Evesham Probus Club Meetings in 2025

PROBUS TALK 26.06.2025

Our speaker on 26th June was our member Mike Fitzgerald with Part 2 of his talk on Reminiscences of Being a Journalist and Television Producer with the BBC.  Starting with a resumé of Part 1 he continued his story of his career with the Corporation which began in Newcastle after attending an interview in Manchester where he thought the job was located.  One of his early lessons was how different the spoken/broadcast word was from written/print journalism.  He told us that in the course of extensive international travels he had learned just how well the BBC is regarded, that the BBC is the most respected broadcaster worldwide, the voice of truth.  In the course of his 28 years with the BBC he was to work in Newcastle, Bristol, London, Plymouth and Birmingham.   Only once did he find himself having to vigorously defend the BBC and that was when he was invited to address a business conference in the American Deep South, in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1980’s. The BBC culture of a public service broadcaster was quite alien to his audience and the fact that it doesn’t make a profit and is financed by a licence fee classified it in their eyes as a socialist organisation, indeed the voice of the Government.

The original founder of the BBC, Sir John, later Lord Reith, laid down its original aims as “to educate, inform and entertain” and that it was not a commercial undertaking.  It operates under a Royal Charter.  Mike argued the case that the £174.50 licence fee, which pays for the BBC’s television, radio, and online services, was “bloody good value” and that the government kept back 3.8% of it to cover the cost of collection.  Mike quoted some telling statistics about “pleasures” consumers spend money on which far outstrip the cost of the licence fee. The most stunning example was that if one smokes twenty cigarettes day it costs £6,862 per annum.

When ITV was launched in 1955 the BBC lost its monopoly, and its share of the television audience fell from 100% to 28%.   Mike attributed the BBC’s ability to recover and share TV audiences 50-50 with ITV to the dynamic management of Paul Fox, Controller of BBC 1.  He had more to tell us about this significant individual later in his talk.

Our speaker joined the BBC at a point when there was an enormous demand for experienced journalists with not only the expansion of television but also of radio.  He said that “the writing was on the wall” back when he worked on the Daily Herald in Manchester.  Senior newspapermen were leaving to take up jobs reading the local tv news, for example.  One such was his boss, Bob Southgate, who became one of ITV’s top reporters, covering the Arab-Israeli wars of the ‘60s, the Vietnam war and the Prague Spring.  He was destined to become Managing Director of Central Television’s News Division.

When Mike joined the BBC it was London-based. Radio was run from Broadcasting House in Central London and TV from TV Centre in West London.  Stations in larger cities such as Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester had units working exclusively for the networks. Probably the best known was the Natural History Unit in Bristol which, thanks to David Attenborough, some innovative producers and mind-blowing technology made it the world leader that it is today.   

Mike was driving home to his digs in the North East on 22nd November 1963 when he heard on his car radio that President Kennedy had been shot.  He told us he almost turned his car round to go back to the studio until he realised that at that moment he was out of the journalistic mainstream.  He wished he was back in London “handling the biggest and most tragic news story of the decade.”   But he got over it.

While in Newcastle our speaker worked with Frank Bough who was destined to become one of television’s most accomplished and popular broadcasters.   Frank’s very public downfall years later was a particular shock to Mike, who had always found him to be not only a perfect gentleman but someone who was averse to the kind of language that was common parlance for someone who had worked in busy newspaper newsrooms.

“Fitz” as Mike became known, talked about some of the many people he worked with in the North East. It was a time for a steep learning curve and he was fortunate enough to have some first class broadcasters to teach him the ropes.  Having acquired new skills such as directing and editing film, the time came when he applied for and got the job as producer of BBC West’s Point West regional news programme in Bristol.   He hadn’t been there very long before he came up with the idea of making a film about the Fleet Air Arm, who were under threat of being disbanded as a result of a House of Commons Strategic Defence Review.  It gave him a taste of documentary film making and, when regional television appointed their own producers, Fitz was one of them.  His problem was that there were many slots to fill in the schedules but not much money.  The compromise was to make lots of studio programmes so that one could save money to make a limited number of documentary films.  An example was inexpensive studio-based quiz shows.    He confessed to feeling embarrassed that he had used people like Kate Adie and Hugh Sykes (who were to become top-flight foreign correspondents) as quiz captains, though on reflection they, too, were learning new crafts in the process.

The time came when the BBC decided to appoint senior posts responsible for the production of eighty regional programmes a year (on top of the nightly news magazine programmes). “We must have been doing something right in Bristol because all three of us with BBC West were appointed.”  Mike went to Pebble Mill, where he had spent a happy six months previously working on Pebble Mill at One.  His editor there had been Terry Dobson, the man who broke the story of the Kennedy assassination.  At the time he was working for Granada Television, when he got a tip-off from a contact at the Press Association that they had heard about the shooting on short wave radio.  After checking back with his source Terry broke the story on the local programme – beating BBC News and ITN.   Granada had told ITN but the duty editor decided not to break the news until he got it from his own reporters in the US.  This was in the days before satellite communications.

One of Mike’s most successful films was about a boy with Cystic Fibrosis, called “Living with CF”.  The programme won the Royal Television Society’s award for Best Regional Programme, beating 28 others submitted by the BBC and ITV.  The award was presented to Mike by Paul Fox at a ceremony in London.  Fitz took the opportunity during the Probus talk to tell us a little bit more about Paul Fox.  As a thirteen year old he had been put by an aunt and uncle on the first of the Kindertransport trains out of Nazi Germany. Five years later, as an 18 year old paratrooper he was dropped back into Germany where he was wounded twice. After the war he took the same route as Fitz, working on local and national newspapers and, in his case, Pathe News, before joining the BBC.

In 1952 the BBC was caught with its trousers down when King George VI died suddenly and unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 56.  No-one had thought to prepare an obituary.  BBC TV closed down, ostensibly out of respect for the late King, but really to give themselves time to quickly make a programme about the King.  Paul Fox and a colleague worked through the night, and their programme went out when the television service reopened the next evening. It was an incredible achievement and marked the start of Fox’s meteoric rise.

Mike said some programmes were particular fun to make.  One such was to take four young children from the Midlands to “the other Birmingham” where they stayed with American families for a week before going to NASA’s Space Camp for a week where they experienced parts of their astronaut training.  The children had been chosen as winners of an essay competition run by Mike’s team.  Three of the four had never been on an airplane before.  They all took part in radio interviews in Alabama.  The local radio people there said they were amazed at the four’s knowledge of American music, sport, politics and Aids and their willingness to talk about such subjects.

After a reorganisation Mike and his manager were both declared redundant and Fitz was told he could either move to London or remain in Birmingham and work on the Farming tv programme. He made a film for them about how fallout from Chernobyl had seriously contaminated uplands from  North Wales to the Lake District and Western Scotland.   Many farmers moved their radioactive livestock to the Midlands and the South until sheep were declared safe by government inspectors for slaughter.  Many farmers suffered financial hardship waiting for their grazing land to be deemed safe. The film was about their stories.

The Farming programme was itself a victim of BBC reorganisation when the Corporation decided it was time for a “greener” countryside output and so was born Countryfile and Fitz won the job as its founding editor.  He told us the job turned out to be a poisoned chalice because no-one was quite sure what was required.  After three years Fitz had had enough.  As he put it: “I was glad to take early retirement before Pebble Mill was closed down and the programme eventually moved to Bristol”.

 Mike’s story of progressing from local newspapers to becoming editor of a BBC1 network programme and how the media had changed so dramatically over the years at an ever-increasing pace to occupy a dominating place in our lives was evident from this talk for which we thank Mike.

Alan Smith