Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  There was one small sticking point. Morecambe and Wise were hard workers, and were used to having their guests for a full week of rehearsal, but Previn’s globe-trotting schedule allowed for a maximum of three days. Always a worrier, Eric Morecambe was concerned that it wouldn’t be enough, but Ammonds replied that a few pages of dialogue wouldn’t phase a man who carried whole symphonies around in his head. At the first read-through, Previn was spot on. ‘The first time we did it, I cried laughing,’ recalls Ammonds. ‘We did it for about two or three hours, and every time he did it, it got funnier and funnier.’ Unfortunately, on returning to his office, Ammonds found he had a message from Previn’s agent explaining that the conductor had to pay a sudden visit to his ill mother in America, and that he wouldn’t be back until the night before the show. Ammonds had no doubt that Previn would pull it off. His main concern was Morecambe:

  I thought ‘Christ, how do I explain this to Eric, who’s jibbing at three days?’ I told Eric the next morning, and he said ‘Sod him, we don’t want him.’ I said ‘Whoa, you saw how good he was. We can rehearse, we’ll be all right. I’ll book a room at the Centre with a piano and we’ll rehearse. He lands at 5pm, I’ll get a car to get him to the Centre for 6pm, and we’ll rehearse until 10.’ That’s exactly what we did and every time we did it, I cried laughing. Eventually, André went, Ernie went and I was left with Eric. He said ‘John, this is not going to be as funny as you think it is.’ I just shrugged my shoulders because the following night with the audience, it went through the roof. He was marvellous.7

  Over a drink many years later, Morecambe brought the subject up and told Ammonds ‘John, I’ve never been more wrong. It’s the funniest thing we’ve ever done.’ As Ammonds admits, ‘Some younger producers would have wilted – once he’d said “Sod him, we don’t want him,” that would have been it, but I knew it was going to be a gem.’ It made Previn a celebrity among people who would never have listened to classical music if their lives depended on it, but the greatest accolade came from the landlord of his local pub. As Previn told Ammonds, ‘When I’d been on Morecambe and Wise, they gave me my own tankard.’8

  Producing such a high-ratings show was a high-pressure job, but Ammonds thrived on it, helped by a marked lack of interference from above. ‘That was the joy of it really. I was absolutely in control. One year, I was editing until midnight on Christmas Eve. I was down in the dungeons at Television Centre and I thought to myself “Here am I – it’s going to play to 24 million tomorrow night, and I’m the one man responsible for what goes in and what doesn’t.” On the money I was getting it was even more ridiculous.’9 Nonetheless, in 1974, Ammonds decided to move on. He had concerns that Eddie Braben was being overworked, but Eric Morecambe brushed off suggestions that other writers join the team. Ammonds also found himself being spread too thin, taking on responsibility for impressionist Mike Yarwood’s shows. Fortunately, the ideal replacement was already part of the family, in the form of Ernest Maxin, who had been lending the shows his choreographic expertise when not producing the Black and White Minstrel Show.

  Under Maxin,The Morecambe and Wise Show experienced a subtle shift. Ammonds was a ruthless script editor and an expert in directing the written word. Raised on a diet of Hollywood musicals, Maxin’s forte was in visual comedy and the big showpieces: ‘They used to call me “Mr MGM” – Maxin Goldberg Maxin.’10 The MGM influence was obvious in the 1976 and 1977 Christmas specials. The former featured both the famous Singing in the Rain send-up, with Ernie as Gene Kelly and Eric as the deluged cop, and Angela Rippon’s celebrated emergence from behind the news desk. Inspired by Rippon’s example, others wanted to get in on the act. Maxin recalls: ‘One of the newscasters, I think it was Richard Baker, put his head round my office and said “Do you think you can use me in a show?” He’s a musician, and I said “Yes, I’ll have a think about it.” Then later that day, Michael Aspel put his head around my door, and I thought “Hang on, I’ll use them all together.”’ So it was that the following year’s show featured a stunning pastiche of South Pacific, with Aspel, Baker, film reviewers Philip Jenkinson and Barry Norman, Michael Parkinson, Eddie Waring from It’s a Knockout, and Baker’s fellow newsreaders Richard Whitmore and Peter Woods in sailor suits. This unlikely chorus sang There Is Nothing Like a Dame and appeared to turn cartwheels and somersaults, thanks to a few professional acrobats and some clever editing. Maxin notes that the routine gave Morecambe the jitters, just as Andrew Preview’s appearance had six years earlier:

  When we got to rehearsals, I hadn’t actually realized that I couldn’t get them all there at the same time, because they were all on different duties. Eric was very poorly – this was just before his second heart attack. His lips went blue, he went to the piano in the rehearsal room, leaned on it and said ‘This will never work. I can’t see it working.’ I couldn’t convince him, but Ernie put his arm around him and said ‘Look, if it doesn’t work, we don’t use it.’ If it hadn’t been for Ernie, that number wouldn’t have gone on.

  We shot the whole thing in fifteen minutes, and finished at about eight o’clock. Eric was so worried. Ernie wasn’t worried at all. Eric asked if he could come and watch the edit, and I said come back at about 11. I saw it run through, and it looked great. He came in, ashen white. He said ‘Well?’ I said ‘The best thing to do, you come and sit beside me and we’ll run the thing.’ I watched his face. I could see the reflection in the screen. He was sitting back. As it went on he began to lean forward, and at the end the tears were running down his face. He said ‘Bloody hellfire, Ernest, it works,’ put his arms around me, and gave me a hug.

  How we did it was, you’d see Frank Bough in a mid shot to establish him there. Stop, cut to a long shot, see the acrobat do the trick. Then you come out of it like you’ve just done the trick, put the three together. Some of the public thought it was real. Richard Baker came into my office and said ‘I’m in trouble. I’ve been invited to open a fête and do my acrobatic trick. What can I do? I can’t give the game away.’11

  That show pulled in an audience of 28 million viewers and meant that the pair ended their BBC career on a massive high, for in 1978, they succumbed to overtures from Philip Jones at Thames to rejoin commercial television’s star armada. The move came just as Bill Cotton Junior was stepping up to become the controller of BBC1, after eight years in charge of light entertainment.

  When John Ammonds left Morecambe and Wise, his main commitment had been to Mike Yarwood, whom he describes as ‘the most nervous performer I think I’ve ever encountered, except Frankie Howerd’.12 He was also that greatest of show business clichés, a shy man driven to perform. Born and raised in Stockport, Yarwood had come up on the pub and club circuit around Manchester in the early sixties, and gained a considerable reputation as an impressionist. One of his earliest triumphs had been an uncanny ability to mimic both Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell in their roles as Steptoe and Son. With the help of his friend Royston Mayoh, a producer at ABC’s Didsbury studios, he made his first appearances on television as an impressionist, but it was when he appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium in 1964 that he became a national name. A BBC2 series called Three of a Kind followed in 1967 (the other two were comedian Ray Fell and singer Lulu), then two series for ATV. He returned to the BBC for Look – Mike Yarwood! (produced in tandem with his radio series, Listen – Mike Yarwood!) in 1971, beginning the run that, with Mike Yarwood in Persons from 1976 onwards, was to make him a superstar.

  Although too gentle in his humour to be regarded as a real satirist, Yarwood’s stock-in-trade was the political figures of the day, in particular Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and his eyebrow-heavy Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey. As important as his considerable voice skills was his ability to change between characters in the fraction of a second it takes to cut between cameras. Clever angles and direction meant that he could have conversations with himself as two different characters. The apex of this was singing ‘My Way’, with a line f
rom each of his best-known impersonations. Much of his material relied on placing august governmental figures in incongruous situations, such as depicting Edward Heath on Top of the Pops, singing the Rod Stewart hit ‘Sailing’, a reference to his maritime proclivities. Away from politics, Yarwood also did a devastating Hughie Green, who spent many years working with Yarwood’s old associate Royston Mayoh. He was also, with Stanley Baxter, at the forefront of using television technology to play multiple characters.

