Daniel Farson - 1950s

1950s

Farson shot to fame in the 1950s when he joined Associated-Rediffusion, the first commercial television company to operate in Britain. Here he took risks that few television interviewers (certainly not those employed at the still very conservative BBC) would dare to take at the time. In his series Out of Step (1957) and People in Trouble (1958) - never shown at the same time throughout the ITV network, but much repeated in various regions well into the early 1960s - he dealt with issues of social exclusion and alienation that most of the media at the time preferred to sweep under the carpet (in this he was helped, of course, by the fact that as a gay man - a term he would not himself use even when it came to be much preferred to "homosexual" - in 1950s Britain, he could himself have fitted into the criteria of both series). The most famous editions of these series are the Out of Step programme on nudism (the term "naturism" had yet to become commonplace), which claimed to show the first naked woman on British television, and the People in Trouble programme on mixed marriages (a highly sensitive issue at the time as post-war immigrants tentatively began to integrate into British life). Their fame is at least partially down to the fact that they were repeated comparatively recently, in 1982 (on the fledgling Channel 4).

Another 1958 Farson series, entitled Keeping in Step, looked at establishment institutions such as public schools from a distinctly more distanced perspective than that seen on virtually all BBC programmes (and even most other Associated-Rediffusion programmes) of the time. A regular guest on Farson's programmes at this stage was James Wentworth Day, a reactionary British writer of the Agrarian Right school, who infamously ranted in the programme on mixed marriages, in which he referred to mixed-race children as "coffee-coloured little imps" and argued that black people must be less "civilised" than white people because "a couple of generations ago they were eating each other" (Wentworth Day's remarks were featured in Victor Lewis-Smith's series Buygones and TV Offal). Farson would usually respond to these diatribes with a polite statement along the lines of "I couldn't disagree with you more, but at least you do say what you really feel".

However, Wentworth Day's appearances would rapidly come to an end when he claimed that all homosexuals should be hanged. Farson insisted that the episode of People in Trouble in which Wentworth Day had made those remarks - concerning transvestism - was scrapped before it had been completed. He publicly insisted that the Independent Television Authority would ban it; in reality Farson was terrified that Wentworth Day would attempt to bring him to trial - a trial which would inevitably have been a high-profile event comparable to that of Oscar Wilde. After this, Farson immediately froze Wentworth Day out of his life and his programmes.

Farson's broadcasting career, however, continued to go from strength to strength. Farson's Guide to the British (1959–1960) took a critical eye at a nation in transition and was the first public expression of his long-term quest for the true identity of Jack the Ripper. Other series included Farson in Australia (1961) and Dan Farson Meets ... (1962), which usually featured popular singers of the time. The one-off programme Beat City (1963) was an atmospheric evocation of the Liverpool scene which had given birth to The Beatles and the sociological factors which had brought it into being. In 1960, he helmed Living For Kicks, a documentary about the frustrations and uncertainties of British teenagers in the post-Elvis, pre-Beatles era.

The Daily Sketch, a tabloid paper then owned by Associated Newspapers (who were the "Associated" in Associated-Rediffusion, although they had sold their stake in the company by this time), led the chorus of revulsion to the documentary. The Daily Mirror responded with a defence of British teenagers; a considerable war of words then developed between the two papers, with the Mirror's well-remembered TV commercials ("The Daily Mirror backs the young!") representing its position on the matter.