Guest blogger Heather Lewis grew up with a love of television, with a particular fascination for continuity and idents from the 1980s. In-between looking after her two young children she celebrates Children's BBC in her blog The Broom Cupboard and Me and contributes guest posts for the Curious British Telly website. She writes about the launch of the BBC's full daytime television schedule 30 years ago.

There are a great number of us waxing lyrical in blogs and websites about television shows and schedules of the past. The 1970s and 1980s are now a fondly remembered age when the majority of us had a maximum of four channels to enjoy and the BBC1 nightly channel closedown sequence is worthy of a nostalgic discussion among enthusiasts on social media.

Less talked about though, is the BBC1 daytime schedule in the early and mid- 1980s. There is a reason for that of course and the words 'daytime schedule' are perhaps a little misleading due to a huge gap in the morning hours of programming until October 1986, now 30 years ago.

A delve into the pages of BBC Genome for Friday, October 24th 1986 paints an interesting, if baffling picture of daytime viewing options, or rather lack of options. With BBC Breakfast finishing just after 9am and a repeat showing of Will to Win (a documentary previously shown on BBC2 in 1985) we were treated to a selection of pages from the BBC’s Ceefax text service for a whole 55 minutes before that cornerstone of children’s programming Play School was aired. Pages from Ceefax appeared again afterwards for a lengthy 2 hours and 10 minutes until the lunchtime news bulletin at 1pm. So… where were all the programmes? Was that really it?

We need to travel back to 1983 first of all. The BBC took a significant step forward in launching Breakfast Time early in that year, at that time it was followed by the familiar countdown dots of the schools and colleges strand just after 9am. More change was to come, however, from late in June 1983 as the schools programmes slowly ambled their way over to BBC2, leaving a few holes during the morning hours. By the 19th September 1983 the game of 'scheduling musical chairs' meant that Play School was now moved across to BBC1 and the schools and colleges programming occupied BBC2 for much of the day.

Until 1986 the odd programme creeped in to interrupt the weekday Ceefax and Play School dominance on BBC1. Repeats of Sunday teatime staples included Antiques Roadshow and Songs of Praise; the annual political party conferences filled up the Autumn months with Play School solidly standing its ground every mid-morning throughout (presumably to give the keen politics viewer a chance to take a tea break). The summer of 1984 brought us extended Grandstand, showing highlights from the Los Angeles Olympics.

The school holidays usually saw BBC1 with a slightly more jovial schedule, particularly in 1986, when with the new Children's BBC branding in its infancy, in-vision presenters (Debbie Flint and Andy Crane) appeared on screen during the morning introducing cartoons, the holiday staple Why Don’t You…? and special editions of Newsround. By September 1986 the kids were back at school and pages from Ceefax reappeared, much to the delight of some enthusiasts and the frustration of others.

At last, on the 27th October 1986 the new look BBC Daytime finally arrived. It didn't exactly explode onto our screens, but lightly skipped on, complete with pastel hued promos that included an animated peachy coloured curtain and window for added scenery. Featured in the new daytime line up were the 'filler repeats' of classic comedy and films, but more importantly there was a significant number of brand new shows introduced on to our screens for the very first time.

Children's BBC presentation, now just over a year old, was rewarded with a small mid-morning slot either side of Play School where Phillip Schofield sat with his mid-morning coffee in one of the BBC’s small presentation studios, reading out birthday cards for his under-5 year old audience. It started off as a relatively simple, humble affair, as in addition to the hand-drawn cards, there were birthday messages hastily scribbled onto scraps of paper and shop bought cards! Nonetheless this is a format which was hugely popular and is still going strong every day, now on the CBeebies channel.

 

Open Air bore a striking resemblance to the BBC’s long running show Points of View, but expanding the concept into a live broadcast magazine. Originally presented by Pattie Coldwell, Bob Wellings and Eamonn Holmes each daily edition covered all aspects of television programming in an interactive (for the 1980s) way where viewers could telephone in and be given the opportunity to praise recent shows, or grumble about them. Various show creators, producers and presenters were put in the firing line to answer their questions. Enjoyably, we saw fascinating behind-the-scenes features of the workings of the BBC, for example in 1987 when Richard Straker talked the Open Air audience through his duties as a BBC continuity announcer. Some of Open Air was even dedicated to the new BBC1 Daytime schedule itself, and one of the programmes given notable attention was the lunchtime soap opera called Neighbours, which in terms of peak viewing figures became one of the BBC Daytime schedule’s most successful shows.

The story of Neighbours coming to the BBC was recalled by Roger Laughton who had the task of finding a drama suitable for a lunchtime audience. His choice was made simple when faced with a selection of numerous identikit American soaps, or a lone Australian drama centred round a small street of houses and a handful of families. Neighbours had an immediate appeal to many people, sitting down at lunchtime for 25 minutes of daily television escapism to a friendly world of warm sunshine and backyard swimming pools. Its popularity wasn't restricted to just frazzled mums of young toddlers and the retired, in school and college common rooms all over the country it became essential viewing for teenagers and students, too.

Throughout the latter half of the 1980s the daytime schedule evolved to bring us more new and long-running shows including the topical debate programme Kilroy, and Going for Gold, a quiz with an international flavour hosted by Henry Kelly.

