Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  LWT should have been coining it, but just a few years into its franchise, money was tight, as advertisers continued to spend their money elsewhere. Terry Henebery had been brought in to mount big, prestige shows, including a programme on Richard Rodgers that involved a trip to America, but the company now realized it could not afford them:

  I had a three-year contract, and fifteen months into that, Stella Richman gets fired, overnight. Cyril Bennett’s brought in. I was called into Cyril’s office, and he said ‘Look, we know you’ve been brought in to do a certain thing. We’re not going to be [doing it]. We’ve got to survive here. The sort of programmes that you were brought in to do by my predecessor, Stella, aren’t going to happen. You can sit around and play poker dice for the next year and a half or whatever it is you’ve got left, or we can come to a settlement on your contract.’ So, I got a lawyer onto it, we got a settlement, and I came out into the jungle.34

  While London Weekend was going through its growing pains, BBC1 was developing its variety output, most notably in singer-led shows. Cilla Black, Val Doonican, Dusty Springfield and Lulu all began series of their own in the late sixties. Although videotape had been in use since 1958, many of these shows were still transmitted live, requiring fearsome concentration from the performers and the crew. Paul Smith, then a floor assistant, as the ‘call boys’ had become known, recalls ‘techniques I learned that are now completely and utterly dead. Striking things and putting them back, and getting them out on a live show. The artist is set up with hand mike on the stool, ‘thank you very much’, they’d cut to a close-up. You’d wait for the close-up. And that was your cue, in you go. The sound man goes in from one side, takes the mike, AFM from the other side, takes the stool. Back to the wide shot and they’ve disappeared. You were watching all the time. You’d crawl across the floor, putting things in and out because it was all live. If I were directing a show now and I said “We’ll get to the close-up, go in, set the mike,” they’d ask what I was talking about. I’d have to go through it slowly.’35

  The formats for the singer-based shows was usually fairly simple. The star would sing a combination of their hit songs, standard numbers and new tunes. There would be a guest star, who, if a singer, would do a couple of numbers on their own before duetting with the person whose name was on the title sequence. Then it was time for a closing number from the star of the show. The guest bookings could be interesting. On one September 1966 edition of Dusty, produced by former designer Stanley Dorfman, Woody Allen treated Thursday night BBC1 viewers to some of his stand-up act. On another, in August 1967, Warren Mitchell appeared as Alf Garnett, insulting pop singers of the day and appearing in a Johnny Speight-written sketch featuring theatrical anarchist Ken Campbell as an inept magician. As marvellous a singer as she was, working with the temperamental Springfield could be a trying experience. On one show, several aborted takes in front of an audience resulted in her walking out of the studio in high dudgeon. Thinking on his feet, the floor manager shouted after her ‘Put the kettle on, love. We’re coming with you.’ She turned around, laughing. The ice had been broken, and she went on to give the performance that had eluded her, but many around fully expected her to attack the floor manager physically.

  Lulu’s late-sixties television outings are remembered primarily for the occasion when the Jimi Hendrix Experience were booked to appear on the 4 January 1969 edition of Happening for Lulu, possibly the most of-its-time title ever given to any television programme. The band played a blistering version of ‘Voodoo Chile’, before handing back to Lulu, who introduced the next number, ‘Hey Joe’. However, to the amazement of all in the studio and at home, Hendrix stopped playing his own hit song midway through and announced ‘We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream,’ who had split up the previous November. With that, he launched into a ragged, but heartfelt instrumental version of ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, during which he turned to Mitch Mitchell and said ‘We’re off the air now.’ They weren’t. Director Stanley Dorfman stayed with the action, knowing it to be a proper happening for Lulu. Thanks to an enterprising engineer, this sequence is all that survives of the entire thirteen-part series.

