Turned Out Nice Again
Page 21
Rediffusion had Lord Goodman as their libel lawyer. His eyes lit up, because Private Eye had been very nasty about him. He was well on the shit list. He said to me ‘Well done, we can close the buggers down now. You’ll get so much money for this.’ I said ‘I don’t want to close them down, that would be a very wrong thing to do, in my opinion.’ He was very upset with me. He said ‘Well, you can do what you like, write your own apology and name any charity you like and I will guarantee that the apology goes in. That’s what happened.9
Shortly after the disaster of Stars and Garters, Allan moved to become an executive producer (special projects), as Eric Maschwitz had been after his departure from the BBC. American musician/producer Buddy Bregman came in from the BBC to take over Rediffusion’s LE programmes. Best known as an arranger and producer for the Verve label, particularly his work with Ella Fitzgerald, Bregman had joined the BBC in early 1964, after producing some successful TV specials in Europe. His impeccable contacts earned him the acceptance of his fellow producers, including Terry Henebery. ‘He’d been brought in, this great whiz-kid from America,’ Henebery says. ‘Buddy got some great stuff going – he got all these artists coming in from America, these cabaret artists.’10 Unfortunately for his reputation, there were other areas where the existing BBC staff were ahead of him:
We used to go down and have a right laugh watching him direct. He’d be smoking a pipe in the gallery, he’d have a score out and he’d be saying to the vision mixer ‘And four,’ and the vision mixer would say ‘I can’t take camera four.’ He’s doing it by audio, he’s not looking at the monitors. He was accurate to the tee, but he wasn’t watching the previews, the guys hadn’t got the shots up. It was hysterical.11
One of the highlights of Bregman’s time in charge of entertainment at Rediffusion was Hippodrome, a lavish variety series produced in the gigantic studio five at Wembley, which ran through the autumn of 1966. As a co-production with the US network CBS, the show was produced using two sets of cameras, one in 405-line monochrome for the UK viewers, another in 525-line colour for US transmission. The other advantage of US input was that the show could call on major stars from the other side of the Atlantic. One edition, featuring a troupe of footballing dogs among the turns, was hosted by the unlikely figure of Woody Allen.
Less glorious was Rediffusion’s decision to poach singer Kathy Kirby from the BBC, where she had her own series, in a deal engineered by her manager, ex-bandleader Bert Ambrose. Sir Bill Cotton remembers how he found out that she was leaving:
I got to hear of it on the last show that she did in a series. I thought we were going to do another series. The number one cameraman told me ‘Well, that’s the last we’re going to see of her, then, Bill.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘She’s going to Rediffusion. I’ve got a mate who’s a cameraman there and her show’s on their schedule.’ So, I went into her dressing room, and the three of them [Kirby, Ambrose and her agent Sidney Grace] were standing there. I said ‘Is it true that you’re going to Rediffusion?’ She looked at Sidney Grace, then she looked at Bert, and they looked at each other and then they looked down. I said ‘Well, it’s perfectly obvious that the answer’s yes. Thanks very much,’ and I walked out.12
In the event, the Rediffusion deal fell apart before the show could be made, and Kirby’s old BBC slot had been filled. By the end of its time as an ITV franchise holder in 1968, Rediffusion had almost given up on LE, and was once again subcontracting its entertainment output, this time to David Frost’s company, David Paradine Productions. This link brought in the Ronnie Corbett sitcom No, That’s Me Over Here and the proto-Monty Python sketch series At Last the 1948 Show, starring John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor, with ‘the lovely’ Aimi MacDonald.
While the ITV companies produced many expensive, lavish shows in their first few years, they had long been criticized for caring more about the bottom line than the 405 lines on the screen. In the early years, they had led a hand-to-mouth existence and there were many who confidently predicted the demise of one or all of the commercial contractors. By 1958, however, Associated-Rediffusion had turned the corner into profit, notching up £5.1 million before tax. Soon, the whole system was in rude health, as might be expected from a lightly regulated monopoly. Unwelcome attention had been drawn to this by Roy Thomson, the Canadian newspaper magnate behind Scottish Television, when he declared that an ITV franchise was ‘a licence to print money’.
