by Louis Barfe
It was largely based on the idea of the Johnny Carson show in America. We worked it so that there would be a producer in the box and another producer alongside the girl on the Autocue control and camera 4, the dedicated camera for the links, which had got an Autocue head on it. So Johnnie was up in the box, I was going to stay on the floor and Syd Lotterby, who has gone on to win more BAFTA awards for comedy than I’ve had hot dinners, was the director. As we’re getting ready to go, the floor manager puts the word [out]: ‘Where’s Johnnie Stewart? We’re ready to go. Has anybody seen him?’ I said ‘I don’t know.’ Johnnie had suddenly got into his mind that he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to take the whole gig on at all, so I carried on. He was just outside the control room. They said ‘Aren’t you going in?’ He said ‘No, Terry’s on the floor.’4
Perhaps unsurprisingly in the circumstances, ‘it wasn’t a very good pilot’, although Henebery remembers that Dee had to share some of the blame. ‘Bill Cotton came up for the pilot, and afterwards I was called in to Bill and Tom [Sloan]. They said “The situation is that we’re going to do another pilot. Simon Dee’s been given the hard word. He’s got to work harder, we’re going to invest in it. We’ll do one more pilot up in Manchester, and if it’s all right, we’ll transmit that as programme one and do a live one on the Thursday. You’re going to be in charge, and you’ll have our total backing.”’5
Henebery also had the support of a first-rate production team. The (fresh from a tour of duty On the Braden Beat), Joe Steeples and Michael Wale, while the production assistants were Roger Ordish and David O’Clee (both on attachment from BBC Radio) and Jim Moir. ‘There was a flight [from Manchester to London] – almost half of it was filled with people to do with the Simon Dee show,’ Ordish recalls. ‘It was bringing the guests back so they could get back to London that night, and if it was the second show of the week, we were all piling back on there as well. We used to spend four nights in Manchester and three nights in London.’6
The first show, recorded on 27 March 1967 and transmitted on 4 April, was packed with so many big names that success was practically guaranteed. In a music-heavy line-up, viewers saw and heard Cat Stevens performing ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’, while the Jimi Hendrix Experience were present with ‘Purple Haze’. As if that wasn’t enough, Kiki Dee did ‘I’m Going Out the Same Way I Came In’, Lance Percival gave the nation ‘The Maharajah of Brum’ and Libby Morris sang ‘I Could Fall in Love and Everybody Says Don’t’, all backed by the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra in ‘house band’ mode under Bernard Herrmann.
Not surprisingly, Dee Time took off. From the launch, the show had a memorable set of closing credits, featuring Dee playing up his playboy image to the full, picking up a dolly bird in a Jaguar E-type and speeding her down a spiral ramp. The effect was nearly achieved at great human cost, as Jim Moir recalls: ‘I was on the back of the film car, which was a Land Rover thing. I sat with the cameraman, holding the basher, trying to illuminate his face. Honest to God, as we were coming down the ramp we nearly had our heads taken off by the overhanging concrete beams.’7 As it was, minor injuries had to suffice. ‘The shot of the girl jumping into the white E-type – it’s not ecstasy, she’s shrieking in agony,’ Terry Henebery observes. ‘Because I said to her on about take three “When Dee comes screaming up, it’s no good trying to open the door and get in, we haven’t got the time. Can you jump in over the door?” So she did and at the point when she jumped in, and was just about to put her bum on the seat, he let the clutch out – Boom! – and she caught her leg on the scuttle. So she’s shrieking in agony, and we’re lucky we didn’t get sued by the agency.’8
In addition, Dee overcame his initial teething troubles to become an engaging interviewer, but there were occasions when his mettle was tested severely. Henebery remembers with particular fondness an appearance by the team from the hit radio comedy I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, enlivened by Neil Shand’s suggestion that Harry, the driver who ferried the stars to the studio, should join them on screen. Nobody told the host. ‘Dee’s face was a picture,’ says the producer. ‘He’s looking at me, because it’s live, the band are shrieking. Harry sits there, gets a paper out and starts to read it, he gets a sandwich out, he takes his shoes off. All the time, Dee is saying “Who is he?” and they’re saying “Nothing to do with us,” and you can’t do anything, because it’s live. The rider to this is that the son he had never seen in years saw him on the screen, and they got together.’9
