Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  Behind the scenes, the 1977 contest was memorable for different reasons. The whole show had nearly been cancelled due to industrial action by cameramen. Alternatives were discussed, including recording the performances in each entrant’s home country, but the dispute was eventually resolved and the show went ahead five weeks late on 7 May at the new Wembley Conference Centre. The broadcast was not without its problems, however. Location film for use between the acts was scrapped as unsatisfactory, leaving director Stewart Morris with no option but to let the cameras pan across the bemused, self-conscious audience. The event was won by France’s Marie Myriam with ‘L’Oiseau et l’Enfant’, while ‘Rock Bottom’ – the lyrics being a pointed comment on the UK’s industrial and financial woes – came second. At the end of the show, the credit roller refused to work, and production manager Marcus Plantin recalls a cameraman with a hand-held device falling ‘head over arse’ on Myriam’s victory walk, ‘so the shot started on her face and ended up on the ceiling’.52 Morris must have sensed impending doom and cut away in time, as the viewers only saw the shot lurching briefly to the floor then righting itself, as the cameraman lost his footing walking backwards down the green room steps.

  Although produced to the highest professional standard, disasters permitting, the Eurovision Song Contest was what critics referred to derisively as ‘tits and tinsel’ entertainment. It was this reputation for highly polished jollity that resulted in the BBC’s first foray into satire, That Was the Week That Was, coming from the current affairs department rather than LE. For a few short years at the start of the swinging decade, the satire movement was an inexorable force. On 10 May 1961, Beyond the Fringe had opened at the Fortune Theatre in London. With a minimalist set, no costumes and a cast of four recent university graduates, it killed off the West End tradition of revue (sketches and songs, all lavishly staged) single-handedly and almost instantly. Peter Cook’s impersonation of Harold Macmillan became a cause célèbre, particularly when Macmillan came to see the show himself. Cook, rather than pulling punches, made the script even more barbed, with references to the prime minister spending his spare evenings sitting in a theatre ‘listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face’.53

  Five months after the show’s West End opening, on 5 October 1961, Cook opened The Establishment, a cabaret nightclub offering satire, jazz and dining. Twenty days after The Establishment opened for business, the first issue of Private Eye came out. Satire was talked about as though it was something new, rather than something as old as politics. Acres of newsprint were devoted to the phenomenon. One event in particular counted against the entertainment experts.

  In July 1961, having sensed the tide, the BBC light entertainment group had responded by bringing over American satirist Mort Sahl for a one-off special with a celebrity audience. Unfortunately, the show had been judged a failure by the director general, Hugh Carleton Greene. He blamed LE for treating it like a variety show, with an introduction from Frank Muir and Denis Norden and a musical interlude from singer Georgia Brown and the John Dankworth Orchestra. Bill Cotton, as the show’s producer, blamed Sahl for not tailoring his material to a British audience. Greene prevailed and declared that satire should be handled by the current affairs department.

  When he took the job of BBC director general in 1960, it was clear that Greene – brother of the novelist Graham Greene – was a very different creature to his predecessors. His immediate predecessor, Sir Ian Jacob, had been a career soldier before joining the BBC – a fair man, but a disciplinarian and very much traditional authority. Greene shared the trade of journalism with William Haley who had been DG between 1944 and 1952, but Haley was another solemn and conservative figure, whereas Greene was not. Greene was the polar opposite of Lord Reith, but both stamped their own personalities and sensibilities on the organization, unlike many who have run the BBC. Reith’s BBC was didactic and dictatorial. Under Greene, who knew the value of awkward questions, the BBC was no less rigorous, but less inclined to preach. Reith abhorred levity, Greene encouraged it – as long as it was well done and preferably possessed of a core of intelligence.

