Learning on ScreenFeature Films on British Television in the 1970s
This is an ‘interim report’ by Dr Sheldon Hall, Sheffield Hallam University, on his long-term project on the history of the showing of feature films on British television, covering virtually the entire history of broadcast television from the 1930s to the present. Here he focuses on the 1970s.
About the Author: Dr Sheldon Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Stage and Screen Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It – The Making of the Epic Movie (Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2005; reprinted 2006; 2nd edition 2014); with Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: a Hollywood History (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and among the articles he has contributed to books and journals is a chapter on Straw Dogs in Seventies British Cinema (ed. Robert Shail, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He is currently writing Armchair Cinema: Feature Films on British Television for publication in 2016.
NB: A shorter version of this article was first published in the June 2015 issue of Viewfinder.
Preamble
This is an ‘interim report’ on a long-term project on the history of the showing of feature films on British television, covering virtually the entire history of broadcast television from the 1930s to the present. Not to mislead you, I will not be proposing an elaborate thesis or developing a complex argument: it is very much a snapshot from work in progress, a summary of selected findings, for whatever interest it might contain – and I would appreciate constructive feedback on the extent to which it is interesting! I will not be attempting even a full account of the ten-year period in my title but will try to give a general survey of the field in the 1970s while focusing on 1975 for most of my examples. The choice of year is not arbitrary: aside from coming at the exact midpoint of the decade and being reasonably representative, it also allows me to focus on a number of key controversies, events and developments affecting the presentation of films on television in subsequent years. It also happens to be the first year in which I, as a viewer, was fully cognisant at the time, having started regularly buying the Radio Times in September 1974 and the TV Times in January 1975, and already compiling lists of films on TV – something I’m still doing!
…the only films available to television for more than two decades were B pictures from minor distributors, foreign-language films and mostly pre-war independent productions…
The Context
Although feature films (made for the cinema) had been shown on the BBC from 1937 and on ITV from shortly after its inception in 1955, UK broadcasters were only given comparatively unrestricted access to the backlogs of the major distributors (British and American) from 1964. The mainstream British film industry – especially exhibitors, as represented by the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) – had always strongly resisted the showing of any films on television at all. The British branches of the Hollywood majors went along with this, with the result that virtually the only films available to television for more than two decades were B pictures from minor distributors, foreign-language films and mostly pre-war independent productions, some of them originally released by the majors but that had slipped out of their control. Producers and distributors who dealt with the TV companies were threatened with effective blacklisting and their films, past, present and future, being boycotted by cinemas. From the late 1950s, the backlogs of a limited number of companies became available to TV: among them those of the defunct RKO Radio and Ealing Studios along with the pre-1949 films of Warner Bros. But these were exceptions.
This situation changed in late 1964 when the independent Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn and the American company MCA (Music Corporation of America, which as well as owning Universal Pictures also controlled the pre-1949 backlog of Paramount Pictures) sold large packages of films to ITV and the BBC, respectively. This broke the blockade. The CEA conceded that films more than five years old could be sold to television without objection (features not actually released in the UK could be sold and broadcast freely). The networks now had access to an estimated 9,000 films, allowing them to pick and choose from the offerings of the majors and with no competition but each other.
