Jeremy Isaacs will celebrate his 90th birthday on 28th September. Isaacs was one of the great figures in the golden age of British television—from the 1950s to the 1990s—and his career tells us a great deal about that period and the decline that came after. This is especially topical now with the debate about the possible privatisation of Channel 4.
The greatest director general the BBC never had, Isaacs’s real impact was in commercial television. He started out working for Sidney and Cecil Bernstein at Granada in the 1950s. One image in his memoir, Look Me in the Eye, captures the television culture of the time. Sidney insisted that every office wall “carried twin images that defined Granada’s contrasting ambitions: Ed Murrow, the great CBS journalist, stood for one; Phineas T Barnum, the circus showman, for the other.” There is a clear line from these two images to Channel 4 under Isaacs in the 1980s.
Born Jeremy Israel Isaacs in Glasgow in 1932, he was the oldest son of Isidore Isaacs, a jeweller, and Sara Jacobs, a doctor. They were, he said, “middle class, Jewish and interested in the world and politics.” He grew up in a deeply cultured Jewish home: his parents collected art, helped support Jewish refugee artists during the war and took their sons to concerts and to the Edinburgh Festival.
In the mid-1950s, Isaacs studied classics at Oxford. He chaired the Labour Club, became president of the Union and made lifelong friends including Michael Heseltine and the Labour MP Christopher Price. “I lost my Glasgow accent at Oxford,” he told the Herald. It’s unclear whether he meant this literally or metaphorically. Perhaps both.
After National Service, Isaacs worked at Granada, already known for quality drama and radical factual programmes, revolutionised by Tim Hewat, a key influence on the young Isaacs. “I learned more from him than from anyone else I’ve worked with in TV,” he later said. “He taught me that it’s primarily a mass audience medium and that one must be understood.”
This golden age had a dark side, of course. Women lost out. It was a chap culture, very white and gentile. In the late 1950s, Isaacs applied to work at the BBC. One interviewer noted: “Small, dark Glaswegian Jew.” The other agreed: “He seems to have that cosmopolitan flexibility of mind common to many of his race.” That “cosmopolitan flexibility of mind” may sound positive, but the word “race” sounds jarring all these years on.
ITV was different. In the 1970s, when Isaacs was director of programmes at Thames, he attended the regular programme controllers’ meetings. He later described the flavour of the meetings. Cyril Bennett (LWT) “told Yiddish jokes.” Bill Ward reported to Lew Grade and David Plowright to the Bernsteins. If you “add me, Jeremy Israel Isaacs,” he writes, “you might conclude that Jews ran a significant chunk of the British media.”
But even at ITV there was another side. Some years before, Captain Brownrigg, one of the top executives at Associated-Rediffusion, walked into an editing room. He asked the producers what they were making. “Making a documentary, Israel Rises, sir,” they replied. “Tricky fellow, your Hebrew,” said Brownrigg, giving a flavour of the way TV executives spoke about Jews in the 1950s and 1960s, the time when Isaacs was entering TV.
In the mid-1960s, Isaacs made his name in current affairs, editing ITV’s This Week, where he took on controversial issues including unmarried mothers and homosexuality, and then Panorama. After a brief, unhappy stint at the BBC he moved to Thames where he became controller of features and had the first of a number of run-ins with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) over a series of controversial programmes about Northern Ireland. His career in television was punctuated by short, sharp brushes with authority.
His greatest achievement as a programme maker was ITV’s The World at War (1973–1974), 26 hour-long episodes. It reached audiences of 15m per episode. Almost 50 years on, it remains a landmark in historical programmemaking. In a talk about the making of the series, recorded in 1989, Isaacs laid out his objectives: to tell the story of the Second World War, the fighting but also the social and political experience; to focus on Britain’s war; to be aware of different audiences of very different ages; “to omit nothing of supreme consequence”; to help us understand the times in which we live. “Old men forget,” he said.
There were absences: Yugoslavia, Gypsies, Poland, the Resistance, sea battles, the economics of war. There was only one episode on the Holocaust, though it had a huge impact at the time, helping to break the silence in the culture. Difficulties with the lack of archive film and finding relevant witnesses led to creative solutions. Some of the most astonishing sequences are mute, with no music or commentary, such as one of a village being “cleansed” on the eastern front in the final episode, produced by Isaacs himself.
The quality of research is astonishing. There are unforgettable images of Nazi atrocities on the eastern front. It was not just military history: it was a deeply humane series, which from the famous opening sequence of the uninhabited remains of Oradour-sur-Glane, where the Nazis massacred all 643 inhabitants on 10th June 1944 (“Down this road... the soldiers came”), insisted that war is always about devastation and loss. It was a great achievement and is still watched around the world today.
