Jack Hargreaves - Southern Television

Southern Television

In 1959, by now well known in the trade as a creative media innovator, Hargreaves was head-hunted by Roy Rich to the new ITV franchised company, Southern Television, both as programme maker and assistant programme controller. He might have been promoted but Independent Television Authority (ITA) regulations prohibited being in charge of programming, while also making programmes. It was at Southern, in the same year he joined the station, that Hargreaves made his screen debut with the series Gone Fishing - and so, what had previously been a pastime became the focus of his wider reputation. He recounted how on his first broadcast, sitting in the studio, apprehensive at the thought of being about to talk live to a potential audience of millions, his director had reminded him that although that vast audience might be statistically daunting, it was more likely to be two or three people and perhaps a dog sitting in their front room. He aimed at conversing with such an audience for the rest of his career. The director of nearly all of Hargreaves' programmes at Southern Television was George Egan who, with cameraman Stan Bréhaut, became the third ingredient of a most creative outdoor team.

In the early 1960s Hargreaves, fascinated with a still young medium and perceiving how completely different television - especially live television - was from cinema, collaborated in a new documentary series under the Out of Town umbrella. Hargreaves had moved from his country home in Bagnor near Newbury to a new home near Lymington on the Solent and one of his earliest programmes for Out of Town documented the invention, design and construction, by his friend Denys Rayner, of a family yacht - the Beacon Corvette - which evolved into Rayner's Westerly 22 and became among the first of a new family of small affordable sailing boats capable of being trailed behind a family saloon, easily launched and used for weekending as well as ocean voyaging. Jack and his last wife Isobel, whom he married in 1964, took one of these - "Young Tiger" (named after another of his TV series) - through the Canal du Midi between Bordeaux and Sète in 1965, completing one leg of a transatlantic voyage continued by his stepson, Simon.

The programme Out of Town was broadcast between 1963 and 1981. Jack Hargreaves became a household name in the parts of England covered by Southern Television. When Southern lost its franchise, Hargreaves continued his TV career on Channel 4, also continuing, in prose, the deceptively simple narrative style that had worked well "on the box". Hargreaves' most extended filming relationship was with Stan Bréhaut, the cameraman who worked closely with him for over 20 years on over a thousand shoots. He described Bréhaut, who died peacefully in December 2005, as "the finest outdoor cameraman in England". Enjoyed for the relaxed style of his "countryside" broadcasting, Hargreaves, with Stan's help, used a sure grasp of how television worked best to spread cogent messages about the loss of men's connection with the land.