When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Bernstein’s protégé then set about turning his footage into four programmes for the ITV network titled Cuba Si and his personal views were not exactly disguised. After transmission the usual channels swung into action. The ITA’s deputy director-general, Bernard Sendall, gave Granada early warning that ‘we cannot escape the conclusion that the four programmes taken together lacked impartiality and were in places slanted unfairly against the United States.’ This judgement was confirmed in a chairman-to-chairman letter from Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick to Sidney Bernstein citing the ‘due accuracy and impartiality’ provisions of Section 3 of the Television Act, which Cuba Si had breached. Bernstein replied that ‘we really cannot see that we have breached the sections to which you refer’. He suggested a meeting with the ITA members who had viewed the programmes.

  A month later he was writing again to the ITA chairman, this time thanking him for a ‘most pleasant and happy lunch with authority members’. The letter concluded: ‘I have no further comment to make on our views on subsection (1) of Section 3(c) and (f) of the Television Act but it was very kind of you to give me the opportunity of explaining why – most respectfully – we beg to differ. Yours sincerely, Sidney.’

  Proof that peace was nowhere near breaking out came the following year in an episode described by an ITA official as ‘Granada and Cuba again’. With the world’s eyes firmly focused on the Cuban missile crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union, Tim Hewat dusted down his Cuba Si films and edited them into a single one-off background documentary. He sent the ITA a draft script for ‘an intimate look at the island in the centre of the world crisis’; it would be voiced by announcer Bob Holness, later better known as the presenter of the ITV quiz Blockbusters.

  The script survives and is a mostly factual but also mostly uncritical view of Castro and his Cuba. The only negative note comes towards the end: ‘The events of the last few weeks have shown that Castro’s links with Communism have become a chain which has dragged his people into the centre of the East–West conflict.’

  Hewat and his script got short shrift from the ITA. In their view his previous films were now ‘condemned material and had earned the rare distinction of being classed by the Authority as a breach of the Act’. Recycling them with a new peg, even one as significant as the threat of global war, was not going to be allowed.

  Hewat was not put off controversy by the sagas of Cuba Si and Cuba Again. If Hewat’s mentor and patron was Bernstein, then the man who tried to steer him through the choppy waters was Denis Forman.

  Like many pioneers of British television Forman had an interesting war, in his case the Battle of Monte Cassino when the Allies besieged German troops in a hilltop monastery and took heavy casualties on the slopes below. It cost Forman a leg. Like Bernstein he had contacts in the film industry and after the war he became director of the British Film Institute (BFI). It was through Bernstein’s brother Cecil, who was a BFI director, that he got a job at Granada.

  He set about making his own contribution to Granada’s growing reputation for high quality programme-making and getting into trouble.

  One of the principal battlegrounds was Granada’s flagship weekly current affairs programme, World in Action (WIA).583

  The programme’s first editor was Tim Hewat, who loved to use metaphors that viewers could relate to. One of the most popular programmes of the time was Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a live variety show from the stage of the London theatre which included a quiz called ‘Beat the Clock’. The familiar clock face provided a way to engage viewers in a 1963 WIA about the relatively dry subject of defence procurement.

  The script read:

  This, after Big Ben, is probably the most familiar clock in Britain – the clock that ticks out the big money prizes on Sundays at the Palladium.

  Tonight we use this clock to signal its biggest money ever paid for by the taxpayers.

  Tonight every full-circle sweep of the hand that takes exactly a second – and every flashing light stands for £1 – sixty pounds a second every second.

  And that’s the speed at which Britain is, this year, spending money on defence … sixty pounds a second … £3,600 a minute … £216,000 an hour … £5,180,000 a day, £1,838,000,000 in the year.

  What does the customer get for the money?

  The programme then went on to list examples of alleged waste in defence spending. The ITA previewed the programme and decided to ban it.

  Forman and Hewat got the news at Granada’s London offices. Forman later remembered Hewat’s reaction to the decision. ‘The fuckers,’ said Tim, and again and again, ‘the fuckers’.

  But the two men came up with an extraordinary riposte.

  Forman rang World in Action’s rival on the BBC, Panorama, and explained what had happened. Remarkably it was agreed that Panorama would show on the BBC the central ten minutes of Hewat’s film that could not be shown on ITV. Just before that evening’s Panorama went out Forman rang Sir Robert Fraser at the ITA and told him, ‘I thought you should know, Bob, that part of our Defence World in Action is going out on Panorama tonight.’

  There was a long pause before Fraser replied, ‘Thank you for telling me, Denis.’

  The authority was shocked; no one would have dreamed that two rival current affairs programmes would have co-operated to defeat censorship. Some time later Fraser wrote to Bernstein saying this ‘stunt’ had made him feel sick.584 There was a smell of vengeance in the air. Every edition of World in Action would now have to be vetted by the authority in advance.

  Trench warfare

  On 28 February 1966 Tony Pragnell, a senior executive at the ITA, wrote to a partner at an external law firm:

  Dear Geoffrey,

  There is about to be a major confrontation with Granada about their lack of political impartiality. I have prepared a brief setting out our legal powers in this matter. I enclose a copy. Could you simply say whether you consider it correct and complete?

  It was the start of what Forman was to call three years of ‘trench warfare’. The internal ITA dossier on Granada read like a regulatory charge sheet. It set out the law – ‘the requirements of the 1964 Act’. Then there was the evidence for the prosecution in the form of ITA reports on specific programmes. A World in Action on the BBC in 1965 had been ‘quite irresponsible’, ‘nothing less than a sustained attack on the BBC’. In a programme on the drug industry ‘the amount of time allowed for the industry to present its case was minimal’. A WIA on Vietnam had ‘a minority view at its end’ which ‘appeared to be a summing up’. The script of the Granada view of the ‘six counties’ of Northern Ireland was there too.

  Also in the file was a transcript of an interview in which Bernstein was formally questioned by the new chairman of the ITA, Lord Hill:

  Lord Hill: The Act requires two things. Political impartiality and the absence of an editorial view. In your experience have you had difficulty in applying these two principles required by the Act?

  Mr Sidney Bernstein: The first one, no. The second one, we think we have accepted the Authority’s dictum in the matter but it has been with great restraint.

  Lord Hill: Successful restraint?

  Mr Sidney Bernstein: Yes we have. We have carried out our obligations in that respect with regret.

  The file also contained a background brief on the man himself. ‘There is a negative attitude on the part of Sidney Bernstein towards the requirement of the Act.’ Further the ITA believed Granada ‘is allergic to the concept of impartial presentation of all points of view in public affairs’. The ITA’s starkest pre-trial judgement on the chairman of Granada was that ‘all who work on Granada’s current affairs seem to some extent to carry the Bernstein chip on their shoulders’.

  As it turned out, the ‘major confrontation’ was, in Forman’s words, ‘a bit of a fiasco’. For all their detailed internal planning the ITA staff had failed to tell Granada that their meeting would be about a whole list of programmes. Granada thought it was about
just one programme, on the pharmaceutical industry, and prepared accordingly. Neither side gave any ground.

  In November 1969, Granada executives took up what they regarded as an invitation from the ITA to set out their own interpretation of the due impartiality clause in the Television Act. Forman produced twelve pages, apologising for its length and the fact that ‘it reads a little like a lawyer’s draft’. The document remains to this day one of the most considered pieces written on the concept of ‘due impartiality’, which is held so dear by British broadcasters but, as we have seen from the Martin Bell chapter, is rarely defined.

  Forman set out what he understood to be the ITA’s interpretation then contrasted it with Granada’s. He cited the parallel with a court case:

  The Authority expects the person providing the programmes to act in matters of this kind as both counsel for the defence and counsel for the prosecution, and to pass on to the public the function of judge and jury … Granada believes that it is the proper function of the persons providing the programmes to present a controversial issue to the public, not from the point of view of the prosecution or the defence, nor of both sides one after the other, but from the point of view of the judge in his summing up. In this he refers to the facts on both sides, but he exercises the function of judgment in giving less weight to the arguments of one and greater weight to the arguments of another.

  The final section of Forman’s paper was called ‘Further outlook’. There was one peace offering: ‘We recognise our editorial judgement must give way to that of the Authority.’ But there were plenty of barbs with it. The debate between the two sides had become ‘obsessive’, the ITA’s ‘degree of consternation’ was ‘unmerited’ and, in a final finger to authority, Granada hoped that ‘the indirect pressures of censorship which have affected our team very seriously from time to time in the past can be removed’.

  Forman’s follow-up meeting with Fraser after the November 1969 paper found the director-general of the ITA in a belligerent mood. The Granada letter had revealed the width of the gap between the two sides. But Fraser had something to say that went beyond disputing the contents of the letter. In his view Granada’s current affairs output showed a persistent left-wing bias and if he were a Communist he would have no doubt as to where to look for a job in television. It would be Granada.585

  After the meeting Forman called Sidney Bernstein, or SLB as he sometimes called him, who was at his holiday home in Barbados. Forman found him angry but cool. Bernstein said, ‘I have had to live with plenty of this kind of rubbish in my time. Do nothing until next week.’

  Peace of a kind

  Fraser and Forman were both unhappy with the way things had gone at their meeting and decided to have a follow-up. Mindful that what had appeared in the ITA’s files might affect Granada’s chances of having its licence renewed, Forman cleverly got Fraser to put on the record that Fraser wasn’t accusing him or his senior executives of being ‘Communist/Marxist/anti-democratic’. This compromise was peace of a kind.

  There were to be more two more rows and both were about World in Action. In ‘The Quiet Mutiny’ in 1970 John Pilger visited Vietnam and spoke to American soldiers who reflected the disillusion with the war that was spreading throughout the American army and back home. The ITA found it to be ‘outrageous left-wing propaganda’ even though Granada claimed two members of the ITA’s own staff had passed the programme in advance.

