Another attempt to drop a heavy hint that we’d like a clean copy of an opening tune. In this case we’re sent to an HMV record (deleted, natch) and told that the Teledu Cymru piece is library music.

We wrote to both Bristol and Cardiff in an attempt to get copies of headed notepaper from both locations. This tactic rarely worked - especially here as both Cardiff and Bristol lost the previous letters anyway.

Our first contact with Geoffrey Lugg, head of presentation at ABC, Rediffusion in their last six months, and at Thames. Already you can hear the tone in his letter that his colleagues all remember - a friendly, personable, humorous chap who expected things to be done and to be done well but was always quick to praise when they were and gentle in his rebukes when they weren’t. He would give everybody and anybody the time of day. We moved on from letters to lettertapes to knowing him personally. He was Transdiffusion’s honorary president throughout the 1970s. We still miss him.

Here he is answering the questions we’ve all asked about early Thames now and again: why were there two idents, and why was one dropped? Also, why was Thames operating out of a building that still had a huge, illuminated sign that said “REDIFFUSION TELEVISION” on it?

The mention of seven-day Granada, by the way, was a humorous barb, he would later admit.

Granada’s oddly-shaped notepaper is lovely. A crisp, heavy matte grey paper with the Granada TV logo at the top in a gloss red that sits on top of the paper, leaving a lovely raised finish, rather than the usual embossing seen on quality letterhead.

The letter itself is interesting for two reasons. First, there’s no messing about at Granada. Kif Bowden-Smith’s double-barrelled name is swiftly elided to remove any non-Granadaland pretensions.

Second, the answer implies that Granada has in-vision announcing. It doesn’t, and it wouldn’t until the dawn of the 1970s, and even then with much misgivings on the part of the Bernsteins themselves. What Mrs Becker means is that the people you see in-vision are presenters of “Granada in the North”, an unusual mix of local news, features and continuity that ran through the evening between programmes.

When ‘GiN’ was not running, the other two names do the continuity from behind the Granada symbol.

In this day and age, if you write to the Chairman of a quango or the CEO of a company or the Secretary of State for a department, you expect that the letter will be intercepted by “a secretary” or something similar, and will then be routed to someone else in the organisation to deal with - sometimes a specialist complaints unit, but more often back down to the call centre you were stuck trying to get satisfaction from in the first place.

Not in the 1960s. If you wrote to someone up top in an organisation, they would most likely see the letter themselves and write back; if not, they would pass it down to someone senior with instructions that a full reply be given and the resulting letter would begin with an apology that the head honcho was not the one to reply.

Here we’re writing to the Independent Television Authority in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the forthcoming contract changes. And lo and behold, despite being the busiest he has ever been in this job, the Chairman himself replies to the letter we sent him.

Our idea was that TWW could survive after all, if it was given St Hilary Channel 10 and the Ridge Hill transmitter, creating a tight little ‘West’ region. Harlech could then continue on St Hilary Channel 7 and the former Teledu Cymru transmitters. In theory, it sounds like it would work.

In practice, it fails due to politics and finance.

The politics was at the ITA. Lord Hill of Luton had been stung by the 1964 contract round, where he wasn’t able to make any changes and was treated with outright arrogance by several of the incumbent contractors. He vowed that 1968′s changes would be different, and privately decided that a big company would be for the chop - a real reminder to all of them that they were there at the Authority’s pleasure.

The one for the chop was to be STV, but their competitor, the Grimmond Consortium, was terrible. Meanwhile, TWW’s competitor was good on paper. So TWW were the political sacrifice.

The finance issue was to do with overlaps and the Authority having got its fingers burnt in 1964 when Teledu Cymru collapsed. There was not the money for a full service in two languages from just west and north Wales. Adding the largely English-speaking south of Wales almost made it viable, but if the Welsh contractor faced competition from an English-language only incumbent who had already tied up most of the advertising contracts, the Welsh contractor would be bound to fail… again. This could not be allowed to happen.

We didn’t see this then, and Charles Hill didn’t, of course, explain it to us either, but in retrospect, he was right.

The 1960s were still in the age of deference, where people were expected to know their place. That was coming to an end as youth culture, which definitely and defiantly didn’t know its place, came to the fore and the baby boomers started to tear up the old rules.

But the age of deference worked both ways. While you were expected to address the BBC Engineering Information Department with a well-written letter that began Dear Sirs and ended Yours Faithfully, they were also expected to defer to you as well. So your letter was opened, and if it required someone to sit down and type out an answer, someone did.

In the meantime, a quick postcard was sent, just to assure you that your letter had been received and that it was getting prompt attention from an expert.

