by Louis Barfe
Among the most essential of the workers in these television factories were the orchestras who made the music for the shows. British session musicians had, and still have, an unparalleled reputation for accurate sight-reading, a valuable quality in the frantic world of television. The musicians themselves rarely featured in starring roles, but the conductors became well-known faces. Eric Robinson was pre-eminent at the BBC in the fifties and sixties as a conductor and arranger, providing the accompaniment for the Black and White Minstrel Show as well as his own series, Music For You. ATV used a number of musical directors in its earliest days, including ‘Carry On’ score maestro Eric Rogers and Cyril Ornadel. By 1958, however, with the big bands in decline, Jack Parnell – a star in his own right from his days drumming with Ted Heath and his Music and then leading his own hard-swinging band – came into Uncle Val’s empire:
If you know promoters like I know promoters, if they can get four guys making as much noise as sixteen, they’re going to use them. This was before the Beatles and everything, but I could see it coming. I thought ‘We’ve got to do something else,’ and Leslie Grade said ‘You’ve got to come off the road and bring the band into TV,’ so that’s what we did. The first shows I did were with the band that was off the road. The first show we did was a Max Bygraves special and we went on from that really. A lot of the guys peeled off, really, because they didn’t like that kind of work. I brought in the top session men and wound up with nearly all the Ted Heath band including Kenny [Baker], and Tom McQuater from the Squad[ronaire]s.10 A wonderful band, that was. We made a huge reputation in America. Stars would come and only come if it was our band. I know for a fact that it was demanded by some of them that our band was on it.
At one time, in the early part of that, we were doing five live television shows a week, and the pressure was unbelievable. We had a huge team; we had four rehearsal pianists doing a show each, a whole bunch of arrangers. The main pianist was Norman Stenfalt, from the Heath band. The Arthur Haynes Show, oh there were loads of them. We used to do Thursday Startime, I think it was called, then there was Sunday Night at the London Palladium. We used to do a thing called Music Shop, on Sunday afternoons. I used to play drums on that. I was writing a lot of music for plays and background music and stuff like that. It became much easier when we could record. Easier, but not quite as exciting.11
While Parnell was getting established at Wood Green, on his way to becoming ATV’s main musical director, another broadcasting band members were becoming personalities in their own right. Based at the BBC’s Manchester outpost, the Northern Dance Orchestra – conducted variously over its life by Ray Martin, Alyn Ainsworth, George Clouston and Bernard Herrmann – had replaced the Northern Variety Orchestra in 1954 and worked extensively on radio. When the BBC bought the former Mancunian Films studio (a converted Wesleyan chapel at Dickenson Road, Rusholme) in 1954, the band was called upon to provide music for television as well, not least of which was its own series, Make Way for Music.
At a time when television was tightly scripted, planned and formal, these NDO shows must have seemed wild, anarchic and loose. Make Way for Music was born of a sudden, desperate need, which dictated the form the first show would take, as announcer Roger Moffat recalled shortly before his death in 1986:
It was a Friday and we were doing the radio show at lunchtime. [BBC North entertainment producer] Barney Colehan had arranged for the orchestra to accompany Shirley Bassey in the evening on a live television programme. Shirley had a sore throat so he came dashing down to the studio and said ‘What are we going to do? Shirley can’t do it.’ I said ‘Don’t ask me, I wasn’t on the television show in the first place.’ He said ‘Well, can you think of something?’ I said ‘Why don’t you televise what happens in a sound show.’ He said ‘Thank goodness, that’s a good idea. Can you come along with Les Howard and do the show, and [singer] Sheila [Buxton] and the orchestra?’ I said ‘Yes, all right.’
So, we all assembled to play the same programme on television that we had at lunchtime. Barney had said to the orchestral manager ‘I’d like all their band jackets and smart clothes.’ So, I said to Barney ‘This is meant to be a televised radio show, they’re all in their braces and things. You can’t do that.’ He said ‘Well, you can’t just have them looking scruffy and unshaven’ . . . We all went out to the pub and I . . . said ‘Forget about your jackets, fellas’ . . . Barney went white when they all came on the stage about five minutes before the show. I could hear him screaming through the earphones . . . so we did it like that and it was a great success.12
The show was seen by head of light entertainment Eric Maschwitz on a visit to the North region, and he backed a network transfer. He insisted on the continuation of shirtsleeve order – and the braces sported by lead alto saxophonist Johnny Roadhouse became a national talking point. Colehan got into the spirit of the thing too, making frequent comments over the studio talkback, and giving the impression that the viewer was eavesdropping on a high-spirited rehearsal.