After proving itself on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Dee Time moved to kick off the Saturday night schedule from 23 September 1967. At the same time, the show moved from Manchester to studio G at Lime Grove, where the show acquired an introduction as distinctive as its closing credits. The sports programme Grandstand was being transmitted from studio H next door, with Len Marten as the voice of the football results. ‘We said “Len, would you like a few more bob? Come in and just do the voiceover for the beginning of our show.” So he did the “Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimon Dee!”’10
The high spot of the show’s first year was to be a live broadcast from the Montreux Television Festival, but the achievement was muted somewhat by Henebery’s involvement in a serious car accident on a Swiss motorway the day after, requiring several months’ recuperation.11 Colin Charman moved over from directing the show to become producer for four months until Roger Ordish took over in September 1968. A typical piece of BBC bureaucracy meant that Ordish had to change radically the way the show was produced. ‘I wasn’t actually of producer rank, I was only an assistant producer, and Tom Sloan said “I can’t ask a fully fledged producer to come in and direct for you, because you’re so junior. You’ll have to direct it yourself.” Which is quite ridiculous. I replaced two people and I was replaced by two people. I did, I have to confess, lose control of what was happening. You were doing pop groups, live, and things like that.’12
Ordish’s baptism of fire came on 21 September 1968, his second show as producer/director: ‘I said to one of the researchers that Sammy Davis Junior was in town and that there was a good chance of getting him, but he was considered to be terribly unreliable. I said to the researcher “Just stick with him, go find him, stay with him and bring him to the studio.”’13 The fears were justified, as Davis gave his chaperone the slip, with the result that the show went on air with no sign of its star guest. Midway through the programme, a whisper reached the production gallery that Sammy was in the building. What followed was a textbook example of how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, only to be defeated anyway by events:
The musical director Max Harris, a marvellous man and a very clever arranger, came to speak to me directly, while I was trying to direct the show. ‘Erm, Sammy Davis has come into the orchestra area, and he’s distributing some music that he wants us to play, because he wants to sing a song.’ I said ‘Well that’s great, but you’ve not rehearsed it.’ He said ‘Well the trouble is, his arrangement includes fourteen strings and we haven’t got any strings, as you know.’ That [sight-reading ability] showed you the absolute brilliance of British musicians at that time. The very best people were earning a fortune, but they were always, always playing. When they had to reproduce the backing track for something that was on Top of the Pops, probably it was they who had done it in the first place. [Trombonist] Don Lusher definitely. The crazy drummer, Ronnie Verrell. They somehow botched this thing up for Sammy Davis Junior to sing. The lighting guy said ‘Where’s he going to stand?’ [He was] just turning everything on. Sammy Davis was giving out the time – ‘It’s like this.’14
Posterity has not been kind to Dee Time, with only two complete shows and a handful of clips surviving, but thankfully Davis’s complete, unrehearsed performance of ‘This Guy’s in Love with You’ does exist, and it is truly electrifying stuff. In his introduction, Davis levels with the audience about the unusual circumstances:
This is completely live and ad-lib. The music was brought by my arranger George Rhodes, who, because of t
he union problems, is not allowed to conduct, but the band is more than the kind of band that I would love to work with all the time. So, I thank the cats, and I know it’s off the wall, man. It starts with the bass. I will give you ‘One, two . . .’ and you will start. All right? It’s all live and it’s all happening folks. In colour, but you can’t see it.15
At the end, Dee comes on with a look of obvious delight and relief across his face, shakes Davis’s hand and kisses him on the forehead, unaware that the 15 million BBC1 viewers had missed most of this magic moment. In the box, Ordish’s mood, which had gone from panic to joy as Davis pulled it out of the hat, suddenly turned to horror: ‘We got to the end of verse one and the bloody presentation took us off the air because we were over-running, and put on a trailer about some boring thing like Doctor Who.’16
Ordish produced and directed the show single-handed until May 1969, when Richard Drewett took over as producer, with Jim Moir directing. Throughout the run, the show was in rivalry with Eamonn Andrews at ABC, particularly for the top international stars. There was a ceiling fee of £250 for Dee Time for an interview and a performance, with 100 guineas for an interview alone. There were other issues and controversies, such as the odd lawsuit, including one from pop publicist Tony Brainsby and Brian Michael Levy concerning remarks made by a female singer on the show, and another from an Evening Standard journalist accused by Max Bygraves, after a bad review, of being too tired to do his job.