  Unfortunately, the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1979 rendered many of Yarwood’s signature take-offs redundant. Janet Brown was drafted in to play the Iron Lady, but Yarwood never quite recovered. He followed Morecambe and Wise to Thames in 1982, and remained popular without ever quite recapturing his preeminence. Even with advances in technology, his shows remained among the most labour-intensive in television. At Thames, his 1985 Christmas special was scheduled for five days in the studio at Teddington, after three weeks of rehearsal and other shooting. This was to be followed by a week of editing before transmission, a short lead time for such a complex production, as director/producer Philip Casson observed. ‘We’ve got to put it together, dub it and track it, so that it goes out by December 23. But it’s only late in so much as it’s close to the air date.’ Casson also indicated that most of the studio time was spent waiting for Yarwood to emerge from costume and make-up: ‘The time has nothing to do with how long it actually takes to shoot it.’13

  He added the Prince of Wales to his repertoire, aided by actress Suzanne Danielle as an almost-mute Diana, but Yarwood was not sufficiently able to move with the times. As late as 1984, he was still doing Harold and Albert Steptoe, ten years after the last episode of the sitcom had been screened. He was also battling alcoholism, caused by drinking to calm his considerable nervousness. His last Thames show was in 1987, after which he slipped into semi-retirement.

  Performers like Morecambe and Wise had worked their way up from the variety theatres to television, so the demise of the variety halls had robbed up-and-coming performers of a vital training ground. Most new artists had once learned their craft on the lower-rent halls, the ‘number twos’, and these had been among the first to close, many disappearing in the years immediately after the Second World War. When the top-line venues, the ‘number ones’, followed in their wake, it seemed like there was nowhere for performers to go. Talent shows had existed for as long as television – ATV had Carroll Levis’ Discoveries, while Hughie Green’s famous Opportunity Knocks ran for seventeen years from 1961 – but the chances of an untried performer getting straight on screen were small, the chances of that performer being a hit were infinitesimal, and the wrong type of exposure was potentially fatal to a career. The answer came from the north, where, in many respects, live entertainment had remained close to its music hall roots. Each town may have had its variety theatres, but it also had working men’s clubs and social clubs, where acts were booked for the enjoyment of those who went to drink, an echo of the early music hall days. It was in these venues that the likes of Yarwood served their apprenticeships.

  Bernie Clifton had begun his show business career in the late fifties as a singer, working with the band at his local Co-op dance hall in St Helen’s (‘The very dance hall I was thrown out of for riding the doorman’s bike around the dance floor’). When he was called up for National Service he kept his hand in with weekend gigs in pubs and clubs, and found himself in a very fortunate position. ‘I was stationed at RAF Lindholm near Doncaster,’ he explains. ‘At the time, that was the new entertainment centre of the north. The theatres were closing, the clubs were opening, and Doncaster and Sheffield were where it was at.’ It was during this time that he began adding comedy to the musical element of his act:

  In St Helens as a fifteen-year-old, we had this weird, funny sense of humour. We’d go to the pictures on a Sunday, and instead of watching the film, we’d start this thing called the ‘ten o’clock rally’. As the cinema clock got to ten o’clock, we would all have secreted on our person some form of noise-making machine – a bicycle bell, a rattle, a mouth organ, a kazoo or a Jew’s harp. Anything you could put in your pocket. We used to ruin the film. I don’t know if it was so much [being] Catholic, it was bred on those little side streets, those little rows and rows of terraced houses. If you didn’t do something, you’d go mad.

  When I was doing the pubs and clubs, I insulated myself from the deaths by becoming an entertainer. It would depend where I was. I’d try a few gags out if the audience were nice, and if they liked it, I’d try more. On it went. The following week, if I was down the road five miles and they were a tough audience, I wouldn’t do any gags, which really confused the small following I had. Off stage, I was Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, but on stage I was shy. There’s a difference between being funny in a bar with the lads, and doing it on stage. I’ve still got my [business] card. I was a ‘vocal entertainer’. On the cards it says ‘Entertainment guaranteed. Own transport’. Which is a bizarre thing to say on a card, but very important. If you had your own transport, it would mean that you could do the last spot after the bingo and not get the 9.30 bus from the pit village back into Doncaster.14

  During the sixties, the smaller clubs and pubs in the north were joined by a new breed of club, vast venues offering reasonably priced drinks, a full menu, the chance to gamble and see some top-class entertainers at work. The pioneer was the Greasbrough Social Club, near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, which had been established in 1920 as the United Army, Navy and Airmen’s Club. By 1957, it had 200 more members than could be accommodated in its 300-capacity wooden premises, so a new £36,000 club, with a concert room holding 450, was built opposite. The entertainment on offer proved so popular that the membership list soon grew to four times the club’s capacity.

