Prime Minister, film star, broadcasters – all behaved really badly in the Golden Age of ITV

April 21, 2012 - PRLog -- Do you remember the Golden Age of Independent Television? The 1970’s and early 80’s was a time of greedy bosses, bolshie unions, hell-raising hacks and grasping politicians, according to Welsh broadcaster Ron Lewis.

“Broadcasters weren’t the only ones behaving outrageously,” says Ron, an HTV journalist for 34 years.  “A British Prime Minister refused to record a television interview unless he was paid an extra tenner. Then there was the international film star who tried to bully his own newsdesk when he became an ITV company director.”

Ron looks back at his time as a young reporter and scriptwriter in his e-book “Men from the Adverts Telly,” an insider’s first-hand account of a vanished era of “film, fun, passion and unquenchable thirst.” It’s a personal collection of anecdotes described by top literary agent James Gill as “intriguing and hair-raising stuff - Life on Mars meets Drop the Dead Donkey.”

Ron says, “In those days an ITV franchise really was a licence to print money. We had millionaire owners, stroppy shop stewards and even a cleaner who saved the hardest toilet paper for the rear of the Chief Executive.

“James Callaghan was the Prime Minister who refused to film an interview unless he was paid an extra £10. The film star who put unfair pressure on his own newsdesk was “Zulu” actor and HTV director Sir Stanley Baker.”

A journalist with 42 years’ experience in newspapers and television, Ron uses humour and personal memories to revisit the glory days of ITV. He cuts through the tobacco haze of long-lost newsrooms run with notebooks, clockwork cameras, manual typewriters and paper scripts with carbon copies. Ron was first called the “Man from the Adverts Telly” in an underground message at a coal mine.

He says, “A highly-paid workforce thought the good times would last forever, but always in the background was a power struggle in which powerful trade unions and incompetent managers battled for control of ITV.”

For more information on “Men from the Adverts Telly” go to tinyurl.com/advertstelly