Dee’s tenure at the BBC came to an end in December 1969, after an approach from London Weekend’s head of variety Tito Burns, offering a £100,000, two-year contract. Even if he had been able to match the LWT offer, Bill Cotton would almost certainly not have been inclined to do so. His regular clashes with Dee had used up whatever goodwill he felt towards the star, and Cotton was far from alone.
Unfortunately for Dee, LWT already had a chat show, and it was hosted by one of the directors of the company. As such, David Frost frequently pulled rank when it came to booking guests. Dee’s subordinate status meant that his requests met with even more opposition than they had at the BBC. ‘Stella Richman was running London Weekend,’ says Sir Bill Cotton. ‘She phoned me up and offered me a job. I said “No, thank you.” She said “So, will you tell me how to handle Simon Dee?” I said “Well, just turn down anything he suggests, because it’ll be stuff I’ve stopped him doing over the last three years.” He wanted to conduct the band, book the show.’17 Worst of all for Dee, he had to do without the support of the person who had hired him. Tito Burns had resigned from the company, between the signing of the Dee contract in October 1969 and the start of the series in January 1970, as part of the mass exodus of senior executives following the boardroom putsch that ousted managing director Michael Peacock. At the end of the run in July 1970, Dee was quietly dropped by LWT, and his career never recovered from the blow. ‘There was a time in the second year when he was a very powerful force on British television and he could have gone anywhere. But he was just a bloody fool,’ says Cotton.18
After Dee’s defection, it was a couple of years before the BBC established another hit chat show. In the interregnum, various experiments were tried, including one show hosted by the unlikely figure of Derek Nimmo, a major sitcom star at that time with All Gas and Gaiters. The show, called If It’s Saturday, It Must Be Nimmo, ran in the Dee Time slot from October 1970, and used Richard Drewett as producer and Roger Ordish as director, both from Dee Time. Nimmo’s engagement was contractual, as Ordish explains: ‘They’d said “We’ll give you thirty-two shows,” and he’d said “No I want forty-eight shows.” So they’d say “All right, thirty-six shows.” They’d got him for more shows than they wanted him, and they hadn’t got the scripts. So we did a chat show. It was wonderful, I loved doing it.’19
A far less joyful experience all round was Peter Cook’s stab at the genre, Where Do I Sit?, which began on BBC2 in February 1971. If nothing else, this show proved that the perfect chat show guest – and, as an interviewee, Cook was never anything less than superb value – could be the world’s worst chat show host. Cook didn’t prepare for the interviews, and had made the mistake of insisting on being allowed to sing a song in each show, despite having a singing voice as limited as his comedic brain wasn’t. On top of all this, the producer, Ian MacNaughton, was better known for his work on wild, surreal comedy shows such as Spike Milligan’s Q5 and Monty Python’s Flying Circus than for his ability to keep a chat show on the rails. Reviewing the first show for The Times, Chris Dunkley deplored the ‘endless weak jokes about the technical trivialities of television production’, including frequent shots of MacNaughton in the production gallery, telling Cook what to do next. Dunkley went on to describe Cook’s interview with US humorist S.J. Perelman as ‘pathetic’, and summed up the whole show as ‘dismally embarrassing . . . a sad disappointment’.20
The viewing public and, crucially, Bill Cotton agreed with Dunkley. Where Do I Sit? lasted just three editions. ‘I wanted to take it off after the first show,’ Sir Bill explains. ‘I was very fond of Peter. He tried to sue us, but it came out, in a meeting with the lawyers, that he’d spent the money, so we came to an agreement. I said to him “I wish you’d told me that before all this. Money I can deal with. Bad shows are far more difficult.” In America, if it wasn’t going well, you just went to a commercial, changed it all around and started again. At the BBC, you couldn’t do that. You had to actually build the show so that it worked.’21
