by Louis Barfe
After attending Repton and then Oxford University, Nesbitt had begun his career in advertising, before diversifying into writing for revues and cabaret shows. When, in 1932, the director of a show he had co-written called Ballyhoo became indisposed, Nesbitt asked if he could step in, and so his career as a director and producer began. By 1935, he was working with the celebrated French variety producer André Charlot on his revues, which had been running in London since 1912. He was also producing his own shows, and his first West End pantomime impressed George Black so much that he gave him several Palladium shows to produce, including one with the Crazy Gang. While the unflappable, urbane Nesbitt could produce such rough and tumble without turning a hair, his real signature was in great spectacle. The longest-legged, most glamorous dancers could always be found in Nesbitt’s shows. He was a stickler for professionalism on stage and off, which extended to the modes of address used by his colleagues. ‘Calling him Bob Nesbitt was like calling the Queen “Miss”,’ Rosalyn Wilder, his assistant for twenty years, explains. ‘It was Mr Nesbitt. None of us who worked with him ever called him anything other than Mr Nesbitt. Even since he died, we still refer to him as Mr Nesbitt.’63
Nesbitt had gone to America to produce a show on Broadway called Catch a Star, which was a fearful flop, leaving him with nothing to do. Rosalyn Wilder recounts the story of how the inspiration for the Talk of the Town came:
He was sitting twiddling his thumbs wondering what to do and one of the mob from Las Vegas who was friendly with [impresario] Billy Rose said ‘Why don’t you come out to Las Vegas, it’s just starting up and you might like to do a show there.’ He thought why not, he went out there and produced the first floorshow. He suddenly realized that if you could sit people down and they could watch a show and eat and drink, that it might be a new way of entertaining people. He came back, saw Bernard Delfont and said ‘I’ve done this, I think this is the way forward.’ Bernard said ‘Well, let’s think about it and find a venue.’ They came up eventually with the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome was dying. It was always a dark, dull and dingy theatre and it didn’t have a very large capacity. It had acres of marble, but it was dark and brown, whereas the Palladium was always gold and crimson.64
Even with the combined expertise of Nesbitt and Delfont, the Talk of the Town took a while to find its feet. Rosalyn Wilder, who joined Nesbitt the year after the opening, explains: ‘It started off with just the floorshow, and it wasn’t a huge success. In 1961, Bernard Delfont said “Look, this isn’t working, I’m going to put a star artist in. We’ll do floorshow early, star artist late,” and that’s how we did it.’ Eartha Kitt was the first big name to make an appearance, with each star appearing at the venue for a season of two weeks to a month. In isolation, Nesbitt and Delfont couldn’t pay enough, but combined with television appearances and other engagements, the figures worked out very well. Most of the stars who appeared tended to be singers. ‘If you put on a comedian, frankly, it was less likely to work. Jackie Mason was very much an unknown quantity at the time, but very funny. He had some wonderful routines.’65
There were other, smaller venues that offered dining and entertainment, such as the Pigalle restaurant on Piccadilly, and clubs like Winston’s and the one owned by Latin bandleader Edmundo Ros, but the Talk of the Town was cabaret on a grand scale. Nevertheless, by the end of the fifties, the variety theatre was all but dead. Variety, however, would carry on into the next tumultuous decade, all the time adapting, improving and, yes, even swinging.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Albanie – douze points’
The sixties were a time of great liberalization. The decade began with the passing of the Betting and Gaming Act, which legalized off-racecourse bookmaking and ushered in bingo, the saviour of many loss-making theatres and cinemas. It ended with the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18, taking in the legalization of homosexuality along the way. The Wilson government’s galumphing attempts to harness the ‘white heat of technology’ at least acknowledged the fact that great strides were being made in the field. In particular, telecommunications forged ahead, with the inauguration of the Telstar satellite in 1962 easing the transmission of live television pictures from the US to Europe and vice versa.