The financial basketcase that was early London Weekend had seen them almost go to the wall. Fortunately, they found a new investor who provided money, a better schedule and decided on a new look for the heretofore avant-garde station.

Sadly, the new investor was Rupert Murdoch. He was all the things that the Independent Television Authority didn’t want in an investor, let alone someone who appeared to have assumed the managing director’s chair: an Australian (at the time) whose money had been made from the grubby “News of the World”. They promptly threw him out of London Weekend and told him to take his schedule with him; the company, however, kept the new “oval” logo that replaced the previous wordmark they’d been using.

We wrote to ask them about the new symbol. Such was the turmoil in the company - or perhaps such were the dullness of the questions - they didn’t reply other than to thank us for our letter.

Rupert Murdoch, by the way was never heard of again. Joking! He, of course, came back 20 years later with Sky Television and now dictates British broadcasting policy through a revolving door of pet secretaries of state. So he made good, at least.

Give Tony Benn his due, he wasn’t a politician who did things without thinking about them or caring about what the public thought, even if he had no intention of changing his mind.

As Postmaster-General, effectively chairman of the General Post Office which had a monopoly on the Royal Mail, the Post Office counters, the telephones and the telecommunications infrastructure in almost all of the UK and a middle-ranking cabinet minister, Tony Benn was in charge of broadcasting policy for the whole country.

His policy was simple: the BBC was good, commercial endeavours were bad and unlicensed, unregulated ‘pirate’ commercial broadcasters were the worst.

To that end, he encouraged the BBC to cooperate in starting the Open University; he decided that the BBC, in association with local councils, should open and operate a chain of local radio stations; that ITV-2 would not happen; that BBC-3 would be the next television station; and that the off-shore stations - Caroline, Wonderful Radio London, 390, that type of thing - would be closed down. His main weapon was the Marine, etc, Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967, shortened to just the Marine Offences Act.

At the time of this postcard, it was still just a Bill making its way through parliament. The Bill decided to strike the “pirates” where it hurt, by cutting off their finances and supplies, making it illegal for a UK citizen or business to advertise with them or provide goods and services to them.

The teenagers of the UK were outraged, and organised in a way not seen before - writing letters, signing petitions, holding demos - and, it would turn out, using the vote they had just been given (the age fell from 21 to 18 in 1970) to help turf Benn and the rest of the Wilson government out of power.

As good and faithful teenage “pirate” listeners, we wrote to Benn to explain where he was going wrong with his Bill. The reply was this handwritten postcard, sent by return of post. True to his word, a full reply, albeit telling us nothing new, was sent from the GPO a few days later.

Southern’s envelopes had the relatively new “Southern Independent Television” name added to them by 1965. Their franking machine also had a repeat of their helpful slogan of the time, “The station that services the South”, in case you were in any doubt as to where a television station called “Southern” might be serving.

Tracking down signature tunes and start-up music in the days before IMDb, email and Shazam was hard work.

Most of them were library tracks and the libraries wanted a fortune for a copy - if they’d even provide one at all. Worse, they required the exact details of the track in question in order to even find it - they wouldn’t accept “the theme to [X] on Westward” or “the music Southern used for [Y] last year”, for fairly obvious reason.

So the first port of call was to ask the production company for a copy of the record on tape. This was almost alway, but not 100% of the time, answered with a straight out “no”. But the reply would usually contain the information required - or just enough that the record library would be willing to at least think about checking the rights situation in order to make you a personal copy on tape for 10/- or so.

Dealing with Southern Television was often like pulling teeth, with answers coming in small blobs of information, necessitating follow-up letters which, as seen here, got increasingly snotty in tone.

Still, we finally got the information we needed, if not the tape we wanted, and wrote to De Wolfe seeking a copy of the tune. We got it, but at an extortionate £2 2s 0d.

Do the BBC censor records? The rumours were flying back in early 1968 that the BBC had banned “I Am the Walrus” (misnamed in this letter as “I am a Walrus”) by The Beatles and “Jackie” by Scott Walker - they were not being heard on the still-new BBC Radio 1.

“Jackie” had reached number 22 in the charts during a nine-week appearance beginning the previous December; “I Am the Walrus” was the B-side to “Hello, Goodbye”, released in November 1967 and going on to sit at the top of the charts for 7 weeks.

The BBC were quick to deny that either record had been banned from Radio 1; it just wasn’t being played when people were listening, clearly.

This response is still controversial today - fans of both records from the time will insist they were censored; the BBC sticks to the line that it doesn’t ban, it merely doesn’t play some records sometimes to this day.