  When it came to satire, Greene had experienced first-hand the political cabarets of Berlin in the thirties, when he had been working there for the Daily Telegraph. However, despite the support of Greene, it is unlikely that television would have been able or willing to transmit satire, had the satire boom happened any earlier. In 1944, as a wartime measure, the BBC had adopted a rule that forbade the broadcasting of any material on subjects due to be debated in Parliament within the next fourteen days. Unfortunately, many emergency measures taken in times of national crisis have a habit of becoming permanent fixtures.54 In July 1955, the Postmaster General, Sir Charles Hill – known to wireless listeners as ‘the radio doctor’, thanks to his wartime medical broadcasts, but now a politician – made the rule formal and externally enforced, rather than self-imposed. When commercial television came along, Independent Television News argued that the rule applied only to the BBC and began testing its limits. The breaking point came during the Suez crisis in 1956, when prime minister Sir Anthony Eden and leader of the opposition Hugh Gaitskell were allowed on air to speak to the nation about a matter that the broadcasters could not report meaningfully. The absurd rule was finally broken in 1958 by Granada’s coverage of the Rochdale by-election, and was not enforced subsequently.

  The first satirical salvo on British television was fired by ATV on 29 September 1962 in the form of On the Braden Beat with Bernard Braden. To be fair, the show was more topical than satirical – part chat show, part sketch show, part miscellany of reactions to the week’s events. Braden and his wife Barbara Kelly were Canadian actors who had arrived in Britain in the late forties and found almost instant favour on the airwaves, Kelly becoming a regular on What’s My Line. Breakfast with Braden had begun on the BBC Home Service in January 1950; it was scripted by Muir and Norden, and broadcast on Saturday mornings at 8.15, an unusually early time for a comedy show. When it returned in October 1950 after a summer break, it had moved to Monday lunchtimes, being retitled, for some reason, Bedtime with Braden. Braden and Kelly were also early into television, first in 1951 with a BBC sitcom that laboured under the rather cumbersome title of An Evening at Home with Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly, then in 1955 with a television transfer of the radio show, called Bath-Night with Braden.

  Following On the Braden Beat came a contribution from Associated-Rediffusion – perhaps, the most conservative of all the commercial television companies – called What the Public Wants. It was the brainchild of Elkan Allan, who had been appointed A-R’s head of entertainment the previous year. In many ways, Allan was an unlikely candidate for the job. He had begun his career as a journalist, making his name on the Daily Express, then still a colossus in Fleet Street. He moved into television on A-R’s current affairs magazine This Week, where his contemporaries included Jeremy Isaacs and Cyril Bennett, both later to become significant television executives. Eventually, he progressed to become the programme’s editor. In 1961, he received a summons from the company’s general manager John McMillan with an offer of promotion:

  In 1961, I went to Vietnam and did The Quiet War, which was a major documentary. Just before I went, John McMillan said ‘When you come back, would you like to be head of light entertainment?’ I was surprised. I think it was because I had teenage children and had always been very aware of what was going on in the world of entertainment. I was always a very showbizzy kind of person. I said yes on one condition: that we drop the word light and just call it entertainment. Because it seemed to me to predispose whatever one did, if it were called light entertainment, to frivolity, and that wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do or John McMillan wanted to do.55

  Despite Allan’s background, What the Public Wants, featuring a cast of near-unknown revue performers, turned out not to be what the public wanted. The Times called it ‘a feeble and irr
itating little show that suffers from the callow superciliousness of undergraduate revue’56 and it lasted a mere four editions from its delayed debut on Thursday 1 November 1962 until its exit on 6 December. The main problem was the tight regulatory grip kept by the Independent Television Authority, which rendered the show’s satirical attack toothless – especially the rule barring ‘any offensive representation or reference to a living person’. (This part of the Television Act was repealed in 1963.) However, Allan acknowledged other faults: ‘We had the wrong people. There were some good things in it – Tubby Hayes’ band – but it didn’t work.’57

