Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  Such specials aside, a significant outlet for Hamp’s work in the mid-sixties was the regional news magazine Scene at Six-Thirty, hosted variously by Mike Scott, Gay Byrne and an up-and-coming reporter from Barnsley called Michael Parkinson. Although nominally a current affairs show, it featured entertainment guests every night of the week. Elsewhere in Manchester, the BBC was making Top of the Pops, but Hamp was able to get the best new bands into the Scene at Six-Thirty studio before their record had hit the charts, stealing a march on the opposition. One of those bands was the Beatles: ‘We were in the right place at the right time,’ Hamp confesses. ‘It was a regional show, but it was a big region, because we covered Yorkshire as well at the time, and we were often in the top ten.’17

  The competition between ATV and ABC, and later ATV, Thames, Yorkshire and London Weekend Television, had always meant that Granada tended to enter the light entertainment melee only when it could offer something distinctive and different. The burgeoning club scene gave Granada that in spades. ‘I went to a lot of clubs to see the top of the bill, and I always found that there was a pretty good comic as compère,’ Hamp says, as he recalls the inspiration for The Comedians, one of Granada’s big entertainment successes of the seventies. He gathered some of the best club comics, including former dance band crooner-turned-club owner Bernard Manning, the great if relentless Frank Carson, ex-professional footballer Charlie Williams and former teacher Jim Bowen, and recorded them doing their acts, or, in Manning’s case, the cleaner end of it, in front of a studio audience. Hamp’s stroke of genius was to take only the very best gags and to use the new technology of videotape editing to create a quick-fire comedic assault. Hamp estimates that 80 per cent of the material recorded was never used. Even though videotape editing had come on a little from the early days of physically cutting the tape with a razor blade, ‘it was still cumbersome – we were working with two-inch tape. If there was a joke an hour and ten minutes in, it took about six minutes to wind through, and then you might find that you didn’t want it anyway.’18

  There was scepticism about whether the show would take off. Even Frank Carson thought it would never work. It worked. Fast-moving in a way that had not been seen on British television before, The Comedians would become a massive hit and made stars of the comics it featured, sending their club earning potential skywards and propelling some into their own television shows. It was to run for eleven series between 1971 and 1992. Bernard Manning, who had been dismissed by many at Granada as just a blue comic until Hamp showed them how clean he could work, was to become a central figure in Hamp’s next big hit show.

  The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which began in 1974, wore its clubland influences proudly on its sleeve. It had begun as part of the stage version of The Comedians that Hamp put on in Blackpool and at the London Palladium. The segment proved so successful that Hamp realized it could be a potential format. ‘Shows never turn out as expected, but this one worked out exactly as I’d written it,’ notes Hamp.19 The idea was to feature up-and-coming turns, which included comedy double act Cannon and Ball and magician Paul Daniels, alongside established turns in a fictitious northern working men’s club setting, linked by compère/singer Manning and the clueless, ignorant chairman of the committee, played by Comedians favourite Colin Crompton. Viewed from a modern perspective, the idea that big stars like Buddy Greco, Tessie O’Shea, Howard Keel, Bill Haley and Roy Orbison would play such a venue seems to be a big joke, but in reality, it wasn’t so far from the truth, with the likes of Louis Armstrong playing Batley. No star, no matter how elevated, was safe from Manning’s knocking introductions. He introduced the Irish singing group the Bachelors by saying ‘They’ve been here three or four times before. They come here every week for £10. I know very well they can’t afford to pay us.’20 Crompton’s deliberately ill-informed interruptions (mostly written by Crompton himself, with occasional help from Neil Shand) were also a constant, heralded by the clang of the fire bell he kept on his desk. ‘Just notice, anybody going on the Territorial Army weekend, reveille is at six o’clock. If you don’t like this Italian food, take some butties,’ was one early example.21