Even before Make Way for Music, Moffat had a fairly well justified reputation as an ‘enfant terrible’. Once, during a printing strike, he declared on air that the current edition of the Radio Times was absolutely no use to anyone outside London. On Make Way for Music, his mischievous humour was free to run riot. No song announcement was complete without an affectionate insult aimed at the soloist. He opened one show by assembling several members of the band around him in a circle because ‘I just thought the viewers might like to see exactly what a dope ring really looks like.’13 Such organized chaos met with a surprising degree of approval from the powers that were. When, in 1959, the Corporation made This Is the BBC, a documentary film about its activities, the NDO was featured prominently, playing a superb Alan Roper arrangement of ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht’ ’At’, while the whole BBC is shown enjoying its lunch. In his announcement, Moffat describes Roper as ‘a man who’s made so much money out of the coffee business, he now has a house in its own grounds’.
Make Way for Music was far from being the North region’s only contribution to television light entertainment. Since July 1953, Colehan had been producing The Good Old Days, an outside broadcast from the stage of the City Varieties Theatre in Leeds, a proper horseshoe-shaped music hall dating from 1865. The idea behind the show was to recreate the atmosphere of those far-off nights with modern performers. The audiences, often drawn from the ranks of local amateur dramatic societies, were all decked out in period dress, and there was even a chairman, in the form of South African-born actor Leonard Sachs, to introduce the turns in the florid, loquacious way that Victorian music hall chairmen did. Colehan’s other shows included Club Night, transmitted from northern working men’s clubs, featuring the sort of music and comedy that could be expected on a club bill. Although he worked often at the Manchester studios, Colehan was never based in the north-west, working instead from Broadcasting House at Woodhouse Lane in Leeds, his home city.
In 1958, John Ammonds moved over from producing radio LE at the BBC in Manchester to become the region’s main television light entertainment producer. After the directors’ training course came a three-month attachment to Douglas Moodie in the LE department in London, during which he produced a series of fifteen-minute shows with Michael Holliday, one of the top pop singers of the day. His debut left room for improvement, as he admits: ‘It was the first show I did, and it was live network, at 10.45 admittedly. Mike had forgotten the words. He got completely lost on the last verse. Fortunately, the band, with Johnny Pearson on piano, caught up with him and they all finished together, but I went back to my digs in Wimbledon thinking “Oh, the first real go in London and it was a disaster.”’14 Moodie smoothed the matter over at the programme review meeting, aided by the fact that no one else present had seen the show, and Ammonds returned north to assume his new duties.
One of them was to find something suitable for bumbling comedian Harry Worth, who had so nearly failed to get Brian Tesler off to a flying start at ATV.
A North region-only pilot in 1959 was successful enough to lead to a series in early 1960, written by Ammonds’s benefactor Ronnie Taylor and called The Trouble With Harry. This was followed in the autumn by Here’s Harry, best known for its opening title sequence, in which Worth positioned himself by a shop window and raised an arm and a leg, using the reflection to appear as though he was jumping in the air.
The growing importance of television led to a breakthrough in 1960, when the Royal Variety Performance was transmitted in vision for the first time. It was recorded on 16 May at the Victoria Palace by ATV and transmitted on Sunday 22 May in place of Sunday Night at the London Palladium and ABC’s Armchair Theatre. The suggestion had come up before, but various ceremonial and organizational objections had been raised. It seems most likely that the final approval came as a result of the new technology of videotape recording and editing. The Royal Variety show was (and remains) renowned for over-running, but recording made it possible to package, schedule and transmit the show to its best advantage at last.
