Programs in the Pacemaker series that can be viewed on line are highlighted in red
The concept of these two series TheEnthusiasts and Pacemaker arose from the not very original thought about programs based around an individual who was interesting and was doing interesting things. The concept would enable us to portray individual people in Britain as being interesting, even exciting and being innovative .The programs attempted in some way to counter the idea of the stuffy, unoriginal, boring image which people might have of the British. Also keeping in mind that anything which might be said to encourage trade that might flow from people engaged scientific or industrial activity was a high priority for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Portraits of people who were engaged in science, industry or even "pop" music that contributed to the balance of payments helped to meet this requirement.
The impetus for these programs came about from the Samples Committee Review of the Overseas Television Services in late 1968. That Review is discussed in detail in the section on London Line (colour USA) out of it came the decision to produce some 13 week packages of programs that would not be time sensitive.
The new series of “profiles” started off with six programs entitled The Enthusiasts followed later by two series, each of 13 programs, entitled Pacemakers. Both The Enthusiasts and Pacemaker series were designed to fit a 13 week schedule which reflected the scheduling patterns in most television stations.
In some ways these programs were the most completely successful series thus far produced by the Overseas Television Services. Because they concentrated on one individual, they were able to present a detailed (given the 15 minute canvas) and convincing portrait of the individual and the subject area. While magazine programs with items of 3-4 minutes each could present a very broad brush set of images, these programs could present a more rounded picture of their subject with, hopefully, more impact.
Adam Leys, Producer of both series recalls:
These programs grew out of what we had done with London Line. Looking back over those programs we were struck by how often it was a passionate individual who drew the viewer’s attention and made them focus, where the passion came straight through the screen. So we started casting around for interesting people in odd corners who could generate that sort of enthusiasm. For the first series of six programs, The Enthusiasts emulated the pattern of London Line by being largely a studio based interview with cut-away filmed inserts, but by the time we moved to the second series, Pacemaker, they were largely filmed on location. Some we produced in house ourselves, and a few, such as the film on Francis Lee, we wholly contracted out, in that case to Frank Cvitanovitch, a well-known documentary director of the day.
Programs InThe EnthusiastsSeries Were:
Stuart Turner was once a rally driver, but we made our program about his successes as team manager of the Mini Coopers that won the Monte Carlo rally. That rally was then an important showcase for cars and car sales, and the Minis shocked many and delighted more when they won against much bigger and more powerful opposition in 1964, 1965, and again in 1966 when they were disqualified – for having the wrong sort of headlight bulbs. International outrage, moral victory for the Mini, and Stuart Turner was the organising mind. The film used lots of easily available library footage of Minis winning.
Tony Benn was at the time the Minister of Technology in Harold Wilson’s government, when Harold Wilson was pushing ‘the white heat of technology’. I can’t now remember what Tony Benn said – I’m sure he was his usual enthusiastic self – but I can remember all too well the circumstances in which he spoke. For some reason we had hired a small studio in central London rather than our usual studio in Fulham perhaps to fit in with the Minister’s tight schedule.
We got ready, lit a stand-in, lined up the cameras, and checked the line to the recording outfit, which was in another part of London. Tony Benn arrived, settled in his chair – and at that moment the line to the recorder ‘went down’. Benn was patience itself. I was hugely embarrassed – he was the Minister of Technology for goodness sake! – but he sat on, polite, did not seem annoyed or impatient. I was tearing my hair out, and for some reason it took ages to fix, or so it seemed at the time. In the end it was fixed, after maybe three quarters of an hour, and the interview got done. I was so impressed by his patience, politeness and calm, and remained a fan forever. Caroline Loizos was an expert in animal behavior. I don’t remember how we found her, but she was excellent, young, very bright, and doing research in London Zoo. I went to interview her, and she showed me where she was studying a group of chimpanzees, but on the way across the zoo she stopped us by the end of one of those long cages full of tree bits which was home to some sort of long thin monkey. As she stopped, the monkeys all swarmed to the end where she stood. She then RAN at top speed the full length of the cage, and the monkeys raced her inside the cage, swinging from branch to branch – and the monkeys won. She said she did it every day, interesting, because her published work was all about the role of play in animal development – including humans. Her work at that time was in observing the chimpanzee group, and she told me that no-one had ever observed what they did at night, and the answer she had found after sitting up watching all night several times was – they just sleep.
David Attenborough was at the time Controller of BBC2. He had a huge reputation as a Producer of natural history programs. As Controller he had overseen the introduction of colour television by the BBC and commissioned a major series on the history of art, Civilization presented by the historian Kenneth Clarke.
Peter Parkera successful businessmanwho had then recently been appointed Chairman of British Rail. He was a critic of underinvestment in the railways by successive British governments, claiming that he was trying to shore up "the crumbling edge of quality". He also campaigned vigorously against the anti-rail lobby. Sandy Dunbar had founded the first regional arts association in Britain in 1963. This was the North Eastern Association for the Arts based in Newcastle.
This group of programs thus featured interesting people ranging from a Government Minister to a scientist, major figure in broadcasting, transport, the arts and motor racing.
TheEnthusiasts was a sort of experiment to test the theory that there were enough people with enough passion to make good television. For the new series, Pacemaker, we abandoned the studio interview with inserted footage, and started to make proper short biographies, still with the subject’s voice telling the story, sometimes to camera, and sometimes in voice over.
Programs in the Pacemakerseriesincluded:
Christopher Evans was a big lumbering bear of a man – he had been in a London Line program and we liked him. He had a position at the National Physical Laboratory where he did research on the man-computer interface, and was both wise and funny about it, and about how people reacted to computers – this was in the late sixties, well before personal computers were available, and all computers were thought of as huge (they were) and threatening. He had two good stories. One was that they had experimented with a computer doing initial interviews with patients at a doctor’s surgery when they found that contrary to all expectations the patients loved it, and the doctors loved it too because the patients didn’t lie to the computer as they always did to the doctors.
Questions about how much the patient smoked, or drank, gave quite different answers to the ones the doctors got face to face. The other, which he showed, and which tell you a lot about the feelings about computers at the time, was that he had devised a simple program to show what computers could do, in which a person was invited to think of an animal, any animal. The computer then asked questions which could only be answered with a yes/no answer, and guessed the animal within about three answers. He told us that on one occasion the computer guessed the animal in about two answers, and the person doing the quiz burst into tears, fearing that the computer had got inside their brain.
Colin Chapman had been a racing driver but at the time of our film he was the head and driving force behind Lotus cars, which became a dominant force in car racing in the sixties and seventies. He introduced all manner of engineering innovations with cars that were lighter, faster and more nimble – but also more dangerous for the drivers, though all cars were dangerous in that era. Brilliant driven man – died of a heart attack at the age of 54. Gillian Lynne by contrast epitomised someone at the cutting edge of their profession. Gillian was a dancer and choreographer described as “a woman who works across dance barriers, barriers which she ignores as being irrelevant”. In the film she is seen working with her dancers to prepare a dance scored by the jazz composer Dudley Moore for a television performance.
Professor Eric Laithwaite was at that time Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, and was then – and now – best known for pioneering work on the linear motor, and the Maglev train concept, where a train could float supported by magnets, and run friction free, driven by the linear motor. He had been on a program some months earlier with his models of the maglev train, and a researcher and I went to see him in his office to talk about making a profile of him. At some point I said, rather negatively, that I was concerned that apart from his models there was little to see and film, as so much of his work was theoretical and it was hard to know what would be in the film. He said “put the camera on me and I’ll just talk” – it was what made him interesting, this blithe self-confidence, and it was pretty much what we did. Of course, as so often, it was other countries which pursued his ideas, particularly Japan and the Far East. player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-ian-nairn-1970-online
Barbara Hulanicki who with her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon founded, in 1970, the chain of fashion shops known as “ Biba”. She was very much the poster-person for the fashion shifts of the sixties, and was a very influential figure in the international fashion market providing very much an image of Britain that the Overseas Information Services were seeking to promote.
DrSlee NHS GP soke about the organisation of health centres. It was an attractive program, tricky to make because of the different attitudes to the NHS in the different countries we sent programs to, ranging from the good interest of Canada and Australia for instance, to the opposition from the USA.
Francis Lee was a very successful footballer and later a business man in recycled paper – toilet paper mostly. The program was produced by Frank Cvitanovich who got his friend Michael Parkinson to read the commentary. Frank Cvitanovich was a huge bear of a man, a Canadian who had also been a professional American football player, whom I had known since before joining the COI, and who became a very successful documentary maker for television in the UK.
Ian Nairn (click here to view from BFI) was a maverick in the world of architectural journalism whose work influenced many critics and writers, including those working in the field of "psychogeography". In the late 60s and early 70s he became an unlikely television personality, presenting evocative BBC series including Nairn Across Britain, which blended his unique style of architectural criticism with gently melancholic commentary on Britain's neglected byways. His local pub, seen here, was his preferred "office desk"; one factor in his untimely death. Basil Spence was a very eminent architect, creator of Coventry Cathedral and Sussex University conveyed the passion of a man completely committed to his work. In keeping with a film financed by the Foreign Office the film shows him working on plans for a new British Embassy in Rome.
Glenda Jackson (click to view from BFI)the actor speaking about the nature of acting. We were given amazing access that enabled us to film Glenda discussing the subject on the set of the film she was then currently making “Sunday Bloody Sunday” directed by John Schlesinger who appears in the background. Later she also discussed acting in the theatre on the stage of the Old Vic.
Dan Smith (click here to view from BFI) this profile of the "economic overlord of the North of England" is a window on vanished worlds yet still topical today. Former Newcastle council leader T. Dan Smith was one of the most famous local politicians of his day. Described here as a US-style 'town boss', he was a complex, flawed character who later proved corrupt, but also an articulate, original, sometimes foresighted thinker. His conviction for corruption meant the program had to be withdrawn from distribution.
Norman Brittan was designer of the successful Brittan- Norman Islander aircraft. William Davis a leading financial journalist who talked about journalism and the City of London as a financial centre
Tim Ewart from the company Cambridge Consultants who discussed the increasing use and the advantages of IT in the manufacturing industry.
Ross Belch ( click here to view from BFI) was Managing Director of Scott Lithgow shipyard on the Clyde who were pioneering new ways of building ships against the competition coming from the Far East. At the time this film was made many shipyards on the Clyde were in decline in the face of international competition, especially from Japan and Korea. Ross Belch, managing director of the Lower Clydeside shipyard Scott Lithgow, is determined to keep his company afloat during this transitional period and believes that good industrial relations as well as high productivity are the key to survival. Belch's approach appears to be successful and orders for tankers, naval submarines and small car ferries continue to flood in. Scott Lithgow was later nationalised and became part of British Shipbuilders in 1977. Ross Belch went on to be knighted and was hailed for his skills in maintaining good industrial relations in the notoriously dispute-ridden shipyards.
Mickey Most was a very famous pop music star. Henry Pluckrose was a primary school head teacher who was pioneering a new approach to learning in primary schools
Ian Barrondiscussed the increasing use of computers in universities.
John Sharpdiscussed aspects of education as a teacher
John English (click here to view from BFI) a glassmaker turned theatre director John English had such a hunger for culture in the community that he was inspired to set up the Midlands Arts Centre. He pitches his project as a community focus for a post-work society - issues still on the horizon over four decades on.
Sam MacCreedywasa horticulturist in Northern Ireland who was a champion designer of new strains of rose flowers Lady Allen of Hurtwood (click here to view from BFI) zip wires, climbing frames and open camp fires are no hindrance to children with disabilities in this television profile of children's play pioneer Lady Margery Allen. Her passionate belief in the right of every child to experience the physical freedom of play is matched by the palpable joy and excitement of the children as they explore an adventure playground in Chelsea with minimal adult supervision.
Bob Boote (click here to view from BFI) Stoke native Bob Boote combined a career as a planner with activism as a pioneer conservationist. In 1967, under the pen name Robert Arvill, he published Man and Environment; Crisis and the Strategy of Choice, a review of how 1960s Britain was failing the environment which proposed a radical strategy for improvement.
The potteries of Stoke persist, but this is a vision of post-industrial Britain. With pits and factories closed, polluted sites spoilt Staffordshire until restorative action was taken. Landscaping forms a new contract between man and nature, railway lines become green corridors, a quarry becomes Brockton nature reserve, closed roads allow Cannock Chase to rewild, and the River Churnet runs clean. While this television program was part of the Pacemakers series the film was edited for a wider audience and re-released in 1970 as Black Spot to Beauty Spot.
While the series included famous names it also included people within education and the NHS for instance who were not so well known, but who were making important contributions in the National Health Service and in education, such as the advent of new health centres and a primary school head teacher carrying out a radical new approach to teaching.
The programs were widely distributed and proved to be to be particularly successful in the previous London Line (colour) markets in Canada and the United States. The concept of making programs that were not time sensitive meant that the series went on being used, racking up audiences, for a number of years.
To see a full list of these programs please access "Films We Made" on the Navigation Bar.