Pirouette

An Englishman named Harry Alan Towers, 30, whipped into Manhattan and out again last week on business that, in the past year, has carried him seven times around the world. His business: the international hawking of recorded radio shows. Towers sells British programs in the U.S., U.S. recordings in Australia, Australian programs in South Africa. "I doubt," he boasts, "that you can mention a radio station in the English-speaking world where we don't do business."

Towers himself produces about 35 shows in Britain (TIME, July 7, 1947), and he owns the foreign rights to some 100 more. They range from such cultural items as Sir Thomas Beecham's classical disk-jockey show to a blood & thunder crime series starring Orson Welles. Of the London-made programs, only two--Welles's The Black Museum and The Gracie Fields Show--are heard on a U.S. network (Mutual), but many of the others have been sold to individual U.S. stations. In turn, Towers exports to Britain and the Commonwealth nations such American series as The Hardy Family.

Towers' London office is a six-room apartment ("For years I've had one foot firmly planted there and kind of pirouetted on the other all over the world"), and his chief assistant is his sprightly, grey-haired mother. Explains Towers: "When you work with someone in your own family--why, then you have implicit trust."

Surprisingly, Go-Getter Towers got his start writing radio scripts for the staid old British Broadcasting Corp. Six years ago he formed his neatly named Towers of London, Ltd., and set off on his first world tour with an armful of recorded programs. With his shows now heard in every part of the Commonwealth, and with special programs broadcast in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands, Towers is looking with interest at television. But he has no intention of neglecting his first love, says of the U.S.: "Over here, people are working so hard on television that they've forgotten radio. The market was never so good, just because it looks so bad."

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