Brian Tesler

Brian Tesler CBE (born 19 February 1929) is a retired British television entertainment producer and senior executive. His career encompassed British television's post-war evolution from a single-channel BBC to the arrival of multiple terrestrial, satellite and cable channels in the 1990s. After experience in radio presentation with the British Forces Broadcasting Service in the 1940s he began in television as a light entertainment producer and director for BBC Television in 1952, producing mainly panel shows before gaining experience and working his way upwards to producing larger and more significant programmes. He moved to Britain's fledgling independent commercial television service ITV in 1957, joining Associated Television (ATV), who held the franchise for weekends in London. Here he took over ITV's biggest variety show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

In 1960 Tesler moved into executive management by becoming Supervisor of Features and Light Entertainment at ABC Weekend TV which provided commercial television for the North of England and the Midlands. Tesler was promoted to be ABC's Programme Controller in 1962 and two years later Director of Programmes. In 1968 he became Director of Programmes at Thames Television which provided weekday programmes in London.

In 1974 Tesler was invited to become Deputy Managing Director of London Weekend Television (LWT) and in 1976 he became LWT's Chief Executive. He resigned in 1990, remaining Deputy Chairman until his retirement from television in 1994.

Early life

Tesler was born in Stepney in East London on 19 February 1929. His Jewish father, David, came to England from Ukraine in 1916, setting up his own hatmaking business. His mother, Esther Hyman, also Jewish, was born in Mile End in East London, her parents having emigrated from Russia in about 1893. Her father was a baker.

Tesler was educated at the Chiswick County School for Boys in West London. As well as its academic excellence and absence of antisemitism Tesler found the extra-curricular activities there, including its drama opportunities, to be to his liking. Tesler loved the music hall and variety shows and was a regular visitor to the major entertainment theatres in London. In later life he credited his youthful enjoyment of all aspects of show business as a valuable self-education which prepared him for his career in light entertainment.

One of the teachers at his school encouraged Tesler’s interest in reading, turning it into a love of English literature, and persuaded him that a University of Oxford degree in English was something to which he could aspire. Another teacher, responsible for the school’s drama projects, encouraged Tesler’s growing interest in the theatre by casting him prominently and successfully in school plays. Tesler won a scholarship for a university place to be taken up after his two year National Service in the Army.

Tesler was mustered in the Royal Artillery in the summer of 1947 but after auditioning was posted to the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) radio station in Trieste in Northern Italy as a presenter. He stayed in the BFBS in Trieste until he was demobilised in September 1949.

Tesler’s scholarship took him to Exeter College, Oxford in Autumn 1949 to read English Literature and Language. After three years during which there was some concern from his tutors that he was spending more time with show business activities than his studies, he graduated in 1952 with a First Class Honours Degree, with the highest marks in his year, in English. While at Oxford Tesler was a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), joined the reporting team on The Isis Magazine, sang occasionally with the University Jazz Club and wrote and sold songs with fellow student, the composer Stanley Myers.

Career

BBC Television

Tesler joined BBC Television as a trainee Light Entertainment producer in 1952, recruited on a six-months trial. His first television production, which he also directed, was a musical show called Starlight starring Pat Kirkwood singing and dancing to the music of Eric Robinson's orchestra. It was transmitted on 2 January 1953. Tesler followed this with similar programmes starring Joyce Grenfell and the singing duo Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson

Tesler then rescued a failing panel-game, Down You Go!, which encouraged the BBC to make him producer of a new panel-game for Sunday nights, called Why?. This, however, was "a resounding flop", as Tesler wrote later. It was cancelled after only three shows. Despite this failure Tesler was put in charge of the Light Entertainment Department's output of panel games, both finding and producing or supervising them, which he proceeded to do by introducing Guess My Story, Find the Link, Tall Story Club, One of the Family and The Name's the Same, as well as having overall responsibility for the long-running What's My Line?.

