by Louis Barfe
The brothers thought that their good relations with MCA, one of the largest talent agencies in the US, would see them through, but the first show suffered from the last-minute withdrawal of an American producer, so the Bernsteins decided to become hands-on and book the best talent they could, wherever it could be found. ‘The brothers attended rehearsals together . . . [and] vetted numbers for the regular song and dance troupe (the Granadiers),’ Forman observed.22 Unfortunately, this caused resentment among their fellow executives who thought that the chairman and deputy chairman should be concentrating on business, not show business. They relinquished their grip, rather tellingly nominating not head of light entertainment Eddie Pola, but Denis Forman, the urbane former head of the British Film Institute, to take over from January 1959. It was on Forman’s watch that the most memorable moment of the show’s run occurred, the appearance in June of Maria Callas, performing the second act of Tosca. Videotape recording was in its infancy at this time, and Forman had contrived to get a week ahead, enabling him to watch his great coup on holiday in south Wales. He reported back to Bernstein ‘the impact Callas made [in] that farm kitchen . . . I do not believe there is any film star or actress alive who could have matched her power last night.’23
The company also made a big impression in the field of game shows, in which Pola, an American-born ex-hoofer, majored. To the network, Granada contributed Criss-Cross Quiz with Jeremy Hawk, Spot the Tune with Marion Ryan and Twenty One. NBC’s original US version of Twenty One was the subject of a rigging scandal, after it emerged that contestant Charles van Doren had been fed answers by the production team. The press levelled similar allegations at the Granada version, and these were met with a promise of a robust legal defence, but the show and the legal action were both quietly dropped.
With the regions all playing to their respective strengths in programming, the new service was an instant hit. In February 1956, ITV had between a 60 and 63 per cent audience share in houses that were able to receive the programmes. Qualitative research suggested that only 16 per cent of viewers actively preferred the BBC’s output. The pattern was repeated as each new ITV region launched, with an average ratio of 67 per cent of viewers opting for ITV over 33 per cent in favour of the BBC. Only the Anglia region, which took to the air on 27 October 1959, was a relative failure at first, snaring 55 per cent of the viewers to the BBC’s 45 per cent.
Although each company made regional programmes for its own viewers, the top-rating shows were the networked productions from the major contractors, programmes bought by all of the regions and transmitted simultaneously across the whole of ITV. Before television, tastes in entertainment had been regionalized. The earthy comedian Frank Randle always went down best in his north-western heartland – most obviously in Blackpool, where his summer season shows dominated the Golden Mile year after year. Nowhere was the difference in tastes more noticeable than in Scotland, which had its own comedy subculture, and a famously violent dislike for comics from south of the border. Most notorious was the Glasgow Empire, the Moss circuit’s Scottish showplace, where, in the words of the Scottish actor and comedian Stanley Baxter, ‘English comedians came to die quietly.’24 One of them was Des O’Connor, who faked a faint in order to win a measure of sympathy from the crowd and put a premature end to his ordeal. Mike and Bernie Winters suffered for their art as well. The act began with Mike wandering on stage with a clarinet, on which he played Exactly Like You. When Bernie made his entrance by sticking his head through the curtains and proffering his trademark toothy grin, a voice from the gods shouted ‘Shite, there’s two of them!’25
One of the best-loved of all Scottish comedians was Chic Murray, whose surreal, whimsical material was rendered all the more effective by being delivered in a measured, cultivated accent. (Later in life, he played the headmaster in the film Gregory’s Girl, a perfect piece of casting if ever there was one.) Active from the forties until his death in 1985, he was the very essence of droll – indeed, when he began his performing career in an act with his wife Maidie, they were billed as ‘the tall droll and the small doll’. With his ever-present cap or ‘bunnet’ perched on his head, he delivered lines like ‘There’s a new slimming course just out where they remove all your bones. Not only do you weigh less, but you also look so much more relaxed,’ apparently more bemused than amused. One of his most famous routines involved a trip to a wedding in Blackpool and an encounter with a large-nosed female guest. Not sure how to greet her, he bows. She bows back, and with her nose, accidentally cuts the cake. (‘The bride was in tears. So was the cake.’) Unperturbed, the woman raises her massive conk in the air and begins sniffing – it transpires that she can sense that someone is boiling cabbage in Manchester.
Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton were among Chic Murray’s contemporaries, and it was as the gaudily dressed Glaswegian wide boys Francie and Josie that they made their reputations, first on stage in the Five Past Eight revues at the Glasgow Alhambra and then in their own series for Scottish Television.26 Best known for their ‘Are ye dancin’?’ routine, their fans also never tired of what became known as ‘the Arbroath gag’, in which Josie – played by the lugubrious, equine Fulton – attempts to tell a simple two-line joke, but ends up taking a quarter of an hour, thanks to digressions and Milroy’s interruptions. The kernel of the joke involves a visitor knocking at a door and asking if a member of the household is in. On being told ‘She’s at Arbroath,’ the visitor replies ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait for her to finish,’ having misheard ‘Arbroath’ as ‘her broth’ and thought that she was merely enjoying a bowl of soup. On his own, Fulton would go on to become a Hogmanay institution on BBC television in Scotland, with his annual Scotch and Wry sketch show.
Murray and Fulton had a modicum of success outside Scotland, but neither achieved the profile of Stanley Baxter. He had begun his career as a child actor on BBC radio, in the Scottish Children’s Hour, before honing his craft further during his National Service while serving in an entertainment unit in Singapore that also included Kenneth Williams, future dramatist Peter Nicholls and film director-to-be John Schlesinger. After demob, he joined the company at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, where he worked on dramas and comedies and became, by common consent, the best pantomime dame in the business. From the Citizens’ he joined Howard and Wyndham, the dominant Scottish theatre group, performing in the Five Past Eight shows at the Alhambra.
He became a popular radio comedian in Scotland with shows like Stanley Baxter Takes the Mike, and also began to make appearances on television. By the end of the fifties, however, he was restless, and sensed that the old order of variety was on the way out. ‘I decided I didn’t like the way Howard and Wyndham was going, so I needed to go south,’ he explains. ‘I came south with no prospect of work at all. Stewart Cruickshank, who was the boss, said “Are you sure you’re going? I can’t promise you there’ll be any work if you have to come crawling back.” Full of old-world charm. So I came south in 1959. In 1960, I won the BAFTA and they all shut up.’27
The BAFTA in question (actually an SFTA at the time, as the name ‘British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ didn’t come into existence until 1976) was for the best light entertainment performance; it was given to Baxter for the BBC TV revue series On the Bright Side, in which he starred alongside Betty Marsden, already known to millions for her sterling character performances in radio’s Beyond Our Ken. Film roles began to come Baxter’s way, including a pair of virtuoso performances in 1961’s Very Important Person, in which he played both an inmate in a German prisoner-of-war camp and the camp’s commandant. Nonetheless, he never neglected television, his own national BBC series, The Stanley Baxter Show, beginning in 1963, then resuming from 1967 to 1971 with a run of shows networked from BBC Scotland. The signature of the show – which was, in essence, a variety production, with musical guests between the sketches – was its clever pastiches and parodies of television and films. These were usually written by Ken Hoare and often featured Baxter p
laying more than one part, something that was now possible thanks to videotape recording. However, in among the universally recognized subjects for satire, Baxter also had the courage to introduce a national audience to the Scottish accent in its most undiluted form, in the long-running series of ‘Parliamo Glasgow’ sketches.
Baxter had been mining the comic possibilities of guttural Glaswegian in his radio shows, with scripts by his Citizens’ Theatre colleague Alec Mitchell in the style of lectures given by an ‘elderly English don [who] had come up to look at Glasgow habits and language as if it were the Congo’.28 The pair revisited the idea for television, but were asked for something more visual. Mitchell and Baxter decided that the answer lay in foreign language education programmes like Parliamo Italiano and Sprechen Sie Deutsch? They were right. With the help of a female co-presenter, Baxter explained how Glaswegians spoke in situations such as buying fruit and veg from a market stall or meeting a new boyfriend’s parents for the first time. For example, a request for a drink came out as ‘Whirrabooranurraglessagin?’ The contrast between the prim, earnest way in which the presenters explained the phrases and the guttural nature of the phrases themselves was comedy gold.