There were agonies about the way in which this profit was achieved. In particular, there seemed to be a reliance on relatively cheap American imports, such as the police series Dragnet and the situation comedy I Love Lucy, two of the biggest hits of early ITV. The criticisms received official backing when a government committee of inquiry into radio and television broadcasting, under the chairmanship of Sir Harry Pilkington of the Pilkington Brothers glass company, reported its findings in July 1962.13 It bemoaned ITV’s slender commitment to public service broadcasting and noted the massive profitability of the companies. As a result of the Pilkington Report, an 11 per cent levy on all net profits made by ITA franchisees was to be paid to the Exchequer. On the face of it, the government appeared to be admitting defeat and opting for a financial cut to keep quiet. In reality, the levy had very beneficial consequences for the quality of programming. It made sense to plough money back into programmes rather than letting it become taxable profit.
In contrast, the Pilkington Committee thought that the BBC was very much on the right track and recommended that the Corporation be given responsibility for a third television channel, using the newly-allocated ultra-high frequency band. The launch of BBC2 in April 1964 was to result in a further massive expansion in the BBC’s programming capability and range, particularly in light entertainment. To meet the demand, production assistants and floor managers received long-awaited promotions to producer, while they were replaced in turn by the producers of the future.
From the outset, BBC2 was intended to be different to the other channels. The picture was to be better, the channel being the pioneer of the new higher-definition 625-line transmissions.14 From 1967, it was to be the first European network to broadcast regularly in colour. Under the banner ‘the Seven Faces of the Week’, the programmes were to be scheduled around loose nightly themes: Mondays and Fridays were for family shows, Tuesday was set aside for educational fare, Wednesday for repeats and Thursday for minority programmes. Overall, they were meant to offer an intellectual alternative to the mainstream, crowd-pleasing fare on the existing channels. That’s not to say that BBC2 did not aim to entertain. The bulk of its launch night on Monday 20 April 1964 was to be supplied by the light entertainment group: a performance by the surrealist musical comedy group the Alberts, a lavish production of Kiss Me Kate, then forty-five minutes of comedy. The key difference here was that the comedian featured was the Russian Arkady Raikin – and the show was to be conducted largely in his native language.
On the night, however, BBC2 proved different in a rather more unplanned way. When the BBC launched its television service in 1936, the occasion went off without a hitch. Similarly, the reopening of the service in 1946 had been flawless, as had the launch of commercial television in 1955. This time, however, a fire at Battersea Power Station deprived most of west London of electricity. Crucially, this included BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. Still based at Alexandra Palace, BBC News was unaffected, so viewers in the London area who had shelled out for a flash new 625-line set did get some sort of BBC2 broadcast – in the shape of newsreader Gerald Priestland explaining the situation and reading the news bulletins. By the time the fire was extinguished a couple of hours later, the decision had been taken by BBC2 controller Michael Peacock to delay the launch, including the fireworks display from Southend-on-Sea, until the following day, ditching the scheduled educational programmes. So it was that the first scheduled programme shown on BBC2 was Play School, broadcast at 11am on 21 April 1964. Launch night itself began that evening at 7.20
pm with presenter Denis Tuohy pointedly blowing out a candle and introducing the previous night’s delights.
The only survivor from the original second night schedule was a concert by Duke Ellington’s orchestra, forming the first edition of one of BBC2’s best-remembered early programmes, Jazz 625. The series’ producer, Terry Henebery, had joined from radio, as part of the new intake of producers gearing up for the increased workload:
They were offering secondments to television, so I applied and went through the course at Woodstock Grove, the training establishment down in Shepherd’s Bush. You spent [a] six weeks’ intensive learning how to be a director, all the grammar, learning to do it the right way. To this day, I still think it’s the best training anybody could have ever had, and nobody got it in any other part of the industry. In ITV, you tended to learn it all on the job.