Tesler quickly gained in experience and while continuing to produce panel games he worked his way upwards at the BBC, developing and producing larger and more significant shows. He produced a pilot show for a possible new series written by the radio writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden for the husband and wife light comedy team, Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly. Barbara with Braden transmitted in July 1953 and was well-received by the critics, though the series did not appear for another two years, and was then titled Bath-Night With Braden. It was the first comedy show to transmit on a weekly basis rather than once a fortnight. And So to Bentley, a series also written by Muir and Nordern, featuring the Australian comic actor Dick Bentley with Peter Sellers and Bill Fraser, was regarded as a flop, but showed Tesler had increasing confidence in comedy direction and confirmed to him the value of a live studio audience. Fast and Loose was another comedy series, this time written by Bob Monkhouse and Dennis Goodwin. It was the first series to show their talents as performers as well as writers.

Tesler's musical talents encouraged him to develop music shows was well as comedy. Among them was Music and Magic, described by Radio Times as "a miscellany of music, dance and illusion", which featured illusionists like David Nixon and performers like Frankie Vaughan together with some technical trickery. Tesler broke some boundaries with We Got Rhythm, a show with an all-black cast of singers, dancers and cabaret artistes, including Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson. Frank Chacksfield's light music orchestra was of symphonic size but Tesler was able to use all the television techniques then at his disposal to convert what would otherwise be essentially a radio programme into a television show spectacular. The television spectacle of The Great Little Tilley was only possible by Tesler organising a two-studio production utilising studios D and E at the BBC's Lime Grove Studios in West London, staging dramatic sequences about the life and times of the male impersonator Vesta Tilley in one studio and her music hall performing sequences in the other, while Pat Kirkwood as Tilley in a live production was forced to rush backwards and forwards between the two.

In January 1955, after two years under contract to BBC Television, Tesler signed with the BBC for a further two years. His new contract barred him from working for any of the new commercial television stations being set up to launch Independent Television (ITV) in Britain. Tesler later wrote in his autobiography that "the idea of working in the cut-throat commercial world was repugnant," and that he felt his future at the BBC held plenty of attractive production prospects. At the time he was in the middle of the first season of Ask Pickles, a popular television vehicle for the radio star Wilfred Pickles.

With Ask Pickles, Tesler invented British television's first "sentimental" request show in which viewers could have their wishes come true. Pickles wanted to expand into television and to do that Tesler devised a new show. "Wilfred Pickles invites you to Ask Pickles for the things you would like to see and hear," announced Radio Times. Tesler's office received as many as 10,000 request letters a week from viewers and Ask Pickles became the most popular show on television, scoring appreciation ratings in the 90s. Tesler won the first ever Light Entertainment (Production) Award from the Guild of Television Producers and Directors (now the British Academy of Film and Television Arts [BAFTA]) for Ask Pickles in December 1957.

Another radio star who wanted to break into television was the bandleader Billy Cotton. Tesler was given the task of devising a television version of Cotton's long-running Sunday lunchtime BBC Radio show. As a music hall devotee and avid radio listener, Tesler knew Cotton's act well and knew what would work. He brought in a comedy scriptwriter, engaged guest artistes for comedy routines with Cotton and the band, and even persuaded the portly 60-year-old Cotton to join in dance routines with a line of female dancers, The Leslie Roberts Silhouettes. The Billy Cotton Band Show became a long-running light entertainment success for BBC Television for some twelve years, Tesler producing it for its first season.

Towards the end of that first season with Cotton, it was announced by Val Parnell, the chief executive of Associated Television (ATV), that Tesler, "one of television's top producers", would join the staff of ATV on 1 January 1957. As Tesler's BBC contract was drawing to a close at the end of 1956 he was offered a further two years, but the BBC refused to increase his pay, saying, as later reported by Tesler, "working for the BBC is reward enough". Discovering that a disappointed Tesler might be available, Parnell and his deputy, Lew Grade, offered Tesler double his BBC salary for three years with an annual expenses-paid trip to New York to study US television thrown in. His views on commercial television expressed two years previously had changed. "Personally I think that this is the right time for me, having enjoyed the privileges of BBC television," he told TV Mirror, "to go out into the cut-and-thrust of commercial tv." ATV held the major ITV contracts for the weekends in London and weekdays in the English Midlands and was eager to transmit a lot of light entertainment, Tesler's speciality.

