Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  Another notable TW3 item where LE met hard-edged satire was Herbert Kretzmer’s still-powerful song about the revival of lynchings in the deep South, done in the style of the Black and White Minstrels, with vocal accompaniment from the real George Mitchell singers.65 Best remembered of all, though, was Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s evocation of an old-school comic – played by Roy Kinnear – entering the satirical ring with pun-laden references to Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, only to pull all his punches with the catchphrase ‘No, but seriously, boys and girls, he’s doing a grand job.’

  This was in stark contrast to 6 April 1963, the night when a real old-school comic was enticed onto TW3, only to steal the show. By 1962, Frankie Howerd’s career was in the doldrums, after a long run of success on the radio and on stage. In a fit of inspiration, Peter Cook persuaded him to take the unlikely step of performing at his Establishment club in September. Aided by a script from the combined might of Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Howerd was a smash hit. It had been Speight’s idea to play up the incongruity of the artist and the venue, painting Howerd as out of touch, so that the satirical punches had an even greater effect when they came. Ned Sherrin saw Howerd’s resurrection, and sent associate producer Jack Duncan to sound him out on his normal turf:

  Ned sent me down to Eastbourne to watch Frankie on the end of the pier and it was a disaster, really. I thought he was brilliant, but the audience didn’t. We went for a cup of tea and a sandwich afterwards in a really dreadful café, not even with the merits of a greasy spoon. People recognized him, and they deliberately made rude comments like ‘Not a bad show, but the comedy was dreadful’ as they passed by. I’ve never heard such nasty comments. He was really hurt. He was a delicate soul, as we know. I travelled back in the car with him and his pianist, who was also his driver. He was so depressed on the way back, and I didn’t blame him, but I thought he was wonderful. I said to Ned ‘He didn’t go down well in Eastbourne, but I think he’s terrific and we should have a go.’ On that journey back, I got a measure of the sort of depression he felt about these mediocre people who sneered at his genius. He cared, he really, really cared.66

  That care was apparent in the pains he took to ensure that his TW3 booking made the Establishment success look like an out-of-town try-out. A fresh script was commissioned and Howerd was allotted an eight-minute slot.67 On the night, Howerd’s monologue ran for thirteen minutes, but nobody minded, for two reasons. Firstly, TW3 was open-ended, being the last programme of the evening. Its length was dictated only by available material and overtime payments for the crew. (At the start of the second series, controller of programmes Stuart Hood tried to rein the show in by scheduling a serial based on The Third Man immediately afterwards. Sherrin and Frost conspired to give the plot away at the end of each TW3 until it was axed.) Secondly, he was going down a storm. In Bernard Levin’s discussion segment that week, his opponent had been society coiffeur ‘Teasy-Weasy’ Raymond, so Howerd claimed that the booking had come about after a chance encounter with Frost (‘You know, the one who wears his hair back to front’) under Raymond’s driers. Then an insult for Sherrin (‘Nice man. Underneath’), a reference to Panorama presenter Robin Day (‘Such cruel glasses’) and finally off into a monologue about the Budget. He had pitched the act perfectly, and that one appearance revitalized his career.

  In addition to the open-ended nature of the show, an element of looseness was apparent in Sherrin’s directing style. He made no attempts to disguise the mechanics of a television studio, with cameras and booms moving in and out of shot freely and the audience often fully visible. The sets for each item were basic and stylized, while for Frost’s pieces to camera, the background was the bare studio wall. Other loosening influences were present, both for the performers and the audience. ‘Being Talks, there was a wonderful piss-up before and after the show, which you wouldn’t have got with Light Entertainment . . . and the studio audience were served with the most appalling mulled wine, served by girls in black fishnet stockings,’ recalled Willie Rushton.68

  Although director general Hugh Greene thought satire on television a good idea, he lived in fear of one or more BBC governors resigning over the programme. This was despite the fact that the huffing and puffing from Postmaster General Reginald Bevins had come to nothing – the result of a personal note from Harold Macmillan urging him not to take action against the show since ‘being laughed over . . . is better than to be ignored’.69 The prospect of a general election made the decision easy. TW3 would be ‘rested’ for election year. In reality, it never returned, although satire did, in the form of Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, BBC3 and The Frost Report. In the meantime, other genres of programming were in need of more urgent attention.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Can you see what it is yet?’

