Sandy Ross - Transcript
[Interviewer is Janet McBain, Date of Recording 14 07 2018]
[Start of Recording]
[00:00]
I: This is an interview with Sandy Ross for the Scottish Broadcasting Heritage Group's Oral History project. The interviewer is Janet McBain, the date is 14th July 2018 and the place is the STV's studio in Glasgow. The copyright of this recording is vested in the Scottish Broadcasting Heritage Group. We will start at the very beginning. You are sort of a local man, aren't you? When and where were you born?
R: Where was I born?
I: Yeah.
R: I was born in Grangemouth in 1948 so I'm not local to Glasgow but I've tended to veer more to the East coast because I went to Edinburgh University so, apart from a period in Manchester, I've lived in Edinburgh for most of my life.
I: So you were brought up in Grangemouth?
R: Brought up in Grangemouth then went to Edinburgh University.
I: What did you do at Uni?
R: At University, well, I wanted to be an MP. That's what I originally wanted to be. And I remember reading this book that said most MPs were lawyers so I went to Edinburgh University to study Law and I did it. I did it for a while. I finished my degree and then I went and worked as a solicitor for about seven or eight years. I ended up, oddly enough I ended up lecturing in Law at Paisley College of Technology before it became the West of Scotland University. But when I was at university I shared a flat with a guy called Steve Morrison who only ever wanted to work in television and another one of my friends at university, oddly enough, was Paul Caladay who also only ever wanted to work in television so I was around people who were interested in television and the media and all the rest of it. And I was also quite involved politically in Edinburgh. I eventually became a Town Councillor when I was twenty-one and I was a Councillor in Edinburgh for about ten years.
But in the early days, one of the, when the Commonwealth Games came to Edinburgh in 1970 I organised this huge demonstration against the cost of the Commonwealth Games and it was, bizarrely, the Chairman of the Commonwealth Games organising committee was called Alexander Ross, which is my name. So, we issued a leaflet, written by Alexander Ross, protesting about the Games and we also had an exhibition in St. John's Church at the West End of Edinburgh called 'What Commonwealth', which the Church welcomed because it thought it was a contribution to the Commonwealth Games, which was opened by David Steele MP at the time. Steve Morrison did a whole thing on this, on BBC Television and BBC Radio and got sacked by the BBC for doing it because he hadn't told them what it was about. They didn't realise it was a protest against the Commonwealth Games. Steve then went off to the National Film and Television School. He was one of the first year's intake at the School and when he was there, Centre Point had just been built in London with the Harry Hines' building which was empty. It had been empty, well, it had been built two or three years previously but had never been occupied and Steve got in tow with a bunch of demonstrators, Film School cameras and one weekend they broke in to the building and so the very first footage of inside Centre Point was shot by them and Steve - always someone in the eye for a main chance - escaped from the building on the Sunday and went to Manchester with all of the footage and they turned it into a World in Action which went out on the Monday night so that was his wildcard into Granada.
[04:33]
And, once he'd been there for about a year or so, he got in contact with me and said, "Look, you're wasting your time lecturing in blooming Law in Paisley. Why don't you come and work for Granada?" So, I went for an interview at Granada Television and with hindsight now, if I'd known who the people were who'd interviewed me for the job, I would have been, I would have had the most unbelievable stage fright because they were all quite giants of ITV at the time. But anyway, I got the job and what Granada, it was during, I think it was during their working class period. They were looking for people with a bit of a broader background and experience. And you got a six-month contract. That was the standard thing that they did for everybody and at the end of six months it was sink or swim. You either left or they extended the contract and, you know, I was quite lucky because I'd done quite a lot of Production of bits and pieces. I'd organised a festival in Edinburgh and all the rest of it so, I mean, I had that kind of skill in my background and I had a great time!
I: So, what was your role?
R: I started as a Researcher in Granada which was the way that everybody started and I spent the first year, more or less, in the Newsroom and we, kind of, did everything. But the person I probably learned most from at the beginning was a Presenter called Tony Wilson and Tony was the guy who went on to found Factory Records and Joy Division and Haçienda and all the rest of it and he was the most televisual, savvy person I think I ever worked with. He was just an unbelievable natural. I worked with him, as his Producer, first of all as his Researcher then as his Producer for two or three years. That was just a great learning experience working with him. I then, after about, I think it was after about two years I was made a Producer at Granada and I spent two years producing the Six O' Clock News programme, Monday to Friday. That was a great learning curve as well. It was just a great experience. Mondays were always terrifying but by Friday you could do the whole thing standing on your head. You know, you start on a Monday morning or Tuesday morning with a blank sheet and produce a programme at six o' clock. And it was live, you know, so that was great fun doing that. I think anybody who works in television should have that experience of producing live, six o' clock programmes.
At that time Granada was kind of gearing up for, I think it was 1980, the license for whatever it was, anyway, so they were having to pay quite a lot of attention to Liverpool. Liverpool is an odd place in, as most of us know most Liverpudlians have a chip on their shoulder and one of the big chips that they have on their shoulder is that they never had their own TV station and they always felt slightly annoyed that Granada based itself in Manchester so they decided to put a lot of effort into wooing Liverpool so I produced quite a lot of live programmes from Liverpool. One of the very first afternoon live programmes was called Exchange Flags we did in a building in Liverpool. We did a kids' Saturday morning show called the Mersey Pirate which came from Liverpool. That was in 1979, the Mersey Pirate and I think the best thing about the Mersey Pirate was the 1979 ITV strike because the show, the programme only went out for seven weeks, the strike came and the programme never came back because we really did do it live on a boat on a Saturday morning. We rehearsed on a Thursday/Friday and the boat set sail, the Royal Iris, on a Saturday morning and it was reading technology, which apparently had been developed to try and cover Francis Chichester going round the world on his yacht and it was a line of sight from the top of the Luther building in Liverpool to the boat and every time the boat tilted you would kind of lose the picture! There was kind of black flashes but again, it was a great experience, you know, doing that programme.
