Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  The low point of Dodd’s career came in 1989, when he went through a well-publicised trial for tax evasion. With the support of George Carman QC and some well-chosen replies to the prosecutors’ cross-questioning, Dodd was acquitted. Although harrowing at the time, the experience has since been mined extensively by Dodd for comic purposes – such as the claim that he pioneered income tax self-assessment. Even if the verdict had gone against him, however, it’s unlikely that it would have dented his massive popularity. ‘No performer has more time for his public than Ken Dodd,’ says John Fisher, and the affection is fully reciprocated.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Let’s get the network together’

  While the BBC had been establishing its dominance over light entertainment, London Weekend Television had been fighting for survival. Following a bruising on-air encounter with David Frost in October 1969, Rupert Murdoch vowed to take over LWT, and, within a year, had a controlling interest in the company and a seat on the board. Perhaps predictably, Murdoch’s hands-on management style and his championing of downmarket populist programming went down like a sausage roll at a bar mitzvah, both at the Leaning Tower of Neasden and with the ITA. However, his money was welcomed and, in the words of LWT’s historian David Docherty, his brief, tempestuous tenure ‘flattened the ground, cleared out the dead wood, and prepared the company for rebuilding’.1 The man chosen to rebuild LWT was John Freeman; he had been David Frost’s original first choice in 1968 and became chairman and chief executive in March 1971. In his long and distinguished career, Freeman had been a Labour MP, editor of the New Statesman, the unseen interviewer in the BBC’s legendary Face to Face series and the British Ambassador to Washington. Running LWT called on the journalistic and political skills that he had accumulated in all of those roles.

  Although Freeman’s leadership skills were critical to LWT’s recovery, the contribution made by programme controller Cyril Bennett must not be underestimated, particularly in the field of light entertainment. Bennett’s background was originally in journalism and current affairs, but he had more than a touch of show business about him. Stanley Baxter recalled his endearing tendency to lapse into Groucho Marx impersonations if discussions got too heavy. His one weakness was a desire to milk a successful show once it had been established. Bennett was responsible for the appointment of Michael Grade as head of light entertainment. Grade proved surprisingly unsuited to the role, despite his family pedigree, but justified Bennett’s faith when he took over as programme controller himself after Bennett’s premature death in 1976.

  Morale at LWT was undoubtedly boosted in June 1972, when the company finally moved into its new purpose-built office and studio centre on the south bank of the Thames. Apart from the massive studio 5, the old Rediffusion complex at Wembley had not been ideal for modern colour production. Most of the original film studios there had very low ceilings by industry standards. At Kent House, producers could stretch out, and even better, their offices were on the same site, with panoramic views of central London.

  Among those producers were a pair of new appointees who helped revitalize LWT’s light entertainment output. One was Jon Scoffield, a former designer who had earned his spurs at ATV, and the other was David Bell, who had made his professional name north of the border at BBC Scotland and Scottish Television. Scoffield’s main contribution to the programme roster was Who Do You Do?, a compendium of the best impressionists at work in the UK at the time. With a gold-standard writing team including the dry wit Dick Vosburgh and the one-liner king Barry Cryer, it ran for five series and three specials between 1972 and 1976. The show enabled impressionist Freddie Starr to consolidate his success after a breakthrough appearance at the 1970 Royal Variety Performance, where his Mick Jagger impersonation went down a storm. Unfortunately, the erratic personality traits he later became famed for were already present. After a series of explosions, he went on a charm offensive, and the ‘nice’ Freddie scared the crew and writers more than his natural, tempestuous side had ever done. Other performers who impressed were Peter Goodwright and Roger Kitter, as well as Janet Brown, already a television veteran with credits going back to the early Lime Grove days, and the completely unrelated newcomer Faith Brown.