  Where Stars and Garters had tried and failed to recreate the atmosphere of an East London pub in a television studio ten years earlier, the Wheeltappers and Shunters got the mood absolutely right in a similarly artificial setting. The atmosphere was almost palpable, the illusion was perfect. The audience were all in the mood, as well they might be with twelve acts per show and unlimited free beer on offer. ‘Normally you issue 500 tickets to get 200 people in, but not for the Wheeltappers,’ Hamp notes. The cameras were well hidden, and the studio audience were lulled into forgetting that they were on television by an absence of the procedures that usually characterize television recordings. ‘We never had a countdown, we just used to start it,’ Hamp recalls. ‘Bernard would sing a song. We didn’t make a big thing of it.’ The net result was that Hamp ‘used to get phone calls trying to book a table. Tim Farmer [the show’s designer] should have won an award.’22

  David Liddiment, later to become Hamp’s successor, but then a junior member of the Granada programme trail-making staff, expresses great admiration for the way the show was made.

  What was clever about the Wheeltappers and Shunters [was that] when you went into studio 6 for a recording of the Wheeltappers you were not in studio 6. You were in a club. It was four walls, it ran uninterrupted, they never stopped. If something went wrong, Bernard would come on, do a bit of banter with Colin, the show never stopped. He gave an audience an evening’s entertainment, the same with The Comedians.23

  The Wheeltappers and Shunters served its last pint in July 1977, but the idea of showcasing new acts without forcing them to compete in a talent show carried on. One later series developed by Johnnie Hamp was Fully Licensed for Singing and Dancing, which ran on Friday nights in 1979 and 1980. Instead of recreating the club atmosphere in the studio, outside broadcast cameras went to the north’s cabaret nightspots and recorded acts on their home turf. The results were then linked by gentle Irish comedian Roy Walker, another Comedians discovery. This was followed in 1981 by The Video Entertainers, for which Hamp went in front of the cameras himself, at the instigation of Granada managing director David Plowright, to introduce the acts in front of a set featuring a television and one of those new-fangled video cassette recorders (a top loader with ‘piano keys’) such as could be obtained from Granada’s own TV rental shops.24

  Johnnie Hamp’s unpretentious, but deceptively clever television programmes in the seventies and eighties captured a microcosm of the era’s entertainment world, from the strangest spesh acts to the bill-topping Hollywood stars. Away from television and the clubs, the best performers were guaranteed bookings in the highly successful summer shows that each major seaside town offered. Blackpool was the Mecca, with three theatrically equipped piers, several large theatres on land, the famous Tower ballroom and circus, and a plethora of smaller bars, each of which could usually support an electric organist, a drummer and a singer/comedian, not to mention the Pleasure Beach at the south end of the ‘Golden Mile’ for the children. At the resort’s peak in the forties and fifties, there was barely enough space left on the beach for the famous donkey rides, largely because whole factories would close for a uniform holiday period, rather than organizing staggered leave.

  Before she became a theatrical agent, Blackpool native Jan Kennedy was a singer, known as Jan Currey. ‘The sixties was when it was at its height,’ she asserts, and she should know, having been crowned Blackpool’s ‘girl of the year’ in 1965. ‘I remember doing a tour of all the theatres in my capacity as girl of the year. At the ABC, we had Marty Wilde, at the Opera House, we had the Black and White Minstrels, at the North Pier we had Gerry and the Pacemakers and at the South Pier, I think we had Freddie and the Dreamers. In every major theatre, there was a major show. And on a Friday night, they used to queue round the block for tickets to the show. On Friday they used to arrive
to go to the guest houses and hotels, the wife used to go and unpack, and the husband went to queue for theatre tickets. That’s how it was. You couldn’t walk on the promenade, you couldn’t get a place on the beach.’25

  Other resorts were just as busy. East Londoners had Southend-on-Sea, with the longest pier in Britain and the sprawling Kursaal complex offering almost every amusement known to man. South Londoners had Margate; Midlanders favoured Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, with its two thriving pier theatres – the Wellington and the Britannia – and Jack Jay’s famous Windmill Theatre, complete with a working, illuminated windmill on its tall, elegant 1908 facade. In the days before cheap air travel, British holidaymakers seeking fun rather than elevation were so spoilt for choice with the likes of Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Worthing, Weston-super-Mare, Scarborough, Lowestoft and Morecambe that they could have visited a different resort each year without repeating themselves once during their children’s formative years. In reality, tribal loyalties and transport tended to keep the punters visiting the same towns year after year, and, once they’d found one they liked, usually the same guest house each year too.

