DRAMA PLAYHOUSE

The Chancer

TX : 7August 30 1972
Director : William Slater
Script : Donald Bull

Cast : Sebastian Breaks (Tom Prince), Brian Blessed (Harry Shannon), Joy Harrison (Deborah), Kenneth Benda (Grimbold), James Kerry (David Aitken), Mary Hignett (Beryl), Robert Fyfe (Firth), Douglas Wilmer (Gerald Franklyn), John Saunders (Flood), Geoffrey Toone (Frederick Lessing), John Wilding (Edward), Jacqueline Ellis (Dorothy Aitken), Anne De Vilgier (Brenda Shannon), Ray Armstrong (Jason), Czeslau Grocholski (Stan) and John Dunbar (Marshall).

Synopsis : Bankers put their trust in men. An attractive character and some fast talking can make or lose them a million. How do Prince's assess the worth of Harry Shannon - a carpetbagger?

Notes : This episode was originally transmitted 8:10pm to 9:00pm.

SEASON ONE

Money Isn't Everything

TX : 7th January 1975
Director : Darrol Blake
Script : Donald Bull

Cast : John Rees (Harry Calder), Christopher Chittell (Eddie), Brigid Erin Bates (Susie), Charles Hill (Marshall), Gerald Case (Edward Dryden), Charles Hodgson (Mark Hammerson), Margaret Wedlake (Doris), Charles Kinross (Andrew Gorton), James Appleby (Fenner), Oliver McFarland (Maeve Calder) and Maggie Grant (Beryl).

Publicity : The Power Behind Prince's - Tuesday's new series The Venturers is about the drama and intrigue of high finance. Set in a merchant bank in the City, the nerve centre of the financial world, it stars Geoffrey Keen (of The Troubleshooters) as Gerald Lang, managing director of Prince's. Here, Donald Bull, who devised the series, sets the scene for The Venturers and Tim Heald gives a breakdown on the "Accepting Houses" - merchant banks: Money is fabulous stuff. Not just money as such - but all the things it means to us: power, love, greed, fear, glory, all the basic drives of our lives.

The Venturers is set in and around a great merchant bank of the City of London - "Prince's", one of the handful of "Houses" which over the past two hundred years have made the City the key financial centre of the world. It's no ordinary bank. At Prince's, millions are everyday figures, for it deals in the money needs of corporations, cities, countries, as well as the huge sums - it could be Arab oil money - seeking investment. Prince's seven-storey building in the City is a compact power centre whose decisions touch every activity of man in which money plays a part - which is just about everything. The men who make these decisions are men of power - such as Gerald Lang (played by Geoffrey Keen), managing director and executive head of Prince's.

Lang, fifty-five, is the maker of the modern Prince's, shaping it from the sleepy family concern it once was into the toughly streamlined organization it has to be to survive. Prince's has taken on Lang's own colour, questing, energetic, receptive to new ideas. There is no deadwood, even family deadwood: under Lang you deliver the goods or go. Take David Ayrton (played by James Kerry), who works on Prince's corporate finance side - the part that deals with mergers, takeovers, major issues of capital. The son of north-country school-teachers, David made it the hard way: through grammar school and Cambridge scholarships, on to Harvard Business School, and now, at thirty-eight, one of the coming men at Prince's, openly bidding for the top. But behind the assurance, there's still a chip-on-the-shoulder uncertainty about really belonging to the charmed inner circle. So his attitude to Tom Prince (played by David Buck) contains a hint of challenge. And not without reason.

Tom is a member of the bank's founding family, and he's inherited more than a fair share of the family charm and the family money. Yet he was never "intended" for the bank. Tom's father was an academic, his widowed mother an earl's daughter. Tom, now thirty-five and unmarried, spent his early years adventuring about the world, in the process becoming a pretty useful mining engineer, flier, sportsman. Persuaded into joining Prince's, "to keep the family end up," Tom quickly finds that under Gerald Lang banking can be as dangerously exciting as anything he's done before. High Priests Of Finance: There are eighteen members of the Accepting Houses Committee, the first division of British Merchant Banks, and their names - or most of them - are synonymous with style, wealth and influence: Rothschild, Baring, Lazard, Guiness, Hambro. Others, such as Brown Shipley, Charterhouse, Japhet, and Singer and Friedlander, may be less well known to the public, but that doesn't make them any the less powerful.

Most of the banks are cheek by jowl in the City, often on the original sites, though unusually in new buildings where the old portraits and furniture are retained to give an impression of antiquity. The great merchant banks originated mainly in the last century and, as their name suggests, they were often involved in trade. Brandt's, for instance, now owned by National and Grindlays, set up their first London office in 1805 at Batson's coffee house in Cornhill as agents for the family's business at Archangel in Russia. There they owned factories, a rope works, a sailing fleet and timber forests and saw-mills. In all, it was worth thirty million roubles - three million pounds. Today most of the Brandts have left, though one remains as head of the firm's timber agency, which is still one of the world's largest. Marcus Samuel, founder of Hill Samuel, began trading with the Far East in 1830. The Kleinworts were the principal original underwriters for Woolworth and Sears Roebuck; the Bensons with whom they later merged financed many of the early American railways. Other nineteenth-century ancestors of today's great banks were already engaged in more glamorous adventures.

The Barings helped the Americans buy Louisiana from the French; the Hambros financed Cavour in Italy and Rothschilds put up money for our purchase of the Suez Canal. Today, the power they wield is, if anything, greater still. One recent estimate suggested that more than a third of the top one hundred British industrial companies have a senior merchant banker on the board. Every major takeover or merger is fought out by merchant banks and all big companies retain the services of a merchant bank on a permanent basis, just as they would an advertising agency, say. One-Hundred-Thousand Pounds As Minimum: Moreover, the banks' influence continues to range worldwide. Shortly before we started borrowing money from the Shah, Brandt's arranged a two-hundred-million-dollar loan to the Iranians, and Kleinwort Benson are financial advisers to the projected Hong Kong underground railway. As well as organizing loans they also manage investments, few nowadays from private individuals, who simply aren't rich enough to make them worth the bank's while. A classic banking story tells how a property magnate asked a merchant bank to take charge of one-hundred-thousand-pounds for him. This was the bank's minimum amount.

Two years later he received a letter. "Dear Sir," it said, " You recall that when your first entrusted us with one-hundred-thousand pounds we told you that we could not consider managing smaller sums. Under our management your shares have now fallen to fifty-thousand pounds and we must therefore ask you to find another company to manage them. But, of course, over recent years much of the old-world family atmosphere of the banks has changed. Many banks are now subsidiaries of larger holding companies and relative newcomers like Sir Siegmund Warburg have entered the banking establishment to upset the traditional balance of power. "Everyone's Too Clever": Nowadays most bankers are well-qualified, usually as accountants or solicitors though there seems to be a high proportion of bright Oxford and Cambridge graduates with arts degrees. As one director put it forlornly: "In our business everybody is terribly coherent. They all talk far too much and usually all at the same time. Everyone's too damned clever". Most seem to have a smart London address (Cheyne Walk, Belgrave Square) and a smart country address. Smartest of all, perhaps, was David Montagu and Company.

His was: The Kremlin, Newmarket. The Guards, and such clubs as Boodles, Pratt's and the Cavalry also abound. Some banks are almost absurdly secretive about their work and their customers, while others are almost brazen at self-advertisement. Hambros make no secret of the scope of their business and while not entirely typical it gives some idea of what merchant banking is about. Eighty per cent of Italian bankers use them as their main or sole London agent (the legacy of the Cavour episode, perhaps); they finance imports of Danish bacon and Volvo trucks; they are heavily involved in forestry, worldwide, and in 1971 arranged a sixty-million-dollar credit for Brazilian shipyards and arranged finance for thirty-one ships delivered in 1972.

Other banks conduct similar operations, often working at breakneck speed and dealing in tens of millions of pounds. As one banker said: "The great thing about this job is that you have to think fast and live on your wits. The most important thing to remember is that a top banker is not just someone who makes a profit for the bank, he is, essentially a wielder of power". (Radio Times, January 4, 1975 - Article by Donald Bull and Tim Heald).

Synopsis : The compulsion to make a million can sometimes be like the devil sitting on your back.

Notes : Episodes were originally transmitted 8:10pm to 9:00pm.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

TX : 14th January 1975
Director : Baz Taylor
Script : Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley

Cast : Prunella Ransome (Helen Sinclair), Margaret Wedlake (Doris), John McKelvey (Philip Bishop), Jonathan Elsom (Michael Croxley) and Richard Steele (Harry Boothroyd).

Synopsis : Having acquired her first million Helen Sinclair immediately goes chasing after her second. But is it wealth she so desperately wants or emotional satisfaction?

The Rich Lunch

TX : 21st January 1975
Director : Gerald Blake
Script : David Weir

Cast : T P McKenna (Harry Donlan), Christopher Banks (Pegg), Hubert Rees (Merry), Barrie Cookson (Ian Lowell) and Nigel Lambert (Grasse).

Synopsis : "I've been set up, haven't I? Got here just for the doing-over. All the smarm and polish, manners and use the right fork, but it's still the jungle, isn't it?".

Gilt Edged

TX : 28th January 1975
Director : Douglas Camfield
Script : Marc Brandel

Cast : Walter Randall (Terris), Terry Walsh (Charlie), Cotchie D'Arcy (Pat Dwyer), Molly Maureen (Mrs Norwood), Natalie Kent (Mrs Brent), Geoffrey Beevers (Mario Celine), Sally Bazely (Mrs Grant), Julian Somers (Mr Foote), Erik Chitty (Mr Haversham), Martyn Jacobs (Plummer), Julia Vidler (The Secretary), Jim Norton (Best), James Walsh (Jan), Christina Paul (The Waitress), Isla Blair (Joanne Kelly), George Waring (Prentice), Patrick Barr (Albert Hart) and Nicholas McArdle (Sergeant Duff).

Synopsis : Money isn't enough. It never is. A man's got to be driven as well as rewarded. It's the only way to get the best out of him.

The Honeypot

TX : 5th February 1975
Director : Baz Taylor
Script : Donald Bull

Cast : Robert Beatty (Harmer Loden), Frederick Schiller (Oskar), Guy Deghy (Baron von Pavelius), Paulette Preney (Madame Charel), John G Heller (Kanzier), Ibrahim Zada (Sheikh Rassid), Nadim Sawalha (Kasim Rassid), Margaret Wedlake (Doris), Aharon Ipale (The Sheik's Secretary), Willy Bowman (The Waiter) and John Rapley (Max Zeller).

Synopsis : "Right now there's thousands of millions of oil money washing about the world, swamping the money markets … the situation's explosive".

Gentleman's Agreement

TX : 12th February 1975
Director : Baz Taylor
Script : Arden Winch

Cast : Terry Scully (Barnes), Patricia Heneghan (Beryl Barnes), Donal McCann (Les Cary), Lindsay Campbell (Sir George Thomas), Ian Marter (Patrick Dyson), Mark Penfold (The Site Foreman), Michael Earl (Lester), John Falconer (Harland), John D Collins (Doctor Tate), Alan Gerrard (Green), Reginald Barratt (Hopkins), Tony Rohr (Harry), Howard Southern (Hale) and Stanley Dawson (Watkins).

Synopsis : "On one side, a fifty-million-pound investment; on the other hand a hundred homeless people. Which is more important, money or human beings?".

The Leak

TX : 19th February 1975
Director : Darroll Blake
Script : Donald Bull

Cast : Pauline Letts (Peggy Lang), Tessa Shaw (Helen), Valerie Van Ost (Julia), Jason Fathers (Wilfred), Dixon Adams (Swaine), Charles Hodgson (Mark Hammerson), Terence Bayler (Trevor Darcey), Rachel Herbert (Hester Peverill), Paul Williamson (John Peverill), Leonard Pieroni, Annabella Kevill, Monty Haltrecht, Frances Kearney and Peter Vidovic (Party Guests), Geoffrey Drew (The Clerk), Nigel Bradshaw (Jimmy), Peter Copley (Sir Stanley Pelham), David Morrell (Lawton), Rita Giovanni (The Maid) and Margaret Wedlake (Doris).

Synopsis : "We're bound to come under suspicion. Once the Stock Exchange starts digging you'll be up, we'll all be up".

The Cannibals

TX : 26th February 1975
Director : David Sullivan Proudfoot
Script : Donald Bull

Cast : Charles Gray (Tony Challon), Robert Flemyng (Reginald Curnow), John Hammill (Spinney), Anton Derby (Ted), Jenny Till (Fran Forrest), Martha Nairn (Bridget Forrest), Margaret Wedlake (Doris), John Kelland (Pearson), Vernon Dobtcheff (Fraser), Pamela Sholto (The Coroner), John Berwyn (Doctor Lamie), Michael Bangerter (Sergeant Gelder), John Gabriel (Major Denis), Norman Shelley (Wyatt) and Gertan Klauber (Bergman).

Synopsis : "The butchers are round the body. It's only a question of who is going to cut himself the largest chunk…".

Sentimental Journey

TX : 4th March 1975
Director : Baz Taylor
Script : Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley

Cast : Norman Rossington (Frank Bolton), Harry Markham (Uncle Dick), Kathleen Heath (Margaret), Bernard Kay (Sir Charles), James Smith (The Barman), Christine Hargreaves (Jane Carter), Madge Hingle (The Dustbin Lady), Maggie Handley (The Secretary), Martin Matthews (The Shop Steward) and Margaret Wedlake (Doris).

Synopsis : "They say that the big money boys stick people into computers, press a button, and if it doesn't start singing `We're in the money' it plays `So long, it's been good to know you'".

Dangerous And The Lonely Hearts

TX : 11th March 1975
Director : David Sullivan Proudfoot
Script : Donald Bull

Cast : Robert Sansom (Barratt), Pauline Letts (Peggy Lang), Olu Jacobs (Mbela), Fiona Gray (Sandra), Nick Brimble (Roddy Smith-Mercer), Margaret Wedlake (Doris), Michael Brennan (Bill), John Wyman (Jimmy), Malcolm Reynolds (Jock), Eric Deacon (Don), Tony Sibbald (Harry), Peter Arne (Kosmos), Glynis Brooks (The Doctor's Secretary), Salami Coker (Neroka) and Sidney Johnson (Lipton).

Synopsis : "No sane man ever makes a prediction about gold. You might as well throw two sticks in the air".

Characters	Portrayed By
Gerald Lang	Geoffrey Keen
Tom Prince	David Buck
David Ayrton	James Kerry
Dorothy Ayrton	Karin MacCarthy
Freddie Pender	Hugh Manning
Lord Kilvern	Cyril Luckham
Sir George Fielding	Willaim Squire