We talk to Patricia Holland, author of Angry Buzz: This Week and Current Affairs Television published by LE Tauris
What is the significance of the This Week/TV Eye series in the context of the UK current affairs genre?
This Week was the first current affairs series on commercial television in the UK, launched in January 1956 by Associated-Rediffusion (A-R), the first of the regionally-based companies which made up the Independent Television network (ITV). It originally mixed lighter items with more serious journalism, but by the end of the 1960s, its team of well-known journalists was fronting in-depth reporting in a documentary style for its weekly half hour slot. In 1968 Rediffusion Television (as A-R was now known) was replaced by Thames Television, whose management strongly supported This Week, (known between 1978-86 as TVEye). Thames itself lost its licence to broadcast in 1992.
How This Week/TV Eye differentiated itself from the other flagships strands like Panorama and World In Action?
Over the 36-year life of This Week/TVEye (1956-1992), there was healthy competition between the three major UK current affairs series. The BBC had launched Panorama in 1953 as a light-weight magazine, but it soon became more solemn and ponderous. Granada’s World in Action, (1963-1998) developed a more punchy visual style. ITV’s regulator, the Independent Television (later Broadcasting) Authority, insisted that current affairs programmes were transmitted in peak time, and this encouraged the three series to vie with each other for programmes that would be attractive as well as powerful journalism.
Which were the most groundbreaking stories This Week/TV Eye covered and why?
Throughout its life This Week/TVEye gave an insight into the news of the day, covering domestic issues –housing, health, poverty, immigration- and overseas stories, from Africa to the Middle East, from Eastern Europe to India and Bangladesh. Its reporters included some of the most outstanding UK journalists, and part of its brief was to interview major politicians, including Prime Ministers.
Jonathan Dimbleby’s Unknown Famine (1972) broke the news of the disaster in Northern Ethiopia; Julian Manyon watched the uprising against Soviet rule in the Polish shipyards in Seven Days in Gdansk (1980); Peter Taylor made a series of challenging programmes on smoking and health, with titles such as Dying for a Fag and Ashes to Ashes (1975). In Here Comes Cruise (1983) TVEye drove a fake missile launcher through the Berkshire lanes to test the reactions of people living near the US nuclear missile base.
The best known This Week remains Death on the Rock (1988), painstaking investigative journalism into the shootings of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar, which outraged Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The series had a long track record of thoughtful and often provocative programmes on the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland –just one of the topics covered by 36 years of dedicated journalism.