Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  Just under a year later, on 16 February 1957, another new show hit the air, shying away from traditional entertainment in favour of addressing emerging trends in music and fashion. Rock and roll was in the ascendant, as were teenagers – themselves an innovation, providing an interim stage between childhood and the premature middle age that had previously been expected of most respectable young citizens. Six Five Special was a show for them. The BBC also had the sudden need to fill the hour between 6pm and 7pm, which had previously been left fallow by both the BBC and ITV to allow parents to get their infants off to bed. During the week, this ‘Toddlers’ Truce’ was now replaced by the news magazine Tonight, while on Saturdays it was the new youth show, which had been the brainchild of young producers Jack Good and Josephine Douglas, both almost fresh from Oxford. It’s fair to say that Good’s motivations for following the path he did differed slightly from those of most young BBC graduate trainees:

  I was summoned to the office of the head of light entertainment, Mr Ronald Waldman. ‘What made you want to be a television producer?’ ‘Well sir, I thought that really this is a new medium and we must use it to the best advantage, to inform, to educate and to entertain.’ Went down a treat. Little did they know that I’d already seen [the film] Rock Around the Clock . . . For me, it [rock and roll] means energy, excitement, novelty and rebellion. Being against toffee-nosed, conventional, culturally dead society. ‘Kick you in the face, you Tory buggers’ stuff. It seemed to me that was what a bourgeois should do. You know if you want to escape the bourgeoisie, you’ve got to turn your back on your own or turn your front on your own and start whacking them. It’s just a natural reaction for an avant-garde bourgeois.36

  Once again, then, it was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man. Good caught the mood of the time perfectly. Co-hosted by co-producer Josephine Douglas and Radio Luxembourg DJ heart-throb Pete Murray, with guest appearances from former boxer Freddie Mills, scriptwriter Trevor Peacock and numerous others, not to mention an in-vision audience of jiving youngsters, it featured the latest ‘hooligan music’, as its detractors dubbed it at the time. Nowadays, most of the surviving hooligans have national treasure status, bus passes and a lifetime’s guarantee of work on the nostalgia circuit. Some even have knighthoods. In 1957, however, they were a threat to the status quo, and so Six Five Special was quite unlike anything that had ever appeared on British television before. Associated-Rediffusion had a record show called Cool for Cats, in which professional dancers accompanied the hits of the day, but it was rather refined, as might be expected from a producer like Joan Kemp-Welch, who later brought the early works of Harold Pinter to the television screen. Six Five Special was anything but refined. Television was still resolutely monochrome, but simply the knowledge that singer Wee Willie Harris had dyed his hair lime green was enough to cause outrage in Tunbridge Wells and other leafy outposts where the easily disgusted set up camp.37 Very few recordings survive, and those that do exist come across as a relay from a rather star-studded village hall hop. One existing show presages Blue Peter by including an incongruous feature on mountaineering between the jumping and jiving. At the time, though, it must have been revolutionary and liberating.

  Good’s next step was typical of many young BBC producers at the time. He went to ITV, ABC to be precise. The money was much better, but the main motivation was that he would be able to ditch the worthier aspects of Six Five Special in favour of rock and roll music pure and simple. On Sunday 15 June 1958, on the stage of the Wood Green Empire, Oh Boy! was born.38 Good promised ‘one of the fastest shows on television. Cackle is cut to the minimum. No jokes, no long “plugs” for the latest recordings . . . Oh Boy! will show exciting singers and bands playing exciting music to an excited audience.’39 It made stars of singers like Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Vince Eager, as well as providing South African organist Cherry Wainer and the house band, Lord Rockingham’s XI, with their hour in the spotlight.

