RELIVING THE GLORY DAYS OF WEST TV
12 December 2006 - Itv is looking back to the future for its new programme schedules, We trawl through the archives of the West's first independent television station TWW.
He disgraced peer Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare is to be the star of a new ITV1 show in which he will hand out his own money to help 'make people's dreams come true'.It is part of a plan by ITV1 to refresh its programme schedules in a bid to win back viewers.
Quiz games will also be making a comeback along with productions of classic dramas. But it sounds like an echo of the days when independent broadcasting first appeared on television screens in the West Country.
On its first night in 1958, Television Wales and West (TWW) launched its own quiz show, The £1,000 Word in which Bert Tann, the popular manager of Bristol Rovers, was one of the winning contestants.
The prize money may have been small compared with today's offerings but nevertheless the producers had no difficulty in finding contestants.
At the time, TWW reached just 115,000 homes in the West Country and Wales.
It started with the Mr and Mrs Show hosted by Alan Taylor who became one of the best known faces on commercial television in this part of the country.
The station's teenage pop show Discs A Go Go, networked live from the Brislington studios every Saturday evening with a local audience, was its answer to the BBC's Top of the Pops.
Kent Walton, best known for his commentaries on ITV wrestling, hosted the show which included some of the top names in the pop charts.
TWW also made a household name of its resident Bristol news reader Guy Thomas, now living in London. Viewers were unaware that he read the bulletins from a small studio, not much bigger than a telephone box, behind the main building.
The station lost its franchise in 1968 and HTV (its full name was Harlech Television) took over. Those were the days when regional television meant just that.
At one time HTV West was producing 555 hours of local programmes a year. While news made up the majority of the output, there were a substantial number of documentaries, features, light entertainment programmes, live church services, children's shows, sport and drama.
HTV carved out a nice niche for itself with children's and family drama productions, some of which were seen the world over.
There was the long-running Robin of Sherwood, filmed all around the greater Bristol area and on the Mendips, Arthur of the Britons, the Canterville Ghost, Noel Coward's Separate Tables and Robert Louis Stevenson's Master of Ballentrae and Kidnapped. A film crew was even sent to Egypt to film Tutankhamen's Tomb.
Mention HTV and most people still think of Bruce Hockin, although he retired 10 years ago. He talked himself into the record books by becoming the longest-serving news anchorman in ITV, having presented the nightly news magazine for 30 years.
He also presented At Home, a weekly programme in which he took the film cameras into the homes of the famous and not-so-famous to show us how they lived. There was never a shortage of guests for the programmes which ran for more than five years.
Among those who let viewers into their homes was Paddy Ashdown, soon after he was elected MP for Yeovil, Winifred Foley who wrote books about her life in the Forest of Dean, Lord Weymouth of Longleat House, Wesley Carr, a former Dean of Bristol, and the jockey Willie Carson.
Bruce worked with a cast of co-presenters who became well known in their own right. There was Jan Leeming, Richard Wyatt, Richard Cottrell, who gave up journalism to become Bristol's first Euro-MP, the late Annie St. John and Gillian Miles, to name a few.
Press Call was a Friday night programme when three local newspaper editors met in the studio to question someone who was in the news that week. Often it would be a national figure, a trade union leader, an author, a leading politician or churchman.
ITV says that one of the old network favourites to make a return will be This Is Your Life. There was much secrecy around the HTV studios when the TIYL team descended on Bristol when it chose ice-skater Robin Cousins from Sea Mills as the subject of one of their programmes.
After winning a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980, Robin was taken on an open-top bus tour of his home city before meeting the Lord Mayor.
Outside the Council House, the civic party was joined by television presenter Eamonn Andrews who told Robin that there were 'more surprises back in the studio at Brislington' where that edition of This Is Your Life was recorded.
The show was planned under a veil of much secrecy with the production team always referring to Robin as 'Mr. Lake'. Interviewees in the programme were also sworn to secrecy.
It was programmes like these that attracted large audiences. But with so many channels now available for television viewers it remains to be seen whether they still hold the same impact.