The training course culminated in three practical exercises: directing a scene from a sitcom, illustrating three gramophone records and a free choice. For his free choice, Henebery called in a favour from his days at Aeolian Hall:
You had a budget of 60 quid. I was ringing up all my contacts from radio, guys like the Alex Welsh band, and saying ‘Look Alex, there’s a probability that I’ll get a series to do. Would you come and do this for threepence?’ ‘Yeah Tel, we’ll do it.’ So I did a Jazz Club with an audience at Riverside [a former film studio in Hammersmith, used by the BBC between 1954 and 1970]. That final exercise was recorded on 22 November 1963. Now, what happened on that day?
Apart from being the day that Aldous Huxley died, it was also the date of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. The cliché about Kennedy’s death is that you never forget where you were when you heard the news. Henebery remembers well the shocked reaction at Riverside Studios:
We’d done the rehearsal and somebody said ‘Come and have a half of beer, Terry, don’t get too tense.’ When I got back, the crew were all in the gallery, and suddenly up comes this ‘Normal Service is Interrupted’, a newsflash. The atmosphere . . . the hairs, if you had any, on the back of your neck stood up. That was my baptism of fire in many ways.15
Meanwhile, up at the BBC’s Manchester studios, John Ammonds was producing a Harry Worth sitcom when the news came through, leading to an unlikely meeting of LE and current affairs:
We were recording a show that night in Dickenson Road. First we heard the news that he was badly injured, then that he was dead. And we thought ‘Oh God, I hope the audience hasn’t heard, because to do a comedy show after that, we’ll be in trouble . . .’ I don’t think they’d heard. So we finished about 8.30, and the commissionaire called me to the front reception desk of the studio. It was Paul Fox, who was then head of current affairs. He said ‘Look, we’ve got some tributes being done live. We’ve got the Prime Minister,’ who was Alec Douglas-Home, and the leader of the Opposition was Harold Wilson. ‘We’ve got him [Wilson] coming over with a very fast police escort from Chester to Manchester. Can you direct this into the network?’ I said ‘Well there’s nobody else here.’
I told Harry he was coming. Wilson arrived at Dickenson Road and they shook hands. The first thing Wilson said was ‘Have you got a private phone? I need to ring the Prime Minister and check what he’s saying.’ The only private phone I could think of in the place was in the kitchen, a little ante-room used for stocking the corned beef and soup. Can you imagine the Leader of the Opposition ringing the Prime Minister with all of this in front of him? This actually happened.
Harry had exactly the same type of Gannex raincoat that he had. [Wilson] went into the studio, and Harry said ‘Do you mind if I come up to the gallery?’ He was intrigued by the fact that we gave Harold Wilson the five minutes to go and wind-ups [visual cues from the floor manager] that he used to get. So we finished it, Harry came down the stairs with his Gannex coat, and Wilson said ‘Thank you, Mr Worth, for bringing my coat.’ Harry said ‘Oh no, it’s mine.’ Wilson said ‘Are you sure?’ It could have come straight out of the show, this confusion routine.16
Once the director’s course had been completed, the next step for a trainee was to spend some time as a production assistant on ‘modest shows like Juke Box Jury, learning the craft’, but Henebery’s call to action as a producer came sooner than he expected. ‘Bill Cotton called me in and said “Michael Peacock wants to do the culture end of things, which gets ignored by the one channel. Mike would like to do jazz. Can you come up with a format that would work?”’ Henebery returned from a holiday in Portugal with a proposal for ‘a formatted programme with interviews and profiles, but they said no, we don’t have the money. They wanted to turn it around and get something on the screen quickly.’17
Instead, the new show was purely performance-based. The simple, effective presentation of the music – depicting the big-name jazz musicians of the day against a simple cyclorama backcloth, with a superb sound balance – confounded critics in Humphrey Burton’s music and arts department. The decision to hand jazz to LE had caused ructions, with one music and arts producer fearing an onslaught of dancing girls and other vulgar distractions. The series was also aided by sympathetic compères: Steve Race at first, and later Humphrey Lyttelton, both musicians themselves. At Henebery’s suggestion, it was Race who came up with the show’s signature tune, based on the sixth, second and fifth notes of the scale.
