Rediffusion (Hong Kong) Limited......Memoirs of Peter Hammond

Excerpt from “Pete - the Memoirs of Peter Hammond”
Episode 12: Hong Kong
July 1958 - September 1966 Page 2

In early June 1962 Marc Millar completed his tour of duty in Hong Kong and returned to his position as one of the more eminent directors of television productions at the Rediffusion parent company in London. His place as Controller was taken by Len Thorne who proudly claimed to have been a jocular presenter of radio programmes for teenagers in Malaysia. Len's ambition was to become a funny television personality in Hong Kong, but his terms of reference stipulated that he was now in the business of management and, to his extreme chagrin, he was under strict orders never to make personal appearances on the television screen.

At Rediffusion, due partly to my prolonged absence on leave, the principle of employing just two announcers-cum-newscasters had been found unworkable; and one or two new colleagues had been taken on for trial periods. Among them was an accomplished actor with a deep, richly resonant voice named Ralph Pixton who had defected from a travelling Shakespeare company that normally toured schools in India and South East Asia. Shortly before I got back from leave my television partner David Perkins had needed to undergo a detached retina operation, which also put him out of action for a while. I must have been one of the first to visit him in hospital following his ordeal. With his eye still firmly bandaged up he seemed consumed with a compulsive urge to talk about the horrendous experience he had been through. He gave me a vivid account of his operation during which, although heavily sedated, he had been required to remain conscious. He described to me in lurid detail how he had contemplated the pointed instrument that had slowly closed in on his eye until, with a muted crushing sound, it pierced his cornea and set about grinding its way through his locally anaesthetised eyeball.... Rediffusion's senior television producer, John Bow, who had meanwhile quietly set up a small private venture making television commercials, now took to asking me from time to time to
provide the "voice over film" in his English language productions - as I had also done periodically for some of Rediffusion's in-house produced commercials. Since the studio John rented for this purpose happened to be very near my new office in Kowloon, it was a simple matter for me to slip out for the occasional half hour and thus further augment my income. Among the products and enterprises whose virtues I was now to be heard extolling over television commercials were: "Lea and Perrins' Worcester Sauce", "Cathay Pacific, the airline that knows the Orient best!", "Omega precision time!" and "Senior Service, the cigarettes that satisfy, presenting 77 Sunset Strip!"

On 1st October 1963 Rediffusion inaugurated its twin-channel television service. While the Chinese Channel, under its newly appointed "Controller" Robert Chung, extended its range of "live" studio presentations from the existing facilities, the English Channel, under "Controller" Len Thorne, moved into a newly completed studio on the 4th floor. From then on the English Channel's duty announcer was required to get himself made up and to preparefive-minutes of "News in Brief" from material on the teleprinter in time to go "on camera" at 1800 hours. At 1830 the "weather man" from the Royal Observatory arrived and set about preparing his chart and writing his text on a "whiteboard", to enable the announcer to complete a "dummy run" before presenting the daily weather report "on camera" from 1925 until 1930. The main news of the day, which also featured film material from VISNEWS, was rehearsed from 2000 on, in preparation for its presentation from 2100 until 2115. "Late Night Final", as before, was presented at station close-down. The duty announcer also provided the voice for the periodic time checks and commercials and, of course, made any necessary ad hoc announcements.
When I got my "China Mail" at the Star Ferry kiosk at lunchtime on Saturday, 23rd November 1963 I was stunned on catching sight of the colossal headline: "Kennedy Assassinated"! I rang Rediffusion at once and was asked to report for duty as quickly as possible, the station being ready to go "on the air" as soon as I arrived. I spent the remainder of the day reading "on camera" hastily prepared news flashes and "raw take" from the teleprinter during breaks between pertinent documentary film, earning myself a bonus windfall of HK$ 200.

