by Louis Barfe
Like all BBC light entertainment trainees in the mid-fifties, Cotton cut his teeth on fifteen-minute single-act shows, the best known of which went out under the Starlight banner. When he took the job, he set out one condition, namely that he was never to be asked to produce his father’s show. However, when Brian Tesler left, the old man asked if the Billy Cotton Band Show could become a family concern. Waldman was all for it, but mindful of the younger man’s concerns. Cotton Senior took the matter into his own hands, as Sir Bill recalls:
I came home one night and my father was sitting there. He’d come for supper, he brought smoked salmon, we sat down and he enchanted my late wife with his stories. He was a great storyteller. And it came to when it was time to go, and he said ‘It’s time that decent men were in their beds,’ and he put his hat on, and his coat, and he stood in the door and said ‘Oh, by the way, why won’t you do my show?’ So I knew I’d been hijacked. I said ‘I wouldn’t want to win an argument with you, but the producer has to have the final decision.’ He said ‘I’ll never argue with you in public, we’ll only ever argue in private.’ Once he’d said that and a few other things, I thought I suppose I’ll agree to it. I really wanted to do it, I suppose. I was a great admirer of my father.49
In the years that Cotton Junior produced the Band Show there were only two disagreements. One came ‘when he booked a girl called Pamela Dennis, who’d been appearing at the Stork Club. She could sing a bit, and she looked great. When we sat there and I heard her sing, I just stopped looking at her and looked at him, and he said “I think I had too much to drink last night.”’50
Another big production bearing the name of Bill Cotton Junior was Perry Como Comes To London, a one-off special in 1960. As with Jack Benny, the BBC had been showing the American crooner Como’s cosy musical shows from the US network NBC – which required editing before they were suitable for British television. ‘We had to take the commercials out. They were all sponsored by Kraft–Philadelphia cream cheese,’ remembers Yvonne Littlewood.51 The shows were such a success that Como decided to follow Benny to London. In preparation, Cotton went to the US and found it ‘quite extraordinary how much better they were at doing these things than we were’. Nonetheless, Como’s American producer Clark Jones trusted Cotton to get on with the job of setting the show up, while he directed the performances.
The show featured cameos from British personalities, beginning with character actor Richard Wattis as the immigration officer Como encountered on his way into Britain. ‘We did all of it on location, with quite a lot of shooting in Covent Garden,’ recalls Yvonne Littlewood, who was Cotton’s production assistant on the show. ‘We had Harry Secombe, Fenella Fielding, Ralph Richardson, Margot Fonteyn. We had a sequence at Woburn Abbey, it was just when the touristic thing was starting up for the houses. The only bit we did in the studio was the last segment – [with his signature tune] “Sing to me, Mr C” – in the Television Theatre.’52
Artistic success was one thing, but there were technical issues relating to the differing screen resolution of the UK and US TV systems, as Yvonne Littlewood explains:
We had to make it in 525 lines because it was American. They had started doing tape editing long before we did. They brought their tape editor with them and set them up a little mini-place in Television Centre on the fourth floor. This guy came and people stood and watched him – of course it was the old knife through the tape in those days. And we had to convert it back to 405 [lines – the British standard] for us.53
Cotton and Littlewood’s colleagues behind the camera included three young men at the start of their television careers. The floor manager was Douglas Argent, the assistant floor manager was Michael Hurll (son of Fred Hurll, the chief executive of the Scouts), and the call boy was William G. Stewart, who has a permanent reminder of the team: ‘We had a group photograph taken of all of us in cricket gear with a shield in front of us saying “BBC” on it. Bill had worked it out. It read “Bring Back Como”. The whole lot of us ended up as producers.’54
In their early days at the BBC, Bill Cotton and Francis Essex had shared an office, as well as the experienced support of Miss Littlewood. Essex’s whiz-kiddery took him away very quickly, first to ATV as a producer, then to Scottish Television as controller of programmes. Thus another vacancy was created, filled in November 1958 by Stewart Morris, the son of Southan Morris, owner of a successful chain of cinemas. The plan was for Stewart to join the family business, but he rebelled and applied to the BBC:
First of all, I wrote all these letters. Dozens of them. Ronnie Waldman interviewed me, he wrote me a wonderful letter, saying ‘In order to stop wasting your time and mine, I will see you for a few minutes.’ I walked up and down Frithville Gardens getting my courage up. I was asked at the selection board, if I didn’t get the job, would I apply for a job as an AFM [assistant floor manager] or a PA? I said no. They said ‘Why?’ I said ‘I don’t think the two jobs necessarily need the same type of approach.’ I was very arrogant in those days. And at the end of that interview, he said ‘I’ll give you a job for six months’ and it was £12 a week. I went straight onto the directors’ course, at the end of which you had to do a thirty-minute production, for which the budget was £30. Trevor Peacock, whom you see now as an actor in the Vicar of Dibley, wrote it for me and appeared in it.55
So it was that the fully fledged Morris produced the youth-oriented music show Drumbeat, set up as the successor to Dig This, which had been the replacement for Six Five Special. As the end of his six months approached, Morris worried that he hadn’t heard anything about a contract renewal. On the last day of his contract, he called in to see Tom Sloan, the assistant head of light entertainment. ‘I walked into Tom and said “Well I’ve enjoyed it, thank you very much,”’ Morris recalls. ‘He said “What are you talking about?” I replied that my contract expired the next day. He said “Get out of here.” I went back to my office in one of the caravans, the phone was going, and I had a new contract. Tom became my mentor really.’56
At this point in the late fifties, each programme had a producer, who also directed the cameras and often wrote the script himself. Each producer had a PA, and that was it in terms of support staff, but that was about to change. ‘We were just secretaries,’ Yvonne Littlewood explains, ‘but along the way they discovered that producers really needed a bit more help.’ This came in the form of production assistants, a job that carried far greater responsibility than its modern-day equivalent as a junior member of a large production team. Eventually, the production assistant layer in the BBC became known as production managers. Littlewood applied for one of the newly created positions:
You didn’t type all the stuff, you had a secretary to do that, but you worked the floor. You did what the floor managers were doing, but you stayed with the producer throughout the production. Quite a few of us girls applied, the ones that had a lot of experience. I went for an interview – it was the head of production management, the personnel person and Ronnie. They said ‘Of course the trouble is that you’ve never really worked on the floor.’ They were giving all these jobs to ex-floor managers. I said ‘Well, I’ve had a lot of experience, and if I have to go on the floor and tell them where to put the scenery, well, I’ll do it. If I don’t do it well enough, you can make me a secretary again.’ Very politely, of course. And anyway I got the job, and I had the feeling that it was only because of Ronnie who had faith in the fact he thought that I could do it and he knew how long I’d been working with Michael. I was a very dedicated person, I know that.57
In 1958, Littlewood’s sponsor Ronnie Waldman decided to move on, after nearly a decade in charge of television light entertainment. He didn’t move to one of the rival, commercial companies, although his experience, skills and contacts would undoubtedly have been prized greatly. Instead, he accepted the challenge of establishing the BBC’s programme sales and syndication arm, a business that would eventually become known as BBC Enterprises. The internal assumption was that Waldman
’s deputy Tom Sloan, who had joined the department as an administrator in 1954, would get the job, but it soon became clear that Sloan had been overlooked. In 1956, the by-now Sir George Barnes had moved to become principal of the University College of North Staffordshire (now Keele University), and the job of director of television had been filled by Gerald Beadle, the former head of the West region. Beadle stayed at his club, the Saville, when in London, where he found himself sharing his concerns for the future of television with a fellow member – songwriter, radio pioneer and former director of variety at the BBC Eric Maschwitz. Since leaving the BBC for Hollywood in 1937, Maschwitz had been a wartime intelligence officer, written his memoirs and returned to the life of a jobbing songwriter. In such circumstances, the appointment of Maschwitz over Sloan’s head went down very badly, as Sir Bill Cotton remembers:
Eric Maschwitz, not to put too fine a point on it, was a well-known drunk in the West End at the time. His wife owned a club, and he had decent money because of what he earned from his royalties. When his appointment was announced, we were horrified. At various times, he’d accused the BBC of being run by ‘Jews and queers’, despite being Jewish himself. Tom Sloan complained to the director general. He felt he had a right to complain.58
In fact, it soon became obvious that Maschwitz, described by Frank Muir as ‘perhaps the last of the great romantics’, was an inspired appointment. His administrative input was minimal, but his ability to boost morale and smooth egos was second to none. The overlooked Sloan became, in effect, the head of light entertainment in all but title, while Maschwitz, the great impresario, gave the department a dash of show business glamour and rallied the troops, as Cotton recalls:
The two of them, actually, were ideal together. We had Tom Sloan looking after the nuts and bolts of the department, making sure that everything was happening, and Eric Maschwitz throwing the parties. He increased the morale of the department no end and he also fought our corner all through the BBC. If you did a good show, you went in to see Tom and got his plaudits, then you went in to see Eric – ‘My boy, what a wonderful show.’ If you did a rotten show, you went in to see Eric and you didn’t go in to see Tom at all. And he’d go ‘I know how you feel, have a drink.’ His way of doing the job, any job, was enthusiasm, and his enthusiasm extended to confronting criticism with the truth. Sydney Newman [the Canadian producer who had joined the BBC as head of drama from ABC] had exactly the same effect on drama.59
In the early years, the BBC light entertainment producers had been expected to work across the department’s output, but as the fifties continued, a divide between narrative comedy, such as sitcoms, and variety, meaning everything else, began to emerge. Duncan Wood was among the comedy specialists, Bill Cotton Junior and Stewart Morris were among the variety experts. In December 1957, at the end of the fourth series of Hancock’s Half Hour, comedy spoofed variety with Hancock’s Forty-Three Minutes: the East Cheam Repertory Company, beautifully written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and produced by Wood, as a ramshackle, cut-price vaudeville show. Hancock’s opening monologue in particular is a fine, cynical take on the whole business of variety on television:
The highest compliment the BBC can pay to an artist. White tuxedo, big orchestra, dancing girls . . . Of course it had to come. They couldn’t keep on disappointing a man of my calibre. I told them, I said, ‘I want the girls, mate, the dancers and the singers. I’m fed up of doing this half hour on my own . . . I want the music and the girls, sitting in the wings reading while they do all the work.’ That’s me. Then come on afterwards saying ‘Thank you very much, it was great,’ without the faintest idea of what they’ve been doing. I said to them ‘[. . .] I want the hour’s show otherwise I shall go over to the other lot.’ And they agreed. And I went over to the other lot. And here I am back with this lot. Makes you sick . . .60
Galton and Simpson’s set-up was that there were no acts booked, Hancock’s sidekick Sidney Balmoral James having spent all but ninepence of the budget on drinks for his friends. All too aware of the competition, Hancock asked ‘How can I do a “Val Hancock’s Monday Spectacular” on ninepence?’ The answer presented itself in the shape of the theatre caretaker’s stage-struck monkey, a troupe of oversized middle-aged dancers called ‘The Glamazons’, the Keynotes vocal group – who think they’re rehearsing for Vera Lynn – and a ‘trio of continental jugglers’. These turn out to be Hancock himself, with Mario Fabrizi – his handlebar moustache instantly recognizable to all lovers of British comedy films – and stone-faced stooge Johnny Vyvyan. Together they attempt a series of pathetically easy or hopelessly bungled stunts, the completion of each resulting in an outbreak of mugging from Hancock.
The highlight of the show, however, is the multi-talentless ‘Arnold’, played by Hancock’s Half Hour regular John Vere. He demonstrates paper-tearing, without producing any shapes. (‘I don’t know, I just tear it.’) He plays the spoons by clanking them together vaguely in rhythm, while singing a set of hitherto unknown lyrics to Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’:
Mister, what d’you call it what you’re doing tonight?
Hope you’re in the mood because I’m feeling all right
Awfully glad to meet you and I hope we’ll be friends
Who wants a bucket of cement?61
Finally, as his big finish, he dances on glass. That is to say he stands on panes of toughened safety glass while still wearing his shoes. When Hancock points out that he was expecting bare feet and broken glass, ‘Arnold’ replies ‘Charming. I’m not cutting my feet to ribbons for you. The man’s a sadist.’ The comic appeal of this forgotten gem is enhanced by the sure knowledge that, early in his career, Hancock worked on real bills as bad as this one. It is both a satire of and an homage to a lost world.
The late fifties also saw the start of one of the longest-running and, ultimately, most controversial light entertainment shows to hit the airwaves. Beginning with a special on 14 June 1958 and a follow-up on 16 August, the Black and White Minstrel Show had progressed to a monthly series by the following January. Designed to showcase the talents of the George Mitchell Singers, the idea had been floating around for some time. Such a show had been mounted in the Alexandra Palace days, and in April 1957, Ronnie Waldman fielded a proposal from the head of Midlands regional programmes for a ‘Kentucky Minstrels’ type show with the news that he was in discussions with his old radio producer colleague Harry S. Pepper. The production job fell eventually to George Inns, who had been involved in television earlier than almost anyone else – as a 16-year-old sound effects boy in radio, he had worked on Lance Sieveking’s pioneering production of Luigi Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in His Mouth for the Baird 30-line system. He rose to become a radio variety producer, working on In Town Tonight and Ray’s A Laugh, before transferring to the Television Service in 1955.
Minstrelsy had long been part of the tradition of entertainment. Inns, Waldman, Maschwitz and company saw no problem in bringing it to television, and making it one of the biggest, most lavish productions attempted so far. The emphasis was on the music, at first drawn from the traditional minstrel repertoire, by American composers like Stephen Foster. In later years, the show tackled modern West End and Hollywood musical items, leading in the seventies to the somewhat bizarre spectacle of a troupe of blacked-up men in spangly waistcoats dancing robotically and singing ‘We Don’t Matter At All’ from the musical It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman. The show also featured a resident stand-up comedian, with Leslie Crowther, Don MacLean and ventriloquist Keith Harris all serving in the role over the years. Although the make-up made it harder to identify performers and it was an ensemble production rather than a star vehicle, stars did emerge from the show, most notably the singers John Boulter, Dai Francis and Tony Mercer.
The vast majority of viewers shared the BBC’s lack of reservations, making it an instant hit, and inspiring a long-running stage version at the Victoria Palace, in need of a star attraction following the Crazy Gang’
s retirement in 1960. Elsewhere, however, there were rumblings of discontent and, for much of its twenty-year run, the BBC came under pressure from racial lobbies to axe the show. Inns always defended the show robustly. He responded to one broadside in 1967 by saying ‘How anyone can read racialism into this show is beyond me.’62 Inns’s sincerity was indubitable, but the idea that the show was born in a more innocent age is undermined slightly by an illuminating coincidence: a few days after the second show had been transmitted, the Notting Hill race riots began.
While this frenetic activity was going on in broadcasting, variety theatre in the West End was in its death throes, having disappeared from almost everywhere else during the previous decade. In the major showplaces of the capital, during the fifties and sixties musicals took over from music hall. Alone, the Palladium continued presenting variety bills into the eighties, before becoming a venue for musical shows. The Hippodrome on Charing Cross Road underwent a more radical transformation than most other comparable venues, though. It closed as a variety house on 17 August 1957, following the season of hit American singer Charlie Gracie. When it reopened in August 1958, it was as the Talk of the Town cabaret restaurant, with most of the 1901 Frank Matcham interior removed or hidden from view. It was a joint venture between hotelier and caterer Charles Forté, Lew Grade’s brother Bernard Delfont and theatrical producer Robert Nesbitt, who came up with the concept.