Talking Stock: Hi-de-Hi’s Opening Titles

Out of all the many great things about Hi-de-Hi!, one of my very favourites is how the show achieves such an achingly specific sense of period.

Part of that is the beautiful location filming, at Warner’s Holiday Camp in Dovercourt. Part of that is because Jimmy Perry lived and breathed this world, rather than spending his whole life indoors attempting to become a writer. And part of that is the brilliant theme music, which – much like the Dad’s Army theme – sounds like something which was sung at the time.

But alongside the strains of “Holiday Rock” is another, less-talked about means of establishing exactly when we are. Look past the close-up of Paul Shane’s face in the opening titles, and stock footage – mostly from the late 50s – plays in the background. A quadrant of key historical events of the time. And that same footage was used from Hi-de-Hi!‘s pilot in 1980, right through to its last episode in 1988.¹

So, where is this footage from? The answer is contemporary newsreels, mostly from the late 1950s, from outfits like Pathé and Visnews. And helpfully, the paperwork for the Hi-de-Hi! pilot lists every single one of the newsreels used, along with their catalogue number. So I thought it would be fun to try and trace every newsreel clip used in the opening titles, and find the full versions of each online. That, to me, seems like a worthwhile way of spending my life. I presume, if you’re still reading this article, that reading such a thing seems a worthwhile way of spending your life too.

First, the good news. I’ve managed to identify every single historical event depicted in the opening titles, and trace a good number of the original newsreels, especially when it comes to the Pathé material. On the other hand, even with the original paperwork, some of this material has been impossible to find. Exactly why is a bit of a story in itself, and I’ll explain along the way.

So take a trip with me now to 1959…

Khrushchev and Macmillan

Date: 22nd February 1959 • Original Footage: Pathé • Links: Pathé / YouTube

Luckily, we start with an easy one, at the top-left. Our very first piece of footage is Harold Macmillan – complete with fur hat – arriving at Moscow to meet Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. This was taken from a Pathé newsreel called “Russia Fetes Premier”.

The trip was the start of a ten-day visit to the USSR by Macmillan. Sadly, it failed to end the Cold War. Couple of lazy bastards.

SR.N1 Hovercraft

Date: 22nd June 1959 • Original Footage: Visnews • Links: Pathé / Screenocean

Top-right, and probably my favourite shot in the whole title sequence; early footage of the very first hovercraft ever made, the SR.N1. Oddly enough, this footage isn’t from the very first test of the hovercraft on the 11th June, or the famed Channel crossing on the 25th July. Instead, it’s from a relatively obscure source: Visnews footage of a Combined Services Exercise on the 22nd June 1959.

Great fun to watch in its own right with the helicopters and tanks… and then just as things can’t get any more exciting, the first hovercraft in the world races into view near the end.

“Sputnik”

Date: Unknown • Original Footage: Visnews

OK. So here we run into our first problem, and annoyingly early too. Even worse, this is surely one of the most interesting images. On the bottom left: two dogs, about to be sent into space on a Soviet rocket. Surely this should be easy to work out?

Sadly not. On the Hi-de-Hi! paperwork, this is simply labelled as “Sputnik”, and the footage is from Visnews – catalogue number 6919/A/1958. Unfortunately, we now run into a recurring issues with Visnews footage; much of it doesn’t seem to be available online. Moreover, Visnews doesn’t exist as a separate entity any more; Reuters bought it outright in 1992.

Now, some Visnews footage is freely available online; indeed, see the above hovercraft example, which has been syndicated to both Pathé and Screenocean. But it seems huge chunks of Visnews footage remain publicly inaccessible, and this is one of them. Which to me, feels odd; footage this striking of Soviet space dogs should surely be very easy to track down. As it is, I can’t even find out which of the Soviet space missions this is, or identify which of the many space dogs they are.

There is secondhand use of this footage elsewhere, though. This BBC news report uses the pictures while talking about the dogs Belka and Strelka, who flew on Korabl-Sputnik 2 in 1960. Meanwhile, this BBC Four documentary uses a still from this footage, but identifies them as Dezik and Tsygan (aka Gypsy), who flew in 1951. The Visnews catalogue number suggests the footage was issued in 1958, indicating that Belka and Strelka from 1960 are unlikely candidates – but at this point I’ve learnt not to take anything for granted.

