H		ß G | à I
	Dr E HAAS	Managing director, Polymedia
	The young generation, the buyers of the late 70s and 80s, will be more international in their taste than our generation is, let alone the generation of our parents. ... A long period of relatively free exchange of information and ideas has presented a chance for millions of young people to learn how other nations live and act, how they dream and otherwise express themselves. Their taste will be less provincial, more international than today. In Europe we can already now clearly observe the trend on television.	• Video Publishing Year conference, New York, September 1972
	WILLIAM HALEY	Sir William John Haley KCMG 1901-1987; journalist; BBC Director-General 1942-52; editor ‘The Times’ 1952-66
	1 The BBC must provide for all classes of listener equally. This does not mean it shall remain passive regarding the distribution of these classes. It cannot abandon the educative task it has carried on for twenty-one years to improve cultural and ethical standards.	• policy statement 1943; cit. Asa Briggs, Sound and Vision: History of broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol IV, 1979
	2 It is no part of the BBC's function to become another newspaper. News is only a small fraction of the BBC's activities and output. The spoken word can supplement the written word: it cannot supplant the written word.	• address to Radio Industries Club. 28 November 1944
	3 Broadcasting will not be a social asset if it produces only a nation of listeners. ... It is not an end in itself. ... The wireless set or the television receiver are only signposts on the way to a full life.	• 'The Place of Broadcasting', broadcast talk, printed in The Listener, 20 November 1947
	4 We cannot tonight present ITMA. Tommy Handley, 'that man', that humorous, ebullient, kindly man, around whose personality it was built, and whose art held it together, is dead. … In ITMA, Tommy Handley and his team ... created something significant. ITMA spans an age. The very title, with all it denotes if ever you stop to think about it, tells you how much history its lifetime covers. 'It's that man again' originally meant Hitler. How typically English it is that an epithet at first devised for something threatening and hateful should have been transferred to one of the most welcome and most lovable of men.	• broadcast, BBC Home Service, 9 January 1949 Listen to the broadcast [Source: BBC] See also Francis Worsley
	5 The aim of the BBC must be to conserve and strengthen serious listening. ... While satisfying the legitimate public demand for recreation and entertainment, the BBC must never lose sight of its cultural mission. ... The BBC is a single instrument and must see that the nation derives the best advantage from this fact.	• policy statement 1949; cit. Asa Briggs, Sound and Vision: History of broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol IV, 1979
	6 [Television is] An extension of [sound] broadcasting.	• Title of an article in BBC Quarterly (IV,3), autumn 1949
	7 An editor should have no regard for the side-effects of what he prints. That’s the job of the politicians.	• source unknown
	WILLIAM GLENVIL HALL	1887-1962; barrister, British Labour politician, vice-president of the British Film Producers' Association
	1 At the end of the last war the British film industry was practically dead. It was because of the short-sighted policy of the government at that time that Hollywood became the household word it is today, and that American films found their way into almost every corner of the world.	• House of Commons, debate on film industry, 1942
	2 I want to make it clear that neither is it intended to obtain additional revenue, nor is it an aggressive act against Hollywood in the interests of our own British film industry. The step has been taken simply and solely because the country cannot afford to pay for the exhibition of American films in this country at the present time. ...     The best British films are certainly more satisfying than the ones we get from America. ... The British cinemagoer has not, so far as I know, made any great outcry at the possible risk of losing American films under the duty. That lesson will not, I hope, be lost on the American producers.	• as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, House of Commons, 3 November 1947, on the 75 per cent import duty on American films, imposed on 6 August 1947
	ALAN HAMILTON	British journalist
	Like drugs, there is money in lowest-common-denominator vacuity. Endemol, the independent producer which makes Big Brother alongside its highbrow output of Changing Rooms, Ground Force and Ready, Steady, Cook, last year posted pre-tax profits of £15.8 million on a turnover of £89 million. No one ever lost a fortune by underestimating the public appetite for tackiness and vulgarity.         The satanic genius credited with introducing the idea of Big Brother to Britain is Peter Bazalgette, the Cambridge-educated son of a stockbroker who heads Endemol. He is the great-grandson of the illustrious Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who built London's sewers and rid the capital of a great stink. There are those who think that the present generation has reversed the flow.	• The Times, 7 August 2004
	TOM HANKS	1956- ; American film actor
	Being here tonight says two things. I am ready to be counted as someone who gives a damn about planet Earth. More importantly, it says: 'I own a TiVo and an not afraid of missing the finale of Friends'.	• at a Los Angeles ecological meeting, 6 May 2004. TiVo is a brand of  personal video recorder
	FORSYTH HARDY	1910-1994; Scottish film historian
	When films were silent and the Scandinavian producers could sell their films—as they did—all over the world, their achievement was remarkable in that they were competing successfully with stronger units in larger countries. When sound reached the cinema ... the mere survival of [Scandinavian] film-making became remarkable.	• Scandinavian Film, 1952
	ROBERT HARRIS	1957- ; British author, journalist and historian
	At least HBO made the film. TriStar optioned it and then dropped out when their market research showed that their target audience not only didn’t know who had won World War Two, they didn’t know what World War Two was.	• on the film of his novel Fatherland; quoted in The Independent, 24 November 1994
	JOHN HAWKINS	Director, Philips Consumer Electronics
	Technology is not the most important thing. The information highways are going to have to convey a new content. It is the quality of these new contents that will be paramount.	• European Audiovisual Conference, July 1994
	WILL HAYS	President, Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association
	1 The fact is, motion pictures are yours rather than ours. It is for you indeed to say what they shall be like and how far forward they may go toward their limitless possibilities.	• ‘Motion Pictures and the Public: An address before the Women’s City Club of Philadelphia, April 20, 1925’
	2 Whether we like it or not, we must face the fact that we are not in that class of industries whose only problem is with the customer. Our public problem is greater with those out of than those in the theater.	• MPDAA Annual Report, 1932
	ERNEST HEMINGWAY	1898-1961; American writer
	What you do is sell your book to the movies, go to the bar and take a drink. You don’t think about the movie, you don’t look at the movie, you know it’s going to be a piece of shit. The idea of selling a book to the movies is to make money.	• to Irwin Shaw, quoted in Richard Schickel: Brando: A life in our times, 1991
	CECIL HEPWORTH	1874-1953; pioneer British film-maker
	There was nothing of courage in what I did. It was always just a lark for me. ... I was suckled on amyl acetate and reared on celluloid.	• Penguin Film Review 8, April 1948
	Sir A P HERBERT	Sir Alan Patrick Herbert 1890-1971; barrister, MP (independent), humorous author
	And when the film was finished quite It made my bosom swell To find that by electric light I loved her just as well.	• ‘’Twas at the pictures, child, we met’ in A Book of Ballads
	ROBERT HEWISON	British cultural critic and historian
	1 Had we more faith in ourselves, and were more sure of our values, we would have less need to rely on the images and monuments of the past.	• in The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline, London: Methuen, 1987
	2 If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotised by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.	• in The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline, London: Methuen, 1987
	Dr/Lord CHARLES HILL	1904-1989; ‘radio doctor’, politician, chairman of Independent Television Authority 1963-1967, chairman of the BBC 1967-1972
	1 I hereby require (a) that the [British Broadcasting] Corporation shall not, on any issue, arrange discussions or ex-parte statements which are to be broadcast during a period of a fortnight before the issue is debated in either House or while it is being so debated; (b) that when legislation is introduced in Parliament on any subject, the Corporation shall not, on such subject, arrange broadcasts by any Member of Parliament which are to be made between the introduction of the legislation and the time when it either receives the Royal Assent or is previously withdrawn or dropped.	• Order made as Postmaster-General, 27 July 1955, enforcing a previously voluntary code
	2 The licence payer is also a voter. In calculating the licence fee, governments have an eye to the effect on the electorate. The fee lends itself to the dramatisation of politics: a single sum, extracted once a year, easily distinguishable from the general pattern of taxation. It is particularly vulnerable to those understandable hesitations and anxieties which may seize politicians as elections loom.	• Royal Television Society Convention, Cambridge, 1970