  After the initial burst of Six Five Special and Oh Boy!, pop music on television had lost its way a little. None of the successor shows, such as the BBC’s Drumbeat or ABC’s Dig This!, caught the viewers’ imagination in the same way. BBC Television managed one big hit pop show in the form of Juke Box Jury, a Saturday teatime fixture from 1959 to 1967, but it was a sedate panel game in which celebrities declared the week’s new releases to be hits or misses under the control of the suave David Jacobs. In 1961, ABC producer Philip Jones took a step in the right direction, by combining the disc-grading system of JBJ with live performances from hit artists of the day. The result was Thank Your Lucky Stars, hosted from Birmingham by Radio Luxembourg disc jockey Keith Fordyce and his BBC Light Programme counterpart Brian Matthew. Following a trial run in the Midlands and North between April and June 1961, the show was networked that September.

  The best-remembered part of TYLS was the ‘Spin-A-Disc’ segment, where a guest DJ would play the latest releases for three teenagers, who voted on them. Instead of Juke Box Jury’s simple yay or nay, the Thank Your Lucky Stars panel graded each release, with five points being the top score. So it was that a Black Country teenager called Janice Nicholls became a national television personality, known for her enthusiastic judgement on many releases: ‘Oi’ll give it foive.’ In performance terms, the first networked show featured singer Eden Kane, born Richard Sarstedt, one of the three Sarstedt brothers to have a UK hit single. Also appearing in that debut transmission was actress Shani Wallis introducing 18-year-old Roy Tierney, whom she’d discovered singing in a coffee bar, as well as comic actors Harry Fowler and Mario Fabrizi introducing singer and comedian Kenny Lynch, followed by a burst of the then hip traditional jazz from Bobby Mickleburgh’s Confederates. In November, Fordyce dropped out, leaving Matthew as sole host. By this time, the show was starting to attract enough big names to justify its title, including Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Petula Clark, ‘Mr’ Acker Bilk, Helen Shapiro and Billy Fury.

  While serviceable, Thank Your Lucky Stars was a traditional variety show, only focused on pop bands. The next revolutionary step in pop music television came from an unlikely source. Associated-Rediffusion had been content to make excellent current affairs and drama programmes, and leave the entertainment to the rest of the ITV network. When Elkan Allan took over as head of entertainment in 1961, the job could have been viewed as a sinecure. The department had two big hit game shows, in the form of Take Your Pick and Double Your Money, to justify its existence, while ATV, ABC and Granada were all competing to get entertainment shows on screen. Allan decided against an easy life and began tackling the department’s weaknesses:

  Quizzes and games pretty much took care of themselves. With Take Your Pick and Double Your Money going, there was actually nothing to be done with them. They theoretically came under me. I felt I had no knowledge of or expertise in situation comedy, so I recruited Sid Colin and he came in and did that as my right-hand man, as it were. I left that whole side to him. That left me with music, in which I was very interested.1

  Initially, Allan was thinking in terms of a show for a regional opt-out slot,
and he had a presenter already available in the form of Keith Fordyce. ‘Keith Fordyce had a long-term contract [with Rediffusion], so I discussed with John [McMillan, programme controller] what else we could put him into,’ Allan recalled. ‘I said “Let’s do a programme called The Weekend Starts Here, and let’s have all the things, all the events and activities which young people can do in London that weekend.” Then I thought that was a bit of a clumsy title, so I said “Let’s call it Ready Steady Go . . . The Weekend Starts Here.”’ The pilot was made at Associated-Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, and looked to be unspectacular until halfway through:

  It had all kinds of elements in it. It had film, theatre, even, I think sport. Among the things was music. Concerts you could go to. We had Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who were doing a concert at Brixton that weekend, in the studio and they were due to play twice – once at the start of the programme, once at the end. It had one commercial break in the middle. We set the studio in a conventional way with a stage and rows of seats. In the audience was my 14–15-year-old son, Andy, and his sister Mary. Anyway, when Brian Poole played his first number, one or two of the kids got up and did a little bit of dancing. We encouraged people to do what they wanted.

