How Sir Richard Francis Helped Revolutionise the BBC

In 1958, My father joined the BBC as a trainee. It was a forgotten age: television was still a relatively new and not a widely trusted or understood medium, it was black and white and only available to the minority of the more well-to-do who owned a television set. The BBC had a new competitor, ITV, which was only three years old.

In the 1950s, television news was a talking head in a studio, labelled ‘radio news’ for its lack of visual impact. It would arrive at the studios in a reel of tape within a tin, often as silent picture film with separate sound tapes. The news, if spoken, would be in stilted, official tones and still, frozen faces inherited from Newsreel era when the commentary was in the background, overlaying often silent video pictures. If from a far-flung place it would take days as the tin drums were loaded on a plane and shipped back to London. Sound and picture would be painstakingly synchronized in the studio or not at all. Satellite television had yet to be invented.

Interviews with politicians were rare and conducted in strictly controlled circumstances. The interviewers were deferent and the fare dull. But a revolution was coming and my father, Sir Richard (Dick) Francis was to be in the thick of it. My first book, “The BBC versus Thatcher”, charts the major set-piece events that re-shaped and revolutionised news and current affairs broadcasting in the decades that followed and how my father played a central role. 

This new science of television required new ideas for production, lighting, and pace. Dick was to become an early master of these techniques. So he, as others, became well known and valued by the political leaders of the time, educating them on how best to project themselves and their policies into the lens and synchronized microphone. The evolving politics of broadcasting shaped him, and over the remainder of his BBC career, he shaped it. Harold Wilson, elected Prime Minister in 1964, was an early master of the power of embracing the television medium rather than avoiding it. Working in symbiosis with the television crew was henceforth to be a prerequisite to attaining and retaining high political office.

After the innovation of showing General Election results on television as the votes were being counted, Dick invested himself in speeding up our understanding of electoral statistics through psephology, in the analysis of the results, as well as how this could be continuously broadcast through the night, building dramatic plotlines in real-time through instantaneous expert analysis and early prediction of the Election result. It was revolutionary. Dick, interviewed in 1986,

“1964 was probably the biggest of the ‘cardboard elections’. TC3 studio was chocker with graphic displays, graphic artists, telephonists, and streams of runners getting information to the commentators and scoreboards and, to make sense of it all, Bob McKenzie, with his cardboard swingometer. The scene was more like Waterloo station at rush hour than a TV studio.”

The following year and thousands of miles away, Tunisia was entering civil war and Dick was there to bring live pictures to British living rooms for the first time. Dick writing at the time, 

“Tonight’s edition of 24 Hours is the first programme on British television to come live from Africa”, “from Cap Bon in Tunisia to Monte Erice in Sicily. From Sicily the pictures will be transmitted to the Italian mainland via the Eurovision network to London.”

This new satellite television was to bring the US presidential election specials live to the UK and the rest of Europe from 1968. Dick had spent many months knitting together a network of relationships and agreements with the US TV networks and, critically, their satellites. He developed a pioneer’s knowledge of the new field of live transatlantic television; experience of big set-piece outside broadcasting and finding ways to convey complex information and technologies in an interesting and engaging way for television.

Dick felt that the Apollo moonshot programme was a fantastic opportunity for the BBC to both capture these world-changing events like the US Presidential Elections and the Apollo Moonshots and to take a leading role in solving the myriad of technical and commercial barriers to broadcasting live television into our living rooms. Dick interviewed in 1986,

“Coming out of Cape Kennedy, up to New York, there were only four longline video circuits available. The three US networks had one each and the ‘US pool’ had the fourth one. We were able to persuade them that they should help to forge an ‘international pool’. As the BBC were already leading the international operation, ours would be the ‘International Pool Line’. The International Pool Line was the backup line for the American networks. They owned it but they were pragmatic.”

Dick worked his way diplomatically through the minefield of different needs and contractual issues, to resolve how to provide basic coverage for any broadcaster in the world, whilst preserving sensible backup if any of the American networks lost their picture. So the BBC-led European Broadcasting Union (EBU) consortium became the sort of ‘air traffic controller’ for all international video alongside the three American networks.

For Apollo 11, the signal had a lengthy routing: the main picture was sent back from the states, across the Pacific, and then across the Indian Ocean via two satellites, and a landline right across Japan in between. Most of the time we had one of the Atlantic satellites up as a backup. Dick,

“The real problems were ones of cost and lack of numbers of satellites. We had a mad situation as we ran up to Apollo 11. According to the final flight plan, it transpired that the actual moon landing, the actual landing on the Moon was liable to coincide with the feed of a baseball game to Puerto Rico. Months in advance, not one but two Puerto Rican stations had booked the satellite circuits so they could put rival coverage of this baseball. They were damned if they were going to move off their spot, particularly as they reckoned, they could ‘dodge’ a bit of the moon landing in amongst the baseball and get the best of all worlds in what was a rather competitive television environment. I remember going down to Puerto Rico spending a rather pleasant couple of days lying about on the beach and pool and gently negotiating this notion out of their minds. That was the kind of competition that you had for the very limited number of satellite channels.”

“Just as war brings on an aircraft industry, there’s nothing like space programme to bring on communications technology. And there’s nothing like an election programme to bring on broadcasting technology, as we found by putting the general election results directly online.”

Dick was able, as none before, to weave together broadcasting technology and political nous. By leading the technology around big elections, the life blood of the BBC, you could get the government on your side, you got the money, and you got the licence for what you wanted.

Dick was always on the look-out for new technology.

In July 1978, during an interview with Dick Francis, by then on the BBC’s Board of Management as Director, News and Current Affairs, The Times described the affirmed tech-lover in his own lair, trailing the latest emergent technologies: 

“A loudspeaker in his office bursts into life and a voice announced the Spanish camping site tragedy. He got up and closed the curtains, and the computer characters on the Ceefax set one of three in the room, jumped into sharper focus. He operated the remote control and got a news flash on the latest development. We were at the time talking about the future and role of electronic news gathering techniques – lightweight equipment that will mean, as it develops, a speedier news service to the viewer, via studios and Post Office links.”

Dick sponsored this new BBC-developed on-screen text technology called Ceefax (literally “see facts”), which allowed viewers to use their remote controls to call up pages of news as text onto a TV screen. It was literally the internet before the internet was even thought of—the first 24/7 news service in the world.It began to take off in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and by the 1990s as many as 22 million people were using it weekly.

By the time he left the BBC in 1986, he had led several revolutions in broadcasting, burnishing the BBC’s claim to be a pillar of what being British is about.

My book, The BBC’s Last Warrior-Statesman, brings to life the events and characters that brought about this revolution in broadcasting, of which my father, Dick Francis, was instrumental.