Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  Although Jones was to become Hill’s great patron, the comedian came to the company through a previous association with Tesler:

  Benny, in between BBC contracts, had done some shows for ATV. I did the first of them [at ATV], it wasn’t a good show, and I was very unhappy with it. It really was a reworking of old material that he’d done at the BBC. It was a hack job. He went back to the BBC and became again a smash, but I’d heard he was unhappy with his director, a sweet, very nice man called Ken Carter. I got a phone call from Richard Stone, Benny’s agent, saying ‘Benny is thinking of leaving the BBC. He wants a change of director. But he’s also aware that the show he did with you wasn’t very good and he’s always felt a bit bad about that. So we’d like to give you first chance, but it depends on who’s going to be the director, who’s going to be in charge.’ I said ‘Well the best guy in the business, Philip Jones.’ ‘Right, we’ll have a meeting, Philip, Benny and me.’ So they had a meeting, and it went well, and he said ‘Yes, we’ll come to terms.’ That was the happiest of all possible marriages. Philip, nice guy that he was, put good people with Benny, [but] he was always there if anything went wrong. You can see it in several of the tapes. Anything goes wrong, Benny suddenly goes ‘Philip!’ Philip was always there to nursemaid him.17

  Thames had inherited ABC’s talent show Opportunity Knocks, along with its host Hughie Green, but not his Rediffusion quiz show, Double Your Money, which had been put down humanely when the new franchises began. Eamonn Andrews was also a big name for Thames, one who was to remain loyal to the company for the rest of his life. His main responsibility was to present the early evening regional magazine programme Today, but he had also revived This Is Your Life with great success. The show had made its British debut on the BBC on 29 July 1955 at 7.45pm. It had grown out of an American radio game show, Truth or Consequences, hosted by Ralph Edwards, who had taken the idea to US television in 1952. The idea was simple: a person of note – sometimes a conventional celebrity, sometimes a worthier candidate, like a war hero – was caught unawares and presented with a potted biography. Friends, family and associates would make grand entrances in order to pay fulsome tribute to the subject of the show. What turned an interesting idea into ratings gold was the surprise element. As the show was live and the subject was to be oblivious to the honour until the last possible moment, viewers had no idea who the show was going to be about, and so millions watched the opening of the show each week, at the very least, with bosses hoping fervently that many of them would stay the course not just for the rest of the show, but for the whole evening’s viewing.18

  Andrews, who had risen to fame on the BBC presenting What’s My Line, had seen the American version during a trip to commentate on a boxing match in San Francisco, and become convinced it was a winner. Ronnie Waldman, the BBC’s then head of light entertainment, agreed with him, and paired him once again with What’s My Line producer T. Leslie Jackson to bring the show to British viewers. The first subject was to have been ace footballer Stanley Matthews, but the press got wind of this and reported the fact several days before the show was due to launch. ‘I therefore had to cancel it,’ remembered Jackson. ‘I had then until Sunday to get a new programme together. The only person whose life I knew anything about was Eamonn Andrews.’19 Andrews was told there was a change of plan, but not the full details. He went to the studio apparently believing that the first show was to be about the boxer Freddie Mills. Ralph Edwards had come over from the US, ostensibly to hand over the famous book containing the host’s script to Andrews at the start of the show. When Andrews saw the name on the front, it was his.

  Although each show was planned meticulously, it wasn’t always a smooth run. On 6 February 1961, Tottenham Hotspur footballer Danny Blanchflower became the first person to decline the honour, reputedly calling the programme ‘an invasion of privacy’ and declaring that he was not going to be ‘press-ganged into anything’. As this was an occasion when the surprise was to be recorded slightly in advance of the live transmission, a reserve programme was transmitted.20 Blanchflower refused a second attempt three months later. In October of the same year, a technical fault on one edition of the show led to the director’s talkback going out live on air as the pick-up was being transmitted from film. Viewers heard Yvonne Littlewood ‘yelling “Sound on film, where’s the sound gone? . . . Oh Christ, not again.”’21 Ever the diplomat, Eric Maschwitz had defended Littlewood at the programme review board, suggesting that she was merely ‘asking for help from above’.22

  When Eamonn Andrews left the BBC in 1964, to begin his own chat show and World of Sport for ABC, the show came to an end, declining ratings suggesting that it had run its natural course, but the Thames revival proved otherwise. With World of Sport being handled by London Weekend from August 1968 onwards, Andrews began looking for other shows he could present for Thames. Brian Tesler explains: ‘He came to me and said “This is what I’d like to do,” and handed me a little piece of paper with This Is Your Life on it, and inserted between “your” and “life”, [the word] “colourful”, bless his heart, because colour was just coming in. He wanted to revive This Is Your Life, and he persuaded me that it would be a good idea, that there was a lot of mileage left in it.’23

  Although Andrews’ suggested title modification wasn’t adopted, the revived show returned to the airwaves on 19 November 1969, in the first week of colour broadcasting on ITV, with an edition devoted to the singer and comedian Des O’Connor. Andrews was right about the mileage left in the show. The show’s second lease of life lasted thirty-four years, and the format may yet return. Throughout its entire history, it remained substantially unchanged, with the earliest surviving editions being recognizably the same show as the last. Ever present was the pleasant twist at the end of the show. Sometimes it would be the arrival of a relative from abroad who had earlier been heard or seen only in a recorded greeting. Other times, it would be the opportunity to fulfil a lifelong ambition. When, in January 1959, bandleader Ted Heath was the show’s subject, his wish to conduct a brass band was taken care of courtesy of Foden’s Motor Works Band trooping on under the end credits. Following Andrews’ death in 1987, his place was taken by Michael Aspel, who had much in common with his predecessor. Both had hosted the BBC children’s variety show Crackerjack for many years, and Aspel had also made his own mark on the world of chat in the eighties, with Aspel and Company for LWT. Both managed to be gentle, warm, unthreatening personalities, without being truly bland. Indeed, Aspel’s entire career has been marked by his subtle wit.

