Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  ERIC: What’s it like being famous?

  JOHN LENNON: Ah, it’s not like in your day, you know.

  ERIC: What? That’s an insult that is. What do you mean not like in my day?

  LENNON: My dad used to tell me about you, you know [does ‘when I was knee-high to a grasshopper’ gesture].

  ERIC: Only got a little dad, have you?39

  For the number that followed, a rendition of ‘Moonlight Bay’, the Fab Four and Ernie donned striped jackets and straw boaters, while Eric emerged from the wings in a deluxe Merseybeat wig and that quintessential piece of early Beatle fashion, a collarless Pierre Cardin jacket, shouting Beatleisms, and the odd Gerry and the Pacemakers quote, over the others. There is a story that the show’s producer, Colin Clews, insisted on it going out early in the run, in case the Beatles’ star faded suddenly. The fact that, by the time the show was recorded, the band had already scored three number one hits and a number two, as well as appearing at a Royal Variety Performance, suggests the story is apocryphal. Although the scope and extent of their career and influence was not yet apparent, it was already evident that they weren’t any old transient pop fad.

  The encounter with the Beatles underlines Morecambe and Wise’s generosity as performers. Eric, Ernie and their writers Sid and Dick – sometimes referred to as ‘Sick and Did’ – knew that the quality of the show mattered more than who got the laughs, sometimes giving away the best lines to guests if they thought it would get a better response. Mike Winters had no such sense of perspective, according to Eric Geen, who wrote for Mike and Bernie in their ABC heyday:

  The trouble was that Mike wanted to have as many lines as Bernie. Mike had to be on screen as much as Bernie. It was foolish. Bernie didn’t worry, he was laid-back, but Mike did all the business, and whatever Mike said went. Mike blew it. He was jealous and it made it very difficult to write sketches. He didn’t like other people on the show getting laughs. Also, they didn’t want to do slapstick, they wanted to be more serious. If you’re a comic, you can’t be serious. Bernie was a funny fellow – a natural clown.40

  Although Mike and Bernie Winters were entertaining enough, it’s obvious that ATV had the better double act. However, the double act that headed the firm through its early years came to an end in September 1962, when Val Parnell retired as joint executive chairman. From that moment on, ATV was Lew Grade was ATV; although he was a powerful man before he even entered television, his involvement with the medium made Grade a household name. He had grasped television’s potential from the start, and had withdrawn from the family agency in March 1956 to concentrate on ATV. He would remain devoted to the company until his retirement in 1977.

  In an industry based on vision, Grade was one of the biggest visionaries of all. Early on, he saw the value of exporting and syndicating programmes on the American model, and ATV’s success in this field was marked by three Queen’s Awards to Industry for Export Achievement. ATV’s main export products were the filmed adventure series made by its sister company ITC, such as The Saint, The Baron, Danger Man and Man in a Suitcase. However, ATV also managed to package entertainment shows for the American market, often using big US stars – a real case of flogging sand to the Arabs and a testament to Grade’s skills as a salesman. In particular, ATV enjoyed a warm association with singer Jo Stafford, not least because her manager Mike Nidorf was an old friend of Grade’s – indeed it was Nidorf who had alerted the agent to The Times’s announcement inviting applicants for commercial television franchises in 1954.

  ATV was also early into full-scale colour production, making colour shows for export more than two years before they could be transmitted domestically.41 In the US, NBC had been transmitting successfully and regularly in colour since 1954, so ATV made its most exportable shows in monochrome for domestic transmission and in 525-line NTSC colour, the US standard. One of the most prominent, if not actually the earliest, was The Heart of Show Business, recorded in 1966 and transmitted in the UK on 26 March 1967, although British viewers could see it in monochrome only. It was a charity spectacular, in aid of the victims of the collapsed slag heap at Aberfan, starring singers Shirley Bassey, Tommy Steele, Frankie Vaughan and Sammy Davis Junior, as well as the newly wed actors Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Among Taylor’s duties was to introduce an acrobatic act known as Les Trois Charlies, who on closer inspection turned out to be Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers, performing in the mode of Tony Hancock’s useless troupe on Hancock’s Forty-Three Minutes, a decade earlier.