As director of programmes at Thames in the mid-1970s, Isaacs oversaw an extraordinary burst of creativity: The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies and The Sweeney, Trevor Griffiths’s political drama, Bill Brand, Rumpole of theBailey and Minder. Such dramas were both hugely popular and original.
Then came Channel 4. Early on in his memoir, Isaacs set out his credo: “I am in favour of backing people who make good, interesting, watchable, entertaining, shocking, offensive-to-some, television programmes rather than playing safe. It is not a question of my taking risks, it is a question of television taking risks.”
In 1979 he gave his famous MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, “Signposting Television in the Eighties,” widely seen as a bid for the job heading the new fourth channel, calling for programmes that extended the choice available to viewers, which would cater for minorities which had been neglected by mainstream British television, and which would offer a wider spectrum of opinion.
Isaacs assembled a terrific team: David Rose, head of regional drama, formerly head of the English Regional Drama department at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham; Michael Kustow, head of arts, previously at the ICA and RSC; Liz Forgan from the Guardian in charge of news; Alan Fountain, commissioning editor for independent film and video, who championed British independent filmmakers and the new cinema of Latin America and Africa.
Channel 4 under his leadership welcomed talented producers and documentary-makers like Mike Dibb, Martin Smith, Geoff Dunlop and John Wyver, creative figures like John Berger, Pina Bausch, Susan Sontag and Peter Brook. It was an extraordinary moment in the history of British television.
When the BBC withdrew an invitation to EP Thompson to give the Dimbleby Lecture, Isaacs immediately wrote a letter to the Times inviting Thompson to give his lecture on Channel 4.
The opening nights of Channel 4 tell the story: Ian McKellen’s unforgettable performance in Walter, The Comic Strip Presents… and Jack Rosenthal’s bitter-sweet story of cricket and a first kiss, P’Tang, Yang, Kipperbang. Under Isaacs as chief executive, Channel 4 gave British television an exciting shot of adrenalin: dramas like A Very British Coup and Film on Four (20 broadcast in the first 14 months); Cheers; The Snowman, Harry Enfield’s “Loadsamoney”; Nicholas Nickleby and Greek tragedy; films like Neil Jordan’s Angel, Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Launderette, Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary Shoah and Tony Harrison’s V. These were Channel 4’s best years and they made BBC Two under Alan Yentob and then Michael Jackson raise its game.
Isaacs and the new channel had their critics. Many programmes were attacked for being dull, niche, sexually permissive, too politically partisan. The tabloids called it “Channel Swore,” “Channel Snore” and “Channel Bore.” Mary Whitehouse was a predictable critic. There were inevitable run-ins with the IBA regulator. When Channel 4 showed Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and Sebastiane there was more outrage. There was controversy over Ken Loach’s A Question of Leadership, and, above all, a series about the Greek Civil War called Greece: The Hidden War which, according to Isaacs, was the reason he was never offered the job of director general at the BBC.
In 1989, Isaacs became director of the Royal Opera House, a role he would hold for 10 years. It was a stormy time. In a BBC Two documentary called Trouble at the House, Isaacs revealed that “I did not jump: I was pushed.” During the decade he was at the opera house, he never severed his ties with television. He wrote a personal account of his time at Channel 4 (Storm Over 4, 1989), gave the Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture on the making of The World at War, and presented a number of programmes on BBC Two, including Face to Face (1989–1998). After leaving the opera house he went on to produce two major historical series, Cold War and Millennium, for Ted Turner.
Jeremy Isaacs was an odd mix—part insider, part outsider. When he was knighted in 1996, the party at The Ivy was full of the great and the good. But he was also an outsider, Jewish, and considered a troublemaker by the establishment.
Deeply cultured, it is not entirely clear what he made of the rough-tough world of ITV or the kinds of cultural compromise and pragmatism that were always part of TV’s culture. Perhaps that’s why his years at Channel 4 were so happy. He had more creative freedom, fewer battles about ratings, censorship and the unions.
Above all, he was in the right place at the right time. Granada in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the BBC in the mid-1960s, Thames in the 1970s, Channel 4 in the 1980s. It was a huge explosion of creativity, perhaps unparalleled anywhere else in postwar British and American culture. Was that simply a matter of luck—the strange coincidence of a lot of money slushing through the system allied to an old-fashioned cultural elitism?
There is much to celebrate as Isaacs turns 90. He was one of the great figures in British television history. Never mind the tabloids. What will survive will be so many extraordinary films and programmes—a rich and enduring legacy.