	ALFRED HITCHCOCK	1899-1980; British-born film director
	1 The chase seems to me the final expression of the motion picture medium.	• quoted in ‘Core of the movie—the chase’ in The New York Times Magazine, 29 October 1950
	2 While you’ll find heated denial in film circles that the average movie audience is only of teenage intelligence, and whereas a number of people in motion pictures take it for granted that TV is only for morons, the truth is that we who make TV films are allowed to end our stories on a downbeat note as often as not. So, in spite of bleats from some TV writers, we have more freedom on TV than we do in motion pictures. Perhaps all that proves is that people will accept more mature entertainment if they don’t have to pay for it.	• quoted in ‘Pete Martin Calls on Hitchcock’, Saturday Evening Post, 27 July 1957
	3 Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.	• source unknown
	4 Television is like the American toaster: you push the button and the same thing pops up every time.	• source unknown
	5 Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.	• source unknown
	6 The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.	• source unknown
	OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES	1841-1935; US Supreme Court judge
	A mirror with a memory.	• on the Daguerreotype process
	HERBERT HOOVER	Herbert Clark Hoover 1874-1964; US President, 1929-33
	1 The only justification for Federal regulation of radio communication lies in the fact that no such communication at all would be possible unless some authority determined the power and wavelengths to be employed by different stations and classes of stations in order to prevent mutual interference with the transmission and reception of messages.	• Annual Report as Secretary of Commerce, 1921
	2 The ideal of universal communication, which has long aimed to inter-relate everyone possessing the necessary equipment anywhere on this earth, is in its realization predictable and must be accepted as an augury of better understanding and of swifter means of accomplishment throughout the world.	• Radio Broadcast, September 1922
	3 I believe that the quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising. The reader of the newspaper has an option whether he will read an ad or not, but if a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements there will be no radio left.	• 1924
	BOB HOSKINS	1942- ; British actor
	I would love to go to see Blade Runner with Leonardo da Vinci. Can you imagine sitting there, wallop, ’ere y’are son, cop some of that! If you had some of that in your day would you have mucked about with a pot of paint?	• Statement for National Cinema Day, 2 June 1996
	JOHN HOUSEMAN	1902-88; Stage, film and television actor/producer
	People listen to radio in their cars, and what they listen to is music and news, and not to drama. Just, you know, if there’s a box that has sound and sight, and another box that has only sound, they’ll look at the sound and sight.	• ‘The Shadow Knows’, BBC radio documentary about Orson Welles, 1985?
	Lady ELSPETH HOWE	Chairman, Broadcasting Standards Council
	The exploitation of the misfortunes of others is not an endearing human trait. There is a limit to trial by television. A society which has long since abandoned the stocks should think twice about the modern version designed to titillate and entertain rather than inform.	• on confrontational talk shows; source unknown
	HENRY D HUBBARD	Secretary, US National Bureau of Standards
	Dare we expect a camera with automatic focusing, automatic aperture adjustment, a camera recording in full color, with bi-visual stereoscopic effect, developing the picture instantly, telegraphing the pictures, exactly as recorded automatically to be filed, and with mechanism for instantly locating any film without index, and exhibiting it immediately, a camera with self-sensitizing plates on which no separate pictures but a continuously changing picture is formed and erased after being telegraphed to the storage room.	• 'The Motion Picture of Tomorrow' in Transactions of the SMPE, Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 1921
	ANDY HUMPHRIES	British screenwriter
	Most film-makers don't worry about the finances because they do not expect to make any money in the first place.	• in connection with his debut film Sex Lives of the Potato Men, produced by his company, Devotion Films, with National Lottery money and tax breaks, and described as one of the worst two films ever made; The Times, 20 February 2004 See Spokesman for UK Film Council
	IAN HUNTER
	Only by a great expansion of the viewing habit can the present service develop—or perhaps go on at all. When you arrange your television parties, take care to choose an evening when there is something good on—such as a short play, a cabaret, or an outstanding personality. And don’t ask too many at a time.	• The Radio Times, 1938
ß G | à I

 

Page updated 14 April 2008
Compilation and notes © David Fisher