Tesler completed the first season of the Billy Cotton Band Show and initiated and produced the first two programmes of a new series starring Petula Clark,and cast and laid out the rest of the series, before leaving the BBC after four years.

Independent Television

Tesler started at Associated Television in London on 1 January 1957. He was to produce his initial show for the company, an edition of Val Parnell's Saturday Spectacular, for live transmission on 19 January. He told his bosses, Parnell and Lew Grade, that he wanted the singer, dancer and comedian Dickie Henderson to star in it. Parnell tried to veto the choice as he and Henderson had fallen out. Tesler, however, had a clause in his contract that allowed him the power to cast his own programmes. He insisted on Henderson being the star and Parnell was forced to allow it. The show was so popular and Henderson's performance judged so impressive that Parnell encouraged Tesler to bring him back four more times for the Saturday show.

Tesler became Parnell's favoured producer for Saturday Spectacular. In 1957, Tesler's first year at ATV, he produced Saturday night specials with some of the top British comedy stars of the time like Max Bygraves, Frankie Howerd, Benny Hill, and Norman Wisdom, Americans like Rosemary Clooney, Ray Bolger and Johnnie Ray, and old-time entertainment idols like Jack Buchanan and George Formby. This series of entertainment specials, which ran from November 1956 to March 1961 (though in the last year or so without Tesler as he left ATV at the end of 1959) performed well for audience appreciation, occasionally making it into that week's ten most-watched programmes.

While he continued to produce Saturday Spectacular, Tesler was asked by Parnell to take over running Sunday Night at the London Palladium in the autumn of 1957. This show was transmitted 39 weeks a year from the West End's premier variety theatre. It was first broadcast in September 1955 so had been running for two seasons by the time Tesler took it over and in that time only 4 editions had failed to make the Top 10 of British television's most popular programmes. In its heyday 28-million viewers watched it, at that time nearly half the population of the United Kingdom. The comedian Tommy Trinder had always been the compère of the show, but Tesler considered him "old hat" and wanted to replace him. Despite the viewing figures, Tesler also thought the show "had become routine, its novelty and glamour ... fading". To enliven the show Parnell agreed to let Tesler bring in the precision dance troupe the Tiller Girls and asked him to find a way to replace Trinder, who had rattled Tesler already and had offended Parnell and Grade so much they had decided not renew his contract for the 1958-59 season.

For the first few months of the 1957-58 season Trinder was taking time off from the Palladium for an extended tour of South Africa. Tesler took the opportunity to engage various compères to take his place temporarily in order to pick the best of them to take over in autumn 1958 when Trinder’s contract would not be renewed. He tried out Dickie Henderson, Bob Monkhouse, Hughie Green, Alfred Marks and Robert Morley, each for a few weeks. At the same time, Tesler was producing a show called New Look, with a team of young, mostly unknown, performers, chosen by Tesler. Among them was an all-round dancer, musician and comedian, Bruce Forsyth, who caught Parnell’s attention. Tesler and Parnell knew immediately that in Forsyth they had found their new Palladium compère. After a couple of successful tryouts on the Sunday shows Forsyth was engaged full-time to replace Trinder for the 1958-59 season. Within weeks audience figures rose to over 14 million households.

Tesler's show New Look was a studio-based revue with a regular team of young all-round entertainers who could gain television experience and possibly be moulded into star material. Tesler chose wisely. Among them, including Forsyth, were Jack Douglas, Joyce Blair and her brother Lionel Blair, Ronnie Stevens, Jeremy Lloyd and Roy Castle. When Parnell saw Castle in the pilot of New Look he immediately put him into the 1958 Royal Variety Performance.

