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Text of the page (random words):
love television another attempt to drop a heavy hint that we d like a clean copy of an opening tune in this case we re sent to an hmv record deleted natch and told that the teledu cymru piece is library music we wrote to both bristol and cardiff in an attempt to get copies of headed notepaper from both locations this tactic rarely worked especially here as both cardiff and bristol lost the previous letters anyway tww opening tune our first contact with geoffrey lugg head of presentation at abc rediffusion in their last six months and at thames already you can hear the tone in his letter that his colleagues all remember a friendly personable humorous chap who expected things to be done and to be done well but was always quick to praise when they were and gentle in his rebukes when they weren t he would give everybody and anybody the time of day we moved on from letters to lettertapes to knowing him personally he was transdiffusion s honorary president throughout the 1970s we still miss him here he is answering the questions we ve all asked about early thames now and again why were there two idents and why was one dropped also why was thames operating out of a building that still had a huge illuminated sign that said rediffusion television on it the mention of seven day granada by the way was a humorous barb he would later admit granada s oddly shaped notepaper is lovely a crisp heavy matte grey paper with the granada tv logo at the top in a gloss red that sits on top of the paper leaving a lovely raised finish rather than the usual embossing seen on quality letterhead the letter itself is interesting for two reasons first there s no messing about at granada kif bowden smith s double barrelled name is swiftly elided to remove any non granadaland pretensions second the answer implies that granada has in vision announcing it doesn t and it wouldn t until the dawn of the 1970s and even then with much misgivings on the part of the bernsteins themselves what mrs becker means is that the people you see in vision are presenters of granada in the north an unusual mix of local news features and continuity that ran through the evening between programmes when gin was not running the other two names do the continuity from behind the granada symbol in this day and age if you write to the chairman of a quango or the ceo of a company or the secretary of state for a department you expect that the letter will be intercepted by a secretary or something similar and will then be routed to someone else in the organisation to deal with sometimes a specialist complaints unit but more often back down to the call centre you were stuck trying to get satisfaction from in the first place not in the 1960s if you wrote to someone up top in an organisation they would most likely see the letter themselves and write back if not they would pass it down to someone senior with instructions that a full reply be given and the resulting letter would begin with an apology that the head honcho was not the one to reply here we re writing to the independent television authority in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the forthcoming contract changes and lo and behold despite being the busiest he has ever been in this job the chairman himself replies to the letter we sent him our idea was that tww could survive after all if it was given st hilary channel 10 and the ridge hill transmitter creating a tight little west region harlech could then continue on st hilary channel 7 and the former teledu cymru transmitters in theory it sounds like it would work in practice it fails due to politics and finance the politics was at the ita lord hill of luton had been stung by the 1964 contract round where he wasn t able to make any changes and was treated with outright arrogance by several of the incumbent contractors he vowed that 1968 s changes would be different and privately decided that a big company would be for the chop a real reminder to all of them that they were there at the authority s pleasure the one for the chop was to be stv but their competitor the grimmond consortium was terrible meanwhile tww s competitor was good on paper so tww were the political sacrifice the finance issue was to do with overlaps and the authority having got its fingers burnt in 1964 when teledu cymru collapsed there was not the money for a full service in two languages from just west and north wales adding the largely english speaking south of wales almost made it viable but if the welsh contractor faced competition from an english language only incumbent who had already tied up most of the advertising contracts the welsh contractor would be bound to fail again this could not be allowed to happen we didn t see this then and charles hill didn t of course explain it to us either but in retrospect he was right the 1960s were still in the age of deference where people were expected to know their place that was coming to an end as youth culture which definitely and defiantly didn t know its place came to the fore and the baby boomers started to tear up the old rules but the age of deference worked both ways while you were expected to address the bbc engineering information department with a well written letter that began dear sirs and ended yours faithfully they were also expected to defer to you as well so your letter was opened and if it required someone to sit down and type out an answer someone did in the meantime a quick postcard was sent just to assure you that your