Jack Hargreaves 'Out of Town'
Jack Hargreaves, 'Out of Town: A Life Relived on Television', Dovecote Press 1987
www.dovecotepress.com/?page_id=716
...and my Wikipedia article about my stepfather:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hargreaves
The URL on Soundcloud - below - is for the soundtrack of Jack Hargreaves' last 'Out of Town' broadcast on Southern Television made in 1981 shortly before the station lost its franchise. The lack of a picture seems to make J's words more independent of their time, allowing me to imagine what he's observing, as in an unillustrated book. Distant sounds enter the background briefly. If the film was made in his usual way, it would have been filmed mute. A soundtrack appropriate to the film would be added in the studio and J would then record a commentary that would be spliced into the broadcast programme. My stepfather would not have been talking as the film was made, but sitting or standing beside his cameraman - Stan Bréhaut (Bray-o) - who'd been the other half of nearly all his programmes for Southern TV over 30 years. Stan filmed with an Arriflex camera without sound. Not until late in the series did he use a tripod..
soundcloud.com/simon-baddeley/01-last-oot
At the end of this track there's a video clip that I did find in which JH says 'cheerio' and opens a bottle of beer. This can be seen on a special episode of 'Out of Town' on Southern Television's successor Meridian, 'One more out of Town' at:
vimeo.com/13408662 at 01.50
[Email me at simon@baddeley.be for the password]
This programme compered by his friend and colleague Fred Dinenage was coincidentally broadcast the evening Jack died on 15 March 1994. Fred when I met him at Jack's funeral and who knew Jack was ill at the time the programme was made, said it was typical of his professionalism that whether by luck or magical intention it should have gone out that same night. JH had a liking for the risks of live TV, but this evening had been pre-recorded. Isobel, his wife of thirty years, who died in 1998, told me that though Fred had kindly sent her a tape shortly after the broadcast, she couldn't bring herself to watch it. I've never been able to find the original master track.
In July 2010 Ian Wegg, who'd traced me through the internet, kindly sent me a DVD containing the whole programme. I’ve edited it to show the episode of Out of Town that JH agreed to make for the broadcast, though the series had actually ended 13 years earlier shortly before Southern Television lost its franchise. In this 'special' the shed is not the usual studio rig, but one of my stepfather's real sheds - one at his last home, Raven Cottage, near Belchalwell in Dorset. Who was behind the camera then? I don't know. The broadcast includes a reunion between Jack and his companion entertainers on ‘How!’ the popular children’s programme he invented.
At the time this programme went out I was on a train. A few hours earlier I'd been beside Jack’s hospital bed with Bay, my sister. He was in a coma; had been far away since he'd arrived at the Hospital a few days earlier; already becoming part of everything, even though he seemed so palpably there and just in heavy sleep. At moments I’d wanted to raise my voice and shake him awake but he was a long way off. All the same we spoke to him in case he might have heard us somewhere in some last liminal space. Perhaps our voices hovered on a riverbank as he gazed at a rise or heard us by the edge of some wintry wood in the evening or imagined all of us, Bay and me and Mum, in the suspended time of dreams, strolling up Regent Street together after seeing a film in Leicester Square long ago, feeling it was now. Perhaps our murmurs by his bed fused with our childhood chatter in one river - Lambourn, Winterbourne, Kennet, Enborne, Itchen and Stour flowing together. Perhaps I’d imagined him a little boy again remembering his mother and father and brothers and the bullnose Morris days long before he knew us; long before the war and its intensities, Fleet Street, television studios, advertising agencies, cities of the plain and their dangerous women.
Perhaps all these were fleeting together to drift on the surface like sun sparkling off a cold chalk stream hiding for a moment the clean gravel, crayfish, caddis tubes and mayfly larvae, miller’s thumbs and brown trout suspended in the invisible current, with water crowfoot and emerald starwort stroking their golden scales.
Bay and me had eaten in Dorchester, then caught the train together and talked about Jack and Mum and our own children and us. It was the longest we’d been together for ages. I left Bay at Southampton so she could go on to London, phoning her husband Gabe to say she was on her way. “I think we’ll be back quite soon“ she’d said. Isobel rang me just after I’d got home to Birmingham saying Jack slipped away as the nurses turned him in the bed at 8-o-clock that evening when my train was somewhere between Banbury and Leamington Spa.
I have streamed more of Jack's programmes on Vimeo:
...and on Youtube:
www.youtube.com/my_videos?sq=Jack+Hargreaves
If anyone has original off-air broadcasts of Out of Town or Old Country I'd be delighted to hear of them and with the donor's permission will endeavour to show them on the web.
