go down to the beach, I screamed as I watched the earth disappear from beneath my feet which encouraged the pilot to swerve around, very exciting.

Another memorable moment was on Les Miserables, a serial with Frank Finlay, when we were filming a scene on the Isle of Wight that involved convicts in chains. These 20 or so actors were costumed and made-up in Portsmouth and I had to get the ferry tickets and march the men on board with their chains clanking away to get them to the location.

Trudging 14 times up and down St, Michael's Mount in a day on Man in the Iron Mask is seared into my brain as is hiding in cars to cue the drivers on Z Cars before the days of walkie-talkies.

A scene from War and Peace

On War and Peace we had a thousand Yugoslav soldiers for several days and the organisation involved in getting them ready and into position was impressive.

Filming in the centre of Bern for A Perfect Spy which involved closing the streets for a night shoot; Filming on Tender is the Night in Switzerland and France was a challenge, especially the beach scenes with strong winds blowing away the parasols and having to reschedule due to the rain.

Shooting Old Men at the Zoo with wild animals was interesting, plus having to find enough male extras prepared to have their bottoms exposed for injections as part of one scene shot in a disused biscuit factory near Hereford.

Trying to shoot London street scenes for Day of the Triffids was problematical as it was supposed to be deserted of any moving traffic. I enjoyed filming in Bath on Persuasion, as to see the actors in period costumes in the actual places in the book was a delight.

When finding locations, the variety of places I have been to has added to my education: inside prisons, mortuaries, council flats then stately homes, hospitals, court rooms, the working end of crematoriums, factories, dock yards and airports.

Working with the Visual Effects on Silent Witness makes one a bit blasé about body parts and post mortems!

How important do you think it is to preserve the history of TV and radio listings? I think it is very important to preserve the history of TV and Radio listings to show future generations the breadth and level of productions of the past. Looking at the pages in the 1950s and comparing them with the present day listings, shows how trivial much of today's output has become. It is also a great reference source.

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