TELEVISION FILLERS: BACKGROUND 1960 TO 1989 The Film Division productions that over time, have become most widely known to the public, were the Television Fillers or, in the parlance of government departments, Short Public Service Information Films. Characters such as Green Cross Code Man, Charley, Joe and Petunia all became well known figures to the adult public and well known to children through television exposure. The dangers of crossing the road, driving badly, getting caught in a storm at sea, being robbed, became well known hazards. All this through several hundred short films looking uncommonly like television advertisements but transmitted by commercial television stations free of charge with some additional screenings by the BBC. The origin of the “Short Public Service Information Film” otherwise known as either “a cinema trailer” or “television filler was in the 1930s. The Cinema Trailer became very important in the 1939-1945 years of WW2 as films of between 1-3 minutes shown in cinemas. They were included in that section of the evening cinema programme devoted to trailers for forthcoming films, hence the term. The messages of the war time cinema trailers were largely around aspects of living in wartime such as saving energy through taking smaller baths, looking out for health, digging for victory and many more. After the end of the war the cinema trailers continued to be produced by COI and Crown Film Unit, for example "Coughs and Sneezes", "You have been Warned", cinema trailers were produced about dangers from unexploded bombs, Food Flashes from the Ministry of Food and trailers introducing the new National Health Service. The establishment of commercial television in 1954 with breaks in programmes for advertisements led to the suggestion by the commercial television companies of making similar short films for television, hence the term Television Fillers. The two outlets, one in cinemas and other in television appear to have continued in parallel for a period but gradually morphed into a situation where cinema exposure was used for paid commercials while television was used both for paid commercials and the free air time accorded to Television Fillers. The use of television fillers by the ITV network was well established by 1960.The deal between ITV and COI was that each regional station would be supplied with a “library” of around 100 television fillers by the COI. The actual decision about which filler to broadcast and when it was broadcast was to be at the discretion of the ITV station. The rationale for this decision was to establish a clear distinction between fillers and paid time commercials where the decision about what to broadcast and when was determined by the sponsor and the media buyer. By contrast the Television Fillers would be used to “fill” unsold advertising time or when programmes under ran their scheduled airtime. On the face of it, the scope and transmission opportunities might not appear to have been very significant. However as part of the arrangements the stations were asked to log the use of fillers and these logs demonstrated, over time, a remarkable level of usage. By 1969 some 25,000 transmissions by ITV stations and a further 10,00 screenings by BBC were recorded during that year. By 1975 the ITV screenings had risen to 40,00. The value of this amount of airtime was estimated at the time to be of the order of £8 million was based on ITV rate cards. (NA: INF 12/1100). People and Process: Television Fillers Unit The lists of Television Fillers that were produced provide an indication of just that, but they do not give any indication of the people in Film Division who were responsible for making the fillers or the conditions within which they worked or the process of production. These notes hopefully throw some light on these questions. The team responsible for the production of television fillers generally consisted of less than six people at any one time. The unit was led by a Senior Producer together with several producers. The unit also used a number of freelance writers. The following is not a complete list but includes from the late 1960s until the 1980s as Senior Producer: Peter Broderick, Gerry Evans , Robin Duval. Christine Crawshaw. Producers included: Christine Hermon (nee) Crawshaw, John Boddington, John Marshall, Diana Humphreys, and later Richard Smith. John Ross joined in 1985 until 1987 and then 1995 to 2010 during which period he produced all the Television Fillers. Robin Duval joined 1968 as “ideas/writer” then writer/producer until 1974. He was to make a huge contribution to the innovative and creative aspects of the television fillers.
His memories (warts and all) of joining the unit, the people in it, provide something of the atmosphere of the COI Film Division and the working conditions .Robin Duval writes: In the summer of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Saddam Hussein rose to power, the Republican Party nominated Nixon for President, Dubček’s Czechoslovakia was crushed by the Soviet Union, Pope Paul VI prohibited birth control, South Africa struck a crucial blow against apartheid by rejecting an England Cricket Team containing Basil D’Oliviera, and Dad’s Army appeared on British television for the first time. Meantime in an office at 40 Berkeley Square, dissatisfied with my career as a commercials producer for the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, I spotted an advertisement in the Guardian for a ‘Writer/Ideas Man’ (gender specific) at the COI. I clipped it and took it home to my girlfriend, and we agreed to give it a whirl. The salary