On a more basic, domestic level, prosperity was on the increase. Full employment, or something quite like it, was being maintained. In February 1960, the total number of jobless was a mere 450,000. Car ownership more than doubled between 1959 and 1969, rising from 4.4 million private vehicles to 9.7 million. House building was booming, reaching a peak of 400,000 new homes a year towards the end of the decade – with the average house price rising from £2,784 in 1956–1965 to £6,757 in 1966–1975. Most importantly for the purposes of light entertainment, between 1957 and 1967, the number of television licences grew from 7 million to 14.3 million.
This was bad news for radio, which slid into second place in the punters’ affections. However, the ageing staff in radio light entertainment were not helping ensure that the medium remained up to date. When Terry Henebery had joined BBC Radio as a 25-year-old producer in 1958 it was still ‘the days of the dance-bands and all that jazz. Ted Heath, Lou Preager, all that was still happening,’ although the menace of rock and roll was emerging. The Light Programme’s response was to retitle its Saturday morning Skiffle Club as Saturday Club – reflecting a more general pop music policy – under the production of Jimmy Grant, with Brian Matthew presenting. Henebery took over Grant’s old job of producing Jazz Club.
In terms of comedy, there were successes like The Navy Lark – a situation comedy set on HMS Troutbridge, a dumping ground for the senior service’s most inept sailors – and the sketch series Beyond Our Ken, starring the unflappable Kenneth Horne. In 1965, following the exit of writer Eric Merriman, Beyond Our Ken became Round the Horne, scripted by Merriman’s former collaborator Barry Took and his new colleague, Marty Feldman. In the process of the changeover, the show became much more risqué. However, Took and Feldman were clever enough to ensure that those most likely to be outraged would not understand a word of the show’s coded filth and innuendo. The characters Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, were a pair of actors who popped up each week doing different jobs to pay the bills during their ‘resting’ periods. Obviously homosexual, much of their dialogue was written in the gay patois of Polari,1 in which good was ‘bona’, a face was an ‘eek’, a look was a ‘vada’, feet were ‘lallies’, men were ‘omis’, women were ‘palones’ and men like Jules and Sand were ‘omi-palones’. Naturally, when they ran a legal firm, it was called ‘Bona Law’, while Julian admitted ‘we’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time’. This was, for its time, what Jules and Sand would themselves have called ‘bold’. Yet, even with hit shows like this, radio was in a decline.
In the mid-sixties, the recruiters made a concerted effort to entice bright young men into radio light entertainment, going direct to the universities. One of them was Trinity College, Dublin, where, in 1963, Roger Ordish was coming to the end of his studies:
They sent a wonderful man called Peter Titheradge, who was what was called a Light Entertainment Organizer. He came to universities just looking at people who did comedy – writing, directing or performing. He was able to say ‘You can come for an interview.’ That was phase one. Phase two was the interview, and it was with him, Roy Rich [Pat Hillyard’s replacement as head of radio LE] and [his assistant] Con Mahoney I think. I passed that interview and was given a six-month training attachment. My first pay cheque said ‘producer’, which was pretty amazing. My mother said ‘Where do you want to go from here? You’re a BBC producer and you’re 24.’ I said ‘Well, I don’t want to be anything else.’ And I never was.2
Junior producers were expected to learn the ropes on ‘a terribly simple thing, which was little more than a disc jockey show – a daily live programme called Roundabout. It had a different presenter every day and it was records, live music – or pre-recorded, original
music – and short interviews, funny news clippings, all that sort of stuff.’3
The Musicians’ Union’s rules of the day, which governed the amount of ‘needle time’ allowed on radio, resulted in a need for specially recorded music. If radio stations were allowed to play too many records, the union was concerned that its members would be done out of a job. As it transpired, the union was largely correct, and in the seventies, the BBC was eventually forced to disband many of its staff orchestras, including the famous Northern Dance Orchestra. But in the sixties, beat groups were on the rise, and younger listeners wanted to hear the original artists, not an orchestral cover version. The revitalized Radio Luxembourg was bound by no such strictures, so music fans would brave the atmospheric fading of its high-power signal on 208 metres medium wave, broadcast from the Duchy of Luxembourg, to hear the latest records as they were intended, linked in English by disc jockeys like Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, Jimmy Savile and Pete Murray. The station, known affectionately as ‘Fab 208’ and ‘the station of the stars’ was aided in its endeavours by the major record companies, such as Decca and EMI, who sponsored shows on the station to promote their latest releases. The BBC appeared even more out of touch with the latest musical trends when offshore pirate radio stations began to operate from ships and forts just outside British territorial waters. First on the air was Radio Caroline, opened on 28 March 1964 by Irish entrepreneur Ronan O’Rahilly from a converted passenger ferry anchored three miles off Frinton. In December, Wonderful Radio London – known to listeners as Big L – followed suit, and while many stations came and went, Caroline and Big L were the dominant forces, with well-organized advertising sales forces based on land in London. With audiences of several million, the pirate ships and Luxembourg were repeating the pattern of the thirties, but this time there was no world war to force the competitors off the air.
