GLORY DAYS -- really! -- in the BBC in the 1960s and early '70s.

What an opportunity!


RELEASE & LORNA PEGRAM:

          Lorna Pegram was a dynamic, mother of three, forty three year old executive producer in arts television who had made her way up through BBC radio. Either she instigated,  or was appointed to run RELEASE. This was a weekly arts programme on BBC 2 that tended to the more rarefied end of the programming spectrum.

          RELEASE was live. Film segments were pre-shot and edited and integrated into studio discussion. She trusted me enough to allow me to make three short (1-15 minute) films.

          BASIL BUNTING was a northern poet. I was lucky to be introduced to his work by the now internationally famous literary agent Andrew Wylie who is a close friend of mine an was himself writing poetry in London. The eminent scholar of English and popular culture, Richard Hoggart agreed to interview Basil B on location in the wilder north of England where his epic poem Brigflatts.

          I think it was OK, Basil B reading parts of the poem in his gravelly, northern accented voice, shots of the landscape in bleak autumn and comments to Hoggart.  Bunting had long been unrecognised. Then well into his sixties, surviving with an un-glamorous newspaper job, the publication of his collected works and Briggflats gave him significant critical acclaim and a small but devoted following that continues long after this.

          We were a small part of that.

          IAN NAIRN was a tough critic of British architecture who wrote for the Sunday Observer as well as architectural journals. In a modernising programme, Euston station in London had been knocked down. The station served the northwest of England, so was one of five major terminals in London. Notably a Roman style arch that was originally entry to the station courtyard was demolished after years of protest and attempts to have it moved. So the film I made in 1967 with Nairn was not so much news as a lament, to the awful blandness of the ‘new’ station which must rank among the most undistinguished of major rail terminuses in the world.

          Nairn was a master critic of the dismal in post war British architecture. He liked where the trains actually came in which was really a place of raw engineering, electric overhead wires and bare concrete, honest to itself. Not only was the new, boxy station horrible – what remains of it still is – the arch was lost. Such was the disdain of the engineering firm contacted by the British government to tear it down, it was pulverised and recently (as of 2024) has been found as filling for other buildings.

          The film was not news. It was pithy and, I am proud to say, Ian Nairn credited me with starting a career in front of the camera which spanned several television series. I think this is right. He said it to me, although his Wikipedia article suggests he may have made other films ahead of ours. He was a gritty and perceptive man who took architectural criticism away from high art towards looking at the ordinary, most of which was, to his eyes far too ordinary – the simple small things like paving which can make a town centre such a delight or so dismal.

          I made one or two other short films for RELEASE  and was then lucky to be offered a job by my hero of all bosses, Robert Reid, who had created the BBC HORIZON series of science documentaries.

HORIZON FILMS (Series nos and episode nos are from the Wikipedia listing of all Horizon films.)

1970: WHOSE COAST? (Series 6 #21) Peter Cantor, for whom I worked and devised this film, had, luckily for me, a magisterial view of the function of the producer. In theory with the money given – out of the series budget – the BBC producer did not have the normal function of putting together the whole and the money to make it. Luckily for me, Peter Cantor, felt that I could do the work while he supervised from his desk. The film was an exploration of the conflicting demands on the British coast line. I do not remember a great deal about it. I think, in ecological terms, it was pioneering. I know we covered serious coastal pollution in the north east from coal mines and chemical industry factories. In south Wales we covered the – then – pioneering effort to make a south Wales coastal path – now describing the whole Welsh coast and the claims of an oil refinery at Milford Haven to be safe and clean which, by journalistic luck, led to an oil spill while we were there. It was a good start in a longer form film, not the sharpest reporting but in some cases beautiful and evocative.

          I like and liked interrogative (?) titles. This was 1970, treated an environmental subject perhaps tamely, yet did so. One forgets how new environmental protest is. (It is also possible that I was brought in to bring some sharpness to a film about the coast that consisted largely of helicopter footage that was nice looking and said little.)

1970: A CASE OF PRIORITY:  (Horizon Series 6 #29) I was lucky to work with John Mansfield on what we developed into a  poignant and – I think –  praised film. Medicine on tv had generally been presented in terms of heroics -- ‘Your Life in Their Hands’. Newcastle had a number of doctors interested in how money for medicine was spent. In particular was money being drawn away to high cost procedures perhaps with little long term benefit from the needs of a (in this case widely poor) urban population. The other kind of priority related to survival of the ulta-ill both at the start and end of life. At what point was heroic medicine too heroic. Setting the film in one locale (Newcastle with its elegance in decline) created a locus for issues that were not so much answerable as worthy of discussion.

I think we had 12 weeks in which to make a 50 minute documentary. (5o minutes + 10 minutes of other BBC material matched the commercial 48 of content + 12 of advertising. I think it was 5 weeks research and set up, 2 to 3 of shooting during which the editing would begin. Crews were relatively big: Director, assistant and PA (the only female), two on camera, two on sound, one or two on lighting. Cutting rooms worked 8 to 12 hour days with the sound tracks being laid in the last week and then mixed in a morning. The negative was  cut into two matching reels over night and the first print ready the next day.  This was the third 1970 Horizon I made:

1970: SOMETHING FOR OUR CHILDREN (Horizon series 7 #6)… or will there be something for our children?

          Ecology really was not covered. The word ‘environment’ seems to have only come into its modern use in the 1950s. This was eight years after the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Rachael Carson’s fierce attack on the terrible long term damage being done by the pesticide industry. Michal Andrews and I made the film together (he went on to he head of the world famous BBC natural history film unit at Bristol.) We were alerted to a grim situation in which European birds of prey were becoming extinct. This was known to be due to the mother birds destroying their own eggs which had weak shells, this the result of organochloride toxins accumulating in top of the food chain birds.

          The approach we took might have been too soft in journalism terms. Or it may have had the virtue of not thrusting too much bad environmental news down the viewer’s throat. The quasi-government Nature Conservancy had responsibility for the near extinction of British hawks and we followed their work – the raptor crisis, crisis in the ripping up of hedgerows, inability of the Highland forest to re-grow due to deer numbers, protection of golden eagles. I think it was OK as a film. Any reporter has to face that, if too polemical with these issues, a lot of people flee, and if you are not sharp tongued, you are being soft in a crisis.

I do remember… We suggested to the editor of Horizon, Peter Goodchild more environmental coverage. This ecology really was a subject, we argued. We were mocked and lacked the means or the guts to take it forward.

1970: WHAT KIND OF DOCTOR? (Horizon series 7 #23). Set in the prestigious St Thomas Hospital in London, an examination of self-perpetuating elitism among medical students – top surgeons were the top and general practice, community medicine and mental illness were for the losers. It echoed the times, was well received and led obscurely and unfairly to my dismissal from Horizon. It was made with my eminent colleague Brian Gibson.

1971: ONE LIVERPOOL OR TWO? (Horizon series 8 #4). That this was in a ‘science’ series may seem odd. It was an intrepid attack on the way phony science – the sociology of planning – was used to uproot communities and the priority of traffic allowed freeways to be thrust into the middle of old cities. Jane Jacobs had written The Life and Death of Great American cities and I tried to catch the spirit of that in talking to task major urban plans that looked lovely on paper, purported to be scientific and produced bland, socially divided spaces. Liverpool was being made all about access to Liverpool and not enough for those who lived hard lives there.

          On the strength of it I wrote the short book The Politics of Planning of which there is usually a copy or two on AbeBooks.

1971: PERISCOPE WARS (Horizon Series 8 #11) was about the evolution of submarine in naval war and relied largely on commentary and stock footage. It

 made with Alan Segal (who went onto edit the dynamic news series World In Action for Grenada television.) Several of these Horizon’s were made with two younger producers. The editor, Peter Goodchild, had the idea this would sort out the strong from the weak, see who directed the more dramatic sequences. Our response was to work as a team and tell him we could not remember thus foiling a policy he appeared to intend to sort the strong from the weak. In fact everyone from my intake had pretty successful film or tv careers.

IN ADDITON: I had been drawn to quasi-scientific issues  (in a remarkably free era for young producers). I, or we, had made film on conservation issues before it was fully a subject and issues of medical priorities and ethics, the planning film about science misused and the submarine one about the grim interface between advancing technologies and weaponry. I made three other films, one on what was known about how memory worked which included some quirks of memory (the Memory Man who had a prodigious memory). I made a film with Professor Louis Wolpert about how the embryo knows to develop in the way it does and how patterns are laid down in nature. I was given film that the BBC had bought from a German film maker which had spurious material about the supposed extinction of the pygmy tribes tropical Africa. We ended up putting him right via film and interview with  the eminent pygmy expert, the British anthropologist Colin Turnbull.

At this point, via a change of fortune, which appeared to be mis-fortune, my boss at the BBC, Robert Reid, founder of HORIZON, was either fired or left.

          Bob Reid, to me, a liberal, represented the best of the liberal and investigative approach to science broadcasting, supporting a move to enlarge what was meant by science to include medical ethics, controversy about the use of drugs in the psychiatric profession, environmental issues.

          In 1960, before the ‘sixties’ were really swinging, Hugh Carlton Greene was appointed Director General with a view to livening up BBC television content in competition with Independent Television. Greene was  a liberal and a journalist and the brother of that scourge of the British establishment, Graham Greene, the novelist. He, Hugh Carlton Green, really oversaw the revolution, allowing savagely satirical programs that took politicians to task. And the broad documentary output of which I was part was also critical of the status quo.

          Bob Reid and Horizon exemplified that.

An Ignominious End with a concealed silver lining:

          Why Bob left has never been clear. He moved to a lucrative but, for him, professionally unsatisfying partner in the independent production house Videoarts which never produced serious films on science or medicine. In his place came the most conservative of the science producers, Philip Daley.

          Each year Philip Daley produced a long, elaborate programme on an aspect of pure science with the writer and presenter Nigel Calder. These films were reverend to their topic and uncritical of those scientists who explored it, had high production values and were. The Restless Earth  and The Violent Universe were typical of these big budget shows that were accompanied by illustrated books. Now Philip Daley, Calder’s producer, was made head of Horizon. My head rolled.

          I can’t prove all the links. Furious at the BBC for criticism of his government and probing into private financial affairs, the Labour Prime Minister had appointed Lord Hill who was a doctor, conservative and ex-broadcaster to be chairman of the BBC – not director general. Greene remained there. Hill was supposed, it was said, to ‘clean up the BBC’. One of his more pernicious acts from my point of view and, strangely irrelevant in the broad picture, was a direct request from Hill to Daley not to renew my 6 month contract. I say ‘irrelevant’ in that I was hardly behind the news department digging into Wilson’s finances, or a satirical programme making fun of him.

          My misdemeanour, now elevated to sin, was to have made the film ‘What Kind of Doctor?’ about the hospital where Lord Hill had been trained. Perhaps I should have been flattered. I had made the worst film the BBC had ever made.

          This was odd indeed, and devastating for someone with a family to support. There was no redress, merely a short ten minute dressing down by Daley.

          Yes, the film had been critical of St Thomas’ in saying that too much prestige existed around the top surgeons and not enough was ascribed to community medicine or general practice and psychiatry. The film was, as much as anything, a description of the inside of a teaching hospital and the lives of young students. My co-producer was Brian Gibson who was sure-footed and went on to Hollywood. It was edited by the highly experienced Roy Fry and approved by the Horizon editorial staff.

          Now it was the worst film the BBC made and I, with no Bob Reid to appeal to, out of the BBC.

          I had a hard two months before my contract ended and this story ended happily. Thanks in part to Bob, I was hired as a writer-director on the proposed American version of Horizon, the NOVA series made at the Public Television station in Boston, WGBH. Instead of a six month contract being cut short, a one year contract ran on there for five.

Link to: Films made for NOVA (mainly available for download) >>>

Link to: Francis Gladstone career page >>>>>