How a shed become an icon of broadcasting history
Steve Wagstaff
There was a time when Jack Hargreaves’ rustic potting shed was famous.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hargreaves presented TV show Out of Town, a successful weekly documentary about traditional country life.
He would sit in a mocked-up shed, built inside a television studio, instantly recognisable with his white beard, briar pipe and wax jacket.
Later episodes were filmed in his actual shed at his home in Belchalwell, Dorset, with the show regularly beating Coronation Street in the ratings across the south of England.
In the beginning, Hargreaves would talk to the camera from inside the mock-up version at Southern TV’s Northam studios in Southampton, Hampshire.
“[He] introduced films that he’d done and he talked over them,” said cameraman Steve Wagstaff, who worked with the broadcaster.
“There was no sound on the films, it was just him talking around them live,” he explained.
Born in London in 1911, Hargreaves produced morale-boosting public information broadcasts during World War Two.
He also ran political PR campaigns in the 1950s and, as deputy programme controller of Southern Television, even created long-running ITV educational children’s TV programme How.
Steve Wagstaff
But his true love was the natural world.
“Sometimes we’d go out and film sheep shearing or meet blacksmiths or wheelwrights,” said Wagstaff.
In 1982, Southern TV was taken over by Television South (TVS) and Hargreaves had to jump ship.
“The problem for Jack was he was part of the management team so he couldn’t continue with TVS,” the cameraman said.
“At the time, Channel Four was just starting and he decided to do the same programme but called Old Country for Channel Four.”
For this new venture, Hargreaves’ garden shed studio was set up inside the village hall in Meonstoke.
More than a decade later, the iconic set up was replicated in BBC comedy sketch series The Fast Show.
Charlie Higson played a genial countryside TV presenter character called Bob Fleming, who was to all intents and purposes Hargreaves, with a very bad cough.
Old Country lasted for three series and Hargreaves then entered the home video market.
He produced a series of 28 programmes under the original title Out of Town and, for these, Jack did his bits to camera from his actual shed at his home in Dorset.
“He moved to Belchalwell and he had a barn built in the back field,” said Wagstaff.
“All the films that Southern TV had made were kept in storage. Those films were useless to anybody else so he acquired them.
“We went along to his real shed and we filmed the links between those films. He would present to camera and talk a bit about some aspect that was in the shed and then introduce the films.”
In 1972, Hargreaves was awarded an OBE for his work on the Nugent Report, which looked how land owned by the Ministry of Defence could be returned to public or agricultural use.
The broadcaster died in Dorchester in 1994 and his ashes were reportedly scattered on Bulbarrow hill, just south of his Belchalwell home.
But what became of his shed?
Wagstaff says it still survives intact.
“The shed is still there,” he said. “I went back there when the house changed hands and the shed has not been touched, it was the same as it was when we were filming there.”
Broadcasting
Television
