by Louis Barfe
On And So To Bentley, Tesler collaborated with another young producer. Ernest Maxin learned his craft not in university revue, but on the variety stage. Maxin’s violinist father had passed on his musical skills to his son, while his maternal grandparents had run a boarding house for theatricals in Leeds, as a result of which Harry S. Pepper was a friend of the family:
He came round to visit us one evening at teatime. I was practising, he heard me playing a little Bach and Mozart on the piano and he said to my mother and father ‘You know, we’ll take the kid on tour with us. We’ll black him up and we’ll make him a minstrel.’ My father said ‘No, mein boy is going to be a classical pianist,’ but my mother said ‘How much, love?’34
Maxin spent the next three years touring with Pepper’s company, getting a thorough grounding from the other acts in everything from tap dancing to timing a gag, before he fell foul of the child performer’s main occupational hazard:
We were at the Sheffield Empire and Harry rang my parents, to say ‘I’m sorry, Dora and Max, but the kid’s washed up in the business, he’s not getting the laughs any more.’ I was too big. It was funny when my feet didn’t touch the floor. I was nine, but I looked about thirteen. So you’re looking at the only guy who was washed up at nine without a pension.35
Nonetheless, Maxin continued performing through his school years, and devoured every Hollywood musical that he could. When he left school, he became a professional actor and dancer. One engagement was an Australian tour of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire with Vivien Leigh. A BBC booker came out to try and entice Leigh to work for television. She said no, but the booker suggested that Maxin should go and see them on his return. He saw this as his golden opportunity:
From when I was with the minstrels, I wanted to be a producer and a director. Harry S. Pepper sometimes used to throw his coat over his shoulders, and I saw myself being like that. I didn’t feel I was ready for films, but I’d seen some television and I was excited by it. I thought it was the right progression.36
As suggested, he presented himself at Lime Grove upon his return to Blighty, but found the response muted at first:
I must have created a great impression, because they didn’t even know who I was. Then, they remembered. Bill Lyon-Shaw was there, in Ronnie Waldman’s office, and I’d worked with him on a show in the theatre. Bill saw me and said ‘I know him. He’s an actor, a dancer and if you want any music scores done . . .’ He always had a cigarette on the end of his mouth. He asked ‘Why are you here, old boy?’ and the cigarette would go up and down. I said I wanted to be a producer. He said ‘Good, we’ll encourage you.’ Ronnie Waldman, whom I loved dearly, a wonderful guy, said ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to pay him.’ Bill said ‘Seriously, I think he’d be very useful. He’s got a good pedigree from the theatre. Tell me, what’s your favourite form of entertainment?’ I said ‘Going to the movies.’ He said ‘That’s what we want.’37
Education apart, Tesler and Maxin had other things in common, not least geography, as Tesler grew up in Walthamstow, near Maxin in Leyton. They became firm friends from the moment they met on the directors’ training course at Luxborough House off Marylebone Road, as recalled by Tesler:
It had been sort of a sixth-form college. The lecture rooms had desks where two people sat side by side. On the very first morning, I’m looking around all these people, who I later discover included David Attenborough, Michael Peacock, Paddy Foy and lots of other names.38 This tough-looking thickset guy, who looked as if he was a boxer, came over to me, looked down at me and said ‘Are you a Jewish boy?’ I said ‘Yes.’ He said ‘Can I sit with you?’ So Ernest and I sat together. I think that’s so typically Ernest and shows you what a sweet, sweet man he is.39
The young men of LE soon made their mark by leaping on every technical innovation that arrived in the studios. Tesler and Maxin, in particular, were praised for their inventive use of new camera tricks like overlay and inlay, where images from two sources could be combined.