was at Information Officer level - no more than I was getting at JWT - but writing was what I most wanted to do and there might be other opportunities further down the line. The job also came with one of the best pension schemes available in the UK - and I didn’t have to pay a penny for it. I remember the title as the ‘Writer/Ideas Man’ which now sounds politically incorrect, but then I think was just normal. The intention was to provide an alternative option (as well as a challenge) to the scripts the independent companies had been supplying in response to the departmental briefs. I was not meant to be a producer but - on the back of my previous experience as a commercials producer for J Walter Thompson - I wheedled my way into that function and thus writer/producer became the de facto post. By the end I was taking briefs, researching and writing scripts, agreeing them with departmental officials and advisors, producing the fillers and presenting them to the departments. If we felt the brief seemed to require animation, I was more likely to brief someone like Richard Taylor or Bob Godfrey and commission him to write the scripts. Live action scripts though were almost invariably written in-house. Gerry Evans’ special relationship with John Krish was about the only exception I can think of from my time. The interview was surprisingly unrigorous, even by the laid-back standards of the 1960s. The most remarkable aspect of it was that I was never required at any point to demonstrate actual achievement as a writer or ideas man. I had brought along a file of mostly unfilmed scripts in my briefcase - and that is where the file stayed. I probably told the panel that I was dissatisfied with the commercials I’d been making (Lux Toilet Soap, Ribena, Kelloggs, Kipling Cakes) and wanted to do something more socially respectable. That was the kind of thing we used to say in the 1960s. The job offer came back within a week or two, and I accepted. But, when I arrived at my new office in Hercules Road, it was to a major culture shock. At JWT I had been used to a large room of my own with a smaller room next door for my Assistant. The commercials I was producing ran at peaktime on ITV, frequently in long, high-profile campaigns. Most days I lunched at Kettners or the TrattoriaTerrazza (reputedly Harold Wilson’s favourite restaurant) at someone else’s expense - usually a production company that needed a job. If I had to go into Soho to check on progress on a commercial - which happened most of the week, sometimes two or three times a day - I hailed a passing taxi and charged the fare back to the agency, with never a quibble from management providing the pattern of expenses was broadly in line with everybody else’s (i.e. generous). As for receipts, nobody was particularly bothered. Compare this with the COI. I found myself on arrival sharing a room, slightly bigger than my JWT office, with three other men and two women. No carpets, no curtains. I had been tucked away in a corner by the door with a small desk, a wooden chair, non-electric typewriter and telephone. Staring down on me from the wall opposite was a single bleak poster: ‘DON’T SAY DON’T’. Apparently the Queen had recently visited the building and commented adversely on the style of the COI’s advice to the public. The ‘Home Television Unit’ - of which I was now a part - produced short public information films for government departments, most commonly Transport (Road Safety), the Home Office, Employment, Environment, Health, Defence. They were called ‘fillers’ because that is exactly what they were: material designed to occupy unused television advertising slots (when the fewest people were likely to be watching). My job was to take briefs from the departments and convert them into (typically) 30 or 45 second scripts. I was also required to follow through with the independent companies that produced the scripts, which meant I still had to travel into Soho and central London. Taxis, however, were forbidden in all but the most exceptional circumstances, and even claims for tube fares had to be witnessed and approved before the expenses could be redeemed. Lunches were severely frowned upon: who knows what corruption might flow from competitive supplier generosity? I think I even recall - during the earlier days - having to sign in on arrival and out again at the end of the day. I can hardly believe that now, but it would have been perfectly consistent then with the COI’s policy of almost total lack of trust in junior staff. The argument naturally was that it was all taxpayers’ money. (A point of view that - as I later discovered - was less strictly applied by other government departments and did not inhibit the comparably funded BBC.) But once my initial disbelief had receded, nearly all the memories of my time in the Unit are happy ones. Taxpayer funds notwithstanding, productivity was never thought to be much of an issue. (Mrs Thatcher was, after all, still eleven years away.) None of us arrived in the office much before ten o’clock. By lunchtime we would be in one of the pubs surrounding Hercules House, frequently not emerging for another two or three hours. It was quite hard for me to buckle down to my job. Apart from the general difficulty of focussing on ideas and scripts in a space packed tight with other people, my three male colleagues were all excellent raconteurs, and spent much of the day engaging the room - and me - in endless merry conversation. The overall boss of the Unit was Peter Broderick. What he did at his desk to justify this rôle remained a mystery to me. It was clear also that