Tesler continued a heavy production schedule at ATV, making at least one Saturday Spectacular a month and sometimes more often, featuring artistes of the like of Harry Secombe, Bernard Bresslaw, Dave King and Arthur Askey. Once New Look was completed Lew Grade also asked Tesler to come up with an idea to feature the West End's latest showplace, a theatre-restaurant named The Talk of the Town. Tesler brought in outside broadcast cameras to cover live a floorshow in the first half of the programme and a big name cabaret act in the second. Tesler also composed the music for the opening titles. Live from Talk of the Town had a short run in December 1959. Hosted by Noele Gordon it starred among others, Diana Dors, John Bentley, Beryl Reid and Bruce Forsyth. The series ended with a gala edition on New Year's Eve 1959.

Live from Talk of the Town was Tesler's last production for ATV. He had decided he would become a freelancer at the end of his ATV contract so that he could have freedom to pick the shows he wanted to produce. He left ATV on 31 December 1959.

Resolving to become a freelance producer, Tesler lined up contracts with both ATV and the BBC at the beginning of 1960, but before they could begin he was approached by Howard Thomas, the managing director of ABC Weekend TV. ABC held the commercial television franchises for weekends in the North of England and the English Midlands and was one of the so-called "Big Four" companies that between them produced most of the ITV networked programmes. Thomas invited Tesler to become ABC's Supervisor of Features and Light Entertainment. Thomas offered him a "free hand" answerable only to him. Tesler was wary of becoming a programme executive at this point in his career, feeling that for the time being he wanted to stay as a producer. "I would miss the sheer fun of it," he wrote later, "the thrilling danger of a live production; the exhilaration of seeing something come off ... live, on air." Thomas persisted, however, and Tesler, having been shown ABC's state-of-the-art new production studios at Teddington in west London accompanied by Thomas' further persuasive efforts, accepted and joined ABC in February 1960 to be in charge of everything ABC transmitted other than drama and outside broadcasts.

Now controlling what was thought to be the only combined Light Entertainment and Features Department in television, Tesler needed to exercise executive responsibilities which were new to him and at the same time develop knowledge and expertise in features, an area of television in which he had not previously been involved. Disregarding his lack of experience he moved quickly to improve ABC’s feature offerings, particularly in terms of the company’s regional identity. He set up local news and current affairs operations at the studios at Didsbury in Manchester and Aston in Birmingham for programmes of local interest, ABC of the North and ABC of the Midlands, to be transmitted to their respective regions on Saturday evenings. At the end of his first year at ABC Tesler was also able to write that the company had transmitted the first British television programme to be devoted solely to books and authors, The Book Man; a popular science programme with high ratings, You'd Never Believe It!; a teenage religious series, The Sunday Break; and an investigative religious series called Living Your Life.

As for the regional aspect of light entertainment in his first year at ABC, Tesler set up weekly outside broadcast live transmissions of adapted theatrical farces from many of the multiple repertory theatres throughout the Midlands and the North under the umbrella title of Comedy Matinee. And a musical show, Sing Along With Joe, featuring Joe "Mr Piano" Henderson, transmitted from a wide variety of factories throughout ABC's regions.

Tesler was also able to increase ABC's light entertainment contributions to the ITV network in 1960. Bob Monkhouse presented Candid Camera with the help of Jonathan Routh fooling the public with pranks from September 1960, Our House, a rare 60-minute situation comedy was launched and ran for 39 episodes;, a pop and rock show Wham! began in April 1960, though it received poor reviews and a second series was cancelled. Steamboat Shuffle presented a wealth of traditional jazz acts and occasional folk singers on board a mocked up Mississippi riverboat moored on the Thames by ABC's Teddington Studios in the summer of 1960, and Tesler was able to sign up American dancer and singer Sammy Davis Jr to make his first British television appearance on ABC. Even though as an executive Tesler's producing days were supposed to be behind him, he could not resist taking on directing Sammy Davis Jr meets the British. Tesler vowed it would be his last production job but was tempted to produce one more programme, a Christmas show for 1960, Alice Through the Looking Box, featuring many of the biggest comedians, actors and personalities of the day. It won ITV's biggest audience on that Christmas Day.

During the ensuing seven-and-a-half years before the end of ABC's franchise in the North and Midlands, Tesler established a growing reputation as a production executive, particularly when in October 1962 he was promoted to be ABC's Programme Controller, in charge of the creation and presentation of all the company's output, and in 1964 when he was made Director of Programmes and elected to the Board of ABC Television, becoming the first ITV Programme Controller to be appointed to a Board.

ABC was the smallest of the so-called 'Big Four' ITV companies which were expected to make the impressive, expensive programmes that would be networked over the whole country, but it was increasingly able to carry more production weight than its size suggested. Much of this was down to Tesler's personal reputation and his ability to attract a new school of producers, directors and writers. With them under contract it was easier to entice top performers and presenters to ABC.

Many of the programmes and series Tesler introduced at ABC became major network successes. Among them were the pop music show, Thank Your Lucky Stars, which lasted for five years from 1961; Big Night Out, which brought outside broadcast cameras to major entertainment events around the country and ran for five series from 1961-1965; Comedy Bandbox, which showed off new comedians like Jimmy Tarbuck, Mike Yarwood and Les Dawson; Opportunity Knocks, a talent show presented by Hughie Green, which became one of ITV's Top Twenty shows and ran for 14 years; and The Eamonn Andrews Show - Live from London! was produced from Teddington in 1964 and was British television's first late night chat show. It, too, appeared regularly in the Top Twenty TV ratings. After Sammy Davis Jr, American entertainers like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee made their first British TV specials for ABC. A successful new sitcom emerged in Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width with Joe Lynch and John Bluthal. Blackpool Night Out from the resort's ABC Theatre, later became The Blackpool Show, hosted by Mike and Bernie Winters, Tony Hancock and Dickie Henderson. Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd joined ABC for their own comedy shows on Saturday nights, and Bruce Forsyth starred in his own Sunday night ABC series.

Tesler ensured that sport dominated the network on Saturday afternoons with a new show, World of Sport, hosted by Eamonn Andrews, and supported by ABC's outside broadcast vehicles, at that time ITV's largest fleet. Culture was represented by an arts programme, Tempo, which was so successful it remained as ITV's only regular programme on the arts until 1968 and showed that ITV could be highbrow while remaining populist.

Network drama on ABC flourished, with, as well as one-off plays continuing successfully in Sunday night's Armchair Theatre, a number of popular drama series were sustained or emerged under Tesler's encouragement, such as espionage series The Avengers, Redcap about the military police, Public Eye, a crime and detection series, and action-drama spy series Callan.

In 1967 the Independent Television Authority (ITA) announced a rearrangement of franchises to start in 1968. This meant that there would no longer be a contract for ABC to reapply for. The Northern area, split into North West and Yorkshire, was to become a seven-day operation, as would the Midlands. Existing weekday contractors, Granada in the North West and ATV in the Midlands, were considered the favourites. ABC decided to submit two applications: one for the service for London weekends, the other for the Midlands seven-day operation, although it favoured the first contract.

It was expected that ABC would be awarded the London licence, but the strength of another application, from the London Weekend Television consortium, ruled this out. Since the Midlands seven-day franchise was to be taken by ATV, and the ITA had no desire that an operator with the reputation of ABC should lose out through no fault of its own, they ordered a merger between ABC and the existing London weekday company Rediffusion, with ABC having majority control, to become the weekday supplier for London, the prime ITV contract. The ITA also insisted that the managing director of the merged company should be ABC's Howard Thomas, and the Director of Programmes should be Brian Tesler, the only individuals named or specified in the 15 franchise awards, and "regarded as having the safest hands in the network".