[09:52]
And then, I ended up doing almost everything at Granada. I produced Drama. I had a very good working relationship with Alan Bleasdale who wrote quite a lot of the stuff for the Mersey Pirate and we developed one of his books, Scully, for Channel Four and that became a Drama series for Channel Four. I produced comedy programmes. We did a programme called Alfresco. I spent about a year putting the cast together and the cast for Alfresco were these newcomers to television. It was Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Siobhan Redmond, Robbie Coltrane and Ben Elton. With hindsight, I should have given up working in television and just should have become their Agent and did that! So, we did two series of that. It never quite became the success I thought it should have become but it did make, kind of, stars of all the actors. And then the last thing I did at Granada was a documentary series in the days when ITV used to do kind of adult education. There was a slot at seven o' clock on a Monday night before Coronation Street and we did a series called the Human Jigsaw with a Presenter called Ray Gosling who was, you know, a very quirky, unusual character and what this series did was we took the big issues which effect everybody - ageing, teenage, food, drink and all the rest of it and we would look at how allegedly so-called Third World cultures dealt with these things. So, how did the Maasai deal with their teenagers? How do other tribes deal with death and then we crosscut with the way that we in our society deal with these things and it was quite a successful series and it was great fun to make. Gosling was a great character to work with.
I: Was that for the Network?
R: That was for the ITV Network.
I: So, you were with, you were at Granada when Gus Macdonald...
R: Well, the way I ended up with Scottish Television was - I didn't know it at the time but STV was gearing up for the 1990 franchise rights. So, if you go back and read the official history of ITV you'll find the only reason STV got the license the previous time around, which must have been 1980, was because there wasn't anybody else! And the history of ITV is very critical of STV and the programmes and the finances and everything else and there was a bid against them in 1980 but the decision was that they, the opposition was not credible. They were better with the devil they knew, which was STV, than bringing in this other company. Bill Brown, I think, had decided that that was just not going to happen again so the first step on the route to making sure that 1990 was much easier was to hire Gus because Gus was a very senior figure in the ITV Network, very credible and all the rest of it so they obviously, with the added fact that he was Scottish! So, they went to Gus and they brought Gus back to Scotland to head up the change, the changes that had to be made to STV. And it was the night of his leaving party in the Stables at Granada when Gus kind of sidled up to me and said, "Do you want to come to Scotland?" and I said, "Oh, that's interesting!" And he said, "So, do you?!" And I said, "I'll think about it." And he got in touch with me again afterwards and it was all very clandestine and I had to go to London to meet Bill Brown, who was the Managing Director, and it all took place in the Company flat in South Kensington because all the ITV companies had flats in London at that time because the Directors of Programmes and the Managing Directors would meet, I think it was every second Monday. You know, there wasn't the same transport system then as there is now so they would all go and stay in the flats on a Sunday night, sort the world to rights on the telephone or dinners at these flats and then go to the ITVA meetings on a Monday morning. So, I went to meet Bill at the flat in South Kensington. It was just a chat, a very amicable chat and the next thing, I get a formal offer from STV to come and be, now what was it? I think it was the Controller of Entertainment. That's what I came here as and it was also slightly dead man's shoes because David Bell, who was a legendary ITV Producer, had been the Director of Entertainment. He had gone to the ITV, I think he had gone to LWT where David produced things like Stanley Baxter's shows and that sort of stuff. David's job was taken over by a guy called Clarke Tait. Now, I don't know whether they would have kept Clarke or not but Clarke died suddenly so there was this gap and they needed somebody to come and fill the position. So my brief was Regional programmes, kids' programmes, entertainment programmes, anything in that area, was the brief when I came here.
[16:52]
I: And that was with a view to meeting the quality thresholds for 1990?
R: Well, there were two briefs. One was, in these days we were responsible for something like twenty-five hours of local programming, you know, the ITV, the license we had in these days was a much stricter, much more stringent license. You know we had to do Religion, Gaelic, Entertainment, News, all of that so all that brief had to be met and at the end of every year a report went to the ITC and they literally counted minutes - you know, where's your Social Action, where's your Religion, where's your Gaelic. The minutes were counted and added up and woe betide you if you were found to be short in any of these categories. So, I was doing all the Entertainment and Feature stuff in Regional programmes but, at the same time, gearing up for what was going to happen for 1990.
And, at the same time, of course, there was major changes happening within the ITV Network because of Mrs Thatcher. Her ear was being bent by the Saatchis and the advertising people and all the rest of it who were saying look, basically ITV is a monopoly. We actually don't know from one month to the next what will be charged for advertising. They can charge us what they want. So, she was hearing all this from the advertisers and, at the same time, what they were really observing was that the ITV Management didn't really manage, it was the Trade Unions who decided the size of crews, the staffing and all the rest of the stuff. In fact, I remember when I left Granada I was on the Shop Committee then. I was the Shop Steward for the Producer/Director section and Malcolm Foster was the main Shop Steward for the ACTT [Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians] and he came up to sort of say goodbye to me and to wish me luck at STV and I can't remember the guy's name who was the Shop Steward here and he said, "I know you think at times that I'm a bastard," he said, "but wait till you get to Scotland and meet..." whatever the guy's name was who was the Shop Steward at STV! Because the Unions effectively, because, you know, the Company's made so much money that if there was a problem that needed to be solved they just threw money at it. There was this thing called the White Book which was supposed to set out all the Terms and Conditions but I don't think anybody was paid according to the rates that were laid out in that White Book. The Company paid for this, paid for that, paid for other things. So, that had to be sorted out as well. There's an academic called Alan McKinlay who's a Professor at Newcastle University who's been doing a study of Scottish Television for quite a while and some of the stuff that Alan's written, I mean he compares the way the ITV companies were run to medieval craft guilds, you know! But he's an academic and he's basically, Management in TV stations didn't manage. It was the Unions who did the management for them. So all these changes and also, looming up was the threat of Sky and subscription television and a different model and advertising beginning to run down and all of these things were happening so ITV knew it had to change.
