Out of Town
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Jack Hargreaves OBE |
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| Born |
31 December 1911 Palmers Green, London |
| Died | 15 March 1994 (aged 82) Winterbourne Hospital in Dorchester |
Jack Hargreaves OBE (31 December 1911 in London – 15 March 1994) was an English television presenter and writer. His enduring interest was to comment without nostalgia or sentimentality on accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside.
He is remembered for appearing on How, a children's programme, which he also conceived, about how things worked or ought to work. It ran from 1966 on Southern Television and networked on ITV until the demise of Southern in 1981.
Hargreaves is well known as the gentle-voiced presenter of the weekly magazine programme Out of Town, first broadcast in 1960 following the success of his series Gone Fishing the previous year. Broadcast on Friday evenings on Southern Television the programme was also taken up by many of the other ITV regions, usually in a Sunday afternoon slot. He also presented three series (one of them with Ollie Kite) of Country Boy, a networked children's programme in which a boy from the city was introduced to the ways of country. Other programmes he created for local viewers were Farm Progress and a live afternoon series Houseparty. His country TV programmes continued after the demise of Southern with Old Country for Channel 4.
Most of his viewers were probably unaware that he was a player in the setting up of ITV, and a member of Southern's board of directors. From early in his life he acquired a sophisticated grasp of city life. He made his reputation in the heart of London, on whose outskirts he was born. Yet for the last 30 years of his life, while employed by the National Farmers' Union, serving on the Nugent Committee (the Defence Lands Committee that investigated which parts of the Ministry of Defence holdings could be returned to private ownership) and throughout his later career as a TV personality, he sought – in entertaining ways – to question and rebut metropolitan assumptions about the character and function of the countryside. A biography of Hargreaves by Paul Peacock was published in July 2006. It was for his contributions to the Defence Lands Committee which produced the Nugent Report in 1973 that he was appointed an OBE.
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