Occasionally the programme went too far. Covering anti-Sony factory protests in 1977, its team hunted America to film the rumoured gatherings of people in T-shirts claiming, ‘Sony – from the people who gave you Pearl Harbor’. Not finding any such shirts, they printed a few off themselves.122 ‘Born Losers’, shown in 1967, was a compassionate study of a nine-child family living on £16 a week; it got its message across to many viewers, but broadcasting the Walshes’ intimate details came close to destroying the family itself.123 From then the team were wary of putting members of the public quite so brazenly on show – a consideration regarded as optional by other programmes.
The emergent youth culture demanded coverage. Young producer John Birt’s idea of helicoptering Mick Jagger into the grounds of a stately home to chat with the Bishop of Woolwich was a success, in publicity terms at least. (‘We should aim to transmit at least one outrageous and improbable programme each year,’ demanded long-serving editor Ray Fitzwalter.124) But most youth culture stories, from the Mod revival to acid house, tended towards prudishness. ‘No speed party is complete without a joint of grass,’ vouchsafed the authoritatively prurient narrator of Haight-Ashbury examination, ‘Alas, Poor Hippies, Love is Dead’.
News technology progressed apace. Through the late 1970s, the old film crews were steadily replaced by ‘creepy-peepies’: lightweight video cameras far more convenient even than 16mm. A generation of cameramen were left feeling, in the words of one ACTT member, ‘like wheeltappers at a hovercraft rally’.125 Even the BBC’s Panorama started to catch up with the times: a 1981 documentary on German rocket makers OTRAG used a blizzard of electronic effects to enliven the presentation of its great mountain of paper evidence. ‘The days of pointing a camera at a newspaper cutting are threatened at last,’ predicted Peter Fiddick. ‘If you can’t read it, they’ll flash it, colour it and creep it across the screen … until you’re blinded into literacy.’126 The Richard Dimbleby generation of current affairs gave way to Hewat’s boys across the board.
World in Action wasn’t killed off by IBA ruling or legal challenge, but a soap opera. In 1994 EastEnders went thrice-weekly, ruining ITV’s Monday night. The 1990 Broadcasting Act had already loosened the third channel’s current affairs commitments. World in Action, now reaching as little as five million viewers,127 was promptly shifted up against the soap as a sacrifice. It lasted a little over three years. Granada won the bid to replace its old show: ‘Whether by performance, image, heritage or perception, all agree on the value of World in Action,’128 it admitted in the tender, but ‘we need to make current affairs less threatening to younger viewers.’ Its solution, based on CBS’s 60 Minutes model, became Tonight with Trevor McDonald. Broadsheet pundits began making merry with the freshly imported phrase ‘dumbing down’.
BBC2
The BBC loosens its old pre-school tie.
Anyone can fill time with pap and the kids will watch it. It’s safe and it’s easy. We are trying to break away from that.
Joy Whitby, Play School executive producer, 1966
THE BBC’S EARLY CHILDREN’S television was a fortress of twee. Amiable (if slightly grotesque) puppets would get into a jolly old fix, patrician ladies would trill nursery rhymes in strident falsetto, and improving fables would be slowly read out of leather-bound books the size of shed roofs. When Doreen Stephens took charge of the BBC’s family programmes in 1963, this had been the case for rather too long. She found a ‘demoralised, miserable children’s department’129 plodding along with the same Andy Pandy mindset that harked back to before the Suez Crisis. Her initial desire to scrap Andy, Bill and Ben outright was countermanded by an early manifestation of popular nostalgia, but she did gradually phase them out in favour of The Magic Roundabout, Camberwick Green and a new daily morning programme for the under-fives.
Stephens employed Joy Whitby to edit Play School. With two presenters, a tiny studio, a clock for telling the time and an initial weekly budget of £120,130 Whitby concocted a feast of ideas, songs, rhymes and (very basic) documentary films designed to stimulate toddlers’ imaginations. The fustiness of old gave way to bold designs and plush soft toy companions (though Hamble, a grotesque china doll, was the one anomalous throwback to morbid Victoriana and suffered chronic abuse from presenters and technical staff as a result, before being replaced in 1986 by the marginally less creepy Poppy). In a reversal of the usual metrics, the programme was judged a success by its makers if children abandoned the show half way through to go outside and do a wobbly dance or search for round things.131
If this sounded like a tepid bath of liberal unction, the third woman involved in Play School’s inception, series producer Cynthia Felgate, added a tougher note. ‘Talking down is really based on the assumption that you are being liked by the child,’ she reasoned. ‘But if you imagine a tough little boy of four looking in, you soon take the silly smile off your face.’132 As a former actor with a theatrical troupe specialising in that toughest of gigs, the in-school educational performance, she knew whereof she spoke.
An experienced general, Felgate recruited troops from the ranks of repertory, with a sharp eye for nascent talent. Play School staff would take roles in countless other children’s programmes after their toil at the clock-face. They included musicians, from the classically trained Jonathan Cohen to the folk-schooled Toni Arthur and the downright countercultural Rick Jones. The show also pioneered, in its own quiet way, the employment of non-white hosts, beginning in 1965 with Paul Danquah, fresh from filming A Taste of Honey. Humour played a huge part in proceedings, courtesy of Fred Harris (who graduated to adult comedy when radio producer Simon Brett chanced upon his work while, appropriately, off sick), Johnny Ball (soon to launch his own one-man science-and-puns initiative Think of a Number), Phyllida Law (sharing the arch eccentricity of her husband Eric Thompson, Magic Roundabout narrator and fellow School player), and virtuoso mime Derek Griffiths. Add to this a roster of guest storytellers from Roy Castle to Richard Baker, George Melly to Spike Milligan, and you had a clubhouse of wits in the front room daily: the Algonquin Round Window.
Play School was born with the BBC’s second channel, the first scripted programme the morning after BBC Two’s notoriously