Monitor (British TV programme)
British TV series
Monitor is a British arts television programme that was launched on 2 February 1958 on BBC and ran until 1965.
History
Huw Wheldon was the editor from 1958 to 1962. He was also the principal interviewer and anchor until 1964. Wheldon set about moulding a team of talents, including W. G. Archer, Melvyn Bragg, Humphrey Burton, John Berger, Patrick Garland, Peter Newington, Ken Russell, John Schlesinger, Nancy Thomas, and Alan Tyrer. Monitor ranged in subject over all the arts.
The role as editor of the series was passed to Humphrey Burton in July 1962, lasting a year. He was succeeded by David Jones who had worked on the series since the beginning.
The hundredth programme, made in 1962, was a film directed by Ken Russell and written by Wheldon, the celebrated Elgar. The Elgar film was innovative because it was the first time that an arts programme showed one long film about an artistic figure instead of short items, and it was the first time that re-enactments were used. Before this, only photos or location shots had been used in programmes.
“Monitor (British TV programme)” enters the record as british TV series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Monitor, British and programme can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6900471. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1965, 1962 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monitor (British TV programme)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.