  Good had been preceded out of the door by Brian Tesler, who went to ATV in January 1957, after the Corporation rather arrogantly assumed that its own prestige was enough:

  When ITV was about to start the BBC started putting people under contract. I had a two-year contract, which actually took me past the opening year of ITV. I knew nothing about the commercial world, and it frightened the life out of me. Anyway, we were all terribly complacent about ITV. How could it possibly catch on? All those awful little jingles interfering with programmes, you wouldn’t want to watch interrupted programmes like that, so I was happy to stay. But at the end of that two-year period, my contract was coming up for renewal, so I went to see Leslie Page, who was in charge of personnel. He said ‘Ah, Tesler, your contract’s up for renewal. You’ve done quite well, we’d like to keep you on, we’d like to offer you another contract for two years, is that satisfactory for you?’ I said ‘Yes, fine, the only thing is that I’m earning £1,700 a year at the moment, could I go up to £1,800 for those two years?’ He said ‘Oh no. Working for the BBC is reward enough.’40

  The conversation took place in the midst of rehearsals for a musical show with presenter Eamonn Andrews and the orchestra of Frank Chacksfield, inspired by Andrews’ surprise number eighteen chart hit Shifting Whispering Sands. (‘It was a pretty lousy song, but it made good visual material,’ Tesler remembers.) Tesler returned to the studio, where his sombre mood was noticed by Chacksfield and Andrews’ manager Teddy Sommerfield, as Tesler recalls:

  He said ‘What’s the matter with you? You were very bright before you went for whatever it was you went for.’ I told him and he said ‘Ah, would you be interested in working for ITV?’ I said ‘Damn it, yes.’ He went and made a phone call. He came back and said ‘Well, I’ve talked to Lew Grade, and he’d like you to join ATV for a salary of £3,500 a year. Now I didn’t think that was enough, so I got him to throw in two weeks in New York each year to study American television. What shall I say to him?’ I said ‘Bite his hand off.’41

  So, the BBC lost one of its best producers for the sake of £200. The incident prompted Ronnie Waldman to take up cudgels with the personnel department over their inflexibility, pointing out the damage it could do as other valuable staff were tempted to leave. The situation improved, but BBC salaries always remained lower than those of the opposition.

  Despite being the new boy, Tesler was experienced enough to work out that he was being given base metal rather than gold for his first show at ATV, a Val Parnell Saturday Spectacular. Bill Ward sent him to see Grade and Parnell in the office they shared at Television House in Kingsway. (‘They were joint managing directors, so they shared opposite corners of an office.’) In typical salesman mode, Grade enthused about the bill for Tesler’s debut: Harry Worth and one of the dizzy blonde panellists from the ATV panel game Yakety Yak. ‘Nobody else is available because it’s pantomime season, but you can do a great show with those two,’ Grade enthused, not entirely convincingly. Tesler was crestfallen:

  I went away so miserable. I didn’t want to do a variety bill. Two of the last things I’d done at the BBC had been with [comedian/song and dance man] Dickie Henderson Junior. One was a Billy Cotton show in which I had Bill and young Bill with young Dick and old Dick. The two old men and the two young men, with a very good script written by Jimmy Grafton. It had gone very well, and I had great admiration for Dickie. He was in the American idiom. He sang, he danced, he had a great sense of humour. The microphone routine was terrific, just a terrific routine. [This involved Henderson wrestling with an off-stage scene hand for ownership of a microphone lead, while trying to sing. Each time he regained some slack, it would be pulled taut again, causing him to fall over.] And he’d also been the guest on the last Pet Clark show at Riverside studios. They’d done a duet, and I thought if I can get the chance, I want to do a show with Dickie. I phoned him, I phoned Jimmy, and I said ‘Look, I’ve got a date and I don’t like what they’ve given me, I’d like the three of us to do a show.’ They said ‘Terrific idea,’ so we met for lunch,
and it was obvious it was going to be great.

  I went back to the office and I phoned Lew. I said ‘Lew, I know it was very nice of you to offer me Harry Worth, but I really want my first show to be my show. I’d like to do The Dickie Henderson Show.’ He said ‘Val won’t like it.’ Dickie had been the star of a series that Dickie Leeman had produced for ATV, called Young at Heart, that hadn’t been at all successful. So I went to Bill Ward, who was head of department, told him what had happened. He said ‘I’ll have a word with Val.’ He came back and said ‘Val says all right, but it’s not going to be called The Dickie Henderson Show, it’s just going to be a Saturday Spectacular with Dickie Henderson.’

