Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  When Monkhouse was booked for a guest spot one week early in the show’s run, he saw his chance. Instead of the crossbow, he arranged a cannon, from which a stooge was to be fired, as well as some other outlandish props, including a soundproofed booth that turned out to be a working shower. Suitably equipped, Monkhouse sent the show up something rotten, upstaging Jackie Rae. Producer Colin Clews advised Monkhouse that Grade and Bill Ward had given up on the show and stopped watching, so Monkhouse arranged for a telerecording to be made and ensured that the senior executives saw what he could do. The result was that Monkhouse took over from Rae and took firm control of the show.

  At his suggestion, the number of rounds was reduced, to make proceedings rather less breathless and give guest stars a chance to shine. Originally named Heinz, in honour of the German original, the factotum who loaded the crossbow was given the more homely name of Bernie, leading to the alliterative and still fondly remembered catchphrase ‘Bernie, the bolt’. Each edition was to have a theme, with the targets fashioned to correspond with the subject of the week. An early success was a music hall-themed show, with turns from variety veterans like comedian Sandy Powell, sentimental singer Randolph Sutton and male impersonator Hetty King, who had been Frankie Vaughan’s mentor.

  The changes improved the ratings drastically, and the final push came when the show moved to Sunday afternoons. Monkhouse has suggested that the rescheduling came about after Lew Grade’s nephew Michael, then a show business agent, remarked to his uncle that cinemas were full on Sunday afternoons because there was nothing on television. There may be some truth in this, but the lead is more likely to have come from ATV’s rival ABC, which shifted the show to Sunday teatimes in the Midlands and North after just a couple of months on air, with favourable results. From January 1968, the rest of the network followed suit.

  Monkhouse’s tenure on the show came to an abrupt end in 1972, when Francis Essex – who had returned from Scottish Television to become the controller of programmes at ATV – got wind of an apparent misdemeanour. One week on the show, Wilkinson Sword shaving products were the runner-up prize. Shortly beforehand, Monkhouse had been seen lunching with an advertising executive connected to Wilkinson Sword, at which a brown envelope was handed over. When this was reported back to Francis Essex, the assumption was that Monkhouse was taking cash bribes to feature Wilkinson Sword products. In fact, the contents of the parcel had been a rare and mildly salacious comic novel that the executive thought Monkhouse might enjoy. Nonetheless, Essex was unhappy with the host’s relationship with an advertiser and sacked Monkhouse, replacing him with Norman Vaughan.

  Unfortunately, in Monkhouse’s words, Vaughan took to the show ‘like a cat to water’.33 Vaughan likened the experience to trying to be funny while directing traffic, and his discomfort showed. Eventually, much to his relief, ATV released the affable Vaughan from his contract, but his successor was even more out of his depth. Charlie Williams was a Yorkshire-born professional footballer turned comic. He was also black, and won no points with the emancipation lobby through his willingness to tell racist jokes. Like Rae, he proved unable to keep the show on the rails, and after six months, he was given the boot. Realizing that he had dismissed the perfect host over something trivial, Essex asked Monkhouse back. Monkhouse agreed on condition that he would be allowed to take on ATV’s anglicization of the Hollywood Squares quiz, in which contestants tried to work out whether celebrities, sitting in a 3x3 noughts and crosses grid, were answering questions truthfully. There is a lot of snobbery about quiz shows, but the fact remains that hosting one well takes a great deal of skill, which Monkhouse had in spades. He regarded the quiz show as an utterly valid form of entertainment, and never looked down on what he was doing. He also loved the mechanics of the shows he presented, whereas all the other Golden Shot hosts looked like they wished they were doing something/anything else.

  One of the few comedians at the time who matched Monkhouse as a game show ringmaster was Bruce Forsyth, with years of hair-raising live experience on the ‘Beat the Clock’ segment of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. After finally leaving SNAP in 1964, his career had somewhat been in the doldrums. He had appeared intermittently in his own shows for ABC, but a long and bitter battle with his agent Miff Ferrie had got in the way of bookings. Traditionally regarded as an ITV performer, the next big step in his career was to be with the BBC.

  Bill Cotton Junior, newly elevated to head of light entertainment following the death of Tom Sloan in May 1970, visited the Dutch television service to give a talk. In return, his hosts showed him their hit game show Één van de Acht (‘One Out Of Eight’), in which eight families competed to accomplish tasks set for them by experts. This aspect of the set-up was a win-win situation. If a task was completed well, the viewers could enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of a fellow ordinary punter having mastered a craft in minutes. If a task went disastrously, the viewers commiserated and empathized with the poor soul on screen. It was a people show. At the end, the winners were shown a series of prizes on a conveyer belt, and went home with every one of them that they could remember.

  Cotton thought it was a great format, and knew instantly that he wanted Forsyth for the job. Indeed, in Cotton’s mind, the man and the show were inextricably intertwined. ‘I actually called it The Bruce Forsyth Show to start with, but then I thought, no I won’t do that, in case he buggers off,’ Sir Bill admits. ‘I thought the format could work with somebody else, although at the time, I couldn’t imagine doing it with anybody else.’34 Instead, Cotton called it Bruce Forsyth and The Generation Game. Forsyth had been trying to convince Cotton to let him do a chat show, but once he saw the tape of the Dutch show, he was sold.

  For the production of the new show, Cotton turned to a pair of his bright young producers from the mid-sixties intake, Colin Charman and Jim Moir. Moir recalls that, while the format was basically sound, he soon realized that he would need to make some fundamental changes:

  I was shown a short extract of the tape, we were then sent to Holland, to Vara Television in Hilversum where we realized that Één van de Acht was two hours long. Typical continental Saturday night television: these games interspersed with the Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth of Holland, oompah bands, dancers, a great big variety show with this running through it. I remember meeting with the Dutch producers, with whom we got on extremely well, and who were very flattered that the BBC was interested in Één van de Acht. I said ‘It’s two hours here, of course it’ll be shorter at home.’ ‘Oh, how long’s that?’ ‘Forty-five minutes.’ The meal stopped. They were affronted, how could it be done in forty-five minutes? I said ‘Well, it will be.’ What we extracted from their show were the conveyer belt, which was revolutionary, and some of the wacky games that they had, which were really attempts at an expertise. I particularly remember the Punch and Judy man, putting the people behind to do that. It was a very, very great success and Bruce Forsyth hit the ground running. He was the perfect host.35

  His suitability manifested itself in the way he kept such a fast-moving and unpredictable show firmly on the rails, and in the gently mocking way he dealt with the contestants, particularly his grimaces to camera when one of them said or did anything daft. A pilot was made and judged to be adequate but rough in places. Unfortunately, the first recording – just two days before the series was due to make its on-air debut – turned out to be over-complicated and slow, so the decision was taken to edit the pilot hurriedly for transmission. Unaware of the backstage dramas, viewers liked what they saw. Although prerecorded, the show didn’t follow neat, tidy, pre-rehearsed lines, so the host and the director had to treat the show effectively as live, as Roger Ordish, who directed some of the early editions, recalls:

  Although it wasn’t live, the direction aspect of it needed to be live. You had much less equipment than people nowadays. I think we had four cameras. You have four people doing something with a piece of pottery, you’ve got to have one on Bruce, and you need to see one on everyth
ing that’s going on, so the cameramen really were brilliant. You know they’re only seeing what’s on their screen, so how can they know that they have to be over that way? They really needed to be directed. You had to see what Bruce was doing, and then you’d hear Bruce’s voice, saying ‘Oh dear,’ and you’d think ‘Oh what’s he talking about? I can’t see what he’s talking about.’ But the real adrenalin of doing it was tremendous.