[21:04]
One of the first and major changes which Scottish Television really benefited from was the big decision to increase the big five Producing Companies to seven and STV and TVS Southampton, were admitted into that inner circle. So, for the very first time there was an opportunity for STV to produce on a major scale for the Network instead of the crumbs that fell off the table. You know, you would get a Taggart, you might get the occasional documentary but that was it! The other five Companies had everything sewn up and they set up this thing called the Flexi Pool which was a Committee system and it was designed to commission programmes from the Companies and one of the things that, I think it was a sense of humour on their part, because of Gus's background in World in Action and journalism and, you know, high level documentaries and all the rest of it, Gus thought he would end up the Chairman of the factual Committee that commissioned documentaries and stuff but when he went to his first meeting, they made him the Head of the Children's Flexi Pool, you know, which Gus didn't think was very funny! But in any event, he kind of came back and one of the briefs he gave to me, he said "There's a huge amount of money in kids' programming!" Because ITV was a major producer of children's programming at the time. He said, "I want you to get as much of that money for Scottish Television as you can!" You know, we produced hundreds of hours for ITV with things like the Disney Club, What's Up, Doc?, Fun House. All very, very successful programmes. Animation. Pre-school programmes and all the rest of it. I mean, at what stage, STV actually became, we were the biggest supplier in, kind of, numbers of hours and budget to the whole ITV kids' system and it was very successful!
I: But that wouldn't have happened had they not been part of this group of seven?
R: If we, because of the pressure from Mrs Thatcher to open up the commissioning system and Bill Brown, I remember Bill describing it to me as ITV trying to get its retaliation in first. They were trying to show that they could open up. Show that they could commission independent production in the same way that Channel Four. No, Channel Four was set up as a forcing mechanism for the Independent Sector. And they knew that ITV was going to be forced to do that. They were trying to get in first and hope that some of the things they expected were going to happen could be ameliorated by them doing this. I mean, in the end it didn't happen. Mrs Thatcher kind of had her way in the way the licenses were awarded in 1990. But it would never have happened had Gus not been part of that big Seven as opposed to the big Five and it was great for the Company! You know, we got more Dramas, we got more Documentaries, we got more Children's programming, we did more things like Harry Secombe religious programming.
I: Highway was it?
R: Highway. You know, so we got into areas that we'd never really been allowed to play in before because of the fact that we were there at the table and able to wheel and deal in the way that the big Five had always wheeled and dealed so that was very good for Scottish Television.
[25:25]
I: Can I take you back to when you first came up, was it 1986?
R: I think it was '86, yes.
I: Did you take a long, hard look at what STV was producing? I mean, how did you, did you refresh the output?
R: Well, I'd never really, remember, I'd been away for about twelve years or thirteen years in Manchester and I would come up a couple of times a year mainly, usually during the Festival so I never really watched television when I came up and one day, this knock at the door in Manchester and it was a delivery company that delivered me a box of tapes, VHS tapes of STV's programmes so I started looking at them and I thought, 'well, these are obviously all historical programmes because surely nobody can be producing things like this now?!' And I discovered that, no, they were not historical programmes! They were things like Thingummyjig, things like that, were still on the air. And the famous headline in the Daily Record was one of Gus's early statements. Gus was a man who was great for headlines and statements and it was that we were going to consign the bales of hay to the bonfire! And the tartan was to be no more and all the rest of it so that was part of the brief that he gave me. I discovered when I came up one of my relatives, Kevin, was a senior fireman in Kirkcaldy and I happened to say to him one day that that was it, Thingummyjig, was no more. It's not going to get produced again and he said, "Oh God!" he said, "The whole fire service will be disappointed because," he says, "when we're on nightshift we all sit in the fire station and we hooch and jooch and do the eightsome reel all watching Thingummyjig!" and it was then I realised that people didn't really take the programme seriously so part of the brief was to get rid of all that. One of the very first programmes that I was responsible for, which was the bane of everyone's life, was the Hogmanay show in that first year. We decided that we were going to do it completely differently. Absolutely differently! There was going to be no tartan. It was going to be much younger and we got Jimmy Mulville and Muriel Gray to present it, we had Love and Money was the band on it and I can't remember who else was on it - Victor and Barry, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson, so, you know, we really kind of aged the thing down. And, I don't know if you remember, in these days the Daily Record used to be available at the station on the night before. You could buy a copy of the Daily Record. Somebody turned up at the studio. The show was going out live and they had a copy of the Daily Record with a review written by the Agony Aunt, what's her name?
I: Was it Winnie Lees?
R: What?
I: Winnie Lees or something like that?
R: No. She lives in Edinburgh. I still see her with her two, wee dogs! Wicked Witch o' the East! Anyway, she's written a review of the Hogmanay show before it had even gone out saying, you know, because we'd put out publicity about it and all the rest of it, about how awful it was and, you know, that we don't really want all these young people and punks and everything else! Give us back our traditional Hogmanay show! So, you know, some you win and some you lose. I mean I must have just, I don't know, twenty Hogmanay shows and you can't please anybody any of the time. In fact, there is a, there's a little club between STV and the BBC of Hogmanay Producers and we all kind of just swap notes and talk about it, you know! There was one year we did it in Edinburgh. That was the year of the high winds and we had to, we couldn't use the roof anymore (because we did it from the roof of the studio in Edinburgh) and everything was cancelled! Fireworks were cancelled, pop concert was cancelled - everything! So we had to put, scramble this show together which we put out and in the middle of the show somebody said, "The Chief Superintendent of the Police wants to speak to you." And I said, "But I'm producing!" "He insists on speaking to you!" And he said, "You're still on air producing the Hogmanay show! Everything's been cancelled!" I said, "If you watch the show you can see we're telling people to go home and not to come!" But that was the year, the Production team on the show was Anne Mason, Henry Eagles, John Carmichael and myself and I think we worked out the total age of the Producers of the show was over three hundred! We were all so old! But, you know, there you go!