Back at Lime Grove, Ronnie Waldman had done much, by the late fifties, to make BBC Television’s light entertainment output a polished, professional product. While the audience figures looked grim, the critics all compared the newcomer to the BBC, often unfavourably. This wasn’t to say that the BBC couldn’t learn some tricks from the new network, as Brian Tesler explains:
ITV went straight to the American pattern of the same show in the same slot on the same day every week. You can make a date to watch your favourite programme. Fortnightly, you’ve forgotten what happened, and you had to like the programme all over again. I think the theory was that a cast couldn’t be expected to learn a new script every week. The construction department couldn’t possibly be expected to construct new sets weekly. It’s got to be a fortnightly turnaround. And that was absolute nonsense. So you had big BBC successes, shows that Bill Ward did – such as How Do You View? and Before Your Very Eyes – they were fortnightly. My Ask Pickles was fortnightly. The first run of the Billy Cotton Band Show was fortnightly. Things like the Dave King Show and so on, on Saturday night, were monthly.29
Before long, the BBC began to adopt weekly scheduling.
The BBC was helped by the fact that the new network didn’t have a monopoly on big American names. Throughout the fifties, the BBC had been transmitting imported editions of The Jack Benny Show, one of the top-rated comedy attractions on US television. Eventually, Benny came over to do a special for the BBC, live from the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith. Ronnie Waldman had been trying to get Benny to make a show in London for some time, but he had to battle with the star’s perception of the Corporation’s stuffiness. ‘He wouldn’t come to the BBC because he felt that all the producers wore black jackets, striped trousers and a bowler hat, and that they carried a rolled umbrella and a briefcase,’ explains one who certainly didn’t, Ernest Maxin. ‘Jack called Ronnie and said “I’ve heard about this Maxin guy. They tell me he’s OK. Tell me what he looks like.” Ronnie said “He looks like an American.” I used to have a crew cut in those days, and I went to a tailor who cut the suits in an American way. You know, [I was] Hollywood mad. Then Ronnie said “He’s a Jewish boy.” Jack Benny said “I’ll take him.”’30
Maxin was detailed to meet Benny at the Dorchester, where he was staying on his way to an engagement in Rome. ‘I was very nervous because I admired this guy and I had an hour-long show to do live,’ Maxin admits. Benny immediately put the young producer at his ease. The fact that Maxin was himself an experienced performer helped break the ice. Then the discussion turned to the show. ‘He said “Tell me Ernest, you’ve all seen my shows here in England. How do you see me?” I said “As the public see you. They know that you’re mean, and you’re never older than 39.” He said “Oh great, that’s fine. Have you got any ideas?”’
The idea that Maxin proffered involved Benny trying to make his way through Immigration at the airport without removing his thumb from the date of birth on his passport. At desk after desk, the routine built. ‘I went through it just briefly, and he was laughing his head off. I said “Eventually, you get so disgusted, you ask for the next plane back to Los Angeles. You never come in.”’ Benny liked it, and called in his writers from the next room:
Five writers came in, walked in, like the Tiller Girls doing Jack Benny. Jack looked at me, he didn’t really know what I was smiling at. I explained the idea. They said ‘Yes, Jack, we think it’s a great foundation for us.’ I said ‘But Jack, that’s only the last sketch. I’d like to use your own material for the stand-up sequences.’ He said ‘Oh don’t worry about that, that’s OK. Boys, go in and write this sequence.’ So they said ‘Sure, Jack,’ and all walked back like that. I said ‘I’d better go now, Jack.’ He said ‘You can’t go yet, the boys are writing the script. Give them forty-five minutes.’ I heard them typing away. After about half an hour, they came in and said ‘Jack, take a look at this.’ I was in hysterics. They handed it to him, he looked at it, he started to smile and laugh, so obviously it was OK.31
Although the centrepiece was in place, Maxin was still worried about the rest of the show. When the script was finished, it looked set to under-run by a considerable margin. ‘I said to Jack “You’ve got eighteen pages here. Usually we allow about a minute, a minute and a half a page. At most two minutes, allowing for laughs,”’ Maxin recalls. ‘He said “Really? Then I’m very sorry for your comedians.” I said “Jack, the most you’re going to get out of this is thirty minutes,” but he wouldn’t change. I thought “Well, he’s the master. He knows.” I said “Jack, you’ve got to remember you haven’t got an American audience.” He said “Ernest, I’ve been in the business longer than you. I promise you I won’t let you down, and I know you won’t let me down.”’32