This one remains a mystery, and is the single biggest thing in this article that I’d like to clear up. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Castro Speech

Date: January 1959 • Original Footage: Pathé • Links: Pathé / YouTube

Bottom right, and what a delightful source for something introducing sitcom hijinks; a Pathé newsreel called “Cubans Demand More Executions”. Castro can’t hear you, Die-de-Die campers, I’m going to move onto the next section now.

Billy Graham

Date: Probably 1961 • Original Footage: Visnews

The famed American evangelist, on one of his crusades, top-right. Annoyingly, this is more footage which I’ve not been able to track down yet. The paperwork labels it as Visnews footage merely titled “Billy Graham”, number 3682/1961, meaning it was issued in 1961. Checking a list of Billy Graham’s crusades – an action I never thought I would ever take, incidentally – he visited Manchester in 1961, which would seem a possible source of this footage. But nothing seems to be readily available online, and the footage itself is extremely nondescript, with few other clues.

Damn it all to hell.

Dr. Nkrumah

Date: 10th August 1959 • Original Footage: Visnews • Links: Pathé

Back to firmer ground for this one; this is also Visnews footage, but has been handily licenced to Pathé. This was the Ghanaian Premier Dr. Nkrumah, arriving at London Airport² for an official visit to the UK. Perhaps the significance of this visit has fallen off the radar in the intervening years; although he would see Macmillan, Dr. Nkrumah’s real reason for the trip was to visit Balmoral, to discuss the fact that the Queen’s royal visit to Ghana had been postponed.

The reason for the postponement? She was pregnant with… Prince Andrew. Let’s move on.

De Gaulle

Date: 8th January 1959 • Original Footage: Visnews

Right, this one is incredibly irritating. Bottom-right is the inauguration of General Charles de Gaulle as president of France. Footage of this is plastered all over the internet; not least in this Pathé newsreel. This feels like it should be an very easy piece of footage to find.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. This is, yes, more of that Visnews footage (number 183/59) which doesn’t seem to have been syndicated to anywhere else. So we can view plenty of shots of the inauguration online… from someone standing right next to the Visnews cameraman, at a slightly different angle. (The positioning of the pillar in the background is always the giveaway.)

In many ways, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Queen Mary

Date: Mid-1959 • Original Footage: Visnews • Links: Pathé / Screenocean

From Visnews footage simply labelled “Saunders Roe Houer Craft”, and suspiciously labelled as the 1st January 1959. Which I don’t believe for a single second, as it also includes footage of the SR.N1, which only did its first engine run on the 29th May of that year. I haven’t been able to trace for sure what day this footage does date from, but it would have been from one of these tests conducted in the middle of 1959.

However, if we’re going to take a punt: this article suggests that the 11th June is a strong possibility, it being the first press day for the hovercraft, and also linking the Queen Mary in the background.³

Khrushchev and Macmillan Again

Date: 22nd February 1959 • Original Footage: Pathé • Links: Pathé / YouTube

Well, this is an amusing turn up for the books. Top left and right, this footage of Khrushchev and Macmillan proved to be a confusing one to track down. Until I realised that not only do both shots come from the same Pathé newsreel, but it’s the same Pathé newsreel which started this article; that of Macmillan’s trip to Moscow!

That means three pieces of the footage used in the titles come from the same source; something that really isn’t apparent at all until you start digging into it.

Ban the Bomb

Date: April 1958 • Original Footage: Visnews

Oh good, it’s another infuriating one, top left. You really would think that footage of one of the most important protests of the 20th century – the very first CND march from London to Aldermaston in April 1958 – would be easy to find. But this is more Visnews stuff – number 5028/58 – and again, I haven’t been able to locate the exact material anywhere.

We can at least be sure that this was from the very first march, and not just because of the /58 in the catalogue number. The black MARCH FROM LONDON TO ALDERMASTON sign is extremely distinctive, and crops up in many photos from the time. Indeed, subsequent events actually marched the other way, from Aldermaston to London, so we know for a fact this is footage is from the 1958 march. But the actual material itself remains elusive.

