The third member of this triumvirate was Tony Pragnell formerly an Assistant Principal at the General Post Office who joined the

The third member of this triumvirate was Tony Pragnell, formerly an Assistant Principal at the General Post Office, who joined the ITA as Assistant Secretary in 1954, becoming Secretary in 1955 and second Deputy Director-General in 1961.Sendall and Pragnell were quite different in style, as Lord Hill of Luton, a later ITA chairman, remarked in his memoirs. He gave a fascinating account of the vicissitudes of the early years of ITV, how it came near to financial collapse and how it recovered to become an integral part of British life. A degenerative illness tragically curtailed hls authorship of subsequent volumes. He then started work on the first two volumes on the history of independent television. As the top civil servant on the team, he was responsible both for the money and the conscience of the festival's planners, who greatly appreciated his imaginative and flexible approach to problems He was appointed CBE for this work.

He then had a further spell at the Admiralty before moving into television.Sendall retired in 1977 and received the gold medal of the Royal Television Society for outstanding service to television. He graduated at 20 with a First in Modern History and went on to read Modern Greats. He then had a year as a Henry Fellow at Harvard.He joined the Home Civil Service in 1935 and worked first at the Admiralty, where, once the Second World War had started, he served as one of the three private secretaries of the First Lord, Winston Churchill. Later he become the Principal Private Secretary to Brendan Bracken, Churchill's choice as Minister of Information.After the war Sendall helped to convert the MoI into the new Central Office of Information, and in 1951 he was seconded as Controller of the Festival of Britain Office.

At the age of 16 he won a Demyship in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. Unlike the others around the table he had never made programmes himself, but he held clear and decisive views on what was worth transmitting to the whole country. His comment that one ITV light entertainment programme was "distressingly popular" became part of the folklore.Sendall went to the elementary school in Malvern where his father was headmaster, and from there won a scholarship to the Royal Grammar School, Worcester. In addition, Sendall had particular responsibilities for the supervision of programmes to terms of policy and taste.Sendall was the one member of the authority who regularly attended the Monday morning meetings of the Programme Controllers' Group, the powerful team representing the leading programme companies which determined the main framework of ITV's schedule each week. "Bernard was thoughtful, unobtrusive and civilised, concealing a considerable strength behind a gentle manner; not least important, the companies trusted him. Tony was coolly and calmly efficient, with a passion for detail and a mastery of the facts; he never allowed emotion to colour his judgement."The work of these three, under the general direction of the ITA's first chairman, Sir Kenneth Clark, was to establish the framework in which the new programme companies would operate, and to help decide which should be franchised.

The flurry of indignation among Conservative politicians when Fraser was selected as the first Director- General was well illustrated by David Low in a 1954 cartoon published in the Manchester Guardian which showed a gaggle of Blimps clad in towels demonstrating outside the ITA's headquarters. The chief architect was Sir Robert Fraser, born in Australia and recruited into journalism before the war by Harold Laski He had been a wartime member of the Ministry of Information. Maybe, just maybe, the tax and spending debate in this election could be illuminating and informative instead.. Bernard Sendall was one of a trio of remarkably talented civil servants who established the structure of the Independent Television Authority, as it was first called. Hence the review of child benefit for 16-18s, loans for graduates, and the switch of cash from assisted places to reduce class sizes for 5-7s.If the tax and spending debate between the two parties really does shape up into a choice between particular symbolic priorities the public could be in for a pleasant surprise. Means- testing invalidity benefit perhaps? Or further cuts in entitlement to housing benefit or one-parent benefits.Labour have already been seeking their own symbolic cuts and switches in resources so they can promise new policies but not be outmanoeuvred at the last minute on tax and spending.

What we really want to know is how the parties think taxes should be distributed, and what their most important spending priorities are. David Mellor's pre-1992 caricature of the parties as high-tax-high-spend Labour versus low-tax-low-spend Conservatives obscured more than it explained. Had Labour, in their obvious anxiety about the policy, fallen into the trap of promising to reverse it, the Conservatives would have immediately demanded to know where the cash was to be found. Watch out for spending cuts in a similar vein that Labour will hate, but that will be expensive to reverse.