The BBC launches four TV long-runners and four radio stations still in the schedules today, sees the appeal of police procedurals and, influenced by America, looks into the night.
1962 – Z Cars/Dr Finlay’s Casebook
With Dixon of Dock Green in its seventh top-rating year, the BBC crime scene expanded with Z Cars, a much tougher and more authentic depiction of policing, which developed key TV actors such as Brian Blessed, Colin Welland and Frank Windsor. It ran until 1978, turning police procedurals into go-to shows. In the same year, an equally powerful genre – the medical series – became entrenched in the schedules with Dr Finlay’s Casebook. The Scottish setting of that series, and Z Cars’ northern location, were a response to ITV’s strong regional branding.
1963 – Doctor Who
Aimed at children, this new series was due to start on Saturday 23 November at 5.15pm. But President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas the day before Doctor Who’s first episode, An Unearthly Child. A delay for an extended news plus widespread power cuts – probably caused by pressure on the grid from people following events in America – led the BBC to run a rapid repeat. William Hartnell, as the first Doctor, started the journey of a show that has survived for 59 years (with a 16-year black hole from 1989) and 14 doctors. The dark event that overshadowed the show’s launch was addressed in a 1996 spin-off novel, Doctor Who: Who Killed Kennedy.
1964 – Top of the Pops/Match of the Day
The BBC seems to have been under a lucky star in 1963-4, as Doctor Who was swiftly followed by two more future super-franchises. With the radio Hit Parade becoming increasingly important to young audiences, Top of the Pops was launched on the first day of the new year, featuring live performances of the week’s top songs. The issue of unavailable acts was solved (sexistly) by all-female dance troupe Pan’s People, and acts who couldn’t sing live by lip-syncing. Specialist music channels killed off the show in 2006, and its reputation was further damaged by a long association with sex offender Jimmy Savile, who hosted the first and last shows.
Seven months later, Match of the Day launched a brand that has been interrupted only by ITV or Sky Sports buying football rights. The Football Association had long resisted televising games except cup matches and internationals – fearing league crowds would reduce if fixtures were shown in homes – but, seeking distinctive material for the new channel BBC Two, the corporation persuaded the authorities to allow the second half of one game to be seen on Saturday evening.
1965 – The War Game
The most significant show of this year was one viewers never saw. Peter Watkins’ drama-documentary about a nuclear war – just three years after such a conflict seemed imminent in the Cuban Missile Crisis – so alarmed BBC managers that they consulted the War Office, who concluded the film was too frightening for viewers. Of particular concern were scenes showing the eyeballs of victims melting from the heat released by warheads, and police shooting victims judged by doctors too sick to survive. The film was not screened until 1985, in a season to mark the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
1966 – Cathy Come Home
Not completely losing courage, the BBC turned to a horrible situation that politicians could not claim was scaremongering – homelessness. This film about a couple forced by bad luck and housing policy to live on the streets belongs to political history – spotlighting the launch of one charity, Shelter, and inspiring another, Crisis. But it was also an artistic landmark, highlighting (as The War Game had tried to do) the power of drama-documentary as a small-screen form and propelling the stellar movie career of director Ken Loach (Kes, Hidden Agenda, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, I, Daniel Blake.)
1967 – The Forsyte Saga/Radio 1/2/3/4
Increasingly, the BBC’s defence of the licence fee – criticised from right and left for being a non-means-tested “viewing tax” under threat of criminal prosecution – was to offer something for all possible audiences. This year, the corporation launched The Forsyte Saga, an adaptation of John Galsworthy’s Victorian-Edwardian family epic. Initially niche – because it screened on BBC Two, which still had intermittent reach – it became widely popular when repeated on BBC One on Sunday nights, establishing a key costume drama time-slot. The Church of England was even persuaded to bring forward Evensong to the afternoon so the faithful could fit in both their beloved fixes.
While the corporation courted core audiences with that drama, it also created a step-ladder of listening by splitting and expanding the Home, Light and Third programmes into Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. This change created a potential BBC habit from nightclub to nightcap.
