History Box: BBCtv 16/4/64

BBCtv: APRIL 16th 1964

This month we’re going back to the last week of two-channel television in the UK - the final few days when the Radio Times would list “BBC Television” as a station because there was only that and ITV. These are the listings for BBC-TV on Thursday, April 16th, 1964, five days before BBC-2 would launch in a blaze of blank screens and confusion due to a power cut.

Television back then was of course mostly an evening proposition, with children’s and/or schools programmes using the rest of the day on an as-and-when process. No schools programmes here, though, as it was the Easter Holidays. Instead the box switches on briefly at 10.30 for Watch With Mother (“for the very young”) and Rag, Tag and Bobtail, before going back to sleep between eleven and one-twenty five for more in the shape of Andy Pandy (preceded by five minutes’ news).

The day starts properly at ten past five, albeit with more children’s programming. First, Top Score with Eamonn Andrews. A sort of grammar school University Challenge, apparently, pitting the smartest kids against each other in a city-against-city fashion. I doubt Plymouth ever got very far. Today it’s London against Peterborough. I expect London won. It takes a full three-quarters of an hour to find out, though.

This minor kiddie slot ends with Junior Points of View at five to six. Basically the same as the regular version, only somehow less childish. Then, after another news update at six, there’s regional news at/with Six-Ten in the Midlands and East At Six Ten (see what they did there) in East

Anglia. The two regions had the same Radio Times in 1964, presumably because it was more cost-effective that way.

At six thirty, bought-in cow-bothering fun with a film from the National Film Board of Canada about the annual Calgary Stampede. Ten days of rodeo action! Which is a bit on the random side of things, particularly since the Stampede is generally held in July, but it fills half an hour nicely enough.

That takes us up to seven PM and the somewhat less frivolous Tonight with Cliff Michelmore. Only somewhat, though; it was the precursor to Nationwide in more ways than the merely chronological, being fairly relaxed for a current affairs programme in black and white Britain. Michelmore had a catchphrase, of all things, and sometimes he even sat on his desk, forty years before Kirsty Young made waves by doing the same thing. To be fair, it was sexier when she did it. Still, that’s quite a roll-coll of journalistic talent under him. Brian Redhead, Macdonald Hastings, Trevor Philpott, Julian Pettifer, and in case Michelmore wasn’t relaxed enough, Alan Whicker.

After that, Compact! One of several 60s attempts by the BBC to emulate this “soap opera” format that ITV were having such success with in the form of Coronation Street. Ironically, all it really achieved was giving the opposition another one, because it was created by Hazel Adair and Peter Ling, who cooked up Crossroads while it was still running and went off and launched it shortly before it was axed - according to Adair, because the ratings were too high and the BBC were embarrassed. Whether that’s actually true or just ultra-defensive - the equivalent of Lee and Herring’s jokes about Days Like These or h&p@bbc being moved in the schedules to “give other shows a chance” - we’ll probably never know, not least because only four out of 373 episodes still exist. John Nathan-Turner loved it, though - he kept bothering the BBC to bring it back, with him at the helm, possibly renamed “Impact”. They should have let him.

More soapery next at eight, only this time bought in from America, where they do these things right. Well, they did then. It’s Dr Kildare! Starring the butter-smooth Richard Chamberlain, so ludicrously handsome no-one was surprised when he turned out to be a gay homosexual. Today’s episode: Quid Pro Quo. No further information in the Radio Times, but apparently it’s about Kildare dealing with two students who are crap, one because he’s too cocky and interested in partying, the other because he’s a nervous wreck terrified of failure. What that has to do with “Quid Pro Quo” I don’t know.

That takes us to ten to nine and This Is Your Life, at the end of its original BBC run with Eamonn Andrews (making his second appearance today on BBCtv) before Thames revives it in five years. Today Eamonn presents the big red book of your sins to a giant question mark, which turns out to be dance legend Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet and one of the most important and influential single figures in the history of the artform. Also she knew W. B. Yeats.

The main news is after that at quarter past nine, and only ten minutes long. What a world. That’s followed by another seemingly random documentary, although this time it’s homegrown. Figure skating! There’d been a Winter Olympics in Innsbruck just a couple of months earlier, and although Great Britain won

piss-all as usual (except the two-man bobsleigh) the ice prancing was popular in the ratings. Well, presumably, because here’s an exhibition of “championship performances and cabaret skating” from the Richmond Ice Stadium in London, specially arranged and recorded for television broadcast. That’ll kill forty minutes.

At five past ten, Gallery, the “Today in Parliament”-type magazine programme hosted by future Director-General Ian Trethowan alongside Canadian election professor Robert MacKenzie, keeper of the Swingometer. Today, Trethowan is talking to once and future Liberal leader Jo Grimond. Excitement!

The schedule kind of tapers off after that. There’s one last news roundup at 10:35, followed by perhaps the most random programme of the day: a chunk of adult education of the sort 80s and 90s kids might remember being baffled and/or bored by of a Sunday morning. Learn Italian! You might as well! A series of thirty lessons, and this is lesson 22. If you missed the first 21, well, again there’s no VCRs yet (for the likes of you), so you’re stuffed. Speaking of which, this episode is “In the Kitchen”. In which (I’m guessing) Giulia makes some delicious meals very slowly, naming every ingredient and utensil very clearly twice.

And the rest is closedown, after a quick “Road Works Report” which feels like a mandate from the unpopular Tory Government, six months before an election, throwing a bone at the proletariat. It didn’t work for John Major either when he called it the Cones Hotline, but then he’d already won his election.

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