One other shot is perhaps worth noting in this sequence:

Those particular designs for the BAN THE BOMB and ATOMS FOR PEACE signs are also extremely distinctive, but I haven’t been able to trace alternative shots of those anywhere else, not even in pictures of the time. It’s odd that what feels like famous, genuinely iconic footage, suddenly seems to be vaguely obscure.

Macmillan Re-elected

Date: 9th October 1959 • Original Footage: Visnews • Links: Pathé

A very unusual shot. This is from Macmillan’s re-election speech as MP for Bromley, and is from Visnews; but it isn’t a Visnews camera present at the speech. Instead, it’s clearly a telerecording – a Visnews camera pointing at a television screen, taking someone else’s footage, almost certainly the BBC’s. This is obvious from the black banding artefact near the top of the screen, which is more obvious in the full-frame image, but can even be seen in Hi-de-Hi!‘s titles, once you know to look for it.

Makarios Returns

Date: March 1959 • Original Footage: Visnews

More Visnews missing footage fun, just in case you hadn’t had enough of it. Bottom left, and we have a character who I frankly knew nothing about until I started writing this article; Makarios III, archbishop of the Church of Cyprus from 1950, and president of Cyprus from 1960. His history is far too complicated to get into here, so I’m not even going to try.

For our purposes, the key thing is that in the paperwork the footage is labelled “Makarios returns”, and has a catalogue number of 1606/59. This dates it to 1959, and while we are missing the Visnews footage, there is a Pathé newsreel called “Makarios Acclaimed”, detailing his return to Cyprus after three years of exile. It seems very, very likely that the footage used in Hi-de-Hi! is the Visnews equivalent of exactly the same event. Indeed, the Pathé newsreel ends with footage of Makarios at his palace, which is clearly the same location as seen in the Visnews footage used in Hi-de-Hi.

Sadly, as has happened far too often in this article, the actual Visnews footage of this event doesn’t seem to have been syndicated anywhere publicly. Which is really beginning to piss me off.

Elvis in Germany

Date: 1st October 1958 • Original Footage: Visnews • Links: Pathé

Let’s end on a pleasant note, then. Although if I’d had trouble finding footage of Elvis Presley of all people, I wouldn’t even have been able to bring myself to publish this article. Bottom right is footage of Elvis from his overseas military service in 1958; Visnews material that is helpfully available via Pathé. Thank God for that.

So there we have it. And while it’s vaguely annoying that I couldn’t find some of this material on the public web, it’s perhaps worth remembering that the whole point of this article wasn’t to point to footage behind locked doors, only available to real programme-makers. This was an exercise in seeing what we could find that everybody could see. No doubt if I paid a fair bit of money to dig around everything Reuters have to offer in their archive, I could find all of the missing material, but that wasn’t really what I was aiming for. From that point of view, the above is quite a good hit rate.

Still, I can’t help but feel that at least a couple of the mysteries above could be solved, by someone with a little more background knowledge of the events involved… or maybe just a little bit of luck. If you have any leads, then let me know in the comments below, or contact me elsewhere.

And that’s your lot… but wait a minute. I can already hear you thinking. (Stop whirring at the back there.) It’s all very well covering the material used in Hi-de-Hi!‘s opening titles, but what about the end credits, with all the shots of Butlins and the like? Surely there’s an interesting story there, too?

Of course there is. More on that next time.

With thanks to Al Dupres, Russ J Graham, Paul Hayes, and Tanya Jones.

1. The opening was amended in 1984 to accommodate Simon Cadell leaving the show, but the background footage remained the same. ↩

2. The old name for Heathrow, which changed in 1966. ↩

3. One oddity; the Hi-de-Hi! paperwork claims that the earlier footage of the SR.N1 and the Queen Mary come from the same newsreel, numbered 4301/59. But clearly, I’ve found the footage on two separate pieces of footage. It’s possible the paperwork is simply in error, or perhaps these two pieces were joined in the Visnews archive at one point, and have since been separated. ↩

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