  Showing the chutzpah that would help take him to the top of the executive tree in British television, Tesler disobeyed Parnell’s strictures:

  So I was very naughty, we were all very naughty. The side of Wood Green had the stage, and down where the orchestra pit had been there was just a hole. Down the other side, the side of the wall, there was an area, it was very narrow, but you could use it. I put black material with stars on it with beautiful showgirls in glossy dresses in front of it, and had the camera crabbing along the line. Terrific music, the first caption, star-studded, said ‘Val Parnell presents Val Parnell’s Saturday Spectacular’. And there was Dickie standing by a hat rack, with a clapped-out piece of cardboard that said ‘The Dickie Henderson Show?’ So we didn’t really call it The Dickie Henderson Show, and it wasn’t spectacular, because it had a question mark, but we got away with it. It was a very good show, it had some very good things in it, and bless his heart, Val sent me a telegram, and said ‘It was a terrific show, you can do more Dickie Henderson shows in future, and they can be called The Dickie Henderson Show.’

  That established me at ATV better than I could have expected, because I hadn’t done what was expected and taken what I was given. So from then on I was able to do what I wanted to do. If they gave me stars, and they very often did, I never turned another show down, and I never had any problem with budgets.42

  Tesler was soon given responsibility for Parnell’s flagship show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, known internally as SNAP. He wanted to tackle the show his way, and, this time, he was given his head from the off. Quite simply, he didn’t want to keep Tommy Trinder as the host. ‘He was getting stale, and also he was just a bit too downmarket,’ Tesler argues. ‘By that time, ITV was growing up very quickly. Val was happy, very happy with the change. I was very surprised that there was no resistance. I didn’t know at the time, but he, for some business reason or other, wanted to get rid of Tommy anyway. He’d upset Val, somehow.’43

  At this point in 1958, Tesler had no successor in mind, so a series of guest hosts took over SNAP for a month at a time, starting with Dickie Henderson. He was followed by Hughie Green, Bob Monkhouse, Alfred Marks and, most memorably, Robert Morley. ‘Robert played Robert beautifully,’ says Tesler. ‘He hadn’t heard of any of these people or what they did. It was just hilarious.’ At the same time, Tesler was working on a series called New Look, showcasing new discoveries, ‘which I loved doing. We had Roy Castle, Bruce Forsyth, Lionel and Joyce Blair, Joe Baker, Jack Douglas and Ronnie Stevens, a very capable revue actor. With Bruce, Dickie Henderson said “There’s this guy, you ought to see him, he’s very good.” I thought he was terrific, so I put him onto Sunday Night at the London Palladium, just as an act, and then into New Look. I thought “Wow, I’ve got Bruce, Roy, Lionel, Joyce . . . I’ve got a show here.”’ Val Parnell had other ideas, earmarking Forsyth as the ideal replacement for Trinder on SNAP. ‘Val saw Bruce Forsyth in the first New Look and said “Right, he’s the one we want.”’44

  As with most ‘overnight successes’, Forsyth had been in the business for years. His apparently meteoric rise to the top hosting job in LE belied a long hard slog of working at the Windmill and in summer seasons. Forsyth took over with aplomb, his catchphrase – the first of many over the years – being ‘I’m in charge’. Tesler has less happy memories of the opening of Forsyth’s first show, though:

  I was fed up with that same bit of film at the start, the stars bursting, and I had this terrific idea. I wanted to introduce Bruce to the public and for it to be different. The idea was that we’d start with the orchestra tuning up, so I’d start on the MD’s music with ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’ written on the top. The musical director that night was Reg Cole. We’d pull out, the orchestra would be tuning up and we’d cut to the wings. There was Bruce, standing talking nervously to Jack [Matthews], the stage manager, a marvellous guy. Jack would be saying ‘Don’t worry Bruce, everything’s going to be fine.’ Bruce is saying ‘Well, it’s very important to me. I’ve never done anything like this before. I hope it’s going to work.’ Then I cut to all the glamorous girls coming down a metal spiral staircase, past Bruce, saying good luck. Of course, there wasn’t really a spiral staircase there. Then back to the orchestra. Cue Reg. And ‘Startime’ [Eric Rogers’ famous theme tune] would start, we’d pull back and the show would begin. Terrific. All live.

  So I cue Reg for the tuning up, Reg went straight into the opening music, and I’m screaming ‘Stop it! Stop it! Jack, stop him.’ There was absolute bedlam for about thirty seconds. No one knew what the hell was going on. Then we didn’t go back to the tuning up, alas, and so as far as the audience at home was concerned, they heard the beginning of the music and it suddenly cut dead, and suddenly we were back in the wings with Bruce and Jack, and all the rest of it happened. But that beautiful opening, which I thought was really rather good, went for a burton. Well, half a burton, anyway.45

  The mid-fifties brain drain at the BBC was compensated for by another new intake of producers. One was Francis Essex, formerly of Amersham Repertory Theatre, who had also been behind a West End revue called The Bells of St Martins in 1952. The director of the show had been Bill Lyon-Shaw, and the designer had been Richard Greenough, both taking time out from their BBC work. When Michael Mills left the Television Service to return to the theatre, Essex came in the opposite direction, as Yvonne Littlewood recalls:

  Michael went to work for [the theatre group] Howard and Wyndham, mainly in Scotland. He walked out of the door and left the desk the way it always was. I had been with him for eight years, quite a long time, and I was quite confused. Ronnie sent for me, and he said ‘I’ve just taken on a new young producer, I’d like you to look after him, he’s got no experience of television.’ It was Francis Essex. I said give me a week, ten days to get the desk straight, deal with all Michael’s files and send them off to archive. Within twenty minutes of leaving Ronnie’s office, the door opened and a face peered around and said ‘I think I’m going to come and work in this office with you, could I come in now and sit down, because I haven’t anywhere to sit?’ I said ‘All right, you’d better come in then.’ Francis was quite a whiz-kid, he moved ahead very swiftly.46

  One of the programmes with which Essex made his mark was the record review show Off the Record, presented by veteran bandleader Jack Payne. Song pluggers – whose job was to get broadcasting bands to use their company’s songs, or, where appropriate, to get recorded versions played on air – made a beeline for the programme, one of them being Bill Cotton Junior. Michael Reine, the music publishing company that he ran with composer Johnny Johnston, was doing very nicely, but Cotton could see how important television was becoming and wanted to be in the thick of it:

  We were very successful, making a lot of money and doing well. Then, in 1955, when ITV was starting, Johnny decided to start to write jingles. After two or three months of this, the office was packed full of bowler-hatted advertising agents, all coming to arrange their commercials. I had a wish to be involved in television. I went to Bill Ward at ATV first. I knew the Grades very well because they were my father’s agents. I said to him I’d quite like to get my feet under the table in television. He said no good coming to us, you’ve got to go to the BBC and get yourself trained. Ronnie Waldman was desperately trying to s
ign my father to a joint contract for radio and television, and I encouraged him to take the BBC offer. When I presented myself for the possibility of having a six-month training attachment, with no further obligations, Ronnie obviously thought it wouldn’t do any harm in the negotiations.47

  As important as his connections were, Cotton’s progress was almost certainly aided by a guardian angel already in the department, in the form of Littlewood:

  I’ve known Bill for a very long time. He used to come down when we were doing Off the Record. I remember Bill telling me over a pint in the pub, the British Prince, that he’d applied for a job on the training course and he hadn’t heard anything. He was going to tell them what they could do with the training course if he didn’t hear quite soon. I remember going in the next day to speak to Ronnie’s secretary, a lady called Hilary Mitton. She was a bit forbidding, very businesslike and protected Ronnie all the time, but I got in to see him. I said ‘I don’t know if I should be saying this, but I was having a glass with young Bill’ (we always called him young Bill in those days) ‘and he hasn’t had a reply.’ I didn’t say exactly what Bill said. Not long afterwards he was on the training course, and I’ve often wondered if I was responsible.48