he was restless to move on to greater things elsewhere - indeed he later rose to the top of Public Affairs at the Ministry of Defence - and he had a very relaxed approach to his duties of managing the rest of us. Responsibility for our main business of film production fell to Gerry Evans - like Peter a Senior Information Officer (just slightly less Senior) - a jolly Welshman whose proudest boast was that the artist Rex Whistler had been blown up in the tank next to his when they were together in the Welsh Guards driving through Normandy in 1944. Finally there was Ron Salmon, an IO like me (but more senior), whose job was to tour the television companies, negotiate our scripts and finished films through the ITCA (ITV’s inhouse censorship body) and persuade BBC and ITV schedulers to place our fillers anywhere, anytime. He was an active trade unionist, to whom junior staff came regularly for sage advice, a very kind and intelligent man; though he once staggered me by declaring that, whenever he needed to remember what failure looked like, he only had to check in his shaving mirror. The two ladies were more or less outsiders since the Unit was essentially a boys’ club with boys’ topics - sport, politics, where to find the best local beer, BBC police dramas like Z-Cars and Softly Softly. Of the two I met at the beginning, one moved on after a couple of months quietly filing things. The other was an older woman - perhaps middle 50s - called, if I remember right, Peggy, whose hospitality my lewd male colleagues insisted I avoid (or else be prepared for two week-old hotpot, Mateus Rosé, and no chance of escaping before dawn). Of course I believed everything they told me… how cruel and unreconstructed men were in those days (and still are). Peggy, I recall, helped Gerry out in production and - it was rumoured - in other ways; but left within a year of my arrival, I suspect somewhat sadder and wiser. It is ironic that these first memories are of a COI so male-oriented and dominated: because the overall head of the films and television division at that time was a formidable lady called Frances Cockburn. Her brief predecessor had been a gentle man called Derek Mayne who, we understood, had found the job too stressful; and Frances Cockburn may have been top management’s reluctant choice to pull things together. At all events, like most of the rest of us, I did my best to avoid Ms Cockburn’s basilisk eye. This was undoubtedly a mistake, because when she did finally catch up with me she immediately gave me a crucial leg-up (a one-off but high profile rôle as producer of a travelling roadshow) and shortly transferred me to the more exotic world of half-hour documentaries. But already times were a-changing (Bob Dylan, 1964). In other COI units women were moving into top positions. Within a year or so, two very talented young women actually joined the Home Television Unit as producers. In due time they became so successful that their ‘public information films’ are today being celebrated by the BFI, are available commercially in compilations and watched by millions on YouTube. Their names were Christine Hermon (later Crawshaw) and Diana Humphreys. More of them later. I hated the term ‘fillers’. Still do. It was the word universally employed to describe our output by everyone in the television companies, by the film business in Soho, even by our own superiors in Hercules Road from the Director-General down. The implication that it was a barely tolerated relation to the real thing (ie paid-for commercials) was overwhelming. The budgets for fillers were always minuscule compared with most commercials; they were much smaller than the agency commercials sometimes commissioned by the COI, and smaller - even pro-rata - than other, longer form, COI output like documentaries. Many of the live action companies that filmed my early scripts were pretty well the dregs of the business: often tiny enterprises comprising one man and (occasionally) a girl PA in a single upstairs room somewhere in Soho or off the Grays Inn Road. Some of their directors only made films for us. It was not surprising that we had such a low reputation. We were the poor relation. Pretty well from the outset I decided that, if I was to stay at the COI (and I was already reconsidering my position) things would have to change. I doubt that our leader Peter was especially worried either way - his eyes were on that more distant horizon. Ron Salmon was an ally from the start: he was frequently depressed by the poverty of so much of what he had to persuade the companies to transmit. My main hero, however, was Gerry Evans. He was probably in his late 40s or early 50s by then and looking forward to a civil service pension within the decade. But Gerry was a class act, an artist and a photographer (he had his own dark room in Putney and an array of top-of-the-range equipment) and - critically for me - an inventive and encouraging spirit. He let me discuss directly with the companies how a script should be cast and shot, and encouraged me to comment and - occasionally - intervene throughout the filming and editing process. This took some of our suppliers by surprise (though it was commonplace enough in the commercials industry) and we drew complaints from the longer-serving production companies. Interestingly, they never protested to me: always to Peter or to Gerry and or possibly someone higher still. Gerry dutifully passed on their comments - I have a special memory of the relish with which he relayed some quite nasty criticism of my interfering behaviour from a director whom we both detested but who was a higher management favourite - and left it entirely to me what I should do about it. As soon as I was sufficiently embedded (it maybe took a year), companies and directors who clung to the old ways simply ceased to work for us. Replacing them was another problem. We encouraged successful commercial companies - including some I had worked with at JWT - to bid for our work. We could not pay what the big advertising agencies offered (though we were nudging away at our budget limits all the time). Instead there were a number of other things we believed we could offer them. We could fill their ‘downtime’ while they were waiting for the next big job from Double Diamond or Hamlet Cigars: production companies hated being seen to do nothing. We could satisfy their young bucks with a social conscience. We could give their directors an opportunity to experiment or try something they wouldn’t normally get a chance to do on a commercial, test out a new camera team, give a rising young film editor a chance. We could add to the diversity of their showreels. An early example was a relatively new and small production company called Natural Breaks. They were very anxious to work with us and came to Hercules Road to show off their rather brief show reel, featuring an unknown new commercials director called Ridley Scott. It was a revelation. I remember our snobbish horror (Peter, Gerry, Ron and me) that so much skill and artistry could be squandered on such humdrum ends. In those days, though, a new company had to go through a lengthy COI approval process (a sort of due diligence) and, by the time we were ready and eager to take the young Ridley on, the bird had already flown. We did work together later in the early 1980s, on some COI commercials about heroin addiction - but by then he was a celebrated Hollywood director and cost us probably a hundred times more than we could have got him for in 1970. Inevitably there were hiccoughs on the way. For some major companies, the financial imperative - the bottom line - outweighed all other considerations, and we were unable to agree on a budget or proceed at all. Now and again a shoot could become unexpectedly tricky as the director belatedly realised how tight the COI’s constraints really were. Some of the grander film-makers never came to terms with it. I remember one once-famous name - celebrated for his prize-winning commercials for Guinness - who, when he discovered that the lunchtime catering was, let us say, of less than his accustomed Fortnum standard, sent the 1st Assistant off for a case of Chateau Mouton Rothschild (at his company’s expense) which was then urgently shared around to the rest of us in paper cups. I am not exaggerating… But a lot of the time our drive to raise standards did work. Fillers found themselves shortlisted for industry prizes, even - on one occasion during my time - winning a Lion d’Or at the Venice Festival. We were particularly successful with animation fillers. This was partly because Soho was full of brilliant animators drawn into the business years previously when cartoons were more fashionable with the advertising agencies - Bob Godfrey, Richard Taylor, Nick Spargo, Dick Williams, Bill Sewell (whose tiny son Rufus I once had to babysit while his father rushed out to buy a sandwich: yes, that Rufus Sewell). Their extraordinary talent helped us to establish a fresh and recognisable profile with viewers. It helped of course that a brilliant and simple idea did not have to cost a packet to animate. Think the Charley Says sequence of fillers, for just one example. The opportunities my girlfriend (now my wife) and I had anticipated took a little time to emerge. But eventually Peter Broderick got the career leg-up he had been waiting for, Gerry Evans succeeded to his position, and I slipped in behind Gerry as the new SIO/Head of Production. My script-writing post at the desk by the door was taken over by Austin John Marshall, an extraordinary character who was then recovering from the simultaneous break-up of his marriage to folk-singer Shirley Collins and the death of Jimi Hendrix (whom he had managed). John was a more able writer than I ever was, but tired of the job after a year or so. By that time, though, scripts were also being produced by Christine and Diana - a few still by me - as well as occasionally by film company writer-directors like John Krish. When John Marshall moved on, the Writer/Ideas Man post was never filled again. Other people came and went, always with a dual writer-producer function, of whom the most significant was probably John Boddington. This John was possibly the most talented individual to work in the office in my time and highly respected by the industry, who all seemed to enjoy working with such a delightful man. Sadly he was living on borrowed time. He had contracted some very nasty condition when filming in the West Indies and was permanently on steroids, and in the end had to resign his post. But by then Frances Cockburn had intervened in my life (see above) and I was already moving into other areas. Christine and Diana had effectively taken over the Home Television Unit, raising it to higher levels. I became a Film Divsion documentary producer and eventually moved even further away, into management. But that is another story. Looking back on highlights of that time, I am still startled by the remarkable diversity of the job. There was a fairly constant flow of mundane briefs with no budget and (worse) no ambition from the (usually smallest) sponsoring departments. But there were also briefs that stretched the imagination or required an absorbing