  Even though the US had over a decade’s head start on the UK when it came to colour television, ATV worked out very quickly that the US television companies were creating a lot of needless hassle for themselves. ‘The colour cameras did need a lot of light and we were terribly misled by the Americans, because they said that the colour temperature of the lamps had to be a certain level,’ explains Richard Greenough, ATV’s head of visual services, as the head of design was known by 1967. ‘A new lamp would only sustain that level for a few hours then it became more red. So what happened in the early days was that we’d use lamps for rehearsal, then they’d all have to be changed for recording. This was an enormous problem and expense. Then our lighting directors and the vision control people suddenly twigged the idea that if you altered the red level you were back to where you started. The moment we realized that, the lamps had their normal life and we adjusted the colour electronically. The Americans didn’t seem to get that idea.’42

  Some of the other ITV companies weren’t too sure about Grade’s pursuit of export dollars either. Howard Thomas of ABC ‘sometimes . . . jokingly reminded him that he should be concentrating on Birmingham, England, rather than Birmingham, Alabama’.43 However, even those who thought that some of ATV’s products were vulgar, trashy or too transatlantic for comfort had to admit that Grade himself was a man of honour. Grade was always as good as his word – a verbal contract from him was a firmer guarantee than some rivals’ written contracts.

  Grade’s record of honour came in very useful when he found himself having to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable. In 1965, ATV bought from Prince Littler and Emile Littler the Stoll Moss group, but the acquisition had a 20 per cent voting stake in its new owner. Grade needed to find a buyer for the shares quickly, and approached Sir Max Aitken, chairman of the Express newspaper group and son of Lord Beaverbrook (one of ITV’s harshest critics, who had died the previous year). Aitken was enthusiastic, but almost everyone told Grade that he’d never get the deal past the Daily Mirror, a major ATV shareholder since April 1956, or the Independent Television Authority. Grade’s good relationship with Mirror Newspapers chairman Hugh Cudlipp, and Cecil King, chairman of the Mirror’s parent company, IPC, ensured the first hurdle was overcome with ease. Grade managed to put the ITA’s objections about newspaper influence in television ownership into context by pointing out that one of ITV’s strongest critics was now keen to invest in it. The deal went through.

  The Stoll Moss deal meant that ATV suddenly owned the London Palladium, home of its flagship entertainment show, which maintained its popularity throughout the sixties. During the twelve-year run of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, there were several changes of host. Bruce Forsyth became ill in September 1960, and, for nearly a year, his place as compère was taken by the virtually unknown comic Don Arrol, who described the experience as ‘like working with a ghost behind me . . . it’s Bruce’s show’.44 Forsyth took an unenforced sabbatical from the show in 1962, with affable Liverpool-born comic Norman Vaughan and his catchphrases, ‘swinging’ and ‘dodgy’, taking over.

  As important as ATV’s flagship variety show was, Grade viewed the export of programmes, particularly to the US networks, as a vital part of the company’s future. BBC Television’s light entertainment group had its own international commitments too, but Europe figured far more heavily. A BBC show – the Black and White Minstrel Show – was, in 1961, the first winner of the coveted Golden Rose prize for best ente
rtainment programme at the Montreux Television Festival. Over a decade earlier, the Corporation had played a central role in setting up the European Broadcasting Union, which was instituted at a specially convened conference in Torquay on 12 February 1950, as a response to the increasing Communist domination of the existing industry forum, the International Broadcasting Organization. The final straw had come when the IBO moved its headquarters from Brussels to Prague. At the outset, the EBU’s main responsibilities were technical and political, not least of which was ensuring that broadcasting stations kept to their internationally agreed frequencies. It was one of the Union’s technical achievements that led to one of the most enduring elements of light entertainment programming, namely the Eurovision Song Contest.

  Broadcasting television pictures from the continent to the UK had become a reality on 27 August 1950, when an hour-long outside broadcast had been beamed from Calais across the English Channel. By 1954, the EBU had set up a network of relays between its member broadcasters, allowing live transmission across Europe. The name ‘Eurovision’ was coined by George Campey, the television correspondent of the London Evening Standard. Such technical marvels were of limited use without programmes, though, and the idea of a song contest was mooted, with the first competition taking place in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1956. Due to a missed deadline, the UK sat out that first contest, which was won by ‘Refrain’, sung by Switzerland’s Lys Assia, but entered in 1957.

  After the 1957 contest in Frankfurt, it became a rule that the winning country would host the following year’s contest, but the UK staged the Eurovision twice before winning. In 1959, Teddy Scholten took first place for the Netherlands with ‘Een Beetje’ (‘A Little Bit’), but the Dutch declined to stage the contest in 1960, having already done so in 1958 and found it an expensive do. The UK entry, Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson’s ‘Sing Little Birdie’ had come second, so the BBC took over, holding the contest at the Royal Festival Hall on 29 March 1960, under producer Harry Carlisle, a panel game veteran, and director Innes Lloyd, a curious choice in retrospect as he would become best known for his distinguished work in drama. Katie Boyle made her first appearance as the host, aided by a commentary from David Jacobs. The French won, represented by Jacqueline Boyer with ‘Tom Pillibi’ – and won again just two years later. They passed on the honour of holding the contest a second time, and the BBC was once again asked to step in. Tom Sloan, who had finally become head of light entertainment in 1961, decided that it would be an ideal opportunity to show off the capabilities of the new BBC Television Centre, as Yvonne Littlewood explains:

  There were fifteen countries, even in 1963. We used [studios] three and four, and five for the jury.45 We had the performance in one of the studios, three or four, with the orchestra, and the other one with the audience, the scoring and everything. Harry Carlisle looked after the general administrative side and I did all the direction. We had excellent sound [by] Len Shorey. That contest was significant for me, because singing for Luxembourg was Nana Mouskouri [with whom Littlewood worked many times subsequently]. Singing for Switzerland was Esther Ofarim, and there were other singers like Heidi Brühl and Alain Barrière, Françoise Hardy, all sorts of interesting people.46

  Of the competitors, the voting juries were most impressed by the Danish entry – ‘Dansevise’ by Grethe and Jørgen Ingmann – although their victory was not without controversy. Katie Boyle had been unable to hear the votes cast by the Norwegian jury, so she decided to move on and return to them later. The audience, both in the studio and at home, had no such problems. When she returned to them, their votes had changed and were instrumental in giving neighbouring Denmark a narrow victory over Switzerland.

  Finally, with Sandie Shaw’s victory in the 1967 contest in Austria, the UK got to hold the contest as a winner. For most viewers, the most memorable aspect of the 1968 show at the Royal Albert Hall was ‘Congratulations’ by Cliff Richard being beaten by the Spanish entry, ‘La La La’ by Massiel, with only one point in it. It later emerged that Richard might have won, if it hadn’t been for gerrymandering by operatives of Spain’s General Franco. For those behind the scenes, it sticks in the memory for a quite different reason. At the Royal Albert Hall, Stewart Morris was producer/director, with Tom Sloan on hand as executive producer. Through the rehearsals, all was going like clockwork, but back at Television Centre, Sloan’s deputy Bill Cotton was getting a little restless at having to keep an overworked department running while Sloan was glad-handing the continental visitors; he was also wondering if things weren’t going so well that complacency was setting in. Over lunch with some of his young producers, a plan began to formulate. Roger Ordish, along with Terry Henebery and Brian Whitehouse, was one of the canteen conspirators:

  Bill said ‘Tom’s sitting there saying “All these bloody foreigners coming saying they want to change their rehearsal time and their accommodation’s not good enough . . .” I think he needs something to leaven it. What can you do?’ We said we could be another nation.47

  After lunch, Ordish, Henebery and Whitehouse went to costume and make-up, emerging in dark glasses, wide-brimmed hats, false moustaches and beards as the Albanian delegation. Ordish had become the group’s spokesman due to his ability to speak Russian, and had called in his university friend Sue Arnold, then working on the Daily Sketch, to act as the group’s ‘interpreter’. ‘We even hired a Rolls-Royce,’ Ordish recalls. ‘It was arranged that Tom would see it arrive and he said “Well, at least they’ve got some money.”’ Terry Henebery remembers the precise amount: £10 to hire the Roller for an evening.