Since my return to the Colony from inter-tour leave there had been a reduction in the number of television duty shifts I was allotted - due to the "new faces" who had been added to the roster of announcers. Whereas previously I had been "on" every other evening, I was now given two or three evenings a week, which certainly was a welcome let up in the stress factor.
The easing of this particular burden was largely offset financially by an increase in the rates of remuneration paid to announcers - from the original paltry HK$ 60 an evening, first to HK$ 80 and eventually to HK$ 100. Then from June 1964 on, I was also entrusted with the scriptwritingand voice presentation of "Hong Kong Focus", a weekly programme of local newsfilmed by Rediffusion's own team of in-house cameramen - which brought me in an additional HK$ 200 a week. Besides these regular fees I derived further financial benefits from being roped in from time to time for extra announcing duties, such as appearing in dinner jacket on Christmas Day or on New Year's Eve, when double the normal rates were paid. I always made a point of volunteering for at least one of these "festive" shifts. Then I was periodically invited to participate in special presentations of newsworthy events. I have already mentioned the Kennedy assassination. In October 1964 I belonged to the team covering the British General Elections - when I opened the station at breakfast time by announcing an unrelated, but nonetheless sensational news item: the sacking in Moscow of Nikita Khrushchov. In January 1965 I was enlisted to participate in coverage of the Churchill funeral.

My elation over having finally achieved my pipe-dream of job security and a safe pension on retirement was to some extent dampened by the deeply rooted disdain I had always nurtured for the colourless, soul-less Civil Service, to which I now found myself espoused for the remainder of my professional life! Furthermore, I had never been able to work up much enthusiasm for the dreary business of intelligence gathering from the haphazard streams of uninspiring human sources on which I had to rely. Nor was the associated tedium of report writing (or report editing) particularly edifying, especially when the end product seemed to be of generally questionable value - except on the very rare occasions when what was referred to professionally as a "nugget" actually surfaced. My somewhat ambivalent feelings over my freshly attained professional status were further exacerbated when, shortly after returning from my board, Rediffusion offered me a challenging new television assignment: the presentation of the 1965/6 Hong Kong Inter-Schools television quiz contest entitled "Right You Are", which was one of the Company's more prestigious "live" recorded programmes. "Right You Are" was sponsored by the local Chinese-owned English language newspaper the "Hong Kong Tiger Standard", whose principal editor Leslie Sung personally oversaw the programme's content. Administrative arrangements for the programme were in the hands of the "Tiger Standard's" public relations consultants, the Hong Kong branch of a Japanese company named "IPR" ("International Public Relations") which was managed by a charming and impressively tall Northern Chinese named Stephen Chow. Stephen engaged a British Naval Officer's wife named Heather Berger to deal directly with the schools participating in the contest. Heather was also tasked with looking after the teams and the audiences in attendance during actual recordings. I was left with the task of drawing up lists of the questions I proposed to put, which I had to select from both international and local news items appearing in current editions of the "Tiger Standard". Before each recording I was required to report to the "Tiger Standard" offices in order to submit my questions to Leslie Sung for his approval. As Quiz-Master I was left more or less in charge of proceedings during the actual recordings, which took place on alternate Sunday afternoons at Hong Kong University's Loke Yew Hall, two "quizzes" being recorded on each occasion. The "quizzes", for which I was paid HK$ 300 each, were then broadcast weekly over the period early November 1965 until
end February 1966.
Although Len Thorne's comment on the first two recordings was that I had "taken the show at too great a pace" and tended to give "a theatrical rather than a TV performance", I was subsequently able to strike a more relaxed key which undoubtedly went down a lot better. In fact, following the broadcast of the final programme he issued an internal memo in which he commented that "the atmosphere had been electric and the resultant programme without a doubt one of the most exciting of its kind ever to be recorded for the English TV Channel". Peter Gynt, the South China Morning Post's television critic, wrote: "Congratulations to Peter Hammond on the way he handled the final of the Schools Quiz "Right You Are". There is no getting away from the fact that Mr Hammond has the right touch for this business - what we call TV personality". The winning team, as well as the School they represented, were awarded a number of handsome prizes by a variety of commercial sponsors, the most coveted of which was a trip by the team members to Tokyo - by courtesy of Air France. While in Tokyo they were to be cared for by the Japanese parent company of "IPR"; and Stephen Chow ruled that if a Girls School won the contest, Heather Berger would be invited by "IPR" to accompany them as chaperone, while if a Boys School won, the privilege of accompanying them would fall to me.
In the event Heather was lucky: the St Paul's Convent School won! However, Stephen comforted me by offering to lay on a "duty assignment" to enable me, if I so wished, to travel to Japan at "IPR's" expense, which would involve my conveying personally a gift from him tothe Japanese President of "IPR" in Tokyo.