  Cilla Black had asked expressly for Michael Hurll as her producer after receiving ‘the bollocking of her life’ from him when she had turned up late for a Billy Cotton Band Show.36 Far from being upset, she was impressed with his forcefulness, as well as his loyalty to the show and its star. Her faith in Hurll was fully repaid as he dreamed up stunts that ensured the show would not be a mere case of ‘This is . . . that was . . . thank you . . . you’re just wonderful.’ Alongside the songs, comedy sketches and guests, outside broadcast units were sent to viewers’ houses so that Cilla could surprise them in mid-show. The show capitalized on her folksy Scouse charm and her easy way with the viewers. Sir Bill Cotton remembers how naturally it came to Cilla, just as it hadn’t with Kathy Kirby: ‘I had spent a long time telling her that it wasn’t just singing a song, it was talking to the audience. If you want to see what I mean, look at Cilla Black. She can’t bloody sing, but on the other hand, she can talk to the audience. The audience want to hear you talking to them, if you’re doing that type of show.’37

  Sometimes, however, the outside broadcast crews would descend on rather grander premises than a viewer’s humble abode, as Jim Moir – then a fledgling producer working with Hurll – recalls:

  I was at the Royal Albert Hall. Cilla left the Television Theatre during a live show, got on the back of a motorbike, went to the Commonwealth Institute, where she switched to a car, and from the Commonwealth Institute drove to the Royal Albert Hall, to walk in, interrupt a concert and sing a song. It was amazing and I’ve never had adrenalin like it, because I was worried she wouldn’t make it in time. The simple command from Television Theatre: ‘On you, Albert Hall.’ I directed this sequence, not more than ten minutes, including the ‘Largo al Factotum’, and it was just fantastic. It took me about forty-eight hours to get the adrenalin out of my system. That was because Hurll took the chance, but it wasn’t a chance. It was a planned event. Of course, he had backup, but had it gone awry, it would have been very noticeable.38

  Moir cites Hurll and Stewart Morris as two of the great risk-taking producers in light entertainment, recalling one of Morris’s stunts with particular relish, in which he ‘ran Susan Maughan down the River Thames on one of those aqua cars, driving up the bank into Riverside 2. These are top men. All to bring a spectacle to the audience.’39 Morris also pushed the envelope in his production of BBC1’s The Rolf Harris Show, a weekly date with the affable Australian entertainer and artist. Moir recalls one edition, in which the stage of the Golders Green Hippodrome (which was used extensively as a studio in 1968 and 1969, while the Television Theatre was being converted to colour operation) was stuffed with ‘lions, tigers and water features’. Moir notes that Morris pulled the whole spectacle together in record time, all being ‘done as a set and strike on the pre-record day, which alone should have been three days in the studio somewhere else’. Unsurprisingly, Morris remembers it pretty well too:

  [For] the Moulin Rouge [set], we erected a giant swimming pool, and health and safety went crazy. I said ‘Don’t worry, the fire brigade will come in and suck that water out very quickly,’ and they did. What they were really worried about was that we had a tiger, a full-grown live tiger, which was fixed to the stage with bolts and things, but not so you could see. The trouble was that I wanted to have a couple of girls sitting with it, and he used to get a bit friendly, so that didn’t work. Some idiot said ‘You’ll have to have a marksman there, in case the animal needs to be shot.’ I said ‘Are you serious? You’re going to have somebody with a live rifle in a building with an audience and thirty-one people on the stage? That’s ridiculous. We’ll sedate the tiger.’ So we did. And on the rehearsal it just looked like it slept. I sent quickly to Egton House [where the BBC gramophone library was situated] and got a disc of tigers roaring and thought if I playe
d it, it might at least put its ears up. And it did. I got into trouble for that. Never mind. The things we used to do, Jesus.40

  The Rolf Harris Show was a fixture in the schedules on Saturday nights – traditionally, variety’s biggest night on screen – from 1967 to 1971. Harris was already well known for hit records like ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Sun Arise’, but other talents were to come to the fore in the series. Morris recalls ‘a lot of sleepless nights thinking “How do I make this?” They said to me this has got to be seven o’clock on Saturday night, our main LE spot, so you’ve got to do a show that is not a children’s show. I already knew he could paint. I didn’t know then that he’d already exhibited at the Royal Academy. I didn’t realize his real talent. And that’s when this idea came up.’ This idea being that Harris would produce a giant painting live on air during each show. Thus it was that a whole generation spent their Saturday teatimes watching an Australian gent humming to himself and daubing a huge canvas with a thick brush, occasionally breaking off to ask the audience ‘Can you see what it is yet?’