[31:14]
I: That must have been quite a difference for you though to come up from Granada? In a sense you were more like cast in the role of Commissioning Editor than Producer - would that be fair to say?
R: Oh absolutely. That is one of the erroneous things about television I've always thought. The higher you kind of get up in the Management system, the less hands-on you become with programmes so, you know, you start off working in television because you want to produce programmes or direct programmes or whatever it is you want to do and you end up the Executive Producer, you know, commissioning rather than actually producing. But I still used to keep my hand in with various things and that was one of the other benefits of being one of the Management - you could still, if there were things you particularly liked, you could kind of get involved. For example, when we did this Documentary to mark 30 Years of Scottish Television called What's On Channel Ten, Hen?, there were far too many Executives working on the blooming programme! You know, it was produced and directed by Les Wilson, I was the Executive Producer, who was very hands-on with Les, Gus Macdonald was my Executive Producer and, you know, there would be days when all three of us were in the Edit Suite, you know, all making cuts and doing bits and pieces to the programme so, if something interests you, you were kind of able to dip your fingers and enjoy it.
I: So, how did you organise, I mean did you kind of set up an ideas factory or where did these ideas come from for these new programmes?
R: I tried to do the same sort of thing that I'd been aware of at Granada where there, at Granada everybody, it didn't matter who you were, was encouraged to submit ideas all the time in every kind of programme category. You know, you would write stuff and send it to whoever the appropriate Head of Department was, whether that was Comedy or Drama. When I was at Granada, one of the things everybody wanted to do was work on World in Action so everybody was always trying to dream up great World in Action ideas! One of the things I always remember then was the Head of World in Action was a guy called Ray Fitzwalter who's a very, very clever man! A very, very bright Producer and I still remember one idea I sent in to Ray for World in Action and he asked if I would come to his office and speak to him about the idea and I thought, 'Great! I've done it! I'm finally going to get a World in Action away!' So, I go in and I sit at Ray's desk and he says, "There are forty-one things wrong with this idea," he says, "but I'm only going to start with number thirty-nine! But you're somebody we've always regarded fondly and one day, one of these ideas will work!" So, I tried to do the same thing here with the Researchers, the Producers and the Directors.
Still, the one kind of difficulty with STV was that we were never going to be Granada! You know, we were never going to be one of the big producing companies. Because of our history, because of the stranglehold that Granada and Central and Thames and LWT had on the system, you know, everything that they had was going to be very, very jealously guarded. I mean, to a certain extent, Gus was on a hiding to nothing when he came back here because the Independent Production - people who worked in the building thought 'This is great! We're going to get an opportunity to do this, that and the other! Produce more Drama and Documentaries and everything else!' And the Independent Production Sector thought STV was going to become, like, their Channel Four based in Scotland. It was going to become a bank to commission programmes from them and give them money to produce programmes. They never quite understood how the system worked. In order for us to be able to do that we had to sell it somewhere else. You know, we were never going to produce these things in Scotland. Shortly after Gus came, we tried to reach out to the Independent Production Sector and we hired a whole day, one Saturday, in that hotel across the road from here where the whole Independent Production Sector came and, one after the other, they got up - Peter Broughan who went on to become a Film Producer and all the rest of it - and they were unbelievably critical of STV, Gus and all the rest of it because we had not delivered what they thought STV and Gus had kind of promised they might deliver when Gus came back and STV started to make changes. So Gus tried to explain to them that one of the things they had to do as Independent Producers, was not to think that STV or, indeed, ITV was going to finance arthouse films or very esoteric documentaries, what they had to do was look at the ITV channel and see what it was that ITV wanted and what kind of programmes ITV was looking for and they, in their Independent Production Companies, they had to come back to us and say, "Right, here is a great ITV idea!" and I still remember to this day, Trevor Davis (I can't remember the company Trevor ended up running in Edinburgh), Trevor stood up and said, "That is not what we want to do!" He said, "I would rather retire and open up a florist shop in Edinburgh than produce Game Shows!" And that was the kind of attitude of the Independent Sector in Scotland at the time. They thought STV was going to be the saviour but they didn't quite realise the constraints of working within the ITV system.
[38:19]
I: In a sense it's always been a, I don't know the word, a disconnect or were you aware of a disconnect between working for STV and obviously having to deliver to STV's commercial agenda and shareholders and get advertising in but also being part of a wider, Scottish cultural landscape? I mean, how did you ride that?
R: Well, I mean, if you think of it in a strange way, everything was a disconnect. The way that ITV works is a disconnect because actually, what ITV sells is not really what we used to manufacture. I mean ITV sold advertising, right, so the most important thing about ITV, the thing that brought in the revenue was the spaces between the programmes but you had to have the programmes so that people would watch ITV and watch the spaces in between the programmes. So there was that issue. There was also the cultural thing. I mean for years and years and years people in Scotland loved STV. I mean it was the popular channel, the commercial channel. STV delivered the kind of programmes that people wanted to watch and I think we rode that horse pretty successfully for a good number of years and I don't think we were ever going to be capable of satisfying what the Independent Production Sector wanted. I mean, they were always going to be much more orientated to the sort of things that Channel Four was doing. I mean STV wanted popular programmes and the other thing you must remember about STV in these days was that it didn't have to worry about its audience. Mrs Thatcher was right - we were a monopoly. If you wanted to advertise on television you had to come to STV. There wasn't anywhere else to go.
I still remember again, going back to Granada days when, the ITV system was arguing for a second channel. Like, BBC One had BBC Two and ITV wanted an ITV Two and it was lobbied for and lobbied for by all of the ITV companies and it was then decided that Channel Four was going to be set up. David Plowright who, in that day, was the Managing Director of Granada Television, he called all of us Producers and Directors into a meeting at Granada and I still remember what he said, he said, "There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that there is going to be a Channel Four. The bad news is that we're not running it! It's going to be run independently but the even gooder news is that we're selling the advertising!" So, you know, for the whole of the beginning of Channel Four's life ITV sold Channel Four's advertising so that they had the commercial benefit of the channel without the worries about producing the programmes. And Channel Four never really saw itself as having a brief to commission from STV or, indeed, any of the ITV companies.
I: No, it was always an independent...
R: It was a forcing mechanism for the Independent Sector, as was the 25%, the position that was put on ITV. I mean, I still remember when Alistair Moffat was the Director of Programmes here, Alistair used to encourage loads of ideas to be submitted to Channel Four because Alistair was interested in these kinds of areas and he said, there was one time, one week when we must have sent about thirty ideas into Channel Four when Michael Grade was the Chief Executive and every single one of them was rejected and sent back. And Alistair went absolutely ballistic and he wrote this letter to Michael Grade, I mean, quite polite but very strong - "Dear Michael, ... I accept that one or two of these programmes may not be Channel Four programmes but I refuse to believe that there is not one programme in that submission list that we sent you that would not work for Channel Four." And Michael sent him back a letter saying, "Dear Alistair, Fuck Off! Best wishes, Michael." And I was in my office this day and Alistair storms in and he throws the letter at me saying, "Look at that! Look at that!" And I looked at it and I said, "Oh, that's quite strong language!" And he says, "Come on! We're going to Gus!" So we go downstairs to Gus's office and he storms in and he gives it to Gus and Gus reads it and he says, "Alistair, grow up!"
I: Oh dear!
R: Very funny!
[43:44]
I: So, you've talked a little bit about, I mean you were aware of what was happening outwith STV within the Independent Sector?
R: Oh yes.
I: Were you quite involved with some of the initiatives that were coming through from the Independent Sector such as, like, the Film Production Fund, Scottish Broadcast Training Trust, that kind of thing?
R: I wasn't really involved in that side of it. We did quite a lot with the Gaels because that was another kind of thorny issue.
I: Because they had a pot of money to spend, didn't they?
R: And also we had to make programmes, you know, as again that was part of the license in these days so there was quite a lot that we had to do with them. One of the funny stories about that was back in this thing about the monopoly, you know, STV never had to worry about money to a certain extent, right? If you wanted to advertise on television, you came to STV and sometimes their ratings were too high! You know, we actually had too many high balls which meant that, I can't, it's a very complicated way it works but I remember we couldn't charge as much as we wanted to charge. In an odd way, you could charge more for smaller audiences than you could charge for big audiences. Alan Chiltern, who was Head of Sales at the time, if Alan hadn't been Head of Sales in an ITV company, he would have been a barrow boy in the East End of London! I mean, he was a real, a great character! A Jack the Lad. He came and he said, "Look, our ratings are too high. They are far too high!" He says, "I want you to drop some of the ratings. Make some rotten programmes! Make some unpopular programmes." And he says, "For example, something at 7 o' clock on a Monday night just before Coronation Street so that the audience drops and then it just goes through the roof when Coronation Street comes on!" So one of the things we did, we did this cookery programme in Gaelic called Haggis Agus with Rhoda Macdonald, right? So Chiltern says, "Oh! Great move! Great move!" God! The ratings went up! You know! People wanted to watch this cookery programme in Gaelic! So, anyway. But I wasn't really involved on that side of it. Alistair did a lot of the training stuff and sat on these various committees and all the rest of it. He tended to deal with that side of it.
I: But you were kind of actually with BAFTA, you were Chair of BAFTA for a while?
R: I was chair of BAFTA. Oh yeah, I've always been a member of BAFTA and STV always encouraged you to put something back so I was a committee member of BAFTA and then, for two or three years, I was Chair of BAFTA and I was also very, very actively involved in the Salford Conference, which was a thing that was set up by David Plowright when he left Granada and it was an organisation, a pressure group that argued for more production outside London, outside the M25. You know, we ploughed a lonely furrow for a number of years there arguing that there should be much more devolution of Production and Programme-making and all the rest of it. And I eventually became the Chair of that conference and I did that for a number of years and, in fact, I remember the last year after I had decided it was time to retire, was when the BBC had moved to Manchester and, you know, the Sport was there and Radio Five Live was there and the Head of the BBC in Manchester came to me at the conference and said, "You realise that the reason all the Media City, the reason all of us is here now is because of the work that the Salford Media Conference has done over the years?!" And I said, "We are aware of the continual pressure that we put on the BBC and on ITV and on the Government ministers led to the whole Media City thing in Manchester and, to a great extent, a lot of the BBC stuff that has come to Scotland".
[48:43]
I: Was it on your watch that Glasgow and Aberdeen, Scottish and Grampian, came together?
R: Came together. It was always described as being a merger but, effectively, it was a takeover by STV of Grampian. My role, I'd nothing to do with the business side of it but my role was bringing together the Programme side so, for a while, I was effectively Director of Programmes at STV and Director of Programmes at Grampian and trying to bring the two Production entities together in the most efficient and economic way. So, I used to spend a couple of days in Aberdeen every week kind of dealing with that.
I: So, if Thingummyjig was STV's tartan bête noire then you'd go up to Aberdeen and you've got the Shinty, the sheepdog trials in the top coverage!
R: You had all of that, yeah.
I: So, did you have to sort of refresh Grampian?!
R: Well, we did pretty much the same up there as we did at STV, you know, but, again, there wasn't really a great deal of opposition! You know, I think by then, I think most of the Producers and Directors at Grampian knew that time was at an end for a lot of these Programmes. The really sad thing about the merger and its effect on Aberdeen was that, you know, we had too many staff and we had to let people go. Basically make them redundant because the number of hours, because we were then able to share Programming between here and Aberdeen we just had too many staff for the hours of Programmes that we had to make. So that was an issue.
I: One thing that's come through when we've been talking to colleagues of yours was a sense of, I suppose a slightly old fashioned concept, but corporate loyalty. A sense of family that comes with working with STV. Did you find that when you came in in the eighties that there was this corporate loyalty within the Company?
R: I'd come from Granada where there was a fierce, a fierce corporate loyalty, I can assure you. When you went to work at Quay Street in the morning, you walked into this building and on the left hand side of the foyer was one of Francis Bacon's 'Screaming Popes', conservatively valued at three million quid, then, God knows what it is worth now! And next to it there was a poster which had been taken from some newspaper from the Banff Television Festival and it said, "Probably the best television station in the world!" You know, so you came to work in the morning to a company that could afford to stick three million pounds worth of art on the wall and it was probably the best television station in the world and even now, to this day, I am still part of a Granada Old Boys' network because Granada in these days trained people for the whole of the rest of the ITV Network. People went to work for all of the other companies but everybody kept in touch so I was, and am still, part of that Granada setup. I was less aware of it when I came here to start with, right, but then the longer I was here the more I kind of grew in to it and became part of it and, you know, I do still keep in touch with lots of people that I worked with when I was here. It never felt to be quite as strong as the Granada thing and I always think that maybe one of the reasons for that was, you know, STV didn't have quite as much to be proud of as a station like Granada did and that was because of the way the ITV system operated. You know, until Gus came and the Big Five increased to the Big Seven, people like STV never really got the chance to show how good they could be. You know, how well they could produce Drama programmes and Documentaries and all the rest of it. It was no surprise to me, for example, when he was given the opportunity, Ross Wilson was able to produce a Documentary that won the BAFTA Best Documentary of the Year because a lot of the people working here were every bit as talented as people in the rest of the Network. They just didn't have the same opportunities to make programmes.
[54:13]
I: So, do you take some satisfaction in being part of, enabling that to happen?
R: Oh, absolutely! I mean, I don't know if it's still here because it's ages since I've been here but there's a thing out the back, some kind of wall with STV's Programming achievements - is it still there?
?: I don't know.
R: Right. And I would walk past it when I was wandering across there at lunchtime and I would look at it and, you know, it was all the high points of STV and I would look at it and say, "I was responsible for a good half a dozen of them!", you know, and I still, to this day, you know, somebody will say to me, on the golf course or somewhere, "Do you know, we watched The Steamie in my house the other night and I never knew that you produced it!" And I still get quite a kick out of doing it. When we produced The Steamie for Channel Four, Channel Four broadcast it, the deal we did with Channel Four was we co-produced it and co-financed it with Channel Four but it was agreed that we could broadcast it first in Scotland and then Channel Four would broadcast it on the Channel Four network. The night that Channel Four broadcast it, it got the highest rating that Channel Four had ever had in the UK for that programme. It's probably been surpassed by now but it was hugely successful and, you know, we produced that for Channel Four. Haldane Duncan produced and directed it. The Steamie was originally done at Mayfest. I don't know if you remember all these years ago and the first night was at Jordanhill. Jordanhill High School, I think it was, in their stage area there. When I went to see it, I still remember the next day I was having a shower in Edinburgh and I thought, I phoned up David MacLennan who was the Artistic Director of Wildcard and I said, "Why don't we do it for television?!" And then we spoke to Tony Roper and it took quite a while to get the thing off the ground and if we hadn't been able to rope Channel Four into it I doubt if it would have got produced because I don't think ITV would have commissioned it and STV could not have afforded to make it on its own so we kind of needed the Channel Four's money. But, I mean, this, you know, a number of things like that.
One of the other things that I produced at Granada was The Game which is written by a writer called Paul Pender. Paul is a very good writer. I did it at Granada and it never quite, I felt, worked and it was a play that was set in 1978, during the World Cup, and it was in three acts - Iran, Peru and Holland - and it was just these guys watching the game and when I came here I was able to have some money and I did it again, a second time, for STV, and STV did finance that with a great cast! Phyllis Logan and Alex Norton, people like that. Did it a second time round. It was great to be able to do things like that!
I: Yes, well that's great because there's a considerable body of work that you've made, enabled to happen and you can take satisfaction - I presume you do take pride and satisfaction...
R: Oh, absolutely.
I: In what you've left as a legacy? [58:30] Were there any projects that escaped you, regrets that you never quite managed to get off the ground?
R: I mean loads of things that we never managed to get off the ground, simply because of the way the ITV system operated. I mean, STV, quite simply, did not have the budget to be able to do these things. I don't think we ever achieved the potential we could have achieved in Drama and there were some really good writers working in Scotland at the time but we just could not break the stranglehold that the Drama-producing companies like Granada and Central Thames had on the system. It was just as simple as that, you just couldn't do it. And the other thing as well, ironically, if you were a really good Scottish writer, you know, with your agent and you were looking at which TV station is likely to be able to get your stuff on the Network, you're not going to come to Scottish Television. You are going to go to one of the bigger producing companies and try and do a deal there. Again, if I go back to my experience at Granada, Granada had a whole department where there was, I used to think it was possibly the ideal job you could ever want - you had three people who came to work every morning and read books and that was all they did and every same day Granada had a deal with all the Publishers in the UK and they got advance copies of books and these people read them and wrote notes on them and then they got passed to Heads of Drama to assess them and all the rest of it so that sometimes the deals to do these things were done long before STV would even get a sniff at some of the stuff and that's because of the...
I: Investment and development.
