Sorry about how quiet it's been. Kristen has been working and I've been slaving away on my paper for Early British Television, about Dan Farson. Here's my intro:


“You might well ask, ‘Who was Daniel Farson?’ I was. Thirty years ago I was one of the first investigative reporters for ITV. And I had the great good luck of being in at the beginning when everything was new.” Perhaps prescient in regards to his relative obscurity (now), this was how Dan Farson introduced his own segment on Channel 4’s A-to-Z of Television (1990). He seems to have been largely forgotten, drastically under-credited, or mostly erased from TV history. Scan the indices of every British TV history book printed and you rarely see his name. Type his name into any search engine and you receive only two or three pertinent results to his television career, the rest relate to the prolific amount of books (mostly biographies) that he has written – the most frequent hit being his infamous biography The Guilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Though he largely left television in the mid-sixties, he was one of the first “television celebrities”, one of the most riveting television reporter and interviewer and left a notable body of work in the collective of early British television. In his 70 years of life he was a journalist, an American Army Air Corps GI, a photographer, a seaman in the Merchant Navy, a TV reporter/writer/director, and in his autumn years, an author. With so much under his belt, what then has happened to this important figure? Why is this prolific and memorable character so scarcely mentioned when speaking of those early pioneers of television? The following analysis of his life and TV career will show that his present obscurity is a gross injustice to the value of his “Farsonian” contributions toinvestigative reporting in early British television, if not British television as a whole.

-RP-