I joined the COI in 1965, amazed that I had this chance. I had had an upside-down history in film, starting as a producer in commercials, after an earlier stint for Radio Luxembourg, but that’s another story, and had slowly worked my way back to being an assistant director/writer/producer. I had managed to stay away from working at an advertising agency, despite offers, as I wanted to stay with actual film-making. I had worked in live-action and animation, for television and cinema, and think I was working freelance at the time I applied for the COI job, and had to race for the interview from location. I was astonished to learn that I had the job, though I was quite unsure what it really involved when I turned up at Hercules Road.
I was to produce London Line, the ‘Old Commonwealth’ version, squarely aimed at the white ex-colonies of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, with some distribution to smaller territories as well. It was a weekly 15 minute magazine programme, with studio introduction and closing, and studio based items mixed with location reports on different subjects. It was distributed on 16mm film, which at that time was still the only internationally acceptable distribution medium. Videotape was in use, but the necessary standards conversion, from the European to the US standard for instance, was expensive and of variable quality. In Britain we were still in the world of black and white TV.
The studio element was shot at The Granville Studios, a television studio in a converted music-hall theatre in Fulham. The studio used black and white studio cameras, the images being telerecorded ‘down the line’ at a facility in central London. (For those too young to remember, telerecording was a pre-video tape technology, which was essentially a film camera trained on a small high quality television screen. It made a negative and from that a print, of acceptable quality.) The location items, were filmed by freelance crews from all over the place. The telerecording and the filmed reports were assembled in one of the half dozen cutting rooms at the COI, then taken to a dubbing theatre for any voice inserts, sound mixed, then negatives cut, prints made, and despatched overseas by air.
This London Line was one of a series of similar programmes for distribution in different areas of the world in different languages – in English to Africa, Spanish to South America, Arabic to the Middle East. The Granville Studio was booked for the COI for several days a week, and we were, undoubtedly, their biggest customer.
It took me some time to find out what was going on in the program, and in the production set-up. There was a small team of researcher-writers, about three. They had to come up with a stream of stories, as each program had about five items in it, some very brief and some longer, but even the brief ones had to be organised, objects borrowed, sets designed, scripts written, etc. Each week we would meet to discuss what was coming up, and try to balance the content, with some more serious items balancing some more frivolous ones. From my earliest contact with the program I could see the tension between the desire by some of the senior COI people to please the Foreign Office masters by including lots of ‘heavy’ items, and the production team’s instinct that their first audience was the scheduler at a television station who needed to know that the program would hold his audience, needing a light touch, some tourism, some fashion, some pop music and so on.
A weekly program of any length has a momentum of its own, and it is demanding. Every day things would go wrong – a story would turn out to be too dull, an interviewee would cry off – and other stories had to be found. When I started I found that the researchers were writing ‘draft’ scripts, and all the bits of drafts were being sent to a scriptwriter some days before the studio date for a finished version which he delivered a couple of days later, with the studio bits being sent then to autocue. This process was slowing things down at the very stage when we needed to speed up, and the scripts sometimes got things wrong because the writer didn’t have all the background that the researchers had. It also de-motivated the researchers, who seemed perfectly capable of writing for themselves. I persuaded John Hall, the executive producer, to let me have a go at writing the scripts, and in a fit of generosity he agreed – mind you, it also saved the cost of the writer. From then on the researchers wrote their scripts, which I often tore apart, or sent back for re-writes.
Even though my own writing experience had previously been small, we quickly hit on the right demotic style for television – though I still relish the memory of Michael Smee, the main presenter, declaiming from the studio floor with all the microphones live, “Who wrote this flatulent crap?!”. I was standing beside him, and said I did, and to his great credit he laid about the script, denouncing it – and he was right.
Granville studio : Mike Smee and Adam Leys: more “flatulent crap!”