The bill that night had been assembled by Jack Hylton, newly freed from his association with Associated-Rediffusion. Naturally, the Crazy Gang loomed large, as the show was taking place in their theatrical home. In what The Times described as their ‘topical novelty’, the ageing miscreants appeared as ‘bridesmaids gleefully recalling their part in a recent wedding’, the topicality coming from the marriage of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones ten days before the show. The other acts included Adam Faith (a ‘beatnik’ in The Times’s parlance), Cliff Richard ‘radiating chubby good humour throughout his most sultry songs’15 and skiffle maestro Lonnie Donegan singing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, which had only just vacated the number one spot in the chart, with his band around him dressed in coats and mufflers, as street musicians.16
It was a pair of American performers, however, who stole the show. One was Nat ‘King’ Cole, who ‘sang of love and life with alternate energy and nostalgia, almost winning his battle with a band which seemed to regard beat numbers as an automatic cue for blotting out completely the singer they were supposed to be accompanying and glossy romantic pieces as an excuse for abandoning rhythm altogether’. The other was the man who personified the phrase ‘all-round entertainer’, Sammy Davis Junior, making his first appearance on British soil. The Times described him as ‘a small, wiry, almost Aztec-looking man with a galvanic personality’ and praised his ‘electrifying’ singing and his ‘needle-sharp impersonations of Messrs. Cole, Laine, Martin, Lewis and . . . Louis Armstrong, as they might handle “Birth of the Blues”.’17
Davis was such a smash that he was asked to return for the 1961 Royal show, again televised by ATV. (From 1962 onwards, after intervention from Bernard Delfont on the BBC’s behalf, the two networks alternated in presenting the Royal Variety Performance. To this day, the BBC produce it in even-numbered years, ITV in odd-numbered years.) Even though his impact was considerable the second time around, this time Davis had to compete with two bona fide troupers – the American comedians George Burns and Jack Benny. Burns’s wife and long-time comedy partner Gracie Allen had retired from the business, so a Burns and Allen routine was tackled, with Benny in drag, playing Allen. Given that Benny could slay an audience with nothing more than a pause, the effect was predictably seismic.
The international guest stars at the Royal Variety Performance were not always best remembered for their performance, however, one example being Mario Lanza’s involvement in the 1957 show. Grade Organization agent and personal friend Peter Prichard had been deputed to keep an eye on the singer and notorious drunk. Unfortunately, a rehearsal call caught Lanza asleep, and when Prichard tried to wake him, Lanza lashed out at his friend. Prichard described what had happened to Leslie Grade, whose first reaction was that treating one of his agents like this was unacceptable, and that Lanza should be removed from the show. Pragmatism prevailed and Grade said ‘Peter, let him do his song. Then, when he comes off, hit him back.’ Word of the altercation soon got out, and resulted in a Daily Mirror reporter doorstepping Prichard’s grandmother. Having explained what had happened in the hope of eliciting more information, the reporter was told ‘Oh, most probably. Peter fights all the kids in the street.’ Momentarily, in his aged relative’s mind, the successful theatrical agent had regressed to being a Shepherd’s Bush street bruiser.
In the early sixties, ATV’s dominance of light entertainment within the ITV network was beginning to be challenged by the weekend contractor for Midlands and the North, ABC Television. ABC had excelled in drama from the start, but its entertainment output had been rather directionless, with the exception of pioneering pop shows Oh Boy!, Boy Meets Girls and Wham!!, all produced by Jack Good. ATV had resorted to other tactics to keep ABC in its place, such as refusing some of ABC’s early entries into entertainment, and thus denying them a network showing. These included a Michael Bentine revue series called After Hours, which ABC managing director Howard Thomas would later describe as ‘one of the funniest shows that London has never seen’.18
The turnaround began with two coincidental events: ABC’s acquisition of the former Warner Brothers film studios at Teddington, which gave the company a well-equipped base to help it snare the best talent the capital could offer, and the arrival of Brian Tesler from ATV at the end of 1959. While his three years working for Grade and Parnell had been ‘very happy’, he felt his hard work deserved financial recognition. Freelance work was the answer, ideally dividing his time between ATV and the BBC. Then came the big surprise:
Teddy Sommerfield got me interviews with [BBC head of light entertainment] Eric Maschwitz and [ATV programme controller] Bill Ward, who both said ‘Yes, six months, marvellous, absolutely.’ Teddy then said ‘Oh, Howard Thomas wants to see you as well,’ and I thought, ‘Well, he wants some freelance work as well, so maybe I can do it next year.’ I went in to see him and he said ‘I want you to run features and light entertainment for me. I want you to be an executive.’ I said ‘Ultimately I want to be an executive, but not yet.’ He said ‘Well I want you to do it, think about it.’ That was the end of the year, I went up with Audrey [Tesler’s wife] to her family in Yorkshire, and he kept phoning up in Yorkshire. Howard kept phoning: ‘Come and meet the board.’ So I had a board lunch at Golden Square, then went down to the studios at Teddington. I thought ‘What the hell,’ went back, talked to Audrey and said yes, which upset Bill Ward and Eric Maschwitz. In fact, Bill Ward didn’t speak to me for at least six months or even more, which was hilarious. We had joint meetings, me and my people, Bill and his people, and Bill would say to Muir Sutherland [ABC’s programme co-ordinator] on my left ‘Ask him about so and so and so and so.’ I’d say to Muir ‘Tell him it’s OK, I’m going to do that.’ Muir would say ‘It’s OK he’s going to do that.’ It was absurd. It sounds like a sketch.19
Tesler found the new job hard-going. ‘It was hopeless. It was very difficult,’ he admits. ‘Howard Thomas was not a light entertainment man. He was a news, current affairs and drama man. He knew enough light entertainment to know what was good, but not enough to do it.’ This became obvious when Thomas decided to write a script for a situation comedy himself. Tesler knew it was a poor effort, but realized that actually making it might have the desired effect. ‘It was terrible,’ Tesler says. ‘I said to [producer] Philip [Jones] “Can you do this?” He said “I can’t get anybody to play in this.” I said “Please, it’s going to make a point. It won’t get on the air. Make as good a fist of it as we can just to show Howard that it really is difficult.” Bless his heart, he did. We showed it to Howard. Howard agreed it was terrible and he never ever said anything again about light entertainment, ever.’
Philip Jones had come to Tesler’s attention through an anomaly of television reception at the home of his wife’s parents: ‘They lived in Yorkshire, which was ABC territory, except I couldn’t see ABC programmes, because where they lived in Sleights, there wasn’t a gap in the hills all the way round. The only ITV I could se
e was Tyne Tees, which was how I saw the work of Philip Jones, and how I got him down to ABC.’20 It was a lucky spot. Jones, who had begun his career at Radio Luxembourg, would go on to run light entertainment for ABC and its successor, Thames, well into the eighties. Apart from Jones, Ben Churchill and Ernest Maxin – who came over from the BBC to join his old colleague – Tesler had trouble getting the right staff for his department, many of the best producers being tied up elsewhere. So, while Tesler was busy with executive life, the producer shortages meant that he had to carry on directing shows himself.
One of his productions was a 1960 spectacular that showed ATV and the rest of the network that ABC meant business: Sammy Davis Junior Meets the British. The American star had been booked for his first British performances, including his Royal Variety show triumph and a season at the Pigalle on Piccadilly.21 Tesler had booked Davis, through Harry Foster’s agency, for the Sunday of his first week in town, and arranged a series of set pieces that included a comedy/dance routine in a hat shop, with Lionel Blair playing the upper-crust milliner, and a ‘Pied Piper’ sequence at Battersea funfair with a group of children from Dr Barnardo’s homes. ‘The idea was that part one would be Sammy doing an act with lots of impressions,’ Tesler outlines. ‘Part two would be the Battersea funfair thing, and part three would be his nightclub act, with the studio at Teddington set with tables filled with celebrities.’22 The recording of the Battersea sequence went well, but the playback revealed an unforeseen hazard:
We’re looking at it for the first time, and as he crosses from one exhibit to another, we pan past an entire camera crew. I said ‘Oh Christ, but we’ve just passed an entire camera crew.’ He said ‘They’re not going to be watching the cameras, they’re going to be watching me. Fuck the camera crew.’ He was right, and I don’t think anybody noticed.23