To be shamelessly immodest, I went further than most people [Tesler explains]. I used inlay and overlay more than anybody else did, and before anybody else did. That’s how the Silhouettes, the successors to the Television Toppers, got their name. We wanted a new name and they’d just done a Ted Heath show with me in which they did dance numbers, as shadows, leaping about on instruments all over the place, in silhouette.40
Maxin sometimes favoured more traditional enhancements to the visual experience, something that got him into trouble when he had a studio’s linoleum floor varnished to make it look glossy. ‘Ronnie told me off like crazy for that,’ he admits. ‘It ruined the floor, but it looked terrific on the screen.’41 Once the bollocking had been administered, the firm but fair Waldman had the floor replaced with a finish that could be painted in any way required, and Maxin was given as many spectaculars as he could handle.
The expansion in the number of producers mirrored a significant expansion in the Television Service’s light entertainment output, to around 450 productions a year, or an average of nine per week. The organization moved on 23 September 1953 from Lime Grove to the scenery block at Wood Lane, the first part of the new Television Centre to be completed.
Thankfully, the available studio space had increased as well, with the acquisition of the Empire variety theatre on Shepherd’s Bush Green. It had been built for Oswald Stoll in 1903, to the design of Frank Matcham, but declining audiences were forcing circuits to rationalize. Previously, theatres and music halls had been hired by the BBC on an ad hoc basis for shows, including the Bedford in Camden Town, but the decision had been made to acquire a theatre. The BBC had the option either of buying the Empire or buying the lease of the 1902-vintage, W.G.R. Sprague-designed King’s Theatre on Hammersmith Road. The latter was in better condition, and, at £85,000, nearly half the Empire’s £150,000 asking price, but the former was freehold. That swung the decision, as did its proximity to Lime Grove and the future Television Centre site; not to mention Prince Littler’s willingness to accept an offer of £120,000. This figure seems massive, but, in May 1953, the theatre had been hired by the BBC for a week, at a cost of £1,000, for a Richard Afton-produced gala and an edition of What’s My Line. So it paid for itself in just over two years. It closed as a music hall on 26 September 1953, and the BBC took vacant possession on 29 September. The budget did not yet extend to equipping it fully, so at first it was run on a drive-in basis, using outside broadcast cameras and control vans.
In the early days of television entertainment, studio size made it impossible and undesirable to have live studio audiences. As soon as space allowed, however, audiences were tested, and it was found that they could have a beneficial effect on programmes, as Brian Tesler’s experience on Ask Pickles – an early wish-fulfilment programme, preceding Jim’ll Fix It and Surprise Surprise by a couple of decades – shows:
One week when studio D at Lime Grove was not available, they said ‘You’ll have to go into the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. You don’t have to do it in front of an audience, but it’s the only place we’ve got.’ We thought ‘Why not do it in front of an audience?’ The warmth that an audience brought to Ask Pickles in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire was extraordinary. I said ‘I don’t want to do it without an audience any more.’
And So To Bentley was done without an audience, and it got lousy ratings. Charlotte Mitchell was the girl of the show, and her nanny came to see the show [at Lime Grove] in the little viewing room by reception downstairs. We’d done a send-up of a Ruritanian romance, with Dick Bentley as the ageing student prince, who couldn’t get the girl, because she was a commoner. We went downstairs afterwards, and the nanny came towards Charlotte in tears. And Charlotte said ‘What’s the matter?’ The nanny said ‘Oh it was so sad. He wanted to marry you, but he couldn’t,’ and I suddenly realized that people were taking these satires seriously, because they didn’t know it was meant to be funny.42
While light entertainment on radio and televi
sion went from strength to strength in the forties and fifties, the story of live variety in the immediate post-war era was one of more mixed fortunes. Having let the Crazy Gang go to the Victoria Palace, mistakenly believing that their glory days were past, the London Palladium management under Val Parnell tried to keep attendances up by importing the biggest names from the US. The first to come over was Hollywood song-and-dance star Mickey Rooney in January 1948, causing The Times’s critic to observe that he ‘plays the trumpet lustily, the drums with abandon, and the piano occasionally. He works too hard for his effects, but there is something engaging about him when he relaxes.’43 Perhaps because of this, his season was a flop, and ended midway through its last week.