I manage this Facebook page on JH and 'Out of Town'
Jack Hargreaves 'Out of Town'
Jack Hargreaves, 'Out of Town: A Life Relived on Television', Dovecote Press 1987
www.dovecotepress.com/?page_id=716
...and my Wikipedia article about my stepfather:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hargreaves
The URL on Soundcloud - below - is for the soundtrack of Jack Hargreaves' last 'Out of Town' broadcast on Southern Television made in 1981 shortly before the station lost its franchise. The lack of a picture seems to make J's words more independent of their time, allowing me to imagine what he's observing, as in an unillustrated book. Distant sounds enter the background briefly. If the film was made in his usual way, it would have been filmed mute. A soundtrack appropriate to the film would be added in the studio and J would then record a commentary that would be spliced into the broadcast programme. My stepfather would not have been talking as the film was made, but sitting or standing beside his cameraman - Stan Bréhaut (Bray-o) - who'd been the other half of nearly all his programmes for Southern TV over 30 years. Stan filmed with an Arriflex camera without sound. Not until late in the series did he use a tripod..
soundcloud.com/simon-baddeley/01-last-oot
At the end of this track there's a video clip that I did find in which JH says 'cheerio' and opens a bottle of beer. This can be seen on a special episode of 'Out of Town' on Southern Television's successor Meridian, 'One more out of Town' at:
vimeo.com/13408662 at 01.50
[Email me at simon@baddeley.be for the password]
This programme compered by his friend and colleague Fred Dinenage was coincidentally broadcast the evening Jack died on 15 March 1994. Fred when I met him at Jack's funeral and who knew Jack was ill at the time the programme was made, said it was typical of his professionalism that whether by luck or magical intention it should have gone out that same night. JH had a liking for the risks of live TV, but this evening had been pre-recorded. Isobel, his wife of thirty years, who died in 1998, told me that though Fred had kindly sent her a tape shortly after the broadcast, she couldn't bring herself to watch it. I've never been able to find the original master track.
In July 2010 Ian Wegg, who'd traced me through the internet, kindly sent me a DVD containing the whole programme. I’ve edited it to show the episode of Out of Town that JH agreed to make for the broadcast, though the series had actually ended 13 years earlier shortly before Southern Television lost its franchise. In this 'special' the shed is not the usual studio rig, but one of my stepfather's real sheds - one at his last home, Raven Cottage, near Belchalwell in Dorset. Who was behind the camera then? I don't know. The broadcast includes a reunion between Jack and his companion entertainers on ‘How!’ the popular children’s programme he invented.
At the time this programme went out I was on a train. A few hours earlier I'd been beside Jack’s hospital bed with Bay, my sister. He was in a coma; had been far away since he'd arrived at the Hospital a few days earlier; already becoming part of everything, even though he seemed so palpably there and just in heavy sleep. At moments I’d wanted to raise my voice and shake him awake but he was a long way off. All the same we spoke to him in case he might have heard us somewhere in some last liminal space. Perhaps our voices hovered on a riverbank as he gazed at a rise or heard us by the edge of some wintry wood in the evening or imagined all of us, Bay and me and Mum, in the suspended time of dreams, strolling up Regent Street together after seeing a film in Leicester Square long ago, feeling it was now. Perhaps our murmurs by his bed fused with our childhood chatter in one river - Lambourn, Winterbourne, Kennet, Enborne, Itchen and Stour flowing together. Perhaps I’d imagined him a little boy again remembering his mother and father and brothers and the bullnose Morris days long before he knew us; long before the war and its intensities, Fleet Street, television studios, advertising agencies, cities of the plain and their dangerous women.
Perhaps all these were fleeting together to drift on the surface like sun sparkling off a cold chalk stream hiding for a moment the clean gravel, crayfish, caddis tubes and mayfly larvae, miller’s thumbs and brown trout suspended in the invisible current, with water crowfoot and emerald starwort stroking their golden scales.
Bay and me had eaten in Dorchester, then caught the train together and talked about Jack and Mum and our own children and us. It was the longest we’d been together for ages. I left Bay at Southampton so she could go on to London, phoning her husband Gabe to say she was on her way. “I think we’ll be back quite soon“ she’d said. Isobel rang me just after I’d got home to Birmingham saying Jack slipped away as the nurses turned him in the bed at 8-o-clock that evening when my train was somewhere between Banbury and Leamington Spa.
I have streamed more of Jack's programmes on Vimeo:
...and on Youtube:
www.youtube.com/my_videos?sq=Jack+Hargreaves
If anyone has original off-air broadcasts of Out of Town or Old Country I'd be delighted to hear of them and with the donor's permission will endeavour to show them on the web.
I manage this Facebook page on JH and 'Out of Town'