R: The development and investment that Granada had. I mean, when Andrew Flanagan first took over, I mean Andrew was shocked at how low the Development budget actually was and he argued that in a comparable industry with a turnover that STV had, you would spend X on Development, looking to the future, but I don't think even Andrew was able to increase by any great extent the amount of money spent on Development because I think what he started to realise was, you know, it could cost you up to fifty thousand pounds to develop one Drama idea and if it's turned down, that's fifty thousand pounds! Whereas a company like Granada or Thames were able to advertise that and kind of get involved in it. And also, the other thing that they had was that they had the right to a certain number of Drama slots every year. So, again, going back to when I worked at Granada I was there when they produced Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown. Now, to be perfectly honest with you, I mean they were both sumptuous, unbelievable Drama series but the ratings were terrible! You know, you would just never get away with that now! But it was because David Plowright and Denis Forman, you know, said "We're doing this!" And they went ahead and did it. Again, at Granada when I was there, they did King Lear with Laurence Olivier! I mean, can you imagine ITV broadcasting King Lear now? No, I mean it just wouldn't happen! But they were able to say, "Right, we're going to do this!" Laurence Olivier was David Plowright's brother-in-law and, you know, on you go.
[62:47]
I: Yes, there was a definite shift in the culture of broadcasting in the eighties and nineties from that time on.
R: Oh yes! I mean, the whole, you remember the joke used to be, "What do you call the small box under a satellite dish? A Cooncil hoose! [sic]" You know, Sky was coming and changes were happening. The advertising revenue was the topic. When I first started working in television, both at Granada and here, nobody knew what a television programme cost. Nobody had a clue what a programme cost! And the only thing that the Companies are interested in was the cash that went out the door. The below-the-line costs (the Studios, the staff, the editing, all of that sort of stuff), wasn't really factored in and it was just, you estimated the costs of programmes as cash costs, it was not full costs because the Companies accepted that part of the price for their license was having the Studio, was having the staff to run a Studio and that was all mandated as part of your license. You had to have that. So, nobody knew what a programme cost so one of the major bits of turmoil here was when we moved from a system of only dealing with the cash going out costs of making a programme to total costing. I mean, it was, you know, at the time it was an absolute nightmare because one of the things we discovered was that we, as a Producing entity, were much more expensive than the little Studio down the road because we had all of this overhead to advertise into the cost of the programme, you know. So you had to pay for a share of the HR Department and a share of the cost of the Studios and the concierge at the front door and all the rest of it and, you know, for a while there was a strong argument here that, it wasn't that you were still arguing, it was a fact, that you could go and hire a BBC Studio or a small Independent Productions Studio cheaper than you could make the programme at STV! But, of course, that would only have doubled the cost of the programme at STV because not only would you be paying the cash out to make the programme, you wouldn't be using the facility here so, you know, that would be increasing the costs. So, all that was happening during the 1980s leading up to the 1990s, the threat to the advertising from the Sky, all the other channels. It was particularly that the total amount spent on advertising dropped but that it was being shared out amongst all these different Companies. And the advertisers still knew, you know, if you want, if you really do want to reach a massive audience, you cannot do without ITV but they started to become much more sophisticated about reaching the kinds of audience they wanted to reach so, you know, if you advertise in this programme and that programme and this programme, you'll get your ABC ones and, you know, all of the rest of it. It became a, you know, quite fragmented and quite a difficult environment for most of the Companies and the Sales guys.
I: So, did that start to influence the nature of the programme?
R: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because what started to happen then was that they started to be much more aware of the advertisers and the kind of programmes that the advertisers wanted so that's when you saw it start to move towards making things like travel shows and cookery shows, you know, as part of the Regional Programming. That was very much influenced by the Sales Department. They did the research. They spoke to the advertisers and they looked at what was successful with audiences and then they would start to bring pressure to bear on the Directors of Programmes and the people responsible for producing the programmes to make these particular kinds of programmes.
[67:37]
I: What about access to slots and scheduling? Did you, how much did you, were you sure you could get the slot you wanted for the programme?
R: Scheduling was always an ITV Network responsibility so, you know, the Network would commission for the slots. The truth is, if you go back and look at the ITV schedule from, if you look at some of the old TV Times from 1957/58 and look at the ITV schedule now, you'll see that it's still very, very similar. There might be more episodes of Coronation Street in a week now than there were then but the way the schedule is made up, the building bricks of the schedule, are pretty much what ITV had established way back in the fifties so, therefore, STV would make two kinds of programmes. They would make programmes that had been commissioned for specific slots in the ITV schedule so we didn't have to worry about that but in the days when the ITV Companies all had quite big remits in the number of hours of programmes that they had to make, when the ITV schedule was made there would be chunks left here for Regional Programming and chunks left there. You know, there were different categories of Programming, you know there was A Category and B Category Programming. A Category Programming was programming that every one of the ITV fifteen Companies had to take, simultaneously, at the same time and B Programming you can move around so that if we decided that we had a Regional programme, that we'd made a Scottish programme that we wanted to play in that ten-thirty slot instead of programme X, what we could do is play our programme there and move the Category B programme to eleven and so our programme got, theoretically, the better slot with the potential of a bigger audience. But the black-up scheduling was always done at the Network, you know.
[70:02]
I: So when did you finally retire?
R: I can't think now. Where are we now? 2018 so I must have retired in 2008, I think. Right, so that's quite a time ago.
I: And when you retired, what was your role?
R: I'd been the Director of Programmes at STV and then I took on a, I think it was a kind of, it was like going to the House of Lords. I became the Director of International Development, right, which I think was just a nice way of putting me out to grass and I spent a lot of time not here. I spent a lot of time travelling, trying to see if there were opportunities and avenues elsewhere to produce, co-produce programmes with other countries. I always remember once, when we did the Disney Club, we had a great relationship with Disney! It was a really interesting organisation to watch operate and work and the Head of Disney, Michael Eisner was the Head of Disney in the world but there was a guy called Etienne De Villiers who was the Head of Disney outside the USA and Etienne used to say, "There's three great lies in the world - the fact that Mom's home-cooking is best, teenage sex and the availability of international co-production finance!" He said, "Ah! Maybe I lied about teenage sex!" he would say, but international co-production finance was one of the, kind of, Holy Grails that everybody was kind of looking for and, you know, 'was it possible?' 'Could we do it?'