The next act in, however, was a runaway success. Danny Kaye, who had just starred in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, took the Palladium stage on 2 February, and at the same time took London by storm. In the first half of the show, audiences were treated to the comedy of Ted Ray – on the verge of radio stardom, and, according to The Times, the only one of the supporting cast who ‘rises above a dreary and sometimes distasteful mediocrity’.44
After the interval, it was Kaye’s turn. His forty-five-minute spot took up the whole second half of the show, something that eventually became the norm for visiting megastars. Initially very nervous, he admitted as much to the audience, and the rapturous applause that ensued broke any ice that there might have been. One of the high spots of his act was mimicking a tone-deaf crooner, but The Times’s critic observed that for the most part ‘he just fools about, with a microphone before him and a band behind, dancing a little occasionally, chatting with the conductor, interrupting his own singing, and generally making fun of himself and everyone else’. All of this, however, was to good effect. The Times concluded that ‘Mr. Kaye is a most successful and agreeable clown.’45
In June 1948, jazz giant Duke Ellington returned to the Palladium for the first time since 1933. Unfortunately, a long-standing disagreement between the Musicians’ Union and the American Federation of Musicians meant that he could not bring his orchestra with him, so he and cornet player Ray Nance had to undertake the engagement to the accompaniment of a British trio. The musicians were led by (Canadian-born) bassist Jack Fallon, with Tony Crombie on drums and Malcolm Mitchell on guitar. As good as they undoubtedly were, Ellington was always at his best with his full band behind him. Those who saw the show got variety in the truest sense of the word, with Ellington’s sophisticated music being complemented by the Stockton-on-Tees-born comedian Jimmy James. A teetotaller who was universally recognized by his peers as the best drunk act on earth, his act on the Ellington bill involved introducing his stooge, the long-faced, deadpan, stammering Eli ‘Bretton’ Woods (played by James’s nephew, Jack Casey), as his new discovery. The nature of Woods’s unique talent varied, according to the late Roy Castle, who remembered one occasion:
Our Eli was a whistling contortionist. ‘He whistles “Bird Songs at Eventide” and does the splits at one and the same time.’ Jimmy paused to take a quick drag, but just before the fag got to his mouth he added, ‘And if the sirens go, he’ll probably do three!’46
On another night, Woods, ‘dressed in an ill-fitting suit and a Davy Crockett hat’, was introduced as ‘The Singing Skunk Trapper’. Castle eventually joined the act himself, as James’s second stooge, always billed as Hutton Conyers, a role played by several comedians through the years. Perhaps James’s best-remembered routine revolves around Conyers’ fiercely guarded shoebox and its unlikely contents:
CONYERS: Is it you that’s putting it about that I’m barmy?
JAMES: Me? Good heavens, no. Why should I do that?
CONYERS: Well is it him?
JAMES [to Woods]: Is it you?
WOODS: I don’t want any.
JAMES: He doesn’t want any. We got a load in last Friday. [To Woods] You must have some left.
WOODS: How much are they? . . .
CONYERS: I’ve been to South Africa . . . Just before I came home, they gave me a lovely present.
JAMES: Did they? What did they give you?
CONYERS: Two man-eating lions.
JAMES: Oh yes? Did you fetch them home? Where do you keep them?
CONYERS: In this box.
JAMES: Two lions in there? I thought I heard a little rustling . . . [To Woods] Go and get two coffees . . . He’s got two lions in that box.
WOODS: How much are they?
JAMES: He doesn’t want to sell them . . . He’s got a giraffe in there with the lions.
WOODS: Is it black or white?
JAMES: What colour’s the giraffe?
WOODS: The coffee, I mean.47
Written down, this may well seem baffling and unfunny. Seen and heard, as is possible thanks to its presence in Tyne Tees Television’s opening show in 1959, it’s a tour de force of misunderstanding and mangled logic, with the accompaniment of James’s beautifully timed grimaces, asides and puffs on his cigarette. It’s a world away from the laboured puns of most of James’s contemporaries. James is a reasonable man caught between two idiots, who manage to leave him wondering if he’s not an idiot as well (‘there’ll be enough room in the van for the three of us’). When Conyers claims to have an elephant in the box too, a gift from the Indians, James asks if it’s male or female. Woods interjects with the reasonable enough suggestion that the information would matter only to another elephant. James’s reply is majestic. He fixes the stammering adult in the Davy Crockett hat with a glare and says ‘I’ll stop you going to those youth clubs.’ Duke Ellington’s reaction to his colleague’s act was, sadly, not recorded, but it would be nice to think that he loved James as madly as he professed to love his audiences.
