Jack Hargreaves

John Herbert Hargreaves OBE (31 December 1911 – 15 March 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. Hargreaves 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 (of which Hargreaves was a director) 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 each episode Hargreaves appeared in short 16mm film reports on some aspect of rural life, usually one in each half of the episode. The films were introduced and narrated by him from a studio set based on the interior of a garden shed.

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 programmes continued after the demise of Southern Television with three series of Old Country for Channel 4 between 1983 and 1985.

Hargreaves was involved in the setting up of ITV, and a member of Southern's board of directors, and 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). Hargreaves was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1972 New Year Honours. A biography of Hargreaves by Paul Peacock was published in July 2006.

Early life Born in Edmonton, Middlesex, on 31 December 1911, the son of James Arthur and Ada Hargreaves (née Jubb), Jack was christened John Herbert and was one of three brothers. The family was rooted in Armitage Bridge near Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where at the time of his marriage in 1907 James Hargreaves was a commercial traveller. He based himself partly in London in connection with his work and also to allow his wife the benefits of the capital's midwifery. The brothers attended Merchant Taylors' School, then at the London Charterhouse, in Farringdon, after which Edward and Ronald Hargreaves pursued successful careers in medicine (Ronald became a noted psychiatrist), while in 1928 Jack went to study at the Royal Veterinary College of London University.

Early career

On leaving the college, Hargreaves worked as a vet's assistant, but he was soon earning a living as a journalist. He also became a copywriter, and script writer for radio and films, and by the late 1930s he had established a reputation for his pioneering approaches to radio broadcasting. His reputation as a communicator went ahead of him and he was recruited to the staff of General Montgomery to play a role setting up broadcasting services to Allied forces before and after D-Day. He left the army in 1945 with the substantive rank of major, having briefly held the acting rank of lieutenant-colonel. reviewing the use of land held by the country's armed forces for defence purposes. He became of the opinion that one of the best ways to reserve the countryside for its proper purpose was to keep most people out of it.

Talking Pictures TV began broadcasting Out of Town on 5 February 2024. This included all of the surviving Southern Television episodes and the 1985 compilations made for the home video market.

In May 2025 the British free-to-air channel Rewind TV announced that they would be transmitting Old Country from 20 July 2025.