Short History
Created in 1976, the Edinburgh International Television Festival has grown to become the world's leading forum for media and television professionals
An extract from Who was James MacTaggart?
Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2005
Lost in the mists that often swirl around Edinburgh Castle are the origins of the Television Festival held annually since 1976. Most of the hundreds of TV folk who head to the city in the last weekend of August have forgotten or have never known that the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, the centrepiece of the Festival, predated the event by a year. Most of these people would likely know just as little of this MacTaggart character, except perhaps for the fact that he has passed.
But at the time of his death in 1974 James MacTaggart was celebrated as one of the leading producers, directors and writers of his time, and a two-day retrospective was held in Edinburgh in 1976, which culminated with a lecture, delivered by John McGrath, socialist, playwright and founder of the radical Scottish theatre company 7:84. The retrospective was billed as a "contribution to the 30th Edinburgh International Film Festival", and featured public showings of MacTaggart's acclaimed work, including Candide, The Duchess of Malfi and a TV film version of Robinson Crusoe, written and directed in Tobago just before his death in 1974.
Over the next year, Gus Macdonald, then executive producer of Granada's World in Action and deputy chair of the Edinburgh Film Festival, secured funding and support for what he called a "wee gabfest" for a "wee handful" of programme-makers, and in 1977 the first Edinburgh International Television Festival was officially convened.
There were 175 full and 300 temporary delegates at an event more radical in nature than the more moderate gathering of today. There were screenings of a number of previously banned films, including Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle; Jeremy Isaacs, then director of programmes at Thames Television, led a call for delegates to pass a motion demanding the BBC televise it. In 1982 there were rows about military censorship of the Falklands war, and in 1984, union leader Arthur Scargill was cheered when he denounced TV coverage of the miners' strike.
But what was initially intended was an event where programme-makers "would be allowed to speak freely because their bosses wouldn't be there" turned into a bigger gathering when people started saying the Edinburgh debates raised "huge questions, but there is no one here to answer them". So the suits started to arrive, and the event - now called the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival - is what Macdonald described in 2003 as an event where "any researcher can just walk in and pick a fight with the BBC Director General".