  The BBC’s Royal Charter made it self-regulating, subject only to the scrutiny of the Board of Governors and the stipulations of the Charter itself. Any attempts at satire, if backed by the board of management, were on much firmer ground than an equivalent show at ITV. With the director general on your side, you were unassailable. This was the position that Ned Sherrin found himself in, when called upon to develop That Was the Week That Was. Sherrin had begun his career at ATV in Birmingham, before moving to the BBC, spending a short while as a very junior member of LE staff before heading to the television talks department. There he worked on the early evening magazine programme Tonight, under Welshman Donald Baverstock and Scot Alasdair Milne, both of whom were known for their phenomenal, and largely justified, self-belief. In 1961, Baverstock became assistant controller of programmes for the whole of BBC TV, and was approached by satirical ringleaders John Bird and Peter Cook about doing a show styled on their performances at Cook’s Establishment club. Independently, Sherrin was casting around for ideas that would fit a late Saturday night slot. He paid a visit to the US to see the chat show giants in action, just as chat show pioneer Jack Paar was handing over to Johnny Carson on NBC’s Tonight Show, but concluded that the format wouldn’t work on British television. Instead, he turned his attention to the satire boom, and decided that John Bird was the ideal host for a satirical show. Bird overcame his initial annoyance at having his own idea sold back to him, only to find that he was already committed to a US tour by The Establishment’s company when Sherrin wanted to record the pilot. Instead, he suggested his then flatmate, Footlights contemporary David Frost, as a replacement host.

  There was a small problem with the suggestion, in that Frost was working for a rival: namely Elkan Allan at Associated-Rediffusion. Upon leaving Cambridge, he had applied for one of the company’s graduate traineeships, as a day job while he did his satirical comedy act at various nightspots. Unfortunately, he didn’t make the final two,58 much to Allan’s amazement:

  I was absolutely knocked out with him and I said ‘Obviously he’s got to be one.’ The head of drama and the third person said ‘Oh no, we can’t have him. He’s much too ebullient. He’d be a headache.’ I said ‘I want him and if you don’t take him on this scheme, I will take him on, on my departmental budget, because I think he’s fantastic.’ They said ‘You’re welcome to him.’ So, he came and worked as a researcher for me. He was so bright, so clever, so funny. He was part of the satire thing, although the Fringe people hated him. They thought he was a real hanger-on. He did a one-man stand up at the Blue Angel, which I went to see, and thought he was terrific. So he came and worked for us.59

  Frost’s first outing in front of the camera was presenting one of Allan’s brainwaves, a show about the latest dance craze, the Twist. It was enough of a success for Allan to plan two follow-ups: Let’s Twist in Paris, then Let’s Twist on the Riviera:

  So, David, I, and a film crew went down to Cannes where the Whisky A Go Go – the original discotheque – was, and unfortunately it just pissed with rain. If you go to the Riviera, you’ve got to have the weather. I said ‘OK, nobody knows it’s raining, let’s pretend it’s not. You do this with sunglasses and the summer suit.’ We did the whole show in the rain and nobody ever knew. It was a good show, it worked. He was very good, did it terribly well. Then of course, just when we were building him up, he elected to go to the BBC and work for Ned, and in fact broke his contract with Rediffusion.60

  Frost’s motivation wasn’t economic. When the BBC’s interest in him became apparent, Associated-Rediffusion offered him a four-year contract worth £18,000, not including appearance fees for shows. In contrast, the BBC were offering £650 for thirteen weeks of preparation, plus £135 per programme for presenting, if it made it to a series. ‘I was convinced that TW3 [as That Was the Week That Was soon became known] had a future, albeit currently undefined,’ Frost said thirty years later. ‘TW3 was the sort of show I would have wanted to watch.’61 As well as suggesting the host, Bird also provided the BBC satire show with its title, adapting the old ‘That was Shell, that was’ advertising slogan. The initial plan was to have Frost co-hosting with Guardian journalist Brian Redhead, linking the various sketches and musical items, and a pilot on these lines was made on 15 July 1962, with support from John Bird, Eleanor Bron and Jeremy Geidt from The Establishment. A second pilot was made on 29 September, without Redhead, and with the ambitious Frost showing an increasing inclination to regard himself as co-producer.