The two companies became Thames Television. ABC ceased weekend broadcasting in the North and Midlands on Sunday 28 July 1968 and, with Rediffusion, and with Tesler as Director of Programmes, became the weekday supplier in the London region on Tuesday 30 July.

Tesler was a founder-director of both Thames Television and Channel 4; managing director and then chairman and managing director of London Weekend Television; and the founder-chairman of ITV's first venture into satellite broadcasting with SuperChannel. During his career, he worked for four superiors: Ronnie Waldman, Lew Grade, Howard Thomas and John Freeman; and when he became a broadcasting boss himself he appointed four future significant figures: Jeremy Isaacs as his Controller of Features at Thames; Michael Grade, John Birt and Greg Dyke successively as his Directors of Programmes at LWT. In the 1990s he served on the Board of Governors of the British Film Institute.

Tesler retired in 1994, and has written two books about his life and career. The first, Before I Forget, published in 2006, described his family life, growing up in London's East End Jewish community before and during the Second World War. The second, The Best Of Times, published in 2016, is an in-depth account of his professional career as a producer of light entertainment in the 1950s and 1960s and then as a senior executive in independent television from the 1970s until 1994.

In December 2019 he was presented by Lord Michael Grade with the Television and Radio Industries Club's Special Award for his contribution to British television.

Bibliography

• Before I Forget: A Personal Memoir
• The Best Of Times: A Personal History of British Television 1952-1994

References

Sources

• Barfe, Louis (2008). Turned Out Nice Again: The story of British light entertainment. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-84354-380-0.
• Birt, John (2002). The Harder Path. London: Time Warner Books. ISBN 0-7515-3468-4.
• Cotton, Bill (2000). Double Bill. London: Fourth Estate. ISBN 1-84115-327-3.
• Docherty, David (1990). Running the Show: 21 years of London Weekend Television. London: Boxtree Limited. ISBN 1-85283-103-0.
• Dyke, Greg (2005). Inside Story. London: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-00-719364-6.
• Grade, Michael (1999). It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-3337125-11.
• Halliwell, Leslie; Purser, Philip (2006). Halliwell's Television Companion. London: Granada Publishing. ISBN 0-586-08525-4.
• Isaacs, Jeremy (1989). Storm Over 4: A Personal Account. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. ISBN 0-297-79538-4.
• Isaacs, Jeremy (2007). Look Me In The Eye: A Life in Television. London: Abacus. ISBN 978-0-349-11756-0.
• Lewisohn, Mark (1998). Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy. London: BBC Worldwide. ISBN 0-563-36977-9.
• Tesler, Brian (2006). Before I Forget: A Family Memoir. Bridport, England: Mind Advertising. ISBN 978-0-9554515-0-8.
• Tesler, Brian (2016). The Best of Times: A personal history of British television 1952-1994. Birmingham: Kaleidoscope Publishing. ISBN 978-1-900203-63-0.
• Thomas, Howard (1977). With an Independent Air: Encounters During a Lifetime of Broadcasting. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. ISBN 0-297-77278-3.

External links

• "Members. Brian Tesler". tric.org.uk. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015.
• Brian Tesler Interview somethingjewish.co.uk
• "Brian Tesler (born 1929)". 78rpm.co.uk.
• "Billy Cotton: A life less ordinary". BBC News. 23 December 2014. Retrieved 23 January 2024.
• "Billy Cotton". televisionheaven.co.uk. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015.
• Barfe, L. (2013). Turned Out Nice Again: The Story of British Light Entertainment. Atlantic Books. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-84887-757-3.
• Catterall, P. (2013). The Making of Channel 4. Routledge. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-135-01887-0. Retrieved 23 January 2024.
• White, L. (2003). Armchair Theatre: The Lost Years. Kelly Publications. p. 83. ISBN 978-1-903053-18-8.
• Brian Tesler at IMDb