Now, we did some of it. I mean, for example, we did made animation, which STV had never done before and that was co-produced with an American company called DIC and we made a substantial number of hours of animation which was quite credible that we ever managed to do something like that but different countries have, you know, even down to things like different programme rights. I mean, if you watch The Blue Planet on BBC, the reason why you have that little ten-minute diary thing at the end of The Blue Planet is that most countries only want a programme to last forty-odd minutes, forty-five minutes whereas the BBC wants an hour, right, so you shoot that other stuff so that the BBC can stick that little thing on the end so you've got that kind of issue with co-production. But one of the most amazing trips we had was that China was opening up and it was decided that I should go to China and see what the opportunities were to co-produce with the Chinese so I went and spent a month there and went round the country talking to various Broadcasters and all the rest of it. Then I suddenly realised there was almost nothing I could do with China because you couldn't even broadcast a single episode of Taggart in China because it dealt with drugs, violence, murder, all the things which Chinese television just doesn't broadcast, you know. So, the chances of doing anything in that particular territory were almost zero.
[74:05]
I: What about the, you know, like the Scottish Diaspora? I mean, were there opportunities with Canada, Australia, that kind of thing?
R: Well, we had great relationships with the Canadians, right, and, you know, I still have friends in Canada that we developed programme ideas with but two things happened with the Canadians. In fact, we did co-produce stuff with them but the Canadians were even more paranoid than we were about the Americans. If you think about Canada, probably ninety nine percent of the population of Canada live within about fifteen miles of the nearest American McDonalds and every single Canadian home can watch American television so the Canadians were paranoid about American imperialism and, you know, the fact that the indigenous industry would be wiped out by American imperialist television so Canada had the most incredible system of financing Independent Producers. I still remember one time we were going to produce a kid's programme, co-produce a kid's programme with this Canadian company and I got this phone call one day from this Canadian Producer saying, 'We don't need your money anymore as we are now over-financed" because when they took into account Government money, State money, City money and all the rest of it, all the money was there and, you know, they did not need Co-Production with Scots and the interference that Co-Production brought.
We then got involved, as part of my trips, with an Irish Company. I can't remember the guy's name. I'm so old! I'm trying to remember all these things! But this Irish Company, they wanted to target the Diaspora, the Celtic Diaspora. They wanted to target Scots and the Irish in America and they wanted to set up this Cable Company that would broadcast to them so we had quite a lot of conversations with them about our library becoming involved in this venture. You know, it was going to be a venture but, eventually, they just kind of ran into the sand. Nothing came of it. I don't know why it, kind of, never took off but, again, I think the American TV industry is so competitive and so fierce that it's quite difficult to target that audience and get things like that off the ground.
I: I suppose it's like economy of scale really.
R: Yes, I mean we did explore things like that. We did try and get things like that off the ground.
I: So, looking back at your time at STV, are you quite happy that you, are you quite pleased with what you've achieved? I mean, you should not be by any standards!
R: I mean, you are never happy!
I: I mean, you've made a singular difference!
R: Yeah, but you still sometimes, you know, you're shaving in the morning and you look yourself in the face and you think, 'God, what contribution did I make to, you know, the good of humanity producing Wheel of Fortune or whatever it is?!' You know, I've done something much more useful with my life! But then, I had great fun!
I: But before every Wheel of Fortune there was The Steamie or something else!
R: Oh yeah, but I have to say to you even producing something like the Wheel of Fortune was, you know, was a great experience! I mean, there was another community. Sony Columbia Tristar who was the Company eventually in America who owned the world rights to Wheel of Fortune, once a year they would bring together the family of Fortune and Producers from India, all over Europe, Croatia, we would all meet for a few days in Arcane in the south of France, attached to one of the Television markets and we would show examples of, everybody would show examples of their show, discuss ideas, we would swap ideas and suggestions and, even now, if you watch the American version of Wheel of Fortune there's some of the ideas which we developed here in Scotland which they looked at and thought, 'Oh, that's a good idea! We'll do that and take it on to the American version!' You know, so even for things like a Game Show there's a lot of satisfaction to be got out of it, you know. I've still got the tie, one of the ties that Pat Sajak has worn on Network Television in America presenting Wheel of Fortune! Anne Mason and I went to see it being made in America and we were in Pat's dressing room which is at least the size of this office and Pat said to Anne, "Just take what you want!", so she took some of his ties!
I: So, in retrospect, the life of a Politician or the life of a Broadcaster Executive?!
R: I don't know! I mean, when I see the mess that we are in at the moment then I think being a Television Producer was probably a much easier job and I'm not sure I would have been a very good Politician anyway, you know!
I: I doubt you would have got the same enjoyment from it
R: I certainly don't think I would have got the same enjoyment and I think the other thing, you know, the truth is, at the end of the day, I think being a Politician is a bit like being a football Manager, you know, one day you are going to get sacked whatever happens whereas with television you can choose the time of your going - unless you get sacked, of course!
I: OK. I think maybe on that note, Sandy, shall we, unless there's anything else you would like to talk about?
R: I could, you know, I could talk forever, you know that! You know, even as I'm talking there I'm just thinking about loads of other things which, and it was a great time and I've met huge numbers of people that I, ordinarily, would never have met! Been to places that other people can only dream about and imagine so, from that point of view, the whole experience of working in Television was great! I mean, I remember we went to America - Geoff Henry was the STV Business Manager, Alistair Moffat who was, I think, the Director of Programmes at the time, and myself and we got invited, because we'd done this deal with DIC and we were producing animation, we went to things like the MTV Music Awards and in the, you know, the best seats in the house. You know, there was Jack Nicholson and there was Madonna and there was somebody else, you know, and you're thinking, 'it's not bad for a boy from Grangemouth!', you know, so from that point of view it was great fun! And also, I still keep in touch with loads of people and I'm still friendly with them and that's all through working with Television.
I: OK. Thanks very much Sandy! That's brilliant!
R: You're welcome!
[82:51]
[End of Recording]
