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Celebrating television's This Is Your Life

  

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THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Arthur Christiansen, journalist and newspaper editor, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews outside the BBC Television Theatre, having been led to believe he was in Shepherd's Bush for an appointment.

Arthur, who was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, began his career in journalism as a trainee reporter at the age of 16 with the Wallasey Chronicle, where he worked for three years before moving to the Liverpool Daily Courier and Evening Express. He was named the London editor of the Evening Express in 1925, a position he held for a year before moving to the Sunday Express. In his next role as editor of the Northern Daily Express, he built up the readership by producing a front page which led on Manchester or northern-based headlines - a revolutionary act at the time.

He returned to London in 1933 as editor of the Daily Express, where his imagination and artistry set a new standard in British journalism. His innovations, which included introducing a single headline to the front page and employing women reporters during the Second World War, led to a four million sales peak by 1949. Arthur, affectionately known as Chris, retired from the Daily Express in 1957 after 24 years.

programme details...

• Edition No: 38
• Subject No: 38
• Broadcast live: Mon 21 Oct 1957
• Broadcast time: 7.30-8.00pm
• Venue: BBC Television Theatre
• Series: 3
• Edition: 4

on the guest list...

• Francis Williams
• W H Browning
• Ernest Edwards
• Rupert Denny
• Tim Healey
• Dennis Dunn
• Sir Leslie Plummer
• Brenda - wife
• Celia Ramsey
• Frank Owen
• Bill Knott
• Percy Cudlipp
• Sarah Ellen - mother

related appearance...

• Sefton Delmer - Jan 1962

production team...

• Researchers: Nigel Ward, George Bruce, Michael Friend
• Writer: Ken Smith
• Director: unknown
• Producer: T Leslie Jackson

• names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

Stop Press

headlining Fleet Street's finest

'This Is Your Life' But It Dominates MINE!

Producer Leslie Jackson recalls some heart-stopping moments

Split Second Danny

Radio Times feature on the programme's chauffeur

Photographs of Arthur Christiansen This Is Your Life

The People 20 October 1957

I AM tired of those far-fetched gimmicks to get personalities into the BBC's This Is Your Life studio.

Eamonn Andrews moving in the audience to pick out the unsuspecting celebrity is much more entertaining than those laborious tactics involving cars driving mysteriously and needlessly up to the back door.

I hear that tomorrow's This Is Your Life is exciting the BBC into thinking they will cause a sensation.

In the tricky secret plans preparing it they had one shock – a man to be flown from the United States had a heart attack, and now can't attend.

---

The Liverpool Echo 22 October 1957

TELECRIT

Last Night's Tribute To Journalists

THIS IS YOUR LIFE paid its tribute last night to the people who produce newspapers. It told something of a story of Fleet Street and it underlined the substantial contribution Merseyside has made to modern newspaper history.

Subject for the programme was Arthur Christiansen, hijacked from a car passing the studios to be led before the cameras.

Christiansen, one of Fleet Street's biggest success stories, started his newspaper life in Wallasey as a junior reporter earning 15s a week. His progress was rapid.

Many of the best-known names in journalism were in the studio to offer their personal tribute to Christiansen. Among them were many of the friends he made during his years on Merseyside – Ernest Edwards ("Bee") of the Echo among them.

It was a programme which could not fail to hold the rapt attention of every journalist who happened to be looking in. And I like to think that even the ordinary viewer, who is inclined to take his daily paper very much for granted, found much to interest him in this story of the men who make newspapers.

---

Daily Express 22 October 1957

The paper that set a fashion

ARTHUR CHRISTIANSEN, former editor of the Daily Express and now executive director of Beaverbrook Newspapers, was the subject last night of the TV programme This Is Your Life.

He heard Percy Cudlipp, former editor of the Evening Standard and the Daily Herald, say this of "the young eaglets"...

"That was the name Lord Beaverbrook gave to the young men, very often 20 or 30, to whom he entrusted positions of high power in his newspapers."

"Christiansen and I began together as young eaglets 24 or more years ago."

"He made of the Daily Express the most admired newspaper, the finest job of craftsmanship in the world, because every man was taught to regard each headline and each sentence as a work of art."

"It became a paper which set a fashion in journalism throughout the world."

---

Liverpool Daily Post 22 October 1957

Fleet Street is a parish and I imagine it was the professional locals who gained most from last night's This Is Your Life which was devoted to Arthur Christiansen, the one time 15s a week reporter in Wallasey who rose to be the £15,000 a year editor of the Daily Express.

There must be some sort of television programme in which a success story like his could be presented with illuminating effect, but last night's formula of an endless succession of verbal bouquets, even though one came from so greatly respected an elder journalist as Ernest Edwards ("Bee"), was not the way to project the personality of a man of Christiansen's calibre.

All the time one felt he was only wishing he could have been allowed to speak for himself.