ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Celluloid Television Culture The Specificity of Film on Television: the Action-adventure Text as an Example of a Production and Textual Strategy, 1955 – 1978. https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40025/ Version: Full Version Citation: Sexton, Max (2013) Celluloid Television Culture The Speci- ficity of Film on Television: the Action-adventure Text as an Example of a Production and Textual Strategy, 1955 – 1978. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Celluloid Television Culture The Specificity of Film on Television: the Action-adventure Text as an Example of a Production and Textual Strategy, 1955 – 1978. Max Sexton A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London, 2012. Declaration I hereby declare that the thesis presented by me for examination of the PhD degree is solely my own work, other than where I have clearly indicated. Birkbeck, University of London Abstract of Thesis (5ST) Notes for Candidate: 1. Type your abstract on the other side of this sheet. 2. Use single-spacing typing. Limit your abstract to one side of the sheet. 3. Please submit this copy of your abstract to the Research Student Unit, Birkbeck, University of London, Registry, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, at the same time as you submit copies of your thesis. 4. This abstract will be forwarded to the University Library, which will send this sheet to the British Library and to ASLIB (Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux) for publication to Index to Theses . Author (full names)________Max Peter Sexton __________________________________________________ Title of thesis___ The Specificity of Film on Television: the Action-adventure Text as an Example of a Production and Textual Strategy, 1955 – 1978 ________________ _______________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Degree_______________ Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ______________________________________________________ Abstract The aim of this thesis is to re-examine the use of film on British television, 1955-78, in order to demonstrate that the production of drama on British television was more complex than in the existing supposition, that television drama was either shot ‘live’ or co-existed with the recording medium of film. Instead, the types of interaction will raise questions about the process of production and how the recording of programmes on film addressed the audience watching a domestic medium. The thesis attempts to answer these questions by examining a form and mode of popular entertainment on British television that existed on film. The shot-on-film television series was a form that had been imported from the United States in the 1950s, but had been modified in Britain. The type of modification is shown to reveal how notions of value and quality were assigned to a television programme when a public service ethos determined the cultural discourse set by British television. The development of an export market and the internationalisation of British television will raise questions about the exact appeal of these programmes. At the same time, indigenous modes of film production designed for the domestic consumption of television existed side-by-side with the professional ideologies associated with commercial film-making. These professional ideologies allowed for the development of television as an international commodity. However, they created a tension between separate modes of fictional television production. The thesis concludes that the creation of separate modalities in the British adventure series at various times interacted in the 1960s and 1970s, and led to it becoming a less stable object of analysis, which requires an exploration of the often contradictory ways in which a number of key programmes functioned. Table of Contents Introduction Rationale: The Specificity of Film on Television, 1955-1978………………... 1 Literature Review: Television Function and Form……………….………….... 5 Interpreting Television’s Film Aesthetics…………………………………..… 12 Methodology: Archival Research and Interviews…………………………….. 26 Structure of the Chapters……………………………………………………… 32 Chapter 1 Filmed Television: Form and Mode Introduction………………………………………………………………….... 39 Television Adventure: Boundaries of Text and Genre……………………...... 40 Mode and the Expanded Function of Television…………………………...… 49 Televisual Flow, Programming and the Homogenised Text………………….. 60 The Producer-Text-Audience Relationship………………………………….... 80 Conclusion: The Action-adventure Text as Cultural Category…………..….... 92 Chapter 2 Institution: the Telefilm Adventure Series and New Markets Introduction……………………………………………………………...…... 94 The Search for Television’s Form and Popular Taste….……………….......... 95 The Internationality of British Television Adventure Drama………….…….. 100 Early Telefilm and ‘Technical Excellence’…………………………….…...... 111 Cultural Value in Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1955)…………….…..... 118 Cultural Value in the Juvenile Adventure Dramas (1955-59)………….…...... 122 i The Industrial Scale of Television Film……………………………….…...… 127 Conclusion: Celluloid and Selling Abroad………………………….….…….. 138 Chapter 3 Technology: Creativity and Constraints Introduction………………………………………………………………...... 141 Technical Imaginaries…………………………………………………….…... 142 The Maximisation of Spatial Resources and the Use of Colour…………....... 145 Lighting the 1960s Telefilm………………………………….......................... 158 Celluloid Television and its Usages in the 1970s………………………......... 163 Picture Quality: Gritty Realism and Euston Films in the 1970s……….…...... 167 Celluloid Culture and the Audio-Visual……………………………….…...... 175 Hazell : Inside the TV Studio…………………………………………..…...… 178 Labour Relations and Euston Films……………………………………...…... 184 Conclusion: The Culture of Celluloid Television…………………………..… 193 Chapter 4 ITC and ABC-TV: the 1960s Adventure Series Introduction……………………………………………………………..….... 196 The Appeal to Youth……………………………………………………...…. 197 The Avengers : Realism and Modernity (1964-65)…..………………….….... 211 Adam Adamant Lives! Old-fashioned Adventurer (1966-67).………….……. 229 The Prisoner : Counter-Culture Adventure (1967-68)……………….………. 233 Conclusion: Celluloid Canons on Television……………………….……….. 249 ii Chapter 5 The 1970s Adventure Series: Realism and Action Introduction…………………………………………………………….…..... 252 ABC-TV and Thames Television: Continuities and Tensions………….….... 253 The Protectors (1972-74)………………………………………………....…. 259 Thames’ Relationship to Euston Films……………………………….…..…. 267 Thames Television, Euston Films and the Television Auteur ……………….. 270 Special Branch (1969-74): Realism and ‘Watchability’………………...….. 281 Special Branch (1973-74): Hybridised Values………………………………. 294 Hazell (1977-78): Back to the Intimate Drama?.............................................. 304 Conclusion: Celluloid and the End of the Studio Drama………………….… 313 Conclusion The Specificities of Film on British Television, 1955 – 1978………….….... 316 Bibliography ………………………………………………………..……. 324 Filmography ………………………………………………………..……. 342 iii Acknowledgements and Thanks Alison Smith Dr Michael Allen Dr Matthew Gibson Jim Goddard Trevor Preston Ted Childs Johnny Goodman Muir Sutherland Stephen Pushkin Roddy Buxton The staff at the British Film Institute The staff at the BBC Written Archives Centre Introduction: Rationale: The Specificity of Film on Television, 1955-1978 This thesis analyses the function, form and mode of British television in the period 1955-1978. It finds that historical accounts of British television as having a so-called essential nature - its ability to transmit images and sound instantaneously, and the live origination of programmes - ignore the use of film. The essential nature of television was its immediacy, which was the opposite of film’s ‘recorded’ nature. However, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that during the two decades after the beginning of ITV, as film became increasingly an important part of television programming and production, it became central to the development of drama, promoting a fertile exchange between the forms and modes of film and television. To examine this exchange, a series of texts within a chosen genre has been selected to ask how television’s use of moving images on film as a technology and as a medium was affected by the institution at the time. The thesis provides examples of this process and its complexities, and demonstrates that there was nothing in the technologies of 35mm and 16mm film themselves that dictated how they would be used either in UK television or in Britain’s television export market. Instead, the institution (the focus is on particular ITV companies, but not to the exclusion of the BBC) shaped the aesthetic form in which film was adapted to television to develop programmes within the British adventure series. The thesis will argue that this form is of interest because it was at the centre of many new developments in television as it went from a studio-bound ‘live’ production to shot-on-film production mixing location, soundstage interiors and stock shots and finally to be shot entirely on location. 1 Moreover, the