letter had been received and that it was getting prompt attention from an expert the financial basketcase that was early london weekend had seen them almost go to the wall fortunately they found a new investor who provided money a better schedule and decided on a new look for the heretofore avant garde station sadly the new investor was rupert murdoch he was all the things that the independent television authority didn t want in an investor let alone someone who appeared to have assumed the managing director s chair an australian at the time whose money had been made from the grubby news of the world they promptly threw him out of london weekend and told him to take his schedule with him the company however kept the new oval logo that replaced the previous wordmark they d been using we wrote to ask them about the new symbol such was the turmoil in the company or perhaps such were the dullness of the questions they didn t reply other than to thank us for our letter rupert murdoch by the way was never heard of again joking he of course came back 20 years later with sky television and now dictates british broadcasting policy through a revolving door of pet secretaries of state so he made good at least give tony benn his due he wasn t a politician who did things without thinking about them or caring about what the public thought even if he had no intention of changing his mind as postmaster general effectively chairman of the general post office which had a monopoly on the royal mail the post office counters the telephones and the telecommunications infrastructure in almost all of the uk and a middle ranking cabinet minister tony benn was in charge of broadcasting policy for the whole country his policy was simple the bbc was good commercial endeavours were bad and unlicensed unregulated pirate commercial broadcasters were the worst to that end he encouraged the bbc to cooperate in starting the open university he decided that the bbc in association with local councils should open and operate a chain of local radio stations that itv 2 would not happen that bbc 3 would be the next television station and that the off shore stations caroline wonderful radio london 390 that type of thing would be closed down his main weapon was the marine etc broadcasting offences act 1967 shortened to just the marine offences act at the time of this postcard it was still just a bill making its way through parliament the bill decided to strike the pirates where it hurt by cutting off their finances and supplies making it illegal for a uk citizen or business to advertise with them or provide goods and services to them the teenagers of the uk were outraged and organised in a way not seen before writing letters signing petitions holding demos and it would turn out using the vote they had just been given the age fell from 21 to 18 in 1970 to help turf benn and the rest of the wilson government out of power as good and faithful teenage pirate listeners we wrote to benn to explain where he was going wrong with his bill the reply was this handwritten postcard sent by return of post true to his word a full reply albeit telling us nothing new was sent from the gpo a few days later southern s envelopes had the relatively new southern independent television name added to them by 1965 their franking machine also had a repeat of their helpful slogan of the time the station that services the south in case you were in any doubt as to where a television station called southern might be serving tracking down signature tunes and start up music in the days before imdb email and shazam was hard work most of them were library tracks and the libraries wanted a fortune for a copy if they d even provide one at all worse they required the exact details of the track in question in order to even find it they wouldn t accept the theme to x on westward or the music southern used for y last year for fairly obvious reason so the first port of call was to ask the production company for a copy of the record on tape this was almost alway but not 100 of the time answered with a straight out no but the reply would usually contain the information required or just enough that the record library would be willing to at least think about checking the rights situation in order to make you a personal copy on tape for 10 or so dealing with southern television was often like pulling teeth with answers coming in small blobs of information necessitating follow up letters which as seen here got increasingly snotty in tone still we finally got the information we needed if not the tape we wanted and wrote to de wolfe seeking a copy of the tune we got it but at an extortionate 2 2s 0d do the bbc censor records the rumours were flying back in early 1968 that the bbc had banned i am the walrus misnamed in this letter as i am a walrus by the beatles and jackie by scott walker they were not being heard on the still new bbc radio 1 jackie had reached number 22 in the charts during a nine week appearance beginning the previous december i am the walrus was the b side to hello goodbye released in november 1967 and going on to sit at the top of the charts for 7 weeks the bbc were quick to deny that either record had been banned from radio 1 it just wasn t being played when people were listening clearly this response is still controversial today fans of both records from the time will insist they were censored the bbc sticks to the line that it doesn t ban it merely doesn t play some records sometimes to this day 1964 2016 kif bowden smith minimalism theme by betadeli theme by betadeli