Provincial halls didn’t have the Palladium’s luxury of being able to import exotic stars from the US. In some cases, it was tried, but ended in failure, such as Frank Sinatra’s poorly patronized engagement at the Bristol Hippodrome. Even central London competitors struggled. When dancer turned agent and promoter Bernard Delfont tried to put on American stars at the London Casino on Old Compton Street (now the Prince Edward Theatre), Parnell’s greater resources and willingness to pay top dollar at the Palladium nearly put Delfont out of business at the start of his career.
For some outside the capital, nudes provided the answer, inspired by Vivian Van Damm’s success at the Windmill Theatre. This venue, just off London’s Shaftesbury Avenue – then, as now, the main thoroughfare of theatreland – had opened in 1909 as the Palais De Luxe cinema, but in 1931 it was taken over by a rich widow called Mrs Laura Henderson and turned into a theatre. A brief period of legitimacy, in the form of plays, didn’t pay, so Henderson found a new manager in Van Damm, who reopened the Windmill on 4 February 1932 with a new concept – Revuedeville.
It was a novelty from the start, by virtue of providing non-stop entertainment, as cinemas had been doing for some time. With seats at 1s 6d and 2s 6d, the five performances a day meant that whenever you turned up, you were guaranteed a show, with musical numbers and comedians such as Van Damm’s first discovery, John Tilley. However, the novelty soon wore off, as rival theatres in better locations presented their own non-stop variety shows. Van Damm fought back with what he called ‘living tableaux’:
My idea was that perfectly proportioned young women should be presented in artistic poses, representing a frieze entablature or a famous classical painting. Standing perfectly still, they would of course form part of the glamorous stage decor. This was a revolutionary idea in British show business.48
Even more revolutionary was the fact that they should be largely naked. The standing still was less an attempt to turn flesh and blood into trompe l’oeil and more a necessity imposed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which took a very close interest in events at the Windmill. They decided if costumes were decent or indecent, or whether the fan dancers were letting their fans slip ‘accidentally’ more than was acceptable. The Windmill, aptly, sailed close to the wind and got away with as much as
it could. Van Damm’s daughter Sheila, who took over the running of the theatre on her father’s death in 1960, remembered with gratitude that the Lord Chamberlain’s men gave her advance notice of their inspections and always walked from their base at St James’s Palace, giving her time to check that all was seemly.
Vivian Van Damm is remembered as a benign dictator figure, whose word was law. He looked upon his girls with a fatherly eye, and insisted that the comedians should not fraternize with them – although when a relationship came to his attention, he would let it pass if he thought it a good pairing. Similarly, when he said no in an audition, that was it. Unless, of course, you were Bruce Forsyth. Before Forsyth finished his dance routine, VD (as Van Damm was inevitably known to the irreverent) said he’d seen enough. Forsyth insisted on seeing it through to the end. Despite, or perhaps because of his impertinence, Forsyth got the job.
By the early fifties, the Windmill was famous for its girls, the fact that it had remained proudly and defiantly open throughout the war, and for the vast number of young comedians who began their careers there. They included Forsyth, Michael Bentine, Jimmy Edwards, Arthur English, Tony Hancock, Bill Kerr, Alfred Marks, Bill Maynard, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. (Spike Milligan, infamously and perhaps unsurprisingly, failed the audition.) The ‘living tableaux’ brought out the worst in some of the customers, some choosing to masturbate under cover of a newspaper. A member of staff kept close watch on the aroused hordes with a pair of binoculars (a luxury that was strictly verboten in the opposite direction) ejecting any offenders. Kenneth More, before he became an actor of note, worked at the Windmill, binocular duty being among his responsibilities.