Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  The critical response to the first night was almost wholly favourable, even from parts of the media that had grave reservations about the whole enterprise. Daily Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook had taken against ITV from the outset, largely, it is believed, because he was informed that he wouldn’t get a sniff at a franchise. As a result, the Daily Express declared on 22 September that ‘the whole set-up is futile in its present form’. It was pointed out that the new service ‘can count on 400,000 sets at the most’, compared to 4,767,000 receiving the BBC, although it was not pointed out that the BBC had nearly achieved national coverage, whereas ITV was available in London only. The Express also argued that advertisers got poor value for their money compared with newspaper advertising. Once advertisers realized this, would the new venture ‘be able to pay the heavy price of good programmes? The standards are bound to deteriorate rapidly by comparison with the BBC.’12 The following day, however, even the Express reviewer praised the ‘general slickness’, found the variety show ‘brilliant, but brassy’, declared the Mayfair Hotel relay to be ‘on a level with good class BBC’ and thought the boxing ‘excellent’. In the minus column, the news was ‘scrappy’, the drama ‘poor quality’ and the ads ‘irksome when the novelty had gone’.

  In contrast, the Daily Mirror had used its leader column on 22 September to wish ITV the best of luck, while stressing that it had no connections with any TV companies. Indeed, it had passed on the chance to invest in ABDC when Collins had been at his most desperate for backers. The Mirror’s success had been based on giving the public what it wanted, and it supported ITV as a kindred spirit:

  The politicians have pummelled it.

  The bishops have belted it.

  The killjoys have caned it.

  But from today only the verdict of Mr and Mrs Televiewer matters.13

  And the next day, TV correspondent Clifford Davis pronounced it a ‘slick, fast-moving evening of entertainment’, with even the Edith Evans/John Gielgud extract from The Importance of Being Earnest proving ‘a rare treat in TV drama’. Davis saved his scorn for the ceremonial part of the evening:

  THE BIG LET DOWN was that boring opening. Why did ITV have to go all high-hat and pompous instead of setting the screen sizzling from the start?

  It was BAD SHOWMANSHIP to waste so much time instead of getting on with the job in hand – the job that ITV has been brought in to do – to ENTERTAIN.

  Why inflict on viewers all those sombre sayings and meaningless platitudes [. . .]?14

  The answer to Davis’s question was simple. ITV wanted to make a good impression with everyone, from the lowest brow to the highest hat. Commercial television had been viewed by its detractors as a vulgar, Americanized influence on the British people. The presence of imported shows on ITV like I Love Lucy and Dragnet, and the move away from sedate panel games towards quiz shows with cash prizes suggested that this view was not entirely unfounded. The sombre, none-more-British opening ceremony was a response to these sniffy critics before the real business could get under way, secure in the knowledge that all viewers would sit through just about anything having spent a fortune on sets capable of receiving the new channel.

  Deciding what to watch was made easier by that night’s lacklustre opposition from the BBC. On television, the Guildhall ceremony went head to head with Disneyland: the Donald Duck Story (imported from America, ironically enough), while there was a concert of Schubert and Beethoven on the Home Service, the record programme Family Favourites on the Light, and the poems of Laurence Binyon on the Third. The BBC managed to steal some of the new venture’s coverage by killing off Grace Archer in The Archers, but as this had happened a full fifteen minutes before ITV went on the air, it had no effect on ratings.

  ITV’s first game show came on the second night, in the form of Take Your Pick with Michael Miles. Hughie Green’s Double Your Money began on the following Monday. Both shows and their presenters had come to Associated-Rediffusion from Radio Luxembourg. In Take Your Pick, contestants who answered three questions successfully were allowed to choose the key to one of thirteen numbered boxes. In some were things worth winning. In others were booby prizes. At various junctures, Miles offered to buy the key, leaving the contestants to ponder the chances of the box contents being better than the offer. It was Deal or No Deal with added general knowledge and the bonus of the fiendish Yes/No interlude, where Miles fired personal questions at contestants who were not allowed to respond with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The merest hint of either and they were gonged off. Double Your Money, in contrast, was a relatively pure quiz. Contestants chose a specialist subject from a board on which the options were displayed. The first question was worth £1, the second worth £2, and so on up to £32. Those who got to £32 entered a difficult final ‘Treasure Trail’ round, the theoretical top prize for which was £1,000.

