Jack Hargreaves
TV presenter
Died when: 82 years 74 days (986 months)Star Sign: Capricorn
Jack Hargreaves OBE (1911–1994) was an English television presenter and writer whose enduring interest was to comment without nostalgia or sentimentality on accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside, seeking – in entertaining ways – to question and rebut metropolitan assumptions about its character and function.
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 was the 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.
In 1967, with Ollie Kite he presented Country Boy, a networked children's programme of 20 episodes in which a boy from the city was introduced to the ways of country.
Two further series followed in 1969 and 1970.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.He was involved in the setting up of ITV, and a member of Southern's board of directors.
He was 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).
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.
