The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

182 CINE TECHNICIAN December 1955 Television Service ( Continued) Then there was the Business Manager's Department, which was responsible for all the commercial side of the business : providing studios and office facilities, buying or hiring ' props,' etc. The Business Manager also dealt with Personnel, Welfare and Trade Union negotiations. In fact, over 50 per cent of his time was spent dealing with the very many unions involved in TV. The key of the whole business was the Programme Department, and also the most difficult to organise. It was split into six sections : First, the Drama Section, with John Clements as adviser. Second, Light Entertainment, which embraced variety, panel games, musical comedy and dancing, with Jack Hylton acting as adviser. Third, the Music Section — this was such a specialised world on its own that they decided to form a subsidiary called Musical Facilities Ltd., and got John Barbirolli to organise it. They, Associated Rediffusion, told Barbirolli the sort of music they wanted and how much it was to cost, and through Musical Facilities he chose the music and put it on. This section also provided all the background music for the other programmes. Women's Programmes The fourth section handled Women's Programmes. This catered for a specialised audience, with specialised programmes, mostly during the morning. The programmes were fairly cheap and mostly ' live.' The fifth section dealt with Children's Programmes, from 5 o'clock to 6. Children were a tricky audience, with quite a different mentality. The sixth section, Special Events, was responsible for Sports, Documentary and Outside Broadcasts. Sports broadcasts were the most popular and also the most difficult; to start with one had to persuade promoters that their gate receipts would not suffer; then times and places were often inconvenient from a TV point of view, and the weather was an additional hazard. A lot of money went into sports transmissions, and so far, Captain Brownrigg said, he did not think they had been successful in coping with all the problems involved. A sub-section dealt with Talks, which covered political discussions, interviews and religious broadcasts. Documentary in TV covered the same field as in films — very often in TV the programmes were ' live ' or a mixture of ' live ' and filmed material, which might be either specially shot or library. Outside Broadcasts, or 'Remotes', as they were sometimes called, covered events like the Trooping of the Colour, the Lord Mayor's Show, etc. They were difficult to organise. The speaker recollected a recent OB when a gasometer, suddenly rising, cut off the programme by blocking one of the microwave links! Six Sections These were the six sections of the Programme Dept.; in addition there were six Servicing Sections, organised as fo'lows : 1. Script. A most important section. Unfortunately there seemed to be a great shortage of scriptwriters; out of the large number of scripts submitted, very few were suitable. 2. Casting. Very difficult in television — they were competing for artists with films, which paid better, and with the theatre, which offered better continuity of employment. 3. Design. Responsible for scenery, props, costumes and captions for all programmes. This section probably spent more money than anyone else. 4. Make-up. 5. Presentation; runs the announcers. 6. Engineering. Captain Brownrigg said it would have been easy to have had an Engineering department like the B.B.C.. but he thought that the disadvantage of that would have been the liability of friction arising between the maintainers and the users of equipment. If they were both in the same department, it would be much easier to resolve any difficulties and to bring about the co-operation which was essential in producing a programme. It also made promotion more flexible <f people could move from one section to another; it gave a chance of promotion to everyone. The films, which Captain Brownrigg mentioned earlier, were made at Shepperton Studios by one of their subsidiaries, Future Productions Ltd. The number of films they made was a matter of £ . s. d. What they did was to look at a programme and, if they thought they could sell it afterwards, they filmed it. He personally didn't believe that the viewer could tell the difference between a filmed programme and a ' live ' one. Having dealt with organisation, Captain Brownrigg went on to talk about the worrying responsibility which fell upon anyone running a service of this kind. Television was going to have a great influence on people. It was not part of his job to put in education, nevertheless they could not carry to extremes the policy of putting on a majority programme, they had a responsibility to their minority audience. Another thing they had to do was to slant their programmes, for example in sports, so that they made people want to play themselves and not only watch. They must slant other programmes to make people think for themselves. It would be a ghastly result if we became a nation of passive viewers. To Help Exports Turning to another aspect. Captain Brownrigg said that our prosperity depended on the export trade, and he felt that they could do a good export in programmes. Our actors and technicians reached a higher standard than in the U.S.A. He believed that if they made programmes of a good enough standard they could sell them and bring in a lot of money. Countries all over the world were starting television services, a very expensive business, and the only way countries with small populations could run a service would be by buying programmes. In ten years' time, he hoped that they would be like the shipping business, bringing money into the country. It could not be an entirely one-way traffic, but they hoped to sell more than they had to buy. Captain Brownrigg concluded by saying, that, as he was addressing an A.C.T. audience, he would like to make it clear that he thought of television as a basically ' live ' entertainment. Though it did use film, its technique was ' live ' technique and not film technique. It was an intimate medium, relying in the main on close-up shots.