Farson joined Associated-Rediffusion, the first British commercial television company, in the mid-1950s. Here he took risks that few television interviewers (certainly not those employed at the then-conservative BBC) would dare to take. In his series "Out of Step" (1957) and "People in Trouble" (1958) – never shown at the same time throughout the ITV network, but much repeated in various regions well into the early 1960s – he dealt with issues of social exclusion and alienation that most of the media at the time preferred to sweep under the carpet. The best remembered editions of these series are the "Out of Step" programme on nudism (the term "naturism" had yet to become commonplace), which claimed to show the first naked woman on British television, and the "People in Trouble" programme on mixed marriages (a highly sensitive issue at the time as post-war immigrants tentatively began to integrate into British life). They were repeated in 1982 on Channel 4.