  For those who favoured familiarity over the unknown on their summer break, holiday camps were ideal, funfair proprietor Billy Butlin having opened the first at Skegness in 1936. In the early twentieth century, standardization had been an important factor in industry and business. This was not in the sense of levelling down to a low common denominator, so much as producing objects or services to a consistently high standard at the lowest cost. At a holiday camp, everything the average working-class holidaymaker could possibly want in terms of food, drink and entertainment was available on site. After the Second World War, Butlin’s success enabled him to expand further, until he ran a total of nine camps, including Clacton, Pwllheli and Bognor Regis. In 1946, Fred Pontin had opened a rival firm, beginning with a camp in Somerset.

  Into the seventies, domestic resorts and holiday camps remained in rude health, but gradually, the rise of cheap flights and package tour operators ate into their market. Resorts like Great Yarmouth did a passable impersonation of booming and bustling into the late eighties, but smaller resorts had begun their retrenchment earlier. Only Blackpool remained, and remains, largely oblivious to trends in holidaymaking.

  The glory days of clubland came to an end rather more abruptly, beginning with the introduction of the 1968 Gaming Act, which insisted on a complete separation between gambling and entertainment. Clubs could offer both, but each had to have a separate entrance, and it was no longer possible to see the stage from the casino area. Later legislation denying many clubs gaming licences of any kind finished the job off. ‘Most of them were run with gambling at the side,’ says Jan Kennedy. ‘The Cresta club, Solihull; Batley Variety Club; Wakefield Theatre Club. The gambling licences paid for the entertainment, as they do at Las Vegas and other major entertainment resorts. So the demise of the variety club entertainment really slipped back with the licensing laws. The variety clubs in that sense of the word really started to go downhill from that moment, which was a great shame. The working men’s clubs carried on.’26 Batley Variety Club soldiered on in greatly reduced circumstances until July 1978, reopening that September as West Yorkshire’s answer to Studio 54, a discotheque called Crumpet.

  Despite all of the innovations that had taken place in variety formats, the demise of Sunday Night at the London Palladium in 1967 and the closure of many of the traditional outlets for live variety, the traditional act shows were still going strong on television. International Cabaret had been part of BBC2’s programme roster from its first weekend on-air, but its ancestry went back much further, a show with an identical title having gone out from Alexandra Palace in pre-war days. Indeed, the core purpose of the show in the sixties was nearly identical to its 1937 counterpart – presenting the best European performers, particularly speciality acts, to a British audience. There were also similarities with Café Continental, which had been pensioned off in 1955 when producer Henry Caldwell left for commercial television. On both shows, the studio was laid out as a cabaret club, with the audience at tables. In the case of International Cabaret, the audience at the Television Theatre had the benefit of free cigarettes, supplied as fully practical props at the request of producer Stewart Morris.

  In July 1966, Kenneth Williams took over as compère. He replaced the usual slick, respectful introductions that acts and viewers had come to expect with rambling monologues about the various indignities he had been forced to endure in rehearsals. After expounding at length about fictional run-ins with the make-up and lighting staff, who found it impossible to make him any better looking, and chiding the audience for an insufficient response by reminding them that it was a variety show not a séance, he would then introduce the acts as if it were an afterthought. It was a clever stroke, contrasting physically strenuous performances with a host who seemed utterly indifferent to the whole shebang. Always his own harshest critic, Williams thought that he’d fallen flat on his first show, and it wasn’t until he saw a playback a couple of days later that he realized that it had gone very well indeed. Sufficiently bolstered, Williams made the series his own. Stewart Morris remembers him as ‘the most directable guy . . . such a funny man, but personally so unhappy. [He had] a great brain. He and John Law used to sit together in that little office and knock it [the script] out. Bless him, he was always word perfect.’27