A word about John Hall, he was the executive producer who became my friend, and has remained my friend. He was pivotal in the development of the programs at COI in this period. He is not a dramatic person, but dogged, consistent and in his quiet way determined. He was always open-minded, prepared to take a chance on people and situations, able to play the politics of the civil service, while retaining his friendships from his time at the BBC. He was quite deaf as a result of an illness in adulthood which had been caught from his children, but he never ever complained about it. He loved a written paper which explained and justified a course of action or a program, the ‘rationale’ as he always called it, and would go off to argue a case of any sort so long as he had his paper. It was John who had led the expansion of the programs at the COI to comprise this sizeable suite of productions, employed the film editors, the researchers and directors, and created a big production unit inside an often reluctant civil service.
He was unusual because the COI was an odd place, and creating this producing unit was doing so against the odds. The recent history of the COI in the 50s had been that all the production for the ‘home’ departments was contracted out as a single block of work to a production company, and the COI had developed systems which understood that this was the correct way of relating to the film production industry, at arms length.
It had ‘budget officers’ who knew what to do when faced with the production of a half-hour film for the Department of Whatsits which might take a year or more to research, write, shoot, edit, etc. This was no good at all for television, when production had to take place in a few days, with staff directly employed to do it. This was a very different matter, and there were plenty of people in the COI in admin and finance positions who were deep down convinced that all these people who produced for television were not just flighty and frivolous but were probably dishonest, and the job was to protect public money from them.
It led to many difficulties and conflicts, eased with time but never resolved. The production people felt that their hands were tied, and the civil servants felt that they were being ripped off. There was also a culture clash, in that the staid civil servants felt that the production people were leading glamorous lives, possibly immoral, they critical of it and resented it.
The COI offices were in a dull 50s building near Waterloo Station, the epitome of civil servicedom, filled with people who did exhibitions or publications of all sorts, well versed in working for government departments. Our overseas television group was doubly unusual because while we were funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, we had very little to do with them directly – no vetting of scripts, or showing of rough cuts – we felt that we were working for the television stations which screened our items, even though we had no contact with them at all.
The other parts of the COI were much more tied by their sponsors. And the other sense in which we felt unusual was in directly doing the work ourselves – the researching, writing the scripts, directing the films, editing them – and not just farming it out as a contract to others. There was probably also a sense that the suspicion of the traditional civil service element created a response from us, a certain stylish disdain, a slight devil-may-care, which of course fuelled the suspicion, and so on.
In truth, only some of the incomers had come from television. I myself had not worked in broadcast television, though Eric Halliday (a program Director) had, and Margaret O’Donald (production assistant) had worked in radio at Bush House, but I cannot recall where else. Some were homegrown, and some of the most effective. Most enjoyed working for their country, despite the tensions and contradictions, and they all put in long hours.
The directors had worked in television, though some had washed up on the shores of COI from rather stormy seas. Eric Beecroft, a Canadian, was very serious and solemn; Peter Yolland had worked in light entertainment, and it showed. Mark Lawson was an interesting man who had been a big theatre director in Germany before WW2, had escaped to Britain, found television after the war, and had risen to direct the opening night transmission from a giant new studio built for ATV Ltd an independent television station, which was a live drama two hours long with multiple cameras, camels, dancing girls, etc. And now he was directing shows for the COI.
Later he emigrated to Australia to make a fresh start, and was last heard of as a minicab driver. Bob Morgan, an American, had started as a documentary maker, and had made one about American tourists in Europe, called “ If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium”, a title later pinched for a feature film. Once he failed to show at the Granville for a day’s work, and I sat in the director’s chair for the first and only time, called about two shots and he showed up. I think he had just got bored and decided not to go, and then changed his mind. Some of the other programs had people with television backgrounds, and some took time to understand how things worked at the COI – I remember being furious that a story I had nurtured and waited for was stolen by a newly arrived researcher on another program who just said that was life sweetie, you had to compete – she did not last long there.
And the film editors were interesting too, first of all that they existed at all, inside this odd civil service building. One of them, famously, was Peter Greenaway, who later became an internationally famous film director and stager of opera and other events.
The relationship with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was very interesting at this time. Various studies and inquiries had established that Britain should use television to show itself to the world, and the FCO had accepted that, and produced the funding for it. At the start of my time there, I was quite unclear about exactly what we were trying to say, but we all gradually imbibed, rather than being instructed in, the ground rules of our work. There were the ‘hard’ information goals – to show Britain as an innovative, energetic place, full of dramatic discoveries and earnest politicians. Then there was our real audience, the weary television schedulers in far away television stations, keeping an eye on their audiences’ interests and their boredom thresholds. There was also at this time, the mid-sixties, the surge in pop music, fashion, the whole swinging London idea, which was known world-wide with a mixture of excitement and horror, and which some in the FCO and in the COI viewed as evil and unnecessary.
The interesting part was that while John Hall, and possibly his masters (and mistresses, the Director of the Film Division was a woman) had serious discussions with the FCO annually, to set out production plans and agree budgets, the FCO never asked to see a script or a rough cut, or even see a finished program, except rarely, for some particular reason. They got feedback from their Embassies and High Commissions about distribution achieved, but little on content. So we were a sponsored film unit, where the sponsors assumed that we were working in their best interests, and left us to it. It was enlightened sponsorship, where John Hall and those above him were left as the guardians of content. Later I came to know the FCO people rather better, and their languid air always amused me, but in retrospect their ease in judgement was interesting.
But returning to the major part of the work we did, the television programs. I produced a series of the black and white London Line programs, which were sometimes good and sometimes mediocre, in retrospect. We tried hard to dress up the studio part with simple set dressing, and mixed the occasional serious and rather heavy handed items with much lighter stuff. I recall an interview with the then Minister for Power which was meant mainly to boast about the number of nuclear power stations we then had and were building – oh dear! (And remember asking him as we waited to start whether there were going to be power cuts that winter, as there had been the previous one. No, he said, so long as January and February were sunny and warm. Imagine anyone saying that now, even to a strange civil servant!)
And then we might have a fashion item, shot on location, and a studio music item, or a piece of theatre. On one occasion we got Sybil Thorndike, then appearing in what proved to be her last London stage appearance to come to the studio to talk about her play and her life in the theatre. We asked her about “St Joan”, which had been written for her by George Bernard Shaw, and asked, before the recording, if she might perform a bit of St Joan for us – we had a copy handy for her to refresh her memory. She did it, and the lighting director had prepared a spot for her, and she did that amazing theatre trick of suddenly shedding sixty years - she was about eighty at the time – and seeming like a young girl again. We were all moved, and it looked beautiful on the recording – what was the propaganda effect of that, and could it have been planned? I was clear that it was about culture and history being important in our lives, that it made good television, and would satisfy both the FCO and the unseen studio scheduler seeking to satisfy his audiences.
We actually found another way of checking to see if we had any audiences, when I discovered that for some reason in the past the COI had registered a Post Office box number that had never been used, so we invited viewers to write to us about anything they had seen in the program. I remember being quite astonished when the first letters arrived. There really was someone out there! Then more and more arrived, and we realised that we would have to have some organised way of recording and responding, and someone was assigned to the replies. The letters continued from then at a steady rate, never huge, but sometimes valuable, occasionally commercially valuable. In one program in a later series we had shown the original Spacehopper, a big inflatable ball a child could hop and bounce on, which drew swift letters from distributors who wanted to sell it in the US. I believe the manufacturer wound up hiring whole freight jets to fly them to the States to try to keep up with demand from distributors who had first seen it on our program on a local station. There were many other smaller examples of where commercial links were made, which often astonished us because we had thought that trade links would have connected to things better than our 15 minute program.
Around 1967 things started to change. We knew that Britain was going to start TV transmission in colour, but knew also that the problem of standards conversion on videotape had not really changed – we were sending weekly recorded programmes to countries with at least two different television systems, with the Canadians on NTSC (colloquially known as Never Twice The Same Colour – the US had been the first with a colour TV system and it was great in the studio, but often unstable at the point of reception) and the Australians had adopted the same system as the UK, PAL (Peace at Last, so-called because the French had in the meantime launched their own system, SECAM, known unkindly as Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method). We clearly had to go into colour, but on film. Someone ( John Hall perhaps? actually Bill Stewart JH ) heard of the Gemini system, a strange looking system which attached film cameras to studio black and white TV cameras, so that you could use a regular black and white television studio, but record the output in colour. Strangely, this weird system worked (see Appendix 2 at page…..).
At the same time British Information Services New York (BIS NY), the information arm of the British Embassy to the US which was a powerful set-up in its own right, put out feelers for a program similar to the one we were making for Canada and Australia, but geared for the US market, and in colour. This seemed interesting to everyone, and we on the program felt it was quite an endorsement of what we had been doing.
BIS NY wanted to be sure that the program makers understood the US market, and I went to the US for an exploratory trip, to learn. I had a great time, and was very kindly looked after by Alan Waple, the man in charge of television at BIS in New York. I visited all sorts of people in New York, and then went on a great trip to Chicago, rented a car and went on a three day trip to visit small television stations, to get a sense of their interests and prejudices. BIS had insisted that I make this trip to learn that New York is not typical of the US, but discovered that the BIS staff, Waple included, never made a trip like mine, and seldom went outside New York.
I was treated with unfailing politeness everywhere I went, and with some excited curiosity. I had longish hair like everyone in London, and a neat line in flowery ties, but the hair and the ties were regarded as amazingly way out and daring by conservative America. I drove across the mid-west bible belt, with those huge billboards with bible slogans on them, erected by the farm owner at the turning from the main road to his distant farm. I visited a village called Battleground, named for a 19th century battle between the US cavalry and a ‘Indian’ tribe, resulting in the deaths of many of the cavalry – the number of Indian deaths was not recorded. In the graveyard were the graves of the first settlers in the mid-19th C, small children and old people first, and then later the graves of young men dead in wars with Mexico before the end of the century, speeded up civilisation. In one small town I asked the television station manager how many staff he had. He looked at a sheet on the wall and counted 21 names, including the cleaner. In Peoria, which is the archetypal small town in American lore (“The show closed in Peoria”), a town of about 2-3,000 people in those days, there was a television station where the station manager’s secretary told me that no, she hadn’t always lived in Peoria, but had moved “to the big city” a couple of years before.
I was learning a lot about the US. But I also learned that they were, of course very much like us in so many ways, and even more insular. It is a huge country, with lots of interest in it, and they weren’t on the whole very interested in what happened in Britain. The royal family, Wimbledon, a juicy murder perhaps, but not politics, or industry, or anything which challenged them too much. The program content was going to have be nicely balanced between our two audiences, the demands of our paymasters and those of our television schedulers. In this case the paymasters were effectively in BIS NY, and were focused in the person of Alan Waple.
I don’t think I realised then the history behind him, when in previous times BIS had been a production centre in its own right, re-cutting material sent from London and voicing it with US voices. I think Waple wanted that sort of control again. What was agreed seemed like something to get him off our backs in London, but it was fatal. It was agreed that each week we would send him the draft script so that in New York they could make sure we weren’t using words or phrases which would be misunderstood in the US, like ‘rubber’ meaning a condom, that sort of thing. I remember he had a neurosis about saying things “were pretty short..” or pretty anything, the use of the word pretty in that sense being ‘unknown’ in the US. It was rubbish of course, as they used it then and now in the same way that we do.
A member of staff was taken on to assist in the liaison with New York, Jenny Lucas, who had lived in the US and worked there for the Consulate in Chicago.This was in the days before email, and the only way to send the script was by telex. The COI had big telex facilities because it sent out lots of press material to overseas posts by that method, but it meant having the script ready at least two days earlier than we wanted, and having the whole thing re-typed by the telex operators and sent (at telex speed, much, much slower than email) to New York. Then we waited while they read it and sent back their comments.
