The world of British television off and on the screen, as it was sixty years ago.

Money for Nothing

ITV, nine days to go
Adastral House in Kingsway, “is well on the way to being transformed into Television House – the headquarters of the London commercial television programme contractors and the Independent Television News company,” says The Times under the headline “Nine Days to Go”. Studios 7 and 8 of Associated-Rediffusion were apparently completed and brought into operation for closed-circuit tests yesterday. This gives A-R access to eight out of its nine projected studios, the others being made up of four at Wembley and one each at the Granville Theatre, Waltham Green and the Viking Film Studios. The ninth studio should be completed by November, it says here.

Equity, having supposedly reached an agreement with the ITV companies only a day ago, have already gone back on the deal because they’re not being paid something for nothing.

Jack Hylton was filming parts of the show The Talk of the Town at the Adelphi Theatre for Associated-Rediffusion. The dispute came over the fact that the performers – who needed no rehearsal because the show is already running – felt aggrieved that they weren’t receiving rehearsal pay.

The Times’ television critic enjoyed the BBC’s Saturday night offering As I Was Saying… aka Six Portraits in Crime though for much of it wondered whether “sound-only radio or even the printed page would have done better service to so improbable a tale.” However, “a scene full of suspense in the merchant’s office between Mr Ballard Berkeley as the master crook and Mr Victor Rietti as the Jewish dealer, followed by their journey to the bank, at last justified the pictorial view.”

Animals and wildlife are the thing in BBC TV today. In children’s hour, Barrie Edgar visits Dudley Zoo in The Zoo on the Hill while later, at 8.45pm, David Attenborough returns to our screens this evening, presenting the first in another Zoo Quest series, which this time follows an expedition to British Guiana in South America. After an edition of Starlight there are two consecutive plays to watch, the first is a production of Davy Jones’s Dinner with an all-Welsh cast, and that’s followed by a repeat of Antonia Ridge’s Miss Patterson, starring Fay Compton in the title role and first broadcast in June this year.

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