  The next career step for both Browns came courtesy of the Conservative Party, which had, in 1975, elected Margaret Thatcher as its leader. Both added the Leaderene to their repertoire and flourished. Janet Brown was rewarded with regular guest spots on Mike Yarwood’s BBC shows, saving him the trouble of dragging up, while Faith Brown was given an LWT special, The Faith Brown Awards, in 1978. An audience of 9.8 million suggested that she was worth a series. The job of bringing it to the screen was given to John Kaye Cooper, who had done the special and was one of LWT’s most promising and technically adept young producer/directors. ‘Michael Grade said “Let’s do The Faith Brown Chat Show – chatting with herself,”’ Cooper recalls. ‘It was probably the biggest disaster I was ever involved in.’2

  To be fair, The Faith Brown Chat Show was a complex affair that would have given many a far more experienced performer kittens. It used split-screen technology to show the real Faith Brown interviewing herself as various personalities, including Barbra Streisand and Kate Bush. Kaye Cooper recalls the strain that the performer and crew found themselves under:

  She was talented, but she didn’t have a lot of self-confidence really. We were stretching her a lot, because clearly we wanted someone who did more than about six or seven impressions. We needed a somebody with a much wider range. When the camera was put on her, she wanted to give this performance, and even though she was being herself, you got shades of all these people that she did. An awful mid-Atlantic voice came out. I remember sitting on the set with her, literally with the cameras rolling, getting her to do it line by line, because it was split screen. I had locked-off cameras on her, doing the two-shot where she’s talking to herself as Barbra Streisand, and she couldn’t get the lines right. It was taking forever to make the show.

  Unfortunately, I don’t think Faith ever really recovered from that. It was her big chance. She was a lovely lady and I felt at the time that we pushed her too far. The Faith Brown Awards had been all her best impressions, carefully put together over a period of time. I feel we should, six months later, have done another special with her. We were trying to move her into Mike Yarwood territory far too fast and I don’t think she was ready for it. She did very well in the clubs later.3

  John Kaye Cooper owed his first break into television to producer David Bell and comedy actor Stanley Baxter, whom he met when working as an assistant stage manager at the Glasgow Alhambra in 1966. Baxter was appearing as the panto dame in Cinderella, and the show included a music hall staple, the slapstick wallpapering routine made famous by Albert Burdon. Kaye Cooper had begun his career at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, where he learned from an old stagehand the perfect recipe for the paste, or ‘slosh’ (the key being a certain amount of glycerine). Soon, he became the only one that Baxter would trust to make it. ‘He did a very good job mixing the slosh, but he had very sensitive eyes,’ Baxter observes. ‘I used to feel so sorry for him. He’d be down in the basement with this big electric mixer, his eyes getting redder and redder. He was going to make it [because] the ambition was burning out of the pores. I said to David Bell “This guy’s shit hot and he’s desperate to get into television, you’ve been at STV and now you’re at the BBC. If we both write a letter of recommendation to STV, do you think we can get him in?”’4 Kaye Cooper began as a trainee cameraman, moving on to become a floor manager, then graduating to Thames Television and then LWT.

  One of Kaye Cooper’s first productions at LWT was a spectacular involving two child stars, singer Lena Zavaroni and actress and dancer Bonnie Langford. Both had come to prominence by winning Opportunity Knocks. Among the mixed reviews for Lena and Bonnie was one from Richard Afton, by now the hatchet-man television critic of the Evening News, in which ‘he was savage about Bonnie Langford and glowing about Lena Z
avaroni. It was only years later that I realized why. He was a big friend of Philip and Dorothy Solomon [Zavaroni’s managers]. He’d been primed to say it.’5

  Kaye Cooper was also tasked with salvaging something from Freddie Starr’s Saturday Madhouse. ‘It was quite a nice idea, but it wasn’t working,’ he explains. ‘It was set in a house where the doors led to a chip shop, a chemist and a disco, where the sketches were done. A series was done, but it was quite hard work getting there.’ Kaye Cooper was detailed to take over the project, enlisting Russ Abbot from the comedy group the Black Abbots as the central figure, replacing Freddie Starr. Portly actress Bella Emberg survived from the previous show, while in came Susie Blake, Sherrie Hewson, Jeffrey Holland and a gangling, manic young impressionist called Michael Barrymore, who had been brought to Kaye Cooper’s attention by musical director Alyn Ainsworth. ‘I went down to Blazers [a Windsor cabaret venue]. Nobody knew I was there. I went to see this odd, amazing act of this man who did half the act upside down with his legs in the air. I invited him to lunch in the dining room at LWT. I recognized the insecurity even then, all that came out in that meal that day. Virtually his life story. I needed someone a little crazy who could do odd characters, and he could do almost anybody.’6