What they sent back, of course, was a re-write. The whole of their telex, yards of it, would be pinned up on the office noticeboard while we studied it, and then the rows began. I would protest to John Hall that what New York was doing was not what was agreed, that the changes they were making were often unworkable and damaging, and that the whole process was totally undermining of me and my team.
John would try to calm me, talk to his bosses and to the FCO, talk to New York, etc. We would achieve some compromises, but it was a stupid way to go on.
Gradually BIS NY lost interest in the program. It achieved quite good distribution, given that it was trying to break in to the gaps in a highly developed if fragmented television system, but I think Waple believed he was going to have some smash hit on his hands. As he lost interest and left us alone, the programs got better, but it was too late for the US, even though we continued in production for another two years .
In the early 1970s, a new direction was needed, as it looked as if we could not maintain long runs of regular weekly productions on cost grounds, and the changing nature of television in the world meant that distribution of such programs was getting harder. One proposal that COI put to FCO was for the production of a series of short profiles or portraits of interesting people in Britain. The idea was to capture the enthusiasm and energy of some people on the basis that enthusiasm works very well on television, and that enthusiastic people are often also rather extrovert and survive the business of working with cameras, crews and so on. It also meant that while we could send them out as a series, each program could be free standing, and scheduled at opportune moments.
So the search was on for dynamic and interesting people who would agree to – or who craved – a short film profile. We had hits and misses, but the two series, The Enthusiasts and Pacemakers were quite interesting. (see more on these programs at pages……)
I remember, for instance, going to talk to Prof Roy Laithwaite, who had re-awakened interest in linear electric motors, and magnetic levitation, at Imperial College. He was a man of vision, of amazing rail systems which are now being researched and built in Germany and Japan, but who had nothing to show at that time beyond some small models. I wondered out loud what on earth we could actually film – and he just said to put the camera on him and that would be enough – such chutzpah, and that was more or less what we did.
By contrast one of the programs was later marked as ‘never to be shown’ it was one about T Dan Smith, at the time lauded as a local authority leader of great vision in Newcastle, transforming a run-down city, etc, who later went to jail for taking illegal payments, along with leading politicians and others.
We made profiles of people whose firms promptly went bust, so we were finding some edgy people in an era where they were hard to find – the interesting action was in fashion and music, which we also covered, but much of business and commerce was still very staid and dull. We also commissioned some films from interesting people such as Frank Cvitanovich, a Canadian producer based in London with a huge track record in documentary, who did films on a pop record producer, Mickey Most, and a footballer, and his then wife, Midge McKenzie also did films in this series.
A quite separate event was a program which we made with the Prince Philip. I cannot remember how we got into making a program with and for the Duke of Edinburgh at the Granville Studio. I suppose the Foreign Office was involved as they paid all our bills, but the program he wanted was all about careers for young people in Britain, one of his many schemes. The program had a studio element in which the Duke talked to, and listened to, a group of young people, with filmed elements showing young people at work. For the studio element we had a set built where the group sat in a semicircle around a low bench where the Duke sat. We were using the Gemini three camera system of film cameras attached to the television cameras.
Janice Kay directed in the gallery, I was the producer, and John Hall was the executive producer. I also remember being asked to ask him to change his tie. This was because he was wearing a tie with red stripes. Whoever was in charge of lighting said that in the context of colour television at the time, red stripes would not be stable when the film was transmitted. Prince Philip, to general astonishment, said he thought the stripes might be a problem so he had brought along a spare tie, in a plain colour which he pulled out of his pocket.
Of course there was a mega technical hitch before we could start, I totally forget why, but while it was sorted out I sat in the studio with the Duke, surrounded by the young people, and got him chatting to pass the time, which wound up with him teaching me, and the young people, how to fly a helicopter. He was an excellent teacher! He made no fuss about the delay, and when we eventually came to make the program he was first class, easy to talk to, listened well, patient and encouraging. I realised that his training in going round factories and housing estates and meeting people who were very nervous and putting them at their ease, was the perfect training for a television interviewer.