The job of building such a show for the late night Saturday BBC1 schedule was given to producer Richard Drewett and Michael Parkinson. A former Manchester Guardian and Daily Express journalist, Parkinson had moved into television via Granada’s regional news show Scene at Six-Thirty, before graduating on to Granada’s Cinema series, where his interviews brought him wider attention. Sir Bill Cotton remembers ‘Tony Preston, the assistant head of variety at the time, brought him in to have a drink with me, because he’d been in to see him. Within twenty minutes, I realized that he was as star-struck as I was. I can’t say at the time I actually thought of all the good things that he brought, [but] I did know that performers would get a decent break with him, and he’d ask questions and listen to the answers. He’d get them to talk.’22
Parkinson had worked for the BBC before, but this made Cotton’s job harder rather than easier. BBC1 controller Paul Fox was reluctant. ‘As head of current affairs, he had used him on 24 Hours and said he was idle. He’s a good journalist, Parky, but he has his subjects. They were controversial, some of the questions. Probing, but there was no point-scoring. There was very little trying to make himself important. Now, they [chat show hosts] treat it just like their show – you’re on here to make me look good.’23
The first edition of Parkinson went out on BBC1 on 19 June 1971, featuring interviews with Terry-Thomas and tennis player Arthur Ashe as well as a Frost-style confrontation with royal photographer Ray Bellisario. It wasn’t the polished experience the show soon became and Barry Norman’s Times review described the Bellisario encounter as ‘an awful mistake’. The first twelve-week run had included an interview with John Lennon, then at the height of his battle with US Immigration, but the biggest catch of all had been Orson Welles. Unsurprisingly, with such heavyweights (in every sense) appearing, the show had been a success, and the decision was taken to bring it back very quickly, resuming on 10 October, after only a five-week break. The show soon achieved a momentum. In only the second show of the run, Parkinson met the boxer Muhammad Ali in a now legendarily charged encounter.
The start of the second series had not gone entirely as intended, though. John Fisher, who was with the show from the start to its final series in 1982, first as a researcher, then from 1977 as its producer, recalls the horror story. ‘Paul Fox turned around and said “I think it would be good to start the new batch by repeating the Orson Welles.” They looked and it had been wiped. Within weeks. “Don’t worry” says Paul Fox, “I’ll give you the money to do it again.” Poor Richard has to
explain that it’s not quite the same. One, you’re catching the spontaneity of a moment. Two, you’re talking about Orson Welles. It might have suited him to do it in the summer, but he might not want to come back.’ Nonetheless, Fox told Drewett that the offer would stand, and in 1973, the opportunity arose again, as Fisher relates:
At that point, Welles was working in Madrid. He said he could fly over one Sunday, and the deal was done. The fee, I’m sure, was £2,000, which was crazy money, plus expenses. We were due to be recording at half past three, four o’clock, so we were sitting in the office at Television Centre on the Sunday morning. Parky had worked the questions out and the challenge had been not replicating what had been done the previous time, doing a definitive interview with Welles, trying to bypass what we’d already talked about.
At about quarter to ten, the phone rings. It was Welles’ representative calling from Madrid. ‘Mr Welles has two demands and he’s not stepping on the plane unless you can put them into action. One, because of his size, he wants three seats removed from the aeroplane, and the money has to be available in sterling on the tarmac at Heathrow as he steps off the plane.’ Tony James, an amazing man who was the fixer of light entertainment, said ‘Can you give me a number to call you back? Leave it with me.’ He got onto the airline. He somehow schmoozed them. We had a wonderful connection, a man called Pat Furlong, who ran the BBC shipping office at Heathrow. He looked after the lah-dis, as we called them [lah-di-dahs = stars], as they came through, as well as more mundane things such as making sure that Alastair Cooke’s tape arrived on time every Friday. Thanks to Pat Furlong and Tony, the money was available for him.24