  It was so exciting doing it. I loved working with Bruce Forsyth. He’s absolutely brilliant. My favourite Bruce line, which always sticks in my mind, I think it was the good old classic, the pottery, or a variant on that which had something that didn’t work. Bruce was looking at this man’s product on the turntable and saying ‘Oh dear. What went wrong?’ The man said ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is a bit puckered,’ and Bruce said ‘Well and truly puckered.’ A lovely moment.36

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My auntie’s got a Whistler

  The normal procedure for a light entertainment star had been to establish themselves at the BBC, before departing to ITV for more money, but Forsyth wasn’t the first to reverse the trend. In 1968, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise had left ATV for the BBC. The official reason given was that they wanted to make shows in colour, and BBC2 already had the ability, whereas ATV was not due to transmit in colour until November 1969. In fact, the last ATV series had been made simultaneously in colour for America and monochrome for the domestic market, and Sir Bill Cotton was in no doubt about the real motivation: ‘It was money. He [Lew Grade] wouldn’t meet their demand.’ Grade had offered them £39,000 for thirty-nine twenty-five-minute shows, but his nephew Michael, working as Eric and Ernie’s agent, put professional matters ahead of family ties and offered them to Cotton, as Sir Bill recalls:

  They were an unknown commodity to a degree. They’d done very well for ATV, but they weren’t enormous stars. I made an offer that was right at the top of the BBC’s scale. Artists’ bookings said ‘You can’t pay that amount of money, that just puts everything out of kilter. You’ll get everybody saying, well if they get that money, why don’t I get that money?’ Well, I said, ‘Line them up and I’ll tell them why they don’t. If anybody wants to come to me and say we want the same money as Morecambe and Wise, I’ll say you be as good as them, you’ll get it, I promise you. No question, you might even get more.’1

  Cotton got his way by rationalizing that it was a three-year contract, and while the price may have seemed steep at the start, his confidence in Morecambe and Wise’s talent was such that it would make it seem like a bargain by the end. The idea of spreading the cost over BBC1 and BBC2 also helped justify the finances, as John Ammonds, the producer from their radio days in Manchester who had been selected to take on the new series, explains. ‘Lew Grade could never guarantee repeats because of the regional structure. We were on BBC2 in colour, then BBC1, which wasn’t in colour, for which you get a double fee. So it was twice the money. That was a major thing. The big audience was when it got onto BBC1.’

  As well as reuniting Eric and Ernie with Ammonds, Cotton had secured the scriptwriting services of Dick Hills and Sid Green, but the producer found them less than ideal, despite their track record with Eric and Ernie. ‘They thought they could do anything, that was the trouble. They did write some good stuff, but they didn’t write good stuff all the time. Also they were doing half-hour shows on commercial with two guest stars. So they didn’t have much left to write.’2 Nonetheless, the first recordings went ahead in early August 1968, to be transmitted on BBC2 in colour a month later. The series went down well with viewers and executives, and hopes were high for a second series building on the success, but it nearly didn’t happen. On 7 November 1968, driving back from an engagement at Batley Variety Club to his Leeds hotel, Eric Morecambe suffered a severe heart attack.

  He survived, and slowly it became apparent that he would eventually be fit to resume work, but as preparations were being made for a shorter second series, this time of forty-five-minute shows, the production hit another setback. Over lunch with Hills and Green’s agent, Roger Hancock, Bill Cotton was taken aback to hear Hancock demand executive producer status for the writers as a condition for continued involvement. Morecambe and Wise’s contract stipulated that Hills and Green should be the writers, so Hancock must have felt that their position was strong, but Cotton refused on a point of principle. ‘I said “That is not negotiable. I am not having a couple of writers decide.”

