XIB-less iOS project template refuses to receive touch events

Question

As the title says... I'm creating a template purely from code, ie without using XIBs.

So I create a window and a view controller, and the view controller in turn creates a view

( I am going to provide the answer below, just putting this up so is to save someone from banging their head from week on it. I'm creating a new question because the first question was poorly formed -- the solution had nothing to do with iAd framework, I should have debugged further and figured this out before posting. )

Answer 1

This is a UIKit bug. Full answer at iAd -- cannot click banner

The solution is to set the background colour of the view to anything! eg [UIColor redColor]