Jack Hargreaves

Who was Jack Hargreaves?

Jack Hargreaves OBE 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, which he also conceived; a children’s programme that went out live, mistakes and all, 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 better known as the gentle-voiced presenter of the weekly magazine programme Out of Town, first broadcast in 1963, following the success of his 1959 television debut with the B&W series Gone Fishing. He went on to co-host "Country Boy" with Ollie Kite, also on Southern Television, in which they introduced a boy from the city to the ways of country. His country TV programmes continued in the 1980s with Old Country. Other programmes he created for local viewers were Farm Progress and a live afternoon series Houseparty.

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 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.