  Val Doonican’s shows, which were a fixture of the schedules for over twenty years, were far more sedate affairs, Doonican being very much an Irish version of US crooner Perry Como. If Doonican rocked, it was, as one of his album titles reminded us, ‘but gently’. Indeed, Doonican’s longest serving producer, Yvonne Littlewood, had worked on all of Como’s shows for the BBC, whether as production assistant or producer in her own right. Doonican’s early series, however, were produced by John Ammonds in the converted church in Manchester.

  Somewhere between Doonican and Dusty in terms of attitude came artists like Shirley Bassey, who made a number of spectaculars for the BBC during the seventies. Stewart Morris produced them and can vouch for the power of the Bassey pipes: ‘For one of her specials, I stood her on the top of Cardiff Castle, singing the Welsh national anthem. I’m in a helicopter with no doors on it, about 50 feet away, filming her and the castle in the background. I’ve got a jet engine behind me, and I could hear her singing.’ Having conquered Cardiff Castle, Morris then sent Bassey out to film a sequence on a North Sea oil rig, and while he could still hear her some distance away, this time, she wasn’t singing:

  The helicopter pilot said ‘We should turn back. I can’t land if there’s more than, say, a 10-knot wind, and it’s 15.’ I said ‘You tell her.’ He said ‘I’ll try and land it.’ Anyway, we got on it. I saw this lift, like a bosun’s chair, and I said ‘Shirl, you’ve got to do part of the song in this lift. I’m going to just lift it slightly off the deck and with the angle of the camera, I’ll shoot you against the sea, so that no one will know that you’re still on the deck.’ She wouldn’t have it, but she fancied the captain and I said ‘If I get the captain to go in the rig with you, will you do it?’ She said ‘Yes.’ So I had a quiet word with the captain and the crane driver, and I had them all on my talkback. And as soon as she’s into the song, I gave the signal, and she was lifted up and swung out over the sea. And we did the biggest edit job in matching the effing and blinding to the song. She never sang a word of the song. The language coming out of her was unbelievable. She came back, landed, and said ‘You dangerous bastard.’ But it looked good on the end product.41

  The show Morris made with a clean-living group of talented siblings was a similarly taxing project for different reasons:

  I persuaded the Osmond family to come, and Robin Nash directed it. I put them in a furniture van and took the van into the scene dock of the [BBC Television] Theatre to get them in. There were unbelievable crowds all the way around the Theatre down the side. There was no way we could have got them in, so eight o’clock in the morning, the furniture van picked them up – we’d fitted it out with sofas and Coca-Cola, so the mother and the five of them would get in and be delivered into the scene dock. Before the camera crew came in, they were rehearsing, and the mother, who had the most phenomenal perfect-pitch ear, would call out ‘that’s a flattened ninth’, if one of them sang a bum note. She sat there, knitting. So much talent among all of them.42

  CHAPTER SIX

  Saturday night’s all right for fighting

  The fifties and sixties had been a rich time for television variety, but in the seventies the genre came of age. In 1970, just under 16 million television licences were issued, 6 million more than a decade earlier. Over the following decade, the rate of growth slowed, with 18.3 million licences in 1980. From being the luxury of a privileged few, television had become almost as much of a necessity as gas, electricity and water. The potential audience for television at any one time was around two-thirds of the whole UK population. With only three channels to choose from, and BBC1 and ITV competing vigorously, some shows, particularly seasonal specials, almost managed to realize that potential.