  Meanwhile, Stewart Morris was traversing Europe making sure that Williams and Law had acts to write introductions for, however idiosyncratic:

  I used to spend the summer, basically, touring Europe looking for acts, especially spesh acts, very hard to find, but they were around. One was a girl who came on with a machine that looked like a pinball machine and it had a little dummy artist [gestures to indicate a diminutive figure] that high who would paint on the upright surface at the back. It was quite amazing. I think she really just talked to it. I don’t think she played any great part. But inside that was a man. Folded up with his arm up the back, drawing blind. He had to be let out within moments of the end of the act, otherwise he’d be dead. He couldn’t breathe. He used to get out and it used to take minutes to revive him because he was folded and couldn’t unfold. He was locked in position.

  I think the greatest spesh act I ever worked with was Italian – an opera singer, and his partner was a waiter. The opera singer used to come on in white tie and tails, and then came the irritations of the waiter, this little guy. The way I did it, I got him to serve drinks around the tables before the act so they’d seen him working, and when he dropped a cup, then a tray of cutlery, it was all set up. It worked perfectly, falling over, dropping the tray. In the end he’d get up there and do pirouettes – ballet – on the stage. Then the opera singer would lift him up and he would still be singing the aria. A brilliant act and also the most expensive act I ever used, and I had to wait a long time to get them.28

  Morris has similarly fond memories of an equestrian trio called Les Cascadeurs, whom he used in the winning 1977 BBC entry for the Golden Sea Swallow prize at the television festival in Knokke:

  As the producer/director, you had to do the show as live, you were not allowed to edit it or stop, and if you did, that was going to be transmitted. I took Rolf Harris, Bonnie Tyler and this spesh act that I’d seen at the Lido in Paris. A wonderful French agent called Carmen Bajot took me there. Part of the act, a man canters onto this tiny stage, and the horse falls, literally goes right over and throws him. Lands by my feet, for Christ’s sake. The horse is whinnying, feet thrashing and I’m about to leave. I said ‘Carmen, we cannot ever do this on television, it’s too bloody dangerous,’ and she said ‘Stewart, I’m going to bring you back tomorrow and you will see the horse fall in precisely the same place,’ and I did go back because I didn’t believe it. We did the show in the ballroom in the casino on the first floor. There was no lift so I said to the casino manager ‘We’ve got no alternative. We’ve got to go up the grand staircase.’ And that’s w
hat we did, rode the three horses up the staircase, into the ballroom and into a room we’d converted into a mini stable. When we did the act, the guy did the fall and they had the old travolator, so the horse would go on it, having picked up Bonnie Tyler, and was cantering off into the night. I’m afraid the opposition didn’t have anything like that. Great entertainment, great showmanship.29

  Over at ATV, a mid-seventies revival of the Palladium show, with Ted Rogers as host, had foundered, but in 1977, a new variety show from the company hit the airwaves to great and instant acclaim. Instead of using an established comedian as host, ATV took a risk on a newcomer. Moreover, he was a frog, and his leading lady was a pig. Over the next five years, The Muppet Show would attract star guests as diverse as John Cleese and Julie Andrews – on whose special the Henson puppets had first come to Lew Grade’s attention. One of the most memorable visitors to The Muppet Show set at Elstree was drummer Buddy Rich, enlisted at the suggestion of musical director Jack Parnell. ‘I remember going to Jim Henson saying “Hey, you ought to get the greatest drummer in the world – Buddy Rich,”’ Parnell remembers. ‘He said “Who? Never heard of him.” I think he was kidding me. I said “He’s the greatest thing you ever heard.” He said “All right then,” and we got him, just like that.’30 Rich was to take on the infamous Muppet drummer Animal, whose percussive noises were in reality supplied by Parnell’s successor in the Ted Heath band, the great Ronnie Verrell.