Tonight’s Anglia… in 1970 

8 March 2017 tbs.pm/11067

The TVTimes tells us what was on Anglia Television on Sunday 8 March 1970. Things worth noting include:

  • A fairly typical Sunday from before hours and content rules were liberalised
  • Adult education, which is exempt from the rules on hours, takes up most of the early part of the day. As ever, whether the programmes are actually adult education is somewhat up for debate. Today, they all fit fairly easily, assuming they’ve been produced well.
  • The 15-minute closedown at 1.30pm is more likely to be an intermission with a holding card, clock or ident and some music: a full closedown would take a couple of minutes and necessitate a full, 5-minute long start-up, rending the closedown itself as, what? 8 minutes or so? Hardly worth putting on the baggy trousers for
  • Our first go at entertainment happens at 2.20pm with a repeat of ITC’s Danger Man. This episode was first seen in 1966. It’s in black and white, but that’s okay because Anglia itself is still in black and white at this point
  • Content restrictions require that there is a “closed period” between 6.15pm and 7pm with only religious or moral output and no advertisement breaks. ATV hits the target at 6.15pm with a CoE vicar peering curiously at Judaism. Then Border take advantage of the network slots available to the minor regions for religious programmes with The Beauty of the Earth at 6.35pm – mostly a cheap, studio-bound singalong with airs
  • Stars on Sunday, produced by Jess Yates, who was no better than he ought to have been, at 7pm is a gentle way of sliding from the religious programmes into the evening’s entertainment, being something of a mix of both
  • Did I say entertainment? 1963’s The Victors at 7.25pm from Columbia Pictures is not so much entertaining as a huge slog through death and destroyed people, with a good helping of archive footage of destruction and explosions just to ram the point home. It’s not easy viewing, in the same way that later films like Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now are not easy viewing
  • Still there’s always the BAFTA Awards at… sorry, David Frost and the TV Awards at 10.25pm. How on earth did Frost get his name hammered on to the front of this event? Oh yes, by founding LWT. That’s how
  • Speaking of LWT, there’s poor Simon Dee at 11.30pm. His fluffy teatime BBC show had been turned into a late-night hard arts programme by LWT and had died on its arse. This is a much lighter edition than usual, but it was still obvious that Dee was uncomfortably out of his depth. That, plus LWT’s on-going financial problems and Dee’s own need to be a diva, would soon doom both the show and Dee’s career

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7 responses to this article

Arthur Nibble 8 March 2017 at 1:45 pm

The majority of regions listed have decided to transmit Simon Dee’s sinking ship, which surprises me a bit.

Some very random programming in the regions, as shown by the timings for (and, in Southern’s case, length of) the League Cup final.

Talking of Southern – “Farming Diary”? No, thank you very much, we’ll show our own farming programme from Dover instead.

steve brown 8 March 2017 at 2:49 pm

Manchester City beat West Brom 2-1 after extra time in that Football League Cup Final

steve brown 8 March 2017 at 2:51 pm

university challenge was a staple for years on sunday lunchtime or afternoons then

Rob Horspole 8 March 2017 at 6:57 pm

That would have been the Anglia “Intermission” slide at 1.30, the static knight on the right with the “Anglia” italics bottom left, also used for “Presents”, “Interval”, “Presentation” and “Colour Production”. I was never sure when an interval became an intermission.
The “Weather Trends” was a detailed forecast for the next five days, hence it preceded the local “Farming Diary”.
The OB crew didn’t have to venture far for the “Morning Service”. Anglia would have been able to do this as they did not have a local football game to cover the day before.

Dave Rhodes 8 March 2017 at 7:17 pm

Note Southern opting out of Friends and Neighbours to give us A Song for Easter – a locally made religious song comp, presumably, as they made similar programmes for the network later in the seventies.

Looks like Southern may have transmitted a local religious service at 11 too – note the earlier finish time. I believe they showed local church services quite often in the sixties and early seventies.

As Jessica and Rob suggest, the lines between a closedown and an interval are pretty blurred – surely Southern didn’t actually close for a mere ten minutes at 12.5pm? ATV’s Interval at 1.30 sounds more realistic.

No sign of Yorkshire picking up Anglia’s Farming Diary or Tyne Tees’ rival Farming Outlook yet – at one point later in the decade, they ran the former on a Sunday and the other at Monday lunchtime – but tended to stick with the Anglia offering.

Paul Mason 12 March 2017 at 3:20 am

The Sunday lunchtime “educational” slot came under the banner of “Sunday Session” in my region (Granada) also.

Simon Dee lost his show to David Frost.

The Awards programme, then as now a nauseating luvvie fest mentioned an old favourite of mine Hark At Barker. In it Ronnie Barker played the buffoonish Lord Rustless , his slide-splittingly funny character which we saw too little of. sadly.

Paul Mason 27 March 2017 at 2:42 am

Sunday Sessions probably started with ABC in my neck of the woods until summer 1968.

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