  The concept of using videotape technology to enable one comedian to play several roles at once, as Kaye Cooper had with Faith Brown, had been developed and refined by Kaye Cooper’s original sponsor, the character comedy specialist and Hollywood parody expert Stanley Baxter. Baxter had been brought over from the BBC to LWT in 1972 by his old friend and supporter, the producer/director David Bell. ‘I’d met him [Bell] when he was a trainee cameraman at STV,’ Baxter remembers. ‘He went from [that] to floor manager, then [he was] whipped away to the BBC to become a director, and he never looked back.’7 Baxter’s painstaking, parodic shows, aided by razor-sharp scripts from Ken Hoare, were to become the gold standard in LWT’s light entertainment for more than a decade. The Baxter–Hoare–Bell association began in October 1972 with a series of four programmes under the title The Stanley Baxter Picture Show, but the massive amount of work required for each edition – nineteen days in the studio being quoted for one Baxter show – meant that it made more sense to concentrate on one-off specials.

  Bell’s signature style as a producer was for glossy, expansive shows with big production numbers. ‘David was head of shiny floors and immaculately glamorous things,’ recalls former colleague Alan Boyd.8 A large part of what made Bell and Baxter a perfect creative partnership was their shared affinity for the glory days of Hollywood. ‘He had the same preoccupations with these marvellous musicals,’ the comedian recalls. ‘To escape from the “dreichness” – there’s a good Scots word for you – of Glasgow in midwinter, into this wonderful world of Top Hat was just magical. It so influenced me that I spent half my life after that trying to recreate some of it, but always with a comedy peg.’ Indeed, no Baxter show was complete without a Hollywood pastiche, in which he played the glamorous females too. ‘I did both Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always preferred doing males to females for obvious reasons. There’s greater verisimilitude. A man of five feet ten and a half can only be a joke in drag.’9

  The Baxter shows also spoofed less glamorous forms of broadcasting. One particularly memorable sketch in his 1973 Christmas special was a mock documentary about the making of a religious programme with a trendy director who declares it permissible to talk about anything but religion, in an accent pitched somewhere between LA and the Gorbals. ‘There were a lot of people around then, trying to sound mid-Atlantic, but you could hear the Scots coming through all the time,’ he observes10 – the main secret Scot who springs to mind being Radio 1 DJ Stuart Henry. Naturally, he played every part: the director, the interviewer, the timid vicar with the toupee (‘Stu, we’ve got a little fakey we didn’t know about’), the floor manager and for good measure, the voice-over. The poor, innocent churchman is informed that the programme has to be non-sectarian (‘You mean like Jess Yates?’ ‘Please, not while I’m eating’), and also that the studio was set up for a Jimmy Tarbuck special, making it impossible to rejig the lighting for a mere godslot show. As well as containing Baxter’s taboo-busting impersonation of the Queen (thinly disguised as the ‘Duchess of Brendagh’, a reference to Brenda, the below-stairs staff’s nickname for Her Majesty, also adopted by Private Eye), the 1973 Christmas show featured a superb parody of the BBC news magazine Nationwide. In the original programme, it was customary to take contributions from various regional studios. In the sketch, Baxter played all of the regional representatives, speaking not a single intelligible syllable, but remaining perfectly meaningful and understandable, purely through the music of the accents.

  The high quality of the Baxter shows came at a price, and the LWT bean counters occasionally upbraided David Bell for allowing such extravagance. He always had a ready reply: ‘It’s not your money, dear.’ Fortunately, the financial structure of ITV, with its post-Pilkington government levy on profits, meant that it made sense for the companies to spend as much as possible on the programmes before even thinking about satisfying the shareholders, so, when times were good, Bell was not merely indulged, but encouraged.

  In 1976, Stanley Baxter’s Christmas Box used two charladies cleaning the videotape suite at BBC Television Centre as a clever linking device for various parodies of seasonal viewing: ‘Look what they’re putting out over Christmas. Cilla Black Goes to Las Vegas, Shirley Bassey Goes to Pieces, I’m Dreaming of a Black Boxing Day: the Muhammad Ali Special – they’re all recordings. It’s a fraud.’11 However, the crowning achievement of Baxter’s time at London Weekend was probably 1979’s Stanley Baxter on Television, a sharp, satirical response to Lord Annan’s Report on Broadcasting which was intended as a late-seventies equivalent of the Pilkington Report. The show – produced by John Kaye Cooper, Bell having become a senior executive – opened with Baxter as a civil servant answering the telephone: ‘Good morning, Prime Minister . . . Oh, I agree, it’s dead boring. Not a laugh in it.’12 It then launched into a fraught meeting between Lord Grade (as Lew had become in Harold Wilson’s infamous ‘Lavender List’ of honours in 1976) and Miss Piggy of The Muppet Show, before going on to show how Sir John Gielgud might have presented The Generation Game.

  Bell was openly gay at a time when it was only just legal to be so, and many who worked with him remember his camp, caustic wit with great affection. In the mid-seventies, Kaye Cooper was producing drama at Yorkshire Television when the call came from his old mentor. ‘I got the call out of the blue one day from David, and I can remember the lines now. He said “Hello dear. How are ye? What are you doing with all those drama queens in Yorkshire? Come down here with us LE queens [at LWT] and work on some shows.”’13

  Marcus Plantin, who joined LWT in 1985, adds ‘A lot of people say “Oh, Limp-Wristed Television” and all that, but it was a rather more open atmosphere than the BBC [which had] Johnny Downes, John Street and a lot of people in blazers and regimental ties. It hadn’t loosened up, whereas at LWT, Mike Mansfield had been there, a very big camp personality. David [Bell], Humphrey Barclay. It just made the place flamboyant – that’s the best word. It was a company with panache and style.’14 Stanley Baxter counters by saying ‘You could call it equally Jewish television. Cyril Bennett was a wonderful guy – Jewish. Michael Grade – Jewish. Cyril and Michael were the ones who kept giving me a green light when the complaints came in [from the accountants]. “You know what this is costing?” “This is our flagship. Cut something else.”’15

  When Baxter arrived at LWT in 1972, Brian Tesler – who was to guide LWT from the late seventies to the mid-nineties – was director of programmes at Thames Television, and the next in line for managing director. Tesler’s tenure at Thames had been a markedly successful one, building on the best elements of ABC and Rediffusion:

  I had to merge the two programme departments. It was obvious to me that in features and current affairs I had to have Jeremy Isaacs from
Rediffusion. Grahame Turner and Rediffusion’s OB unit were the best in the business. ABC didn’t make children’s programmes, so it had to be Lewis Rudd from Rediffusion, who ran a very good department. At ABC, Philip Jones was the best light entertainment man in the business, and his department was great, and I thought Lloyd Shirley was marvellous as head of drama for ABC. So, in actual fact, of those departments, there were only two that came from ABC. Two of the most important, of course.16

  With LWT and ATV providing the lion’s share of the ITV network’s variety after August 1968, Jones was able to concentrate on building up the situation comedy roster at Thames. An early hit was Father Dear Father, starring Patrick Cargill as a widower trying to bring up two teenage daughters. Bless This House was also popular, starring Sid James as another father trying to understand his children. Both were produced by William G. Stewart, who had won his sitcom directing spurs at the BBC on Eric Sykes’ shows. Later on came Man about the House, written by Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke and produced by ABC alumnus Peter Frazer-Jones, in which a chef shared a flat platonically with two young girls-about-town. The new company kept up ABC’s support of Tommy Cooper, a relationship that was to bear ever more fruit, and brought Benny Hill into the fold.

  Hill had had a long association with the BBC and a brief flirtation with ATV, but it was at Thames that he was to do his best-remembered, if not necessarily his best work. On the evidence of the few surviving recordings, his early-sixties BBC shows are almost on a par with the work of Stanley Baxter or Ronnie Barker in terms of complexity and inventiveness. One, set at a wedding, shows the bride’s mother’s unflattering view of the groom in flashback, and the groom’s mother’s reciprocal view of the bride. Hill plays several parts beautifully, and the twist at the end is a corker. In contrast, the Thames shows featured the broadest of broad comedy – still very funny at their best, but nowhere near as subtle. Chief among his recurring characters at Thames was the beret-wearing simpleton Fred Scuttle, who turned up in each show as the proprietor of various unlikely schemes including a health farm. In one show, Scuttle was claimed to be responsible for the smooth running of the Thames studios. Henry McGee, playing an interviewer, asked who Scuttle’s favourite comedian was, to which he replied ‘Oh, without a doubt, sir, Mike Spilligan. Spike Milligan. Sorry. I’ve had my nose fixed, and now my mouth won’t work. Good job it wasn’t Marty Feldman.’