Still worried, Maxin shared his concerns with Waldman, who replied ‘He knows more about his work than all of us put together, but remember it could be your job on the line, Ernest. You’d better have something up your sleeve. We can’t put on the potter’s wheel for twenty-five minutes.’ Maxin knew he couldn’t have a standby act to finish a Jack Benny show, so he tried to ‘spread’ it at rehearsals, to little avail. ‘All I could make it spread without it looking slow was about three minutes,’ he remembers. As the show went on the air, live, the young producer was understandably nervous:
The captions for the previous show were going up on the screen, then ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Jack Benny Show.’ He walked on the stage to tumultuous applause and just stood there, with a look that said ‘So, this is the BBC? Lousy.’ Eventually, the laugh started to subside, but as it got to a certain point, he turned as if to say ‘What the hell are you laughing at?’ off-stage, and he stood there like that. It started to subside again, and as that went, he moved his hand. Every time a big laugh came and it subsided, he’d turn. The way he did it was wonderful. We finished, as I wanted to finish it, with exactly twenty seconds to go. The last caption came up ‘Produced by Ernest Maxin’. Bang. Right on time. I’ve got my job, I can go in on Monday. I went downstairs onto the stage. I found myself walking like him. He gave me a big kiss. He said ‘I’ve really enjoyed this. I enjoyed rehearsals.’ All the things you want to hear. We’re still standing on the stage. I said ‘Jack, how did you do it so that you could time it, not even five seconds out, to the second?’ He said ‘Ernest, I’ll tell you. You know when I do that [turn around]? I’ve got a wristwatch on each hand.’ He just kept looking at it. The thing was, if the laugh went slightly before he wanted it to go, he knew, without saying a word, how to build another laugh.33
As it transpired, the competition from commercial television was the final spur the department needed in its bid to be treated with respect by the Corporation’s elders. Current affairs was favoured by the high-ups because it had gravitas. With Leonard Miall and Grace Wyndham Gold
ie running the quaintly titled ‘talks’ department, current affairs programming was going from strength to strength in the form of Panorama and the light, entertaining magazine programme Tonight. However, it was the mass audience brought in by the variety that allowed the BBC to continue to justify its licence fee.
The new shows that emerged in response to ITV included both the innovative and the comfortingly familiar. In the latter camp came the Billy Cotton Band Show, a television version of the hit radio show. Cotton, as an artist represented by the Grade agency, had made six Saturday night programmes for ATV at the start, and while they proved popular enough, Cotton realized that he needed a more formatted show if he wasn’t to use up all of his valuable variety schtick. His son, Bill Cotton Junior, a successful music publisher who was about to join the BBC as a trainee producer, persuaded him to give the BBC a hearing. Ronnie Waldman enticed Cotton Senior with a highly lucrative joint contract for radio and television, and gave him Brian Tesler as producer. As Tesler explains: ‘It was quite a gamble. I was a revue and cabaret man from Oxford, and he was music hall. I think that was one of the reasons why Ronnie was so great. He was great at casting, unlikely casting. Bill wasn’t certain we’d even speak the same language, but of course we did. It was light entertainment.’34
The first show went out on 29 March 1956 from the Television Theatre, opening with announcer Peter Haigh yawning, only to be roused by Billy Cotton shouting his catchphrase. The Television Toppers were present, as were Cotton’s lead trumpeter Grisha Farfel, whose solos became a feature of the show over the next twelve years, and bumbling comic attraction Richard Hearne, aka Mr Pastry. Perhaps most interesting is the inclusion of an act called Morris, Marty and Mitch, the Marty in question being a young Feldman, yet to join forces with Barry Took as a scriptwriter. The mixture proved to be just the sort of thing to claw ratings back from ITV, with 54 per cent of adult viewers tuning in. The quantity was important, but the BBC also valued its own qualitative research, in the form of the Appreciation Index (AI), as decided by what would today be called a focus group. The debut Band Show notched up an AI of 70, 15 higher than any previous Cotton shows.35