The resolution came in the form of the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act, which became law on 14 August 1967. It became illegal for any of the offshore stations to have a business presence in the British Isles, which made the gathering of advertising revenue very difficult. Caroline tried running its airtime sales through an office in New York, but the business soon foundered. Radio London had decided that it would be impossible to make a profit under the new legislation and closed down at 3pm on the day the Act came into effect. There was a welcoming party of over a thousand teenagers for the Radio London presenters as they arrived at Liverpool Street station after the last broadcast. In the pirates’ stead, the BBC, under director of sound broadcasting Frank Gillard, was allowed to provide a new pop music service as part of a reorganization of its radio networks. From 30 September 1967, the Light Programme was to become Radio 2, with the Third Programme becoming Radio 3, the Home Service changing its name to Radio 4 and the new pop station coming in as Radio 1. Most of the presenting talent for the new venture, including Tony Blackburn, Keith Skues, Kenny Everett, Dave Cash and John Peel, came from the pirate ships, as did the style of presentation. Robin Scott, the controller of Radios 1 and 2 told The Times that he had ‘a professional admiration for what they have done. It would be foolish to pretend that we are not using some of the techniques of the commercial stations.’4
The BBC radio networks would eventually reposition the medium and maintain its relevance in the television age, not least as a breeding ground for future television stars, producers and formats, but never again would it be the dominant force in broadcasting. By 1966, radio was plundering television’s script archive in search of ratings, beginning with a series of sound-only remakes of the hit Galton and Simpson-written sitcom Steptoe and Son. The pattern of radio remaking TV hits continued with adaptations of Dad’s Army.
It wasn’t entirely doom and gloom. The sketch show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again began a successful nine-year run in 1964, introducing John Cleese, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor to the listening public, along with their Cambridge contemporaries Jo Kendall and David Hatch. While the others went off to found Monty Python or become Goodies, Hatch became a radio producer, then head of radio light entertainment, controller of Radio 2 then Radio 4 and, eventually, the managing director of BBC Radio. Kendall, meanwhile, would go on, in the late seventies, to be a cast member of The Burkiss Way, an early outing for Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, on their way to becoming one of the dominant writing teams in British comedy.
Over in television light entertainment, the fifties had been a time of experimentation, while the medium tested new formats and approaches. At the start of the decade, most television entertainment had been simple, act-based shows, but the genre expanded to take in panel games, quiz shows, sketch comedy, shows built around a particular artist to reflect their career and personality in a way that would not be possible on stage, and programmes that followed the comings and goings of the popular music scene. The only major programme genre yet to make its debut was the chat show. With so many of the main elements in place, the sixties became the decade of consolidation and increased professionalism. Such gems as LE could offer would be buffed to an incredibly high sheen, particularly when colour television became a reality in 1967.