When the program was complete, it was arranged that we would screen it at Buckingham Palace, in a spare ballroom that was used for screening films. It turned out that it was fitted with a projection booth but no 16mm projector, so we sent our own, to be run by Reg, our senior projectionist, very experienced, very polite and discreet. He went early to get set up, and I joined him half an hour or so before the screening time. He said everything was fine, but seemed rather nervous. The screening went fine, everyone happy. The next day I asked Reg what had happened. It seems that after setting up the projector and screen and testing everything he had some time to wait and was by then a bit tired. He didn’t want to sit in any of the chairs set up for the Duke and his party so he went to sit in a chair at one side, very old and rather magnificent. As he sat down, it fell to bits under him! Reg, alone in this vast room, felt panicky. He hastily fitted all the bits back together again, pushed it back against the wall and left it alone. Whew!
And yet another small detail, the projection box had fittings for two 35mm projectors that had been given to the Queen by the film industry so that they could watch feature films. Every summer when the family went to Sandringham, the projectors went too. It must have been a massive operation, since each projector weighed about 4-500 lbs, and was bolted to a concrete base. Crazy world.
Somewhere around this time John Hall got promoted to some other job, ( became Head of Home Film Production, that is film production for all departments of government except the Foreign and Commonwealth Office-JH) and I applied for his post and became the Head of Overseas Production or executive producer for a group of programs which were well established and running strongly, such as This Week in Britain, a weekly five minute report with presenters, shot in two or three languages, and Tomorrow Today, a new series of magazine science programs produced and distributed in batches of 13 programs. The science series was interesting and varied, and revealed the differences between scientists, some of who would harrumph that their important life’s work could not possibly be shown in a sequence of only four or five minutes, and others who would get the point and talk clearly and concisely about the key importance of what they did – how we loved those men and women.
Since we had a sizeable television production team, and were looking for exposure on foreign television screens, it made sense to consider helping overseas producers who wanted to make programs in and about Britain. COI had done something of this for some time, but usually visiting teams were looked after by Tours Division, who were specialists in arranging visits by guests of the government, often senior ministers or experts who would be put up in the best hotels and carried about in limousines, a very plushy way of life. It wasn’t suitable for, say, a German TV producer who wanted help in finding the right locations for a serious program.
So we in Films and Television Division branched out a bit into ‘co-productions’. This really meant co-financing productions which we felt showed promise of demonstrating real benefit to Britain and which might not be made without an input of some cash. We found that a very small amount of cash committed early usually gave the producer the platform from which to raise his main budget elsewhere. We also sometimes contributed research help, which meant we knew what was going into the program. This worked well enough on a small scale, but then came the big one.
In the early seventies John Hall and I were asked to go the Foreign Office to discuss a proposal which had come via BIS New York, for a week long visit to Britain by the NBC Today Show
The NBC Today show was the premier of the three big US networks daily 2 hour morning television shows, a mixture of politics, news, fashion and so on, of the type now familiar to us in Britain, but unheard of then. ‘Today’ was a big heavy-weight show, with a remarkable producer, Stuart Schulberg. In US terms, this was serious television, not showbiz. If NBC invited senior politicians for an interview, they turned up. They begged to be on.
The Today Show had a practice of spending a week each year in a foreign country, with the extra cost of doing so borne by the host country. It wouldn’t be allowed today under FCC (Federal Communication Commission) rules as it was hidden sponsorship, and was stopped a few years later. The question was – was it worth the money?
In that languid but purposeful way the Foreign Office had, they said someone should go to New York to see what was needed and report back. I found myself on a plane about two days later. I returned and made my report, and the money and logistical support was agreed in a couple of days.
The NBC people were charming, very bright, very professional and accomplished. They knew that I, and later my research team, were government public relations people but they never patronised us or were disrespectful. It was very quickly clear that it was a tremendous public relations opportunity for Britain, and would need heavy staffing at our end. The Foreign Office agreed and supported the plan. The Today show pattern was that they made all the segments on location which were not the news, weather and travel, which were made in New York daily, live. The foreign element was all made on tape with location vans, and the carefully timed tapes were flown to New York daily in those pre-satellite days.