  In the break, which could be as long as we wanted because it wasn’t live, it was being recorded, Andy came bustling up to me and said ‘Daddy, daddy, daddy, you’ve got to take the chairs away so that people can dance.’ I said ‘Jolly good idea’ and ordered that the chairs be taken away. When Brian Poole did his second number, everybody danced and suddenly you could see what the programme should be. It shouldn’t be film, stage and sport. It should just be music. And so we went on the air with a music programme and we were terribly lucky because we just caught the moment when the wave was forming on which the Beatles, the Kinks and the Small Faces were riding. It was extraordinary. We just caught that wave.2

  The pilot was such a success that the show went straight onto the ITV network on 9 August 1963, with Fordyce at the helm and some assistance from a voice and face of youth. ‘Keith is a tremendous professional, and he was able to hold the show together,’ Allan explained, ‘but it was obvious to me that what was needed was one, possibly two young presenters of the same age as the target audience. So we advertised for a researcher, but I had in mind all the time that this person would share with Keith the presenting and the interviewing.’ The 2,000 applicants were whittled down to three on the final shortlist: Anne Nightingale, Michael Aldred and Cathy MacGowan. At the audition, Allan asked them to interview each other, advocating what they felt was most important for teenagers out of music, sex or fashion:

  Cathy immediately said fashion and we had this three-way audition conversation. They were all good, and I took on Cathy and Michael Aldred, who didn’t last. Cathy was so strong, so good, so nice, so bright and clever, and so much of the audience [in terms of age and outlook] that she very quickly dominated that whole side of the show.3

  Another strong influence on RSG was Allan’s erstwhile secretary, Vicki Wickham. ‘After dictating a memo to Vicki about the concept of the show, she put down her pencil and her notebook, and said “Elkan, I’m very sorry, but I’ve got to work on that show. I’ve got to. It’s made for me.” She became the rock on which the whole thing was based. It was she, I think, who went down to Eel Pie Island and heard this group whom no one had ever heard of. She came back on the Monday morning, and said “I saw this absolutely marvellous group, we’ve got to book them. They’re called the Rolling Stones.”’

  Before long, musicians and cultural figures of that tumultuous time came to regard Television House on a Friday night as a social club. ‘If swinging London had a centre, it was the green room at Ready Steady Go,’ Allan recalled. ‘Everybody came. David Hockney used to drop in. The Beatles dropped in whether they were in the show or not. Pretty well everybody was welcome and it was a wonderful thing. Poor old Rediffusion didn’t know what had hit it.’

  At the time that RSG took to the air, ‘poor old Rediffusion’ was still run by Thomas Brownrigg, a former naval captain who regarded the company as a ship. Time was measured in bells and rules were rules. In 1964, Brownrigg retired, and the company was rebranded as Rediffusion London, complete with a sleek new corporate identity and a John Dankworth signature tune to replace its old march. Nonetheless, even hip, swinging, new-look Rediffusion must have emitted a shudder at one of Allan’s more lavish stunts:

  We recruited the dancers by going round the clubs, and giving tickets to people who danced very well. I thought this was a bit elitist and unfair, so we announced on air, if you want to be a dancer on Ready Steady Go, be at Rediffusion at five o’clock next Tuesday. We had 10,000 people turn up and Kingsway was closed to traffic by the police. I had them come in the front door of Rediffusion and that’s where the first loudspeaker was, they started dancing, and danced their way through the building and out the back. There was a back door which backed onto the LSE [London School of Economics]. By the time they were out the door, they’d either got a ticket or they didn’t. It got us on the news.4

  Part of the show’s appeal was the way in which it didn’t disguise the mechanics of television production, rather as That Was the Week That Was hadn’t. ‘Because of my documentary background, I said let’s have a pop show that is openly and honestly in a television studio,’ says Allan. ‘Let’s use the gantries and the spiral staircases. Let’s see the cameras and be honest about it. Then, I still wasn’t satisfied because of the innate phoniness of miming and so I said let’s go the whole hog and have it all played live. It meant moving to Wembley because you couldn’t do live in the little studio at Kingsway.’