There was even a Daytime magazine and a Daytime Club, complete with a flashy membership card. The phenomenal success of Neighbours continued to grow and the combined lunchtime and teatime repeat each day (from 1988 onwards) had audiences of 18 million upwards glued to Ramsay Street's unfolding dramas. The long, enduring stretches of selected 'pages from Ceefax' became a distant memory, much to the wistful sadness of some; but also to the joyous relief of many!

The bits in between the programmes, the glue that holds television together, continuity announcements, junctions, links… There are many ways to describe the material that joins together (or separates, if you like) the distinct programme material on radio and television. That could bring us back to the vexed question of what constitutes a programme - it’s a problem that we have yet to face on the Genome Project, insofar as at the moment we only log actual billed programmes. That said, there are some indications of the existence of continuity in the pages of Radio Times, from billed intervals and closedowns to children’s strands like “But First This!”

From the earliest days of broadcasting, when everything apart from gramophone records was live, it was never a question of just having distinct programmes with nothing between them. Every artist or item needed to be introduced. The earliest broadcasts were in essence someone talking, and it was soon found necessary to plan what they were going to talk about, and to vary the offerings with stories, humour, and music. In a way, continuity is the essence of broadcasting. If you look at stations such as Radios 1 and 2, much of their programming is continuity, since it consists of an announcer/presenter/DJ talking, and introducing records.

Because their voices were the most often heard on the air, BBC announcers were among the earliest recognisable personalities, although the cautious and sober early BBC was reluctant to create any kind of personality cult for them, so they were usually unnamed. Other than the pseudonyms such as “Uncle Mac” (Derek McCulloch) used in “Children’s Hour”, it was not until the Second World War and the need to verify the identities of announcers, to avoid the danger of people confusing Nazi propaganda broadcasts with BBC transmissions, that their names were given on air (as the announcers also read the news). There had however been articles in Radio Times earlier profiling announcers, and their names can be seen in early billings as part of the closedown - but public curiosity (and that of the press) meant that some names were well known anyway.

The first television announcers however were deliberately publicised. Early low definition television had been linked by radio announcers, but it was decided to make a feature of the television announcers, as for one thing they would be on screen so frequently that it would be impractical and bizarre not to name them. When the original announcers, Leslie Mitchell, Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell were chosen, they were the subject of press coverage, and featured in BBC radio programmes prior to their on-screen appearance.

Because the television broadcasts that began in August 1936 all came from a single studio (at first there were two alternate systems, the Baird and the Marconi-EMI system, each with its own studio at Alexandra Palace), everything other than any pre-filmed material appeared as a continuous flow of output. Except for drama, which needed to be kept within its own created ‘world’, programmes would be introduced by the announcers, from whom the cameras would travel over to, or cut to, the act or speaker just announced. The television technology available in the 30s and as late as the mid-50s was not good at the instant cut, and it could be a few seconds before the picture from one camera was replaced by another, so the style of presentation was necessarily more fluid and languid than the rapid style possible now. The television announcers were also in some cases the presenters of programmes, interacting with the artists. Even after he left the announcer’s job in February 1938, Leslie Mitchell continued as the interviewer for the long-running magazine, “Picture Page”.

Post-war, there came to be what seems now a strange obsession with the role of the announcer, and they became the first real television personalities. The pre-war announcers were replaced by new names such as Mary Malcolm, Macdonald Hobley and Sylvia Peters among others, with thousands of hopefuls putting their names forward whenever a vacancy came up. By the end of the 1950s though things were changing, and it was decided to reduce the prominence of in-vision continuity announcers. Male announcers were reserved for out-of-vision factual information, while the female announcers would give details of programmes, programme changes etc. Famous announcer names in the early 60s included Valerie Singleton, Judith Chalmers and Sarah Ward, the latter of whom also hosted the viewer feedback series “Junior Points of View” which along with its parent programme “Points of View” was one of an increasing number of programmes made by the Presentation Department.

When BBC2 began in April 1964, it too at first had in-vision announcements, though with a male and female team including Denis Tuohy, who presented the first edition of the series “Line-Up” (famously a day later than scheduled due to a blackout at Battersea Power Station). “Line-up” was intended to preview the evening’s programmes, and the presentation team would appear during the evening before rounding things off with the closedown. After a few months, this arrangement evolved into giving a brief programme summary at the start of transmissions, and the closedown routine became a review of some of the evening’s programmes – and later this expanded into a more wide ranging review and comment strand, “Late Night Line-Up”, which launched the career of Joan Bakewell* among others, and gave rise to spin-off series such as “Film Night” and “Colour Me Pop” (which begat “Disco 2”, which begat “The Old Grey Whistle Test”…)

(*Always a difficult cliche to justify, but although she had appeared in various programmes including “Woman’s Hour”, “Meeting Point” and “What Next in Labour-Saving Gardens”, “LNLU” was what made Lady Joan famous…)

In 1965 however it was decided to drop in-vision announcements from both channels, and television announcers receded into anonymity. At least, that is, until Children’s BBC decided to revive the tradition in the mid-80s. On 9th September 1985 at 3.55pm, Phillip Schofield made his first in-vision announcement from a tiny presentation studio, which soon became known as the Broom Cupboard. In line with the general approach to presentation and continuity, this was not reflected in the listings or anywhere else in the magazine…

Every Sunday, Andrew Martin will be guiding you through the history of broadcasting by digging out archive gems and information from the BBC Genome listings.