  We were only on the avocado when he threw this bombshell, and I said “Well, now what do we talk about?” We chatted away, and he said “Are you sure?”, I said I was positive. He said “Well what are you going to do?” I said “I have no idea, but something will turn up.”’3

  What turned up was Eddie Braben, a dry, whimsical, former fruit and veg salesman from Liverpool, who had been making a respectable name for himself writing for the wild-haired laird of Knotty Ash, Ken Dodd. Cotton heard from Michael Hurll that Braben had decided to leave Dodd. Morecambe, Wise and Ammonds were all thrilled to hear that Braben might be available. Ammonds approved particularly because he knew Braben’s approach to be more disciplined and diligent than that of Hills and Green, who would come in with ideas that they would develop with Eric, Ernie and whichever producer was in charge. In contrast, Braben was a self-contained gag machine, sending complete scripts from his Merseyside home. Ammonds observes that the writer had a lot in common with the performers:

  Like Eric and Ernie, he’d left school at 14. Eric said he didn’t get as far as long division. Eddie’s stuff was brilliant. We did some pretty heavy editing, Eric, Ernie and myself, but we couldn’t have managed without Eddie, because he was such a marvellous gag man. He had this wonderful, Liverpudlian weird type of comedy. In one show, Eric had a trombone, Ernie was sitting alongside, and Eric was reminiscing about Mr Hardcastle, the bandmaster at the works. His one big ambition was to go down to London to the Albert Hall and see the finals of the brass band contest. Ernie said ‘Well, did he make it?’ Eric said ‘Well he did get to the Albert Hall, but he went on the wrong night and Henry Cooper knocked him out in the first round.’ That to me is classic Eddie Braben comedy.4

  Braben also shifted the dynamic of the partnership slightly. At ATV, Ernie had been more of a conventional straight man, a relatively suave chap who had to deal with interruptions, digressions and diversions from his bespectacled friend, a miscreant child in a man’s body. Braben’s masterstroke was to give Ernie his own distinct comic persona – a vain, pompous, astonishingly prolific playwright with a taste for anachronistic historical epics, and a touching, but misguided, belief in his own abilities. The writer drew on the long friendship between the performers, and made it clear that while Morecambe was allowed to make fun of his companion, he wouldn’t let anyone else get away with it. Braben supplied them with a back story which turned out to be a patchwork of their upbringings and his own, with references to Milverton Street School and a local temptress called Ada Bailey. He also supplied them with a life on screen, by setting sketches in the fictional flat that they shared, introducing an element of situation comedy into a variety format.

  Guests were always a vital part of any variety show, and with Braben, Eric and Ernie continued and developed their policy of gentle mockery towards anyone who dared to appear on the show. This is almost certainly a key to their massive popularity. As a nation, the British can’t bear anyone who’s too full of themselves, as celebrities often can be. When Morecambe and Wise insulted a star, they did so with the full support of their audience, and the stars did their images no harm by taking it on the chin. And, as the show became increasingly popular, ever more illustrious figures lined up to be insulted. The turning point was their 1971 Christmas special. That was the show in which Shirley Bassey lost her shoes while singing her big number, only to have them replaced with the hobnailed boots of Eric and Ernie, dressed as a pair of brown-coated scene hands. It was also the show where Glenda Jackson was serenaded by Frank Bough, Cliff Michelmore, Patrick Moore, M
ichael Parkinson and Eddie Waring. As if those weren’t riches enough, it was also the show in which Eric attempted to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto under the baton of ‘Andrew Preview’.

  Throughout their career, Morecambe and Wise were never shy of reusing successful material, and this sketch was a revisitation of a routine written by Hills and Green back in the ATV days, but with several important differences.5 The ‘all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order’ line is present in the original, as is the gag about the introduction being about a yard too short, but the presence of André Previn as Andrew Preview takes the 1971 remake to a new level. It had been Ammonds’s idea to enlist the conductor, after he saw him in a show made by John Culshaw for the music and arts department. Ammonds found Culshaw in an editing suite and asked whether he thought Previn would be game. Culshaw replied that he and Previn were lunching the next day, so he’d ask:

  True to his word, he rang me the following day, said André was very interested and gave me his number. I rang him, said I produced Morecambe and Wise and he said ‘Before we go any further, you’ve got a great show there.’ I said ‘Thanks very much. I’m glad you said that because I want you to be on it.’ He said he’d do it, so I asked him ‘Can I call your agent and tell them you’re interested?’ He said ‘Better than that. Ring my agent and tell them I’ll definitely do it.’6