The producer of the Today show, Stuart Schulberg, was a very intelligent and very experienced film maker and political producer, the brother of Budd Schulberg ,the novelist and screen writer, and the son of B P Schulberg, a movie producer in the thirties. He gave me a steer on the sort of locations they were looking for, so that we could propose some items when they came first on a reconnaissance visit.
We drew on our regular team of researcher/writers and assigned one to each potential location. When the US team arrived on their reconnaissance they were charming, relaxed and very professional. They visited all the locations, made their choices and went away. We fixed all the access details and provided background information.
Later a huge team came for the production, where we had researchers alongside their people, helping the shows into being. We had five researchers and me – they had about fifty staff, researchers, writers, gofers, producers, directors PAs, etc.
When the week of the shoots came, my team worked their socks off and loved it. Eventually they recorded at Edinburgh Castle, Liverpool waterfront, at a Welsh coal mine, the Roman Baths in Bath, and the Barbican complex in London, They edited the material here, and flew it back to New York, with empty slots for the local news and weather and ads to be inserted there. A huge variety of guests were interviewed, government ministers, actors, sports people, business people and so on. I think it all went well, and it was memorable experience.
We all loved doing it, and the American team seemed to enjoy our people being part of the project.
(The team had booked rooms at The Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, and as they walked in Schulberg said ‘I remember this place, I lived here for a couple of years, and it was true. His father had come to England in the thirties to produce pictures, and he had brought his family and they all lived in the hotel for two years.)
On a later visit I made to New York in 1973 or 74, Stuart Schulberg invited me to join him and a group of friends to watch one of the last of Richard Nixon’s televised addresses to the nation while still fighting to stay in office. Before the program Stuart impressed on everyone that they must be absolutely silent during the broadcast so that we would all hear every word. Almost as soon as Nixon started to speak Stuart leaped to his feet shouting “You liar! It’s not true! And that’s not true either!” It was hilarious, but a nice picture of the man. He just could not contain himself, very committed, very passionate about political life.
Given the COI/FCO image of a slow moving bureaucracy, this speed and ease of decision making to undertake this facility was in part rather magisterial and in part very pragmatic, and rather matched the way television programs got made – fast and flexible, with instant decision-making on the spot. Perhaps that was why FCO left us alone, as they saw something of themselves in the way we worked?
Another strand of our work arose because we had access to the Granville Studio for several days of the week. It was perhaps inevitable that we would get drawn into television training for UK ambassadors going abroad. This was easily done, but showed another aspect of the FCO.
All we did was to show them what they looked like on television, a shock to many. We also showed them that in a television studio they had entered a world in which they were no longer in charge, and many of them found this very disturbing and uncomfortable, bridling at any challenge, angry at any suggestion that their pompous utterances were less than wonderful.
Others of them got the point very quickly, listened carefully and worked hard at improving. This contrast went right through the Foreign Service, when I met many diplomats on trips abroad, sometimes to see other countries’ television set-ups, or chasing possible co-production deals. The FCO staff serving abroad were sometimes extremely clever people, shrewd and clear-sighted. Others of them were supremely dull, amazingly so. I once went to Rome chasing what proved quickly to be an abortive co-production deal which the embassy thought was about to happen, and was invited to join the embassy staff at a ‘family’ party in the embassy grounds that night. This was the old embassy, a huge villa on the edge of Rome, with a big garden of mature trees and a swimming pool, while a Roman aqueduct soared into the air over our heads an idyllic setting for truly boring people, who were metaphorically – and sometimes literally – at home in Croydon, and wished they could be back there. The conversation was all about removal firms and how awful they were.
The co-production idea grew in the early seventies. We found that many television stations in countries we regarded as ones where we wanted to make an impression and where they would not take our programs, such as the German stations, were quite keen on mounting co-productions. They often sought multiple partners, and we found that by committing even a small sum of money, and doing so early, we could help a series of programs come into existence, and be part of the production team. I think this was a particular moment in time at which some stations, had some ambitious producers with ideas beyond their budgets, and before the moment that stations realised the dangers inherent in the ‘co-production’ idea, particularly with a government agency, so only a few such deals were done.