  The seventies also saw the chat show coming to prominence. Chat shows had been a cornerstone of entertainment television in the US almost from the start, but the genre did not take hold in Britain until the sixties. One of the main reasons for this was the smaller pool of potential guests – between them, New York and Hollywood could supply enough talking heads with product to shift to keep any number of shows, from Jack Paar and Johnny Carson downwards, jabbering five nights a week. In Britain, the perception seemed to be that it was only a matter of time before you’d get through everyone and the host would be left twiddling his thumbs. Eventually, at ABC, Brian Tesler decided to wade in. First of all, he had been given the task of beefing up the ITV network’s sports coverage. ‘I wanted to call it Wide World of Sport,’ he explains, ‘but then I realized it was hardly going to be wide, because the BBC had all the contracts. It was going to be very narrow. So we just called it World of Sport. I needed a good front man, and the only one I could think of that I wanted was Eamonn Andrews, who was doing the Saturday afternoon radio sport.’ Tesler also thought that Andrews – veteran of This Is Your Life and Crackerjack – would be ideal for a chat show. The pair shared an agent, Teddy Sommerfield, but the negotiations were far from uncomplicated:

  It was all done very secretively. I drove up to a square – Portman Square, I think it was – and I went into the back of a blacked-out Mercedes. Teddy would be sitting there and we would discuss the contract. At the end of the discussions, I would get out and go back to my car, never to be seen to be doing this. Eamonn liked the idea, because like me he was a hardboiled American fiction fan. He wanted to do two more shows. He wanted to do a children’s show. I said ‘He can’t, we don’t do children’s shows, but I’ve got something I do want him to do. Our version of The Jack Paar Show, a Sunday night, live chat show,’ and he was very interested.1

  The first Eamonn Andrews Show went out on Sunday 4 October 1964. Many didn’t share Tesler’s faith in Andrews as a chat show host. In the radio comedy Round the Horne, he was satirized as Seamus Android, portrayed by Bill Pertwee as the height of conversational ineptitude and blank incomprehension. In fact, Andrews made a decent fist of the job, more moderator than inquisitor, and very much in the self-effacing Johnny Carson mould. For one night in May 1966, the show came from the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester, to mark the first decade of independent television in the north of England. The guest list was A1: on the stage were Harry H. Corbett, Billie Whitelaw and Hallé Orchestra conductor Sir John Barbirolli, all of them with strong Mancunian links, while humorist Peter Moloney represented Liverpool, with musical interludes from Gerry Marsden (sans Pacemakers) and Jackie Trent. The audience was no less star-studded, including both Manchester City manager Joe Mercer and his United rival Sir Matt Busby. The highlight of the conversation came when Barbirolli asked Corbett, who had been born in Burma, raised in Manchester, and was best known for playing a Londoner, ‘Are you a proper cockney like me or a fake?’2

  BBC Television waited until 1967 before making its entry into the world of chat. Bill Cotton, as head of variety, had been mulling the idea over for some time, but was at a loss for a suitable host, until his mother suggested a pirate radio disc jockey she
had seen on a Southern TV regional show, a young man called Simon Dee. Born Carl Henty-Dodd in Manchester in 1935, he had been educated at Shrewsbury, a couple of years above the Private Eye nucleus of Willie Rushton, Richard Ingrams, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot. Instead of turning to satire or investigative journalism, Henty-Dodd worked as a photographer, a vacuum cleaner salesman and an actor before finding his niche at the launch of Radio Caroline in 1964. Adopting a snappier stage name and showing a distinct love of Tamla Motown music, he soon became a hit with listeners to the watery wireless. However, after a year, he came ashore, to work as a freelance for the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, the first of the pirates to go ‘legit’.

  On closer inspection, Cotton found that his mother’s hunch had been right. ‘He was . . . good-looking, a snappy dresser . . . very articulate . . . he seemed to fit the bill,’ he recalls in his memoirs.3 The title of the show was to be Dee Time, reflecting its early evening placement on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the original plan was for the show to be co-produced by Terry Henebery – still at this time a BBC producer – and Johnnie Stewart. As with Stewart’s Top of the Pops, the only place available for the launch of the new show was the converted church in Manchester, and it was there that a pilot was recorded on 31 January 1967. Stewart’s connection to the production was, however, brief, as Henebery recalls: