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Peter Morley was once the golden boy of ITV. As a television director of just four years’ experience he flew to Munich in 1959 to carry out the only his pilot. The resulting programme, Tyranny-the Years of Adolf Hitler, the first one-hour documentary on the comparatively new ITV, won 10 million viewers. He quickly—and, perhaps, curiously—capitalised on his success by persuading the programme controller to commission an original studio production of Benjamin Britten’s opera
The Turn of the Screw, which Morley, an opera novice, had fallen in love with. It went out without a single note of music being cut and without commercials. “Can you imagine that happening today?” Morley asks. Then he made programmes on post-war Japan, a player’s eye view of the London Symphony Orchestra and mixed marriages - a hugely controversial subject in 1964 for which he received threats in the post. Morley was in the enviable position of being there at the outset of TV documentary making, working on the blank canvas of a new medium where almost all subjects were new. “I just thought of those first 20 years of (independent) television as being a great adventure before it became the highly organised ‘industry’ it is now,” he remembers. From directing coverage of the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill to monumental
The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, he built a heavyweight CV which overturns any misconceptions, should they exist, that ITV was only ever the home of populist programming. Morley, who was born in 1924, began work in a cinema projection box at the age of 16 because he wanted to get into film-making. After doing his wartime service with the 8th Hussars in tanks, he wangled a job as a film editor and made government information broadcasts and the like until, in 1955, a colleague suggested he join him at Associated Rediffusion and the new Independent Television empire. Despite admitting at interview that he did not own a television and the only programme he had ever seen was the Queen’s coronation two years earlier, Morley was in. “They took the most appalling risks,” Morley says now. “We were on the air fairly soon after that, having never been in a television studio. I got a ring binder called How to Budget a Programme. That’s the only training I’ve ever had.” His first programmes were advertising magazines, which advertised products in a 15- to 20-minute scripted drama. “They were awful, but a marvellous training ground.” He rapidly progressed to documentaries, starting with Fan Fever in 1956, an investigation of the new phenomenon of fan hysteria, a 17-episode series on MPs handling their constituents’ problems, and a weekly show devoted entirely to London theatre. “It was wildly exciting and huge fun. When it came to the actual programme-making part, there was nobody to tell you what to do or how to do it. There was no yardstick to go by,” he recalls. “Everything was live. The word video, let alone video-recording, hadn’t been invented. If you missed a programme, tough luck; I don’t think we ever thought we were pioneers, but looking back we couldn’t help but do pioneering work.” There was instant access to the controller of programmes. If he said yes, then shows were made—often quickly.
Tyranny—the Years of Adolf Hitler was turned around in four weeks. By that stage, Morley had teamed up with Cyril Bennett, a former Fleet Street journalist, and they wanted to tackle Hitler because they had not seen anything on him on TV before. The programme was a live show involving figures such as Lord Bulloch, the historian and Nazi expert. But the element that grabbed headlines was the filmed inserts of the interviews carried out by Morley in Germany, thanks to an Austrian journalist who acted as go-between. “None of these people had ever been interviewed before or indeed since. They had refused so many offers of interviews. Somehow this Austrian journalist had some leverage,” Morley says. “They came in one by one and I did these interviews. You could see that all of them revered (Hitler) without embarrassment. It seemed perfectly natural to them to be still very much under his spell. What they said wasn’t earth-shattering but the fact that they said anything at all was interesting. They gave enough to get a little insight into the Fuhrer. Hitler’s sister was very shy. It was quite difficult to get things out of her.” Paula Wolf, Hitler’s sister, is seen discussing how her brother adored his mother but went against his father and how he was always the leader when the children played. “They must have had an instinct that his will was stronger than theirs,” she said. — By arrangement with
The Independent |
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