A lot of the credit for this can go to Tom Sloan, who finally took over light entertainment at BBC Television in 1961, when Eric Maschwitz manoeuvred himself into a specially created job as assistant and advisor to the controller of programmes. (This turned out to be a non-job, and Maschwitz left the BBC for Associated-Rediffusion in 1963.) Maschwitz was the nominal head until his exit, but in reality, Sloan was in charge. The romantic Maschwitz had referred to his producers as ‘my ragged army’ and invented affectionate nicknames for them. Frank Muir related in his memoirs how he and Denis Norden were ‘Los Layabouts’, while Dennis Main Wilson was ‘Dr Sinister’ and Graeme Muir was ‘our resident gynaecologist’.5 On taking over, the businesslike Sloan declared that ‘this department has a lot of work to do and we are all professionals so you can forget any “ragged army” nonsense’.6 Waldman and Maschwitz had both been producers and performers, whereas Sloan was an administrator. Frank Muir observed that he was ‘keen on things which he felt were due to him like “discipline” and “loyalty”’ and that his ‘real interest lay not in the product but in the management of it’. Nonetheless, he knew the BBC system backwards, was good at getting just enough money for his staff to do their jobs properly and protecting them from interference from above.
One of Sloan’s first administrative moves was to replace himself as assistant head of light entertainment, choosing Bill Cotton Junior. The appointment acknowledged informally the division of LE’s labours. ‘I looked after variety and Tom looked after comedy,’ Sir Bill Cotton explains. ‘We worked very closely together, there were never any divisions, and I used to defer to him. The division really was situation comedy and musical shows. Between the two, there were sketch shows and broken comedy shows, which could be done by either side.’7 In 1964, the division became formalized by the appointment of Frank Muir as assistant head of light entertainment group (comedy), Cotton becoming assistant head (variety). Producers henceforth tended to be either variety producers or comedy producers.
The increased professionalism was further embodied in BBC Television Centre, which finally opened as a production facility on 29 June 1960, with a variety show from studio TC3 called First Night, produced by Graeme Muir. William G. Stewart was a call boy on that first production, and he remembers the excitement it caused among the normally blasé staff:
It was a variety special, starring David Nixon and Arthur Askey. What was so funny about it was that there were two dance groups at the time – the Television Toppers and the Silhouettes. The Silhouettes were on Billy Cotton’s show, and the Toppers were on every other show. I remember the buzz went round: ‘They’ve got the Toppers and the Silhouettes.’ Now you’d think of it as like Toytown, but it was exciting, like Rod Stewart and Elton John.8
Similar moves to create bespoke studio facilities were afoot at Granada in Manchest
er and at Associated-Rediffusion’s Wembley site. At Teddington, ABC was adapting the existing film stages, which were being augmented with new blocks containing the latest technology. Meanwhile, ATV was creating a state-of-the-art four-studio television centre in the former Neptune film studios at Elstree, which had been bought from the Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Junior. (These studios are really in Borehamwood, but the Elstree name had been adopted by the British International Pictures studios over the road when they were built in the twenties, and it came to signify the several studios in the area, regardless of their real location.)
Compared to the previous makeshift dwellings, these complexes were set up as factories for television. Design and building of sets happened in-house on giant paint frames – the design block at BBC Television Centre, rather cleverly, had a trench in the floor allowing scenery to be lowered for access while the painters remained at ground level. ATV at Elstree had its own rehearsal rooms in the main office block, Neptune House. Associated-Rediffusion’s new studio 5 at Wembley was – and still is – the largest television studio in Britain, perfect for the giant variety spectaculars that A-R didn’t really make.
In time, though, ATV’s studio D at Elstree became perhaps the best of all the LE studios. The advantages it had over the competition were its permanent audience seating and its lighting trench – a simple device that allowed the white cyclorama cloth around the back wall of the studio to be lit in such a way as to give the impression of infinity. ‘That took years to do,’ ATV’s head of design Richard Greenough recalls. ‘For a long time we built the stage up on rather rickety rostrums. I say rickety . . . I don’t know how they didn’t collapse.’9