1968 – Dad’s Army
While a number of BBC franchises (Match of the Day, Desert Island Discs and The Archers) have endured through new shows, Dad’s Army is rivalled only by Morecambe & Wise in the original episodes remaining competitive in the schedules long after almost all participants are dead. Though it is now seen as the epitome of safe family TV, David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s sitcom about the second world war Home Guard was, on premiere, controversial. At a time when almost all viewers had some connection with the conflict, some MPs and BBC managers felt a comedy about the war effort was offensive; another worry was that the depiction of silly part-time soldiers was a metaphor for the impotence of military resistance in the cold war. The show’s longevity is down to perfect punchlines (“Don’t tell him, Pike!”), and Dickensian characterisation. The greatest British sitcom.
1969 – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
To the likely dismay of Lord Reith, approaching 80 in Scottish retirement, this year showed the extent to which his creation now had to share the airwaves with the commercial interloper. Two big live events – the Apollo 11 moon landings and the Investiture of the Prince of Wales – were screened on ITV as well. Even more startlingly, Royal Family, the first ever behind-the-scenes documentary about the House of Windsor, though made by BBC film-maker Richard Cawston, was required by the deal with Buckingham Palace to be screened a week later on ITV.
The year’s main homegrown show was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Taking surreal comedy even further than The Goons, the Pythons launched several major TV careers – John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones – and encouraged comedy about the medium itself, including spoofs of the posh-man arts-lecture format running on the BBC that year in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Python sketches such as a defective parrot returned to a pet shop, a Whitehall department promoting silly walks and singing-and-dancing lumberjacks soon entered the repertoire of British homes.
1970 – Play For Today/What’s New?
Continuing the “one service fits all” policy, conservative audiences were offered a classic period piece – The Six Wives of Henry VIII, the root of TV’s Tudor obsession – while liberals were lured with stories of now in Play For Today. This didn’t really work as political appeasement (audiences for one often objected to the existence of the other) but, over 14 years, PFT delivered some of the greatest screen theatre. Despite the title, some of the best were stories from yesterday: Jack Rosenthal’s story of second world war children billeted with strangers in The Evacuees, David Pirie’s Rainy Day Women, about rumours of German spies in a 1940 village, and Ian McEwan’s The Imitation Game, dramatising the Bletchley Park code-breakers three decades before the movie of the same name. Hotly contemporary, though, were Jim Allen’s The Spongers, questioning welfare cuts; Through The Night, Trevor Griffiths’ critique of NHS treatment of breast cancer; an examination of a rape case in Carol Bunyan’s Sorry; and a pioneering female plumber in Paula Milne’s A Sudden Wrench. Only accidentally televised – a studio drama slot came suddenly free – Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party became the most revered and repeated single TV play ever.
All 10 Play For Today scripts in 1970 were written by men, but the feminism memo had reached Radio 1, where, at 4.15pm on 12 January, between the shows of Terry Wogan and Dave Cash, Anne (later “Annie”) Nightingale became the first regular woman DJ, reviewing the week’s releases in What’s New?
1971 – Parkinson
Though British TV had closely shadowed its American elder, UK networks were nervous of both post-dawn and pre-midnight programming, fearing exhausting the workforce. Michael Parkinson, though, dreamed of emulating Johnny Carson’s Tonight show in the US. Having failed to persuade ITV to give him a stars-on-the-sofa show, he eventually convinced the BBC that his journalistic credentials would lift the genre above showbiz. His Yorkshire accent, striking on a BBC dominated by RP voices, also seemed to promise substance not just stardust. Carson appeared every week night, a model that Parkinson wished to recreate – but he was initially restricted to a try-out of some summer Saturdays at 10.30pm. The first show, on 19 June, hosted African American tennis player Arthur Ashe, in town to play at Wimbledon, comedy actor Terry-Thomas, and Ray Bellisario, a paparazzo notorious for photographing members of the royal family (newshound Parky was looking for a story the papers would pick up). Despite Parkinson’s huge popularity, stuffy BBC governors never allowed the UK’s Carson-wannabe to run more than twice a week.
• Coming up tomorrow (1972-1981) – radio’s greatest ever broadcaster.