In the later seventies I was moved into another job, and I still don’t know whether it was because I had been promoted to my level of incompetence, or because they wanted me to give a kick in the pants to a crucial but moribund area of work – the latter, I like to think. I moved to take over ‘Distribution’, which until then had been the mechanics of sending out the right prints to the right overseas ‘posts’ at the right time. The posts – the embassies and High Commissions – passed on the films to their local television stations. It was a clumsy process, and many posts were bad at it. Often the films were just sent with a driver, with no effort to talk to the television station, and no effort was made to see if they were actually used. Embassy people often did not watch their local television much.
My predecessor had been once to visit the big international television sales event in Cannes, and had recommended that it was worth following up. I went in my turn, and was amazed. Here were television buyers from all over the world, including, crucially, many of the countries to which we were sending films to be given out by the embassies. It seemed clear to me that if they were able to buy programs they would not think well of stuff they got free, and would soon learn to dismiss it as valueless propaganda. We were already in a crowded ‘free’ market, with very poor quality material from Russia and China and other countries being offered free too. We needed to mark ourselves out in a different way, so I returned to London and wrote a paper proposing that we should now start to sell our programs in the market place, not in order to make money or even recover our costs, but to get distribution to countries that were increasingly turning against free material.
Once again, the COI and the Foreign Office were surprisingly quick to back this. For the Foreign Office it was actually a big step as they could see that they were effectively cutting their posts out of the distribution chain. The extra costs were agreed, and the next year (1977?) I had a small team in Cannes, with a professionally built exhibition stand, in the maelstrom that is MIP TV, (Marche International de Programmes de Television). My team were, of course, basically administrative staff from the distribution office of Films and Television Division, mostly quite young, and they were brilliant. We had no idea what to charge, other than that we needed to sound the market, and though we had debated and discussed and practised negotiating skills, and the details of contracts – including such things as territory boundaries and repeat rights – we were truly innocents. We were trying to achieve distribution, not cash, but needed to charge a market rate to have credibility. We had one ace, a member of staff who turned out to be the ideal sales person as she had absolutely no shame. On our small stand we had a television and some chairs, to play out the films we had brought, stacks of leaflets about our programs, and a cupboard full of videotapes. We had also taken a lot of innocent government films on road safety and other stuff, produced for use in Britain, to pad out the offering.
On the first morning our ace – as she turned out to be – spent a lot of time with a visitor, showing lots of these older films, and then came to me to say I had to look very serious, as she had negotiated a price for a bunch of old films but had said she wasn’t sure if her boss would agree it, so I was to look very serious and then agree. She named the figure, which was outrageously high and I had to get inside the cupboard as I was laughing so much. This set the scene everyone cheered up, and learned to aim high. We came back from Cannes with remarkable sales into territories where the programs had not been before, as well as to countries where they had notionally been available free. A bunch of junior clerks in the civil service became television sales people in the south of France, and we had a lot of fun, but looking back it is the nerve of the Foreign Office which impresses me – they got the idea and backed it. Having a lot of fun is, to me, the abiding memory of this time. There were frustrations and irritations, and the running conflict with the hidebound side of the civil service was ever present, but perhaps in a reaction we who were in production tried to be more smart, less respectful than anyone else.
Some people moaned about the restrictions of being in a propaganda service, but the restrictions were not really onerous, and I think that in many ways we had as much freedom as we would have had in some parts of the BBC or other broadcasters. It was sponsored film making with a difference, the difference being that the sponsor had a totally hands-off attitude, did not ask for synopses in advance, did not see scripts, did not always even see the finished programs. Of course the COI management filled some of that role, but it was remarkable, nonetheless. In a funny way, these were golden days, long gone. I left film work in about 1981, and the COI in 1990.