  The best known of all these super-clubs opened on Easter Sunday 1967 in Batley, West Yorkshire, on the site of a former sewage works. The entrepreneur behind the scheme was Jimmy Corrigan, the son of a travelling showman. Corrigan had been a bingo caller at his family’s fairgrounds in his youth, so when bingo halls were legalized, he recognized the opportunity and began building a chain, twenty-three strong at its peak. Anxious to diversify, the success of Greasbrough had prompted Corrigan’s next move, and when he saw the derelict site in November 1966, he moved quickly. With a £60,000 loan from Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, the building proceeded at breakneck pace, with floodlights being installed on site to allow workmen to work until midnight.

  The publicity for the opening night promised ‘seating for 1,500’, ‘a full two-hour show’, ‘light catering’ and ‘drinks at normal prices’, not to mention the luxury of air conditioning. The choice of the Irish singing group the Bachelors as the opening attraction reflected the Corrigan family’s background, as did the arrival of Val Doonican for the second week. After that, Kathy Kirby and Kenny Ball shared top billing for a week, then it was Jimmy Tarbuck’s turn, followed by Bob Monkhouse and Lonnie Donegan, then – just two months before her tragic death – the Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield. Batley Variety Club was a roaring success from the start, and in time, everyone who was anyone in entertainment performed at the club.

  In 1968, the newly established ITV company Yorkshire Television highlighted the growth of Batley as an entertainment hotspot by sending an outside broadcast crew to record a variety show pilot at the club, hosted by singer Ronnie Hilton. Unfortunately, a lack of available programmes meant that the pilot went out hurriedly in an unfinished edit, which soured relations between Corrigan and Yorkshire. Barney Colehan, the BBC’s northern region TV light entertainment producer, had put northern clubs on television in the outside broadcast series Club Night, but the job of representing this new arena of entertainment fully on screen fell to Johnnie Hamp, head of light entertainment at Granada in Manchester. Raised in Carshalton, Surrey, Hamp had begun his show business career as a performer, doing a Danny Kaye-inspired mime act in a touring show put together by Bry
an Michie, the ex-BBC radio producer who had discovered Morecambe and Wise. The first show on the tour had been at the ornate, gothic Granada in Woolwich and when he had completed his National Service in the RAF, he approached the company for a job. After working as assistant manager at various Granada ‘theatres’ (as Sidney Bernstein insisted on his cavernous, lavishly decorated cinemas being called), he went to head office in Golden Square as the publicity manager’s assistant, being promoted to the top job when the incumbent died. He also began putting together live shows for the circuit, before moving over to the company’s London-based television operation at the Chelsea Palace in 1960.

  I was doing things like Spot the Tune with Marion Ryan, Criss Cross Quiz with Barbara Kelly and a show with Bob Holness called Take a Letter [Hamp recalls]. Granada did a lot of quiz shows at that time. Then I went up to Manchester, specifically to produce light entertainment. Granada was very much a drama and current affairs organization. There wasn’t a light entertainment department at all, but I tried to make a few big shows. When blues musicians like Muddy Waters were touring over here, I put together a show called I Hear the Blues. The last show I remember doing at Chelsea was The Bacharach Sound in 1965.15

  Whereas the BBC tradition had been for producers to be directors as well, Hamp was less a technician and more of an old-fashioned impresario. ‘I always thought that the producer’s job was to put the show together,’ he rationalizes. One of his best-known early productions was a one-off stand-up comedy special in 1965 starring Woody Allen, who was then hardly known outside Greenwich Village. ‘He was making What’s New Pussycat at the time, and I went across to Paris to see if he’d be interested in making a one-off show. He was quite insistent about plugging his new LP, and I said “I’m not going to let you just plug the LP. At least we can turn it into a gag.”’16 Hamp replaced the vinyl LP in the sleeve with a fragile 78 rpm disc, which Allen dropped and smashed.