Out

There have been a lot of books written about television, and the occasional purpose of this blog is to point you in the direction of the indispensable ones. In the spirit of Radio 3’s Building a Library, this occasional series will recommend the books that everyone interested in the history of television should own and explain why. The recent blog about Don’t Drink the Water highlighted a few excellent volumes, but the first recommendation for Building Your Television Library is Made for Television: Euston Films Ltd by Manuel Alvarado and John Stewart. 

Euston Films was founded in 1971, and it became one of the most influential British television companies of all time. Its approach to making filmed television drama was revolutionary: it successfully negotiated a flexible approach to working with the unions, hired all of its equipment, filmed on location using a rehearse record approach, and basically created the model for the way most television drama is made now. A detailed understanding of the origins of the company sheds a lot of light on how we have ended up with the style of television drama today. 

Made for Television has three main sections. Part One is a substantial history of Euston Films and its productions. Alvarado and Stewart take great pains to explain the context which gave rise to the company, and they focus on describing – very lucidly – the ITV system of the time, and Thames and therefore Euston’s place in that system. As Neil and I have mentioned several times on the podcast, people of a certain age just naturally understand the ITV regional structure because they were brought up alongside it, as opposed to anyone under around 40 who find it baffling. Made for Television explains the system clearly but without losing crucial detail by oversimplifying things.  

Just as importantly, the authors also go into similarly great and necessary detail about labour relations and the unions within the television industry which loomed so large at the time. This is both one of the most important aspects of television production over the second half of the twentieth century, and also the most neglected and misrepresented. The relationship between the unions and television companies has largely been reduced to actors in Doctor Who DVD and Blu-ray commentaries or documentaries saying that “as soon as it reached 10pm, they threw the power switch, and we had to stop recording.” This has become crude shorthand for an intransigent workforce pitted against suffering artists, but this is a very narrow view of what was happening at the time.  

One thing that always seems to be missed is that the creatives themselves were all in one union or another, and those in the production crew in particular had often worked their way up through a number of different roles and did not see themselves as separate from the concerns of the unions. The usual picture also omits the fact that during the early decades of the film and television industry, production and ancillary workers had often suffered from a precarious existence because of increased casualization. The perception that the unions were unreasonable came from deep scars of the past when people were laid off and couldn’t continue to ply their trade. What is also rarely discussed, but is covered in Made for Television, is that as with all unions, there was often tension between the grass roots and the union leaders, and this was a case in point in the early days of Euston Films when those members working at Thames and those working on location had conflicting priorities. I’m not aware of another book that covers this area as well as Made for Television, but if anyone reading knows of one, then please let me know. 

The book then goes into the history of each Euston production. The key players are interviewed, and there’s a host of production documents including the series format for The Sweeney, and the original treatments for Trevor Preston’s Out and Fox, and Leon Griffiths’ treatment for Minder. For many years the Minder treatment was regarded as the best of its kind, and often circulated to other writers as an aspirational model of how to do it, so its presence here is particularly welcome. 

The rest of the book consists of a series of readings by five academics on individual Euston productions, and a chunky set of appendices including ratings data and charts for every production from Special Branch to Minder series four. When I first discovered Made for Television in Long Eaton Library back in the 1980s, I was initially drawn to the ratings, then gradually worked my way back through the readings, before becoming absorbed into the deep detail about the production history and the context of the times. It’s all terrific, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

I’m still quite keen on checking ratings, but mainly now because television people come out with such tripe about the audience numbers that their shows allegedly used to attract, and it’s not so much that they are picking a figure out of the air but they also treble it for luck. Most programmes about television history invariably feature an actor or director saying something like “we used to get 40 million viewers at least, the churches were deserted, and we put 37 pubs out of business.” In almost 100% of cases the figure they give is absurdly inflated. On the Out DVD/Blu-ray commentary, the wonderful Jim Goddard states calmly that a series he worked on called Helen – A Woman of Today got 27.5 million viewers a week. I raised my eyebrow at this because that’s substantially more than famously high-rated shows like the 1977 Mike Yarwood Christmas Show, and major sporting events like the FA Cup Final.  

Fortunately, for programmes transmitted between 1960 and the end of 1991, there’s an easy way to check these kinds of claims, which is why the other essential book for your television library is Television’s Greatest Hits by Paul Gambaccini and Rod Taylor. Thanks to this massively useful reference work, I could quickly look up Helen – A Woman of Today and see that although it certainly did very well in the ratings, with 12 of its 13 episodes hitting the top 20, and one episode getting as high as the fifth most watched programme of the week, I could also see that it didn’t get anywhere close to 27.5 million viewers. The highest rating – for episode 12 - was 7.3 million households which is how the ratings were measured up until 31 July 1977 after which the number of individual viewers were counted. The generally accepted conversion ratio is 2.2 viewers to one home, so at best Helen – A Woman of Today reached a peak audience of 16.06 million. Nothing to be sniffed at, but not on the groundbreaking level of 27.5 million.  

If you buy Television’s Greatest Hits – which can usually be picked up for peanuts – you’ll be able to refute spurious ratings at your leisure and check how popular a series really was. If it didn’t make the Top 20, then it won’t be in this book. Buying Made for Television is a bit more expensive in the £20-£40 range, but as I’ve outlined is well worth the money and about much more than Euston Films. Together, the two books give a ton of valuable context which when assessing individual programmes is the most valuable but easily overlooked thing. 

Sources in chronological order:

Manuel Alvarado and John Stewart, Made for Television: Euston Films Ltd, British Film Institute, 1985

Paul Gambaccini and Rod Taylor, Television's Greatest Hits, Network, 1993