  The first edition of Double Your Money, a rare survival from those early days, makes very interesting viewing. ‘Mugging’ is a show business term for any form of attention-seeking gurning in performance, and here Hughie Green – Canada-raised and that rarest of creatures, a child performer who had continued to be successful in adulthood – gives a mugger’s masterclass. Every comment to a contestant is accompanied by a sideways look at the camera, with either a wink, a grin or a grimace, as appropriate.

  The contestants seem chosen to cover all the bases. The first is an Arsenal football club clerk who knows a lot about geography and makes it into the Treasure Trail round. Green asks if there are any Arsenal fans in, and gets a massive cheer, unsurprisingly, as the show was made at the Highbury studios run by Norman Collins’s High Definition Films company. The second is a young female physiotherapist, all A-line skirt and horn-rimmed glasses, who goes away with nothing after faltering on the third question – the name of Winston Churchill’s poodle (which was Rufus).

  Then it’s the turn of the married couples. A young couple, married only five weeks, answer questions on the RAF, the husband having recently emerged from his two years’ National Service. He looks barely out of short trousers, his telephonist wife seems the archetypal young fifties wife, happy to defer to her husband in all matters. Green observes that it’ll be a different matter in five years. The stars of the show, however, are a couple from the East End of London. Married since 1900, he is 78, she is 73 and the sort of woman that Irene Handl made a career of playing in films like I’m All Right, Jack and Two Way Stretch. They express no strong preference for any subject, so Green steers them into answering questions on old-time music halls. The husband gets the first question – where is the Metropolitan music hall? – wrong. Having been firm but fair with the youngsters, he can’t bear to see these salt-of-the-earth septuagenarian cockneys go away empty handed. He all but gives them the right answer (Edgware Road) and the £2 and £4 answers prove easy enough. On the £8 question, concerning the identity of music hall’s ‘handcuff king’, the old cockney can remember that the name begins with an H, but even with heavy prompting from Green, the name ‘Houdini’ eludes him. As a quiz show, the format would still work today, but that first edition is a snapshot of a lost age, in which dolly-bird hostesses, pimply, recently demobbed National Servicemen, and people who would have remembered the Jack the Ripper murders as local news all co-existed. It was bright, brash fun for all the family and the viewing figures reflected as much.

  The instant hits of its game shows apart, A-R didn’t really have much light entertainment of its own. Head of drama Peter Willes was nominally in charge, but his main interest was in new, serious writers like Harold Pinter. The company also made an impressive showing in current affairs and documentaries, through series like This Week and Dan Farson’s various quirky but subtly investigative outings like People in Trouble, Out of Step, Living for Kicks and Dan Farson Meets. Slightly mannered presentation apart, the Farson shows that survive stand up amazingly well.

  David Croft – later to become the co-creator of Dad’s Army, Hi-De-Hi! and ’Allo ’Allo – began his televis
ion career at Associated-Rediffusion as a script editor, and he soon realized that Willes ‘was completely at sea in popular light entertainment’, his idea of a hit show being ‘anything starring Hermione Baddeley and Hermione Gingold’,15 both names from the golden age of West End revue, which had long since passed. With the recruitment of Ken Carter from the BBC as senior producer, there were some attempts to build up a light entertainment presence for A-R, most notably American director Richard Lester’s efforts to bring the success of The Goon Show to the small screen with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers in The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d. The experiment was successful enough to result in two further Milligan/Sellers series: A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred. Making many of the wilder flights of fancy from The Goon Show work on television would have been impossible with the technology of the time. The surviving material from the series shows that Lester and co. went to the other extreme, showing quite clearly that these were grotty sets in a small studio, to considerable comic effect. For one item, the respected actor Valentine Dyall wandered out of the studio, down the corridor and into the canteen. There was no studio audience, only the laughter of the cast and crew.

  However, the efforts of Croft, Carter and Willes were overshadowed by a decision to subcontract the majority of A-R’s light entertainment commitments to Jack Hylton Television Productions Ltd, a company formed by the bandleader turned impresario. On paper, it was the dream ticket. Hylton had brought the Crazy Gang back to the West End after the war, when they were as successful as they had been before, if not more. His stage revues at the Adelphi, such as The Talk of the Town, which ran from November 1954 to December 1955, made good use of relatively new performers like Tony Hancock and Jimmy Edwards. His, then, was the golden touch. With Val Parnell and Lew Grade tied up in ATV, Hylton was the next best thing.

  Unfortunately, for the most part, Hylton’s television productions failed to realize the potential of the new medium. They looked stagey, indeed many were just outside broadcasts from existing Hylton stage shows. His first situation comedy, Love and Kisses, was a stage play filmed in a theatre and chopped into five parts. Material used in Hylton shows was often top drawer, but not especially original. The better scripts for the early Hylton shows were ‘adapted’ from Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, which had run on the NBC television network in America from 1950 to 1954, and with writers like Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart, the quality was high. Unfortunately, Hylton chose to ‘borrow’ the material without Caesar or NBC’s knowledge. Eventually, they got wind and a licensing deal was set up.

  Hylton also had a regrettable tendency to let his sexual urges influence his professional interests. He married only twice, but for most of his first, thirty-five-year marriage, he was estranged from his wife and in a relationship with another woman, while enjoying numerous affairs and dalliances. His period in television was marked by his relationship with the Italian singer Rosalina Neri. To describe her professionally as such is perhaps too kind. She was meagrely talented, but undeniably easy on the eye, although the Daily Herald observed that she was ‘a combination of Sabrina, the young Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe – but grown to nightmare proportions’. The Liverpool Echo commented that she was ‘without a voice to match her vital statistics’, while the Manchester Evening News plumped for describing her simply as ‘a shockingly bad singer’. Despite her deficiencies, she made many guest appearances in Hylton shows before gaining her own vehicle, The Rosalina Neri Show, in 1959. Her biggest problem was with the English language, to the point that ‘it proved to be almost impossible to understand what she was saying’ when singing in English.16

  In fairness, Hylton had only two months between closing the A-R programme deal and the transmission of the first show on 29 September 1955. Even worse, the production of the debut offering – a filmed compilation of items from the Adelphi’s The Talk of the Town with additional appearances by Robb Wilton, Stanley Holloway and Flanagan and Allen, under the Jack Hylton Presents banner – was hit by strike action. What the viewers saw prompted the Daily Mirror’s Clifford Davis to suggest that Hylton ‘should confine his activities to the live theatre – and, for pity’s sake, leave television alone’.17

  While Hylton’s shows did improve eventually, the critical reception didn’t – with the bad first impressions counting for a lot. There were sketch show hits: Alfred Marks Time, starring comedian Alfred Marks; Arthur Askey’s Before Your Very Eyes, which had transferred from the BBC; and, prior to his BBC TV debut, The Tony Hancock Show, which remains funny fifty years on, in the handful of surviving recordings. This is largely due to the all-original scripts from Eric Sykes, Larry Stephens (both fresh from collaborating with Spike Milligan on The Goon Show), Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Galton and Simpson’s contribution was uncredited, as they were already developing the BBC TV sitcom that would cement Hancock’s star status. Particularly memorable is a spoof of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Hancock playing opposite June Whitfield, a comic actress whose performances have been, at worst, merely very good throughout her career. Her cries of ‘Show ’em the tattoo, Brad’ lead Hancock to lift his T-shirt, revealing the word ‘Aldershot’ clumsily daubed on his chest. Stupid maybe, obvious maybe, but funny certainly.

  Other Hylton shows that found a measure of favour included the Crazy Gang’s sporadic televisual outings and the occasional visits of the sophisticated French humorist Robert Dhéry. Unfortunately, these were not enough to rescue Hylton’s reputation. In the Daily Mail, Peter Black – whose rigorous, critical, insightful, well-written reviews do much to give a flavour of television from an era when recordings are scarce – felt he understood where Hylton had gone wrong:

  Jack Hylton has very strong and personal ideas about what the television audience wants. He sees us – I’m deducing from what I have seen of his TV shows – as a typical Monday night audience at the Theatre Royal, Shuddersford . . . It is, of course, a profound misjudgement. The provincial music hall audience is so used to making the best of its bargain that it will applaud the dimmest spark of talent or even of effort.18

  In contrast, Black argued, the television audience was ‘spoiled and capricious’. It’s more likely that Black was, charitably, ascribing his own high viewing and critical standards to the majority of the audience, when, in truth, they were mostly rather less discerning than a paying variety audience, reasonably happy to flump down in front of something, anything, after a hard day at work, school or wherever. His perception that Hylton had utterly misjudged the new medium was, however, more than fair.

  Fortunately, Associated-Rediffusion’s shortfall on the network was more than made up for by ATV. The first weekend included the debut of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, hosted by Tommy Trinder. The Palladium show succeeded where Hylton’s early efforts failed, thanks to the prestige of the venue itself (every performer regarded the Palladium as the acme of the profession) the quality of the bill on offer and the fact that the programme was visibly live. In one of the few surviving recordings of the show, dating from 13 April 1958, the bill consists of Pinky and Perky, oddball US comedian Dick Shawn, country singer Marvin Rainwater and jazz legend Sarah Vaughan, not to mention the Tiller Girls, high-kicking their way around the stage. Something for all the family. There was also the added attraction of a game show interlude in the form of ‘Beat the Clock’, in which married couples competed for household goods and a shot at a cash jackpot that rose week by week if not won. At the end of the segment, the victorious couple would be asked ‘Can you come back next week?’ giving independent television its first original catchphrase.

  The Palladium shows were supplemented by Val Parnell’s Saturday Spectacular, which usually focused on a single star. Eric Sykes was persuaded to take on twenty-six of these shows fortnightly, primarily as a scriptwriter, despite the gruelling workload. There were ‘easier ways to commit suicide’, he observed in his memoirs.19 The enticement was the galaxy of international superstars that Parnell guaranteed Sykes. ‘
Mentioning Bing Crosby was like saying to an alcoholic “They’re open,”’ Sykes confesses, visualizing the chance to hob-nob with his heroes. The series got off to a good start with jazz singer Mel Tormé, but in subsequent weeks, the parade of legends failed to materialize. Domestic stars like Tommy Steele, Dickie Valentine and Lonnie Donegan all did their bit, while Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan helped Sykes out on a couple of occasions, as did Sykes’s long-standing collaborators Hattie Jacques and Deryck Guyler, but soon Sykes was contemplating ‘walking up and down Oxford Street with a sandwich board asking for volunteers’.20

  Unfortunately, the presence of the ATV powerhouse meant that the other regions tended not to get a look-in when it came to entertainment. The second biggest contributor in the early years was Granada, the northern weekday company. In a deft bit of showmanship, Sidney Bernstein had decided to give the studios at the new Manchester complex even numbers only, making it seem as though there were twice as many as there really were. Manchester would eventually have studios 2, 4, 6, 8 and 12. The former Chelsea Palace theatre was studio 10, and it was home to hit situation comedy The Army Game and the resolutely high-class variety show Chelsea at Nine, which was very much a pet project of Sidney and Cecil Bernstein’s. ‘They remembered the great days of the Stoll variety shows of the twenties,’ recalled founding Granada executive Denis Forman, ‘in which clowns, classical musicians, famous actresses and great ballerinas could all be found on the same bill.’21