At first, it seemed as though Jazz 625 would be limited to reflecting the very best of the British scene. The first show after the Ducal fanfare had been an all-star jam session featuring George Chisholm, Kenny Baker, Tony Coe, Roy Willox, Laurie Holloway, Jack Fallon and Lennie Hastings; it was followed a week later by the Tubby Hayes Quintet with singer Betty Bennett. The reason for the lack of American artists was a long-standing disagreement between the Musicians’ Union and the American Federation of Musicians. From the mid-thirties until 1956, no US musicians had been allowed to appear in the UK and vice versa. The deadlock had been broken by an exchange – a UK tour for Stan Kenton in return for a US trip for Ted Heath’s band – but a decade on, the system was still firmly one-for-one. The breakthrough for Jazz 625 came from agent and promoter Harold Davison, who was responsible for bringing most of the big names to Britain, as Henebery recalls:
He said ‘Would you be interested in Oscar Peterson showing up for it?’ I said ‘Yes, very, but what about the exchange?’ He said ‘No problem. He’s Canadian, isn’t he?’ Now, I didn’t know then that Oscar wasn’t American. And it was the trio, the great trio with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. Harold said ‘I’ve got the Dave Clark Five going out and doing The Ed Sullivan Show, so I’ve got exchange. As long as the unions are happy.’ So, I had to go to Bill Cotton, my boss, and say ‘We’ve got a marvellous breakthrough, Bill, but I’ll need a bit more money on the budget, because it’s not coming in at the same rate.’ I think it was going to cost £1,000.18
At this time, the total budget allocation for a Jazz 625, including the cost of the (admittedly minimalist) set and the 35mm film or videotape19 used to record the show was £800, so £1,000 on the artist alone was quite a leap. But in retrospect, it was great value, as Henebery remembers. ‘This is 1964. £1,000 for Oscar Peterson and the trio to record an hour. Can you believe it? So Bill said “Is he any good?” I’ll always remember Bill saying that to me. That began the avalanche of people coming in.’ Among them was Erroll Garner, who did two editions of the show, perched as usual on a pair of telephone directories atop his piano stool to make up for his lack of height. Other stellar visitors included Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer – once in their own right and a second time as guests of John Dankworth – guitarist Wes Montgomery, pianist Bill Evans and ex-Ellingtonian saxophonist Ben Webster, who was making an appearance with Stan Tracey’s trio, the house band at Ronnie Scott’s club.
Woody Herman’s big band also made an appearance. Memorable though their performance was, it was the preparations that stick in Henebery’s mind. ‘I had to go to Bill Cotton and ask for some more funds when I was offered the Woody Herman band – that
great band with Sal Nistico on tenor. I went to Bill, and he said “Has he still got a band?” I said “Very much; you want to hear it?”’ It was agreed that Henebery would go to see the band in Scandinavia and talk about the plans for the show, popping in to see Mel Tormé in Copenhagen to discuss another programme. A flight to Stockholm and a long car journey to the Herman band’s hotel brought the news that they were just heading out of town, with the next show a long way away. ‘So, I’d gone all the way to Scandinavia to hear the band, and I didn’t have the gall to say to anybody that I never heard a note played.’ The recce for the show ended up being rather closer to home. ‘I went down with the sound engineer, Len Shorey, and another member of my team to Portsmouth Guildhall, and they were booked to do two concerts on the same evening. The first house, there’s hardly anybody in. Tubby Hayes and some of the guys had come down from London to hear the band. They start playing ‘Blue Flame’, the curtain went up and you were pinching yourself. When they did the show for us, it was fantastic.’20