Robin 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 Armyappeared 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.
The interview was surprisingly unrigorous, even by the laid-back standards of the ’60s. 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 ’60s.
The job offer came back within a week or two, and we 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 Trattoria Terrazza (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 TV 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 andSoftly 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 TV 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 TV Unit, raising it to higher levels. I became a COI 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. 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.
The only other period of my professional life with which I could compare this came very much later when, as head of the BBFC between 1998 and 2004, I set about the alarming task of converting that particular organization from a censorship into a film classification body. At the very least, those Home TV Unit years were an excellent training ground for the necessary process of change. But also - in my life - for a great deal more besides.