  The second row was closer to home. John Poulson was an architect and property developer who seemed to have fingers in most of the pies in the north of England. ‘The friends and influence of John L. Poulson’ was a WIA special which was banned not under the Section 3 clauses about impartiality, but as ‘a matter of broadcasting policy’. The regulator, by now called the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) because it also oversaw commercial radio, never explained exactly what this meant. Instead of replacing WIA with another programme Granada left the screen blank as a protest. Then it was revealed that two members of the IBA board had business contacts with key players in the Poulson affair. The IBA effectively backed down, allowing the transmission of a revised version with only cosmetic changes from the original. Poulson was later found guilty of corruption and sent to prison for seven years, the judge calling him an ‘incalculably evil man’. World in Action was completely vindicated. The IBA was not. This was a landmark moment when a broadcaster effectively overturned a regulator.

  But there was to be a sting in the tail for Sidney Bernstein.

  The IBA had a rule that all members of boards of ITV companies should retire at seventy. Granada asked for a five-year extension in his case. The IBA agreed he could stay as a director until seventy-five but would have to resign as chairman of Granada TV at seventy-one. His brother Cecil took over. Sidney could remain as chairman of the Granada Group, which was outside the IBA’s control, but it wasn’t the same. He and his colleagues took it as a personal snub from the IBA.

  Perhaps the most bizarre moment of Bernstein’s later years came when he took the company into a full-scale legal battle with the Ford car company because they wanted to call a car ‘Granada’. He accepted that he’d borrowed the name from a Spanish city but claimed he’d added value to it. The TV company finally gave up. In 1979 Bernstein retired completely from the Granada business.

  In 1985 Sidney Bernstein finally achieved closure on something that had frustrated him for thirty years. Granada made a film about the film which he had made about Belsen, but which had never been shown. It included long extracts from his original draft version and an interview with him. The programme was shown on television in Britain and also in America on the Discovery Channel under the title A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind. The synopsis reads:

  British soldiers came upon Belsen concentration camp in 1945. They could not believe what they saw. But army film cameramen were with the troops and filmed everything. With the camera unit was Sidney Bernstein, working as Head of Film for the Allies’ Psychological Warfare Division. He resolved that the definitive factual film of the camps must be made, so that the world could be told the truth.586

  Today Bernstein’s film can be seen anywhere in the world via YouTube.

  Five years after Bernstein died in 1993, World in Action died too, a victim of the new programme strategies brought about by the increased focus on profitability in commercial television. Then in 2004 at the conclusion of the inevitable consolidation of the many ITV licences into one company for England and Wales, the name ‘Granada’ began to disappear from the network, retained only for regional programmes in Bernstein’s ‘Granadaland’.

  But in 2012 came evidence that perhaps the spirit of Bernstein, Forman, Hewat and others lived on. The last head of Current Affairs at Granada, Alexander Gardiner, in his new guise as an executive for factual programmes in what was now ‘ITV Studios’, oversaw a programme that contributed to what John Simpson called the BBC’s ‘worst crisis in fifty years’. An ITV documentary, The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, revealed the full extent of the allegations against the former BBC presenter. The work of Gardiner and his team triggered a flood of new allegations by victims of Savile and others who now felt free to speak out. The programme won multiple awards including the RTS award for ‘Scoop of the Year’. The citation praised ‘an investigative challenge which had defeated other media organisations over decades and had been achieved with commitment, skill and sensitivity. The programme-makers had given a voice to victims who had always been denied one, with unprecedented impact across many British institutions.’

  Sidney Bernstein and the old Granada trouble-makers would have been proud.

  To judge Bernstein’s full legacy it is best to look back to that 1958 ITA memo, ‘The Politics of Granada’. Sir Robert Fraser wrote that ‘really one is left in no doubt that Granada is opposed to capital punishment, to the present laws about homosexuality, and to the way coloured people are treated’. Half a century on, capital punishment has gone, homosexuality is no longer illegal a
nd there are laws to prohibit discrimination against ethnic minorities. Bernstein’s Granada can’t take all the credit for these changes in public policy but, uniquely for a British broadcaster, it can claim to have been an agent for social change. No regulator knew quite how to handle that. But no regulator ever fined or otherwise sanctioned Granada for breaches of the rules, nor threatened to take its licence away. Possibly their judgement was that, for all their frustrations with Granada’s ‘politics’, taking off the air the company that made Coronation Street, the nation’s most popular programme and the network’s best commercial banker, would not have been a very smart ‘political’ move.

  11

  SANDY GALL

  In 1980 two men sat across a lunch table in London – one was from the British television news company ITN, the other from British Intelligence, MI6.

  It was a very British occasion. The location was Stone’s Chop House, known for its traditional English food and as a meeting place for Establishment chaps. For many years women hadn’t been admitted to Stone’s. The food was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. And the talk was of a country far away but one which Britain had invaded three times in colonial days for what it believed were the wider strategic interests of its empire. Each time Britain departed defeated.

  Now Afghanistan was back on the British government’s agenda because in 1979 the Russians, learning nothing from British history, had sent in their troops to try to maintain the country’s place in the Soviet Union’s own empire. They were fighting different guerrilla groups known collectively as ‘the mujahideen’, meaning ‘a person who fights a jihad’ or ‘Muslims who struggle in the path of Allah’. One group was led by Osama bin Laden and funded by the Saudi and Pakistani governments. The British and American governments were supporting other groups.