programme of research and travel. I am thinking, for example, of fillers we made for the Ministry of Defence (exploring secret underground bunkers and preparing for the possibility of nuclear war) or the Department of the Environment (travelling the country to look at neolithic tombs, old castles and once great houses; writing scripts to encourage people to visit them). I am exceptionally proud of what was achieved in this period by the Home Television Unit. The Unit was never capable - given its limited funding and ‘filler’ rôle - of matching the output of some other parts of the COI Film Division. But I do believe that between 1968 and 1974 we managed to transform it from a little thought-of office into a fast-moving production team widely respected by the industry at large. The Unit’s profile within the COI itself was raised. The quality of its output was greatly improved. Good people wanted to work for it. Process The essential difference between this team and the documentary and television commercials teams lay in the creation and development of each production. As with any documentary film, the first contact was from a department who had a message that it needed to communicate. So the brief from the department, their message, might be a road safety message “ to mothers, don’t let your young children go out into busy streets alone”. The Film Division Producer in discussion with the department would try to get as much background as possible from the road safety experts. Were there any case studies for instance, what was the essence of the problem? Armed with such information the Producer would attempt to come up with several scenarios, several “good ideas” which might be put across effectively in either 30 or 45 or 60 seconds. These were the usual times of television commercials created by advertising agencies and would thus fit in with the likely available slots that the television stations would be seeking to fill. The creative process was the same, kick around lots of ideas, winnow them down to three or four. Agree them with the Senior Producer. Present to the department. It might take more than one such round of creativity and presentation before a clear winner emerged. An important difference was that often the scenarios/scripts were created in-house by the Film Division Producer and sometimes by writers either employed by production companies or were freelance. Once the script was agreed the Producer in concert with the Senior Producer would choose a production company to make the film under close control. The reasons for a particular choice of a production company might be several, such as track record, or a particular director, or a company with known approach to costs. The end result aimed to look as much like a television commercial as possible in order to fit into a broadcast schedule. However the production costs were far less than any commercial. Another reason for the lower costs was another pillar of the television industry, an agreement with the film technicians union the ACTT (Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians) which allowed fillers to be made with much smaller crews than for paid time commercials Discussions with a chosen production company ensued, mostly successfully though not always. The results would be further detailed development or polishing of the chosen idea/scenario to a point where the production company had sufficient information to create a budget. The process thus far was much the same as that an advertising agency would follow. Start by creating an idea, then choosing a production company and a director, obtaining a budget and getting acceptance from the client. It will be seen that again Film Division did not go out to tender (as explained elsewhere) in choosing a production company. It was the responsibility of the Film Division Producer to see this process through. The Producer supervised the production through the shooting and editing stages to fine cut. At this point the filler would be shown to the client department for approval. Once past this stage and the approval of a “show copy” the filler passed into the hands of the distribution section where it was packaged with relevant information and copies were sent to all independent television stations. A particular strength of both the cinema trailers and the later television fillers operation was the ability to attract gifted creative talent. Directors such as John Krish who directed over many years a number of cinema trailers starting with "What’s In A Number" explaining National Insurance in 1946, to "Sewing Machine (1973)" a simple but very powerful child safety filler together with television commercials such as the "Peach and Hammer" series. John and Joy Halas, Michael Orrom, LotteReiniger, Piers Haggard who directed "Fire Routine (1973)" and Richard Taylor who ran an animation company and made a great many fillers including the famous or infamous series about what do in the event of a nuclear bomb attack entitled "Protect and Survive (1975)" a series made in great secrecy. The production and marketing of Television Fillers was to continue until the closure of COI in 2012 when the operation moved to the Cabinet Office It has not been possible to assemble a complete list of the Television Fillers that were made. The reason is the poor quality of COI record keeping leading to incomplete records of what was made. A list of known Television Fillers can be found by searching the section The Films We Made from the main navigation bar. If you have any further knowledge about what was made please write in through "Contact Us"