  At Shepherd’s Bush, this activity had been watched with interest by Donald Baverstock, one of Grace Wyndham Goldie’s golden boys in current affairs and now BBC1 controller. He asked head of variety Bill Cotton Junior whether the BBC shouldn’t attempt a similar show. Cotton replied that, after years of US domination, enough of the top twenty was British to make it a possibility. Bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks made Britain the epicentre of the pop world. So it was that Top of the Pops began on New Year’s Day 1964. There was no room at Television Centre, the Television Theatre or Lime Grove for the new show, the only available option being the Manchester television studio, a converted church at Dickenson Road, Rusholme. Sir Bill Cotton takes up the story:

  I said ‘Fine, we’ll do it there.’ A lot of people said ‘You can’t do a pop programme, with all the imperatives that has, from a disused church in Manchester.’ As I pointed out, we are an itinerant profession, we go where the work is. And they all turned up. The bands came from Liverpool and Manchester, but they were all living in London. And I said at the time that it would either run forever or be off in six weeks. It was the first time that you could actually say to a producer, in this case, Johnnie Stewart, ‘I want to do a programme, and to be on that programme, you have to be in the top twenty, and there will be no other way of getting on it.’ I knew how the charts worked. There were several charts, but in the end, we got one that represented all of them.5

  Jimmy Savile presented the first show, which featured an appearance from the Beatles performing their latest single ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – pre-recorded to prevent a roadblock in Rusholme. Savile was one of four regular presenters, the others being David Jacobs, Alan Freeman and Pete Murray. However, the presenters had to share the limelight with their producer, Johnnie Stewart, who appeared in the end credits of each show, in silhouette, with flopping quiff and jacket over his shoulder. Another producer made his mark at the front of the programme, albeit anonymously, as Jim Moir was responsible for the famous ‘It’s number one, it’s Top of the Pops’ announcement each week. In 1966, the show moved down from Manchester to studio G at Lime Grove, where it went from strength to strength.

  A less fondly remembered series from Elkan Allan’s time in charge of entertainment at Rediffusion was Stars and Garters, an attempt to bring the flavour of East
End pub entertainment into the homes of viewers. ‘That was a very interesting mistake,’ Allan admitted. ‘Dan Farson did for me a music hall documentary called Time Gentlemen Please, about pub entertainers. It was terrific and brilliantly directed by Rollo Gamble. So we thought, I thought, let’s do it every week. We will recreate a pub atmosphere in the studio and we will have one of the people from Time Gentlemen Please, Ray Martine, as a link man. It was a great failure. I never liked it. It was the opposite of what I was about. It was phoney and what we should have done was filmed in a pub.’6

  The ideal choice would have been Dan Farson’s own pub, the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs, and the decision not to use his facilities rankled. Allan suggests that the place was in such chaos, it made more sense to make it in the studio: ‘He was ripped off by the barman, everybody, but it was a very jolly place. I used to go down there. But he was just screwed and, of course, he had his great weakness for pretty boys. He was always pissed.’7

  Despite the problems, Stars and Garters ran for four series between 1963 and 1965, the final run being renamed New Stars and Garters. In place of Martine came actress Jill Browne from ATV hospital drama Emergency Ward 10, aided by Willie Rushton and his future wife, the Australian actress Arlene Dorgan. All three departed from the series in mid-run. Allan presented the departures as sackings, whereas Rushton insisted that all three had resigned and been double-crossed by Allan. The reasons given for the resignations were that all three had been told that they were the star of the show and that Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were all on board as writers, which was not the case. The disagreement led to a page-long denunciation in Private Eye, of which Rushton was a founder, under the headline ‘Ginger Judas’. Unfortunately, the article also suggested that Allan had been guilty of plagiarism, with regard to Ready Steady Go and several other Rediffusion shows. It went on, gleefully, to describe Allan as ‘one of the most despised figures in television’, before recounting a joke about Allan going to a ‘fancy dress ball stark naked, covered in deodorant, in the role of an armpit’.8 Allan sued: