January 2005


All that glitters ...

IF TELEVISION in the UK ever had a 'golden age', it must have been the late 1960s and 1970s ... with the gold been mined and refined at such smelting works as television studios built beside the River Itchen in Southampton in 1968.

After 35 years, those studios have now closed, part of the final 'rationalisation' and 'consolidation' of about 10 different regional commercial television companies into the single ITV plc.

The studios, built for Southern Television, were probably the only ones in the UK to have railway lines running through the car park - and, a few years later - unpublished pictures of an exceedingly phallic-looking 25ft banana being lifted into place outside the front door pinned up beside every picture desk on Fleet Street.

The railway was one of many linking the mainline between the city and London with the docks. Perhaps ironically, the local BBC headquarters was in South Western House, the former Cunard hotel at Southampton Docks railway terminus, where the platforms were used as car parks, and careless visitors regularly drove too far.

Despite losing the franchise in the early 1980s, Southern Television established itself as a renowned producer of children's programmes and opera, as well as running a news department that employed more than 200 at its biggest.

The company's directors were furious about the loss, but successors TVS brought greater investment and nationally-recognised producers and directors as well as on-screen faces to the banks of the Itchen.

TVS too lost the franchise 10 years later - to Meridian, now just another small cog in the big wheel of ITV plc.

Not only has Northam been closed, so the company can sell the valuable site for housing, but newsrooms and studios in Maidstone and Newbury have also been shut, with everyone moving to an industrial estate half way between Southampton and Portsmouth.

For many of two, perhaps three, generations, not only the news coverage, but programmes good and less good, from the splendour of big budget dramas, to the camp desperation of a pilot Gong Show, the rural ramblings of Jack Hargreaves' Out of Town and the often desperate and much-maligned Houseparty, did come from a dream factory that used true gold.

Photographer Tony Nutley's infamous pictures of the rope around the glans of the banana have probably long faded, but the glory days have not quite gone. The local evening paper, the Southern Daily Echo, part of the Gannett-Newquest empire, has published a history celebrating The Dream Factory, alongside a DVD featuring some of the 'most memorable moments' of the studios' output.

Fred Dineage may be nearing retirement. Jack Hargreaves may be long gone. How is however still educating and entertaining the nation's young ... and even with memories of the backlot filled with Christmas trees and Santas when 'seasonal specials' were being recorded in mid August, yes, Northam has its place in television history - and it is good to see that legacy recorded.

The Dream Factory; a history of independent television in the south, edited by Andy Bissell, Southern Echo/Newsquest, 2004.