This Is Your Life article

SEE... AND HEAR

STUDIO GOSSIP BY GALE PEDRICK

WHEN Leslie Jackson returned from his annual leave at the beginning of the week he was faced with the most exacting of the many difficult tasks that have come his way as a television producer.

In a current communique from the BBC Press Department is a statement that "Hancock's Half Hour" returns as a weekly attraction and will be preceded by This Is Your Life. The important piece of information embedded in this item is that the programme so many people love to hate will in future be presented not in alternate weeks but EVERY Monday night!

This means that the research work, the nervous strain of production, the last-minute crisis, the rejoicing, the tension and despair will all be doubled to say nothing of the headaches involved.

STORMY PASSAGE

This Is Your Life,, which found its way into the first four or five television "top shows," had a stormy passage into the world of British TV - although it had been a best-seller both in sound and on vision in America for years.

The crucial question was whether a show so American in outlook and approach would be accepted by the British viewer. In many quarters it was condemned before it had even been seen on the ground that it depended for its dramatic effect on "intrusion" into the private lives of the subjects.

In the event, complaints were few and far between. All the subjects said they were complimented by being chosen and delighted to meet a succession of old friends.

COLOSSAL TASK

Leslie Jackson and his team are busy sorting names of possible subjects and investigating the most promising. To put on a production like This Is Your Life at intervals of seven days is a colossal task and Mr Jackson has all my good wishes - and so has Eamonn Andrews.

The decision to make the show a Monday night fixture means that I shall no longer have any personal association with it. I feel some regrets about this but from a writer's point of view to prepare a script of this kind once a week would certainly be too much of a good thing. It would to all intents and purposes mean a full-time job and with my other commitments, this is not a practical proposition.

The first programme in the new series is scheduled for Monday September 30.