  The plan was to proceed to the Royal Albert Hall, where Cotton would go in first and check the lay of the land. Terry Henebery explains: ‘The deal was that when we got out of that car, if Bill was at the window blowing his nose, get back in the car, because Tom’s in a bad mood and it’s going to go down like a cup of cold sick.’48 AHLEG (Tel) – Assistant Head of Light Entertainment Group (Television) – was not seen to blow his nose, and so the game was afoot. As the party entered, they bowed to Sloan, who returned the gesture, which almost blew the gaff. ‘Jim Moir [who was running the floor on the show] knew about it, but he wasn’t part of it,’ says Ordish. ‘He almost gave the game away when he got the most terrible fits of giggles seeing Tom Sloan bowing to us.’49 As the stunt escalated, so did Moir’s amusement, although thankfully unseen by Sloan. Ordish continues:

  I was talking gobbledegook, and our interpreter was saying ‘Mr Antolini asks why can’t the Albanians be called for a rehearsal?’ And Tom Sloan was saying ‘Tell them that Albania is not a member of the European Broadcasting Union.’ Of course, when you’re doing all that, you never look at people. You look at the interpreter. The next thing was to say ‘Mr Antolini says that if you hear their song you will find it so beautiful that you will put it in the contest.’ And then we began to sing ‘Congratulations’ in cod-Albanian.

  It was Sloan’s secretary, Queenie Lipyeat, who cottoned on quickest. ‘They thought it was student rag,’ Henebery recalls, ‘but when it all erupted, Tom’s secretary rushed across the room, whipped my moustache off and said “It’s Terry Henebery.”’ There was then a brief pause, while they awaited Sloan’s reaction. ‘There’s that pregnant moment, that millisecond when you think “He’s going to go apeshit.”’ Thankfully, Sloan took it in the intended spirit. ‘He said “I’ve been had, that’s fucking marvellous.”’ He loved it. He adored it that we cared enough to want to do it. Because that’s the way things work, isn’t it? You’ve got to care enough about the person to do it. He paid for the Roller, made us go back to Television Centre, got us into the small bar at the Centre, and made us keep doing it for his friends in the evening. We still had all the gear on, the funny hats, the smoked glasses and the moustaches.’50

  There is another punchline to the story. With the aid of Eurovision’s excellent communications network, news of the prank spread quickly. ‘They had a link-up with all of the Eurovision countries to test the lines and the
y’d all heard this story,’ Ordish relates. ‘In the practice, Albania won the Eurovision Song Contest. Albanie – douze points.’51

  In the fifties and sixties, the music provision for BBC TV’s light entertainment output – including the Eurovision Song Contest – had been dominated by the conductor and arranger Eric Robinson. As well as supplying the backing for programmes like the Black and White Minstrel Show, he also became a star in front of the camera with his own series Music For You. In contrast, his successor was rarely seen on screen, but his name is instantly recognizable to anyone who saw a set of programme credits in the seventies or eighties. Ronnie Hazlehurst had begun his professional musical career as a trumpeter in dance bands around Manchester. He joined the BBC as a staff arranger in the early sixties, and contributed musical scores to all of the big light entertainment shows, including a superb arrangement of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ for a 1964 Billy Cotton Band Show, as well as writing the original theme tune for the Dick Clement/Ian La Frenais sitcom The Likely Lads. He also wrote a big band theme based around the notes ‘B-B-C’ for use every morning before schools programmes.

  In 1968, he became the music adviser to BBC TV’s light entertainment group, and from then was the dominant force in music for BBC entertainment shows. His memorable themes included The Two Ronnies, Last of the Summer Wine, I Didn’t Know You Cared and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Although he was a skilled user of harmonies – deriding one-time colleague Buddy Bregman for his over-simple arrangements – his signature touch was ensuring that the title of the show could be sung to the melody of the theme tune. He built a session band, including trumpeter Kenny Baker, trombonist Don Lusher, pianist Ronnie Price, guitarist Judd Procter, bassist Dave Richmond and drummer Alf Bigden, that could handle any brief. His best-remembered on-screen appearance was at the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest, where he took to the podium wearing a bowler hat, and conducted the British entry, ‘Rock Bottom’ by Lynsey De Paul and Mike Moran, with a rolled-up umbrella.