  Only Frost, Bernard Levin (drafted in from the Spectator magazine to tackle relatively serious debates), and the cartoonist Timothy Birdsall, who drew marvellous works of satirical art live on air, as well as performing in sketches, were from a university background.62 Of the show’s repertory company, Willie Rushton had gone straight from Shrewsbury and National Service into cartooning and generally being wonderful, while Romford-born singer Millicent Martin had appeared on Tonight, performing topical songs, usually written by Sherrin and his long-term collaborator Caryl Brahms. Roy Kinnear and Lance Percival both came from the theatre, Kinnear having made a big impression in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s revue England, Our England, and Kenneth Cope was appearing as Jed Stone in Coronation Street. Meanwhile, the writers were largely drawn from the mainstream press, rather than the ranks of conventional gagsmiths. Peter Tinniswood and David Nobbs had met as reporters on the Sheffield Star, the Peter Lewis–Peter Dobereiner partnership emanated from the Daily Mail and Michael Frayn was on the Guardian. The chief writer – with particular responsibility for co-writing Frost’s material with the host himself – came from just outside the Fleet Street club, in the form of Christopher Booker, co-founder of Private Eye.

  The scripts for sketches were usually in by Wednesday, but other material continued to arrive right up until the last minute, usually by taxi. The hectic pace meant that Sherrin soon decided to delegate some of his production responsibilities. Jack Duncan, a friend of Booker and Richard Ingrams – Booker’s successor as Eye editor – from Oxford, came in to direct the sketch rehearsals. ‘Ned realized that he couldn’t cope with all the political stuff and spare the time to go down and do the sketches,’ he recalls. ‘I always thought that Willie had suggested me, but years ago, Booker told me it was him. So, I was chosen on a three-week contract.’ Duncan’s first move was to tame Frost:

  Frostie was in the sketches and really wanted to direct them all himself. I could see that this was going to lead nowhere so, wet and green as I was, I went to Ned and said ‘I don’t really want Frost in any more sketches, please. I’ll do the sketches, Frost is a cabaret artist and a commentator. All the rest of them are actors, his style is completely different from theirs, he doesn’t fit in any way. He doesn’t want me there anyway.’ So I got Frost banned from sketches. It was hectic, but brilliant – the best time in one’s life.63

  Many of the most memorable items from TW3 were politically inspired, such as Booker and Frost’s devastating This Is Your Life spoof dedicated to demolishing the useless home secretary Henry Brooke, and Gerald Kaufman’s ‘Silent Men of Westminster’ item about MPs who never spoke in the Commons. The show also satirized the world of entertainment far more ruthlessly than an LE inside job would perhaps have dared. The first programme contained a Peter Cook-written send-up of Jim’s Inn, one of the most popular ITV advertising magazines or ‘admags’, in which blatant plugs
for products or services were inserted into a narrative drama or comedy show:

  NIGE: Excuse me noticing it, but I didn’t know you could run to a tie like that, Baz. It must have set you back all of 15 guineas.

  BAZ: No, I’m rather pleased to see your eye lighting on this tie, because, in fact, it wasn’t altogether as costly as that.

  NIGE: How much was it?

  BAZ: Three and sixpence, a matter of fact. I got it at Arthur Purvis, Marine Parade, Gorleston. It’s a dacron tetralax masturpene in the new non-iron histamine luxipac.64

  Jim’s Inn was Associated-Rediffusion’s production, featuring Jimmy Hanley as the landlord of a pub, while Southern had the benefit of Kenneth Horne in Trader Horne. These fixtures of the early commercial television landscape were to be outlawed in 1963, as part of the ITA’s desire to make ITV as respectable as it was profitable.

  That first TW3 also featured a damning ‘tribute’ to Norrie Paramor, the EMI record producer behind the success of Cliff Richard and the Shadows. His tendency to put his own songs on B-sides (the royalty on a B-side being the same as the A-side that sold the disc), or give the publishing rights to his brother’s company, were of particular note. Later in the run, a similar ‘tribute’ appeared, this time concerning Oliver! composer Lionel Bart, and the alarming similarities his tunes bore to older songs. In the finale, David Kernan sang Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Mountain Greenery’ and Willie Rushton sang Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Heart and Soul’ as counterpoint to Millie Martin singing Bart’s ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be’, Bart’s song bearing an uncanny resemblance to both.