  Brian Tesler had been the first choice to take over from Howard Thomas as managing director of Thames when Thomas became chairman, but there was a snag. Tesler had leased his services to Thames’S through his own company. John Read, chairman of Thames’s majority shareholder EMI, wanted Tesler to sign directly and also to cut his agent Teddy Sommerfield out of the negotiations. Tesler was not keen to abandon the arrangement he had worked under since ATV days nor to abandon his agent and friend, and so sales director George Cooper was appointed. Tesler would have been happy to remain as Cooper’s director of programmes, but for an approach from film producer Robert Clark, a former ABC board member who was now affiliated with LWT:

  He said ‘I don’t want to know how it happened. I just want to know one thing. Are you under contract to Thames?’ I said ‘Well, actually, no, my contract as director of programmes has expired and no one has said anything to me.’ He said ‘Fine, you’re free. The second thing – would you like to come and talk to John Freeman about a position here?’ ‘What sort of position?’ ‘His deputy.’ I was a great admirer of John Freeman, so I went to see him. I picked him up, and we walked round Kew Gardens for about an hour, discussing television. We’d obviously come across each other sitting at the same industry tables, so we knew each other very well. He said ‘I’d like you to come across here as my deputy, and if it all works out, in two years’ time, I’ll step down as managing director, remain as chairman, and you become m
anaging director. If it doesn’t work out, tough.’ I said ‘Yes, fine.’ So I joined LWT. I said goodbye to Howard and everybody else. I think Howard kicked himself for not signing me up, but he was becoming chairman and it just slipped his mind.24

  Although London Weekend had made considerable strides by 1974, when Tesler joined, he knew the company still had some way to go. ‘It was in a fairly bad way,’ he asserts. ‘Its programme structure was somehow not right.’ Many within the company viewed him with suspicion, believing that programme controller Cyril Bennett should have been offered the job, but Tesler is convinced that Bennett ‘was a lovely man and a good friend, but he would not have been right as managing director’.25 In particular, his tendency to keep departments separate and deal directly with their heads caused problems. In November 1976, Tesler called a conference at Selsdon Park to discuss the company’s future direction, at which current affairs head John Birt famously realized that he had never had lunch with most of the other people at the table. The conference ended positively, but the whole event was overshadowed by Bennett’s death in a fall from the balcony of his Chelsea flat. Many within the company believed that Tesler was trying to ease Bennett out. In fact, Tesler had already begun the process of renewing Bennett’s contract. To this day, no one knows for sure if it was suicide or an accident.

  While the company was coping with its grief, Tesler had to think about who would succeed Bennett as director of programmes. The man he chose had not only learned much of what he knew from Bennett, but also shared his mentor’s ebullience and humour. ‘It was clear to me that Michael [Grade] was the right guy to be director of programmes,’ says Tesler. ‘I always say I did it to get him out of light entertainment, because he was such an awful head of light entertainment. Michael seemed to be dedicated to making an international comedy star out of Arthur Mullard.’26 Mullard was a flat-nosed cockney former boxer with a talent for mangling the English language. He had made a good career as a stooge to the likes of Tony Hancock, but was never leading-man material. In getting Grade out of LE, Tesler had acted wisely, and the choice of producer David Bell to replace Grade in LE was another masterstroke. Bell promoted what John Kaye Cooper called a ‘collegiate’ atmosphere in the department, moving the offices from the tower to an adjoining half-timbered building, known among the producers as the Tudor Tea Rooms.

  Although LWT made the lion’s share of Saturday night programming for the ITV network, ATV still made some important contributions throughout the seventies. Chief among the company’s LE hits was the Bob Monkhouse game show Celebrity Squares, while ATV also had major network success with its talent show, New Faces. Hosted by Derek Hobson, this was mainly memorable for the scathing verdicts handed down by one of the judges, composer and record producer Tony Hatch. Unlike the products of many modern talent shows, a considerable number of New Faces winners went on to enduring success in show business, among them the red-headed Sheffield-born comedienne Marti Caine and a young black comedian and impressionist from the Black Country, Lenny Henry. Caine was given her own ATV show almost immediately, while Henry worked his passage in the company’s gloriously manic, slapstick-heavy, gunge-strewn Saturday morning children’s show, Tiswas. Victoria Wood was another New Faces winner, but it took longer for her songs and observations to be fully appreciated.

  In the days of the halls, entertainment had been the work of professionals, whose ranks the performers who took part in shows like New Faces and Opportunity Knocks were keen to join. With the arrival of television had come shows that allowed the British public to entertain each other, more or less. In time, these became known as people shows, arguably paving the way for so-called ‘reality television’ – although many involved in those early people shows will argue with equal passion that there is no relationship between the two.

  The first ‘people’ show was Ask Pickles, produced by Brian Tesler at the BBC in the early fifties. ‘[Ronnie Waldman] introduced me to Wilfred and Mabel Pickles [stars of BBC Radio’s Have a Go] and asked me to do a show with them, Tesler recalls:

  [He said] ‘Why don’t you do a request show of some kind?’ So I got a couple of researchers who had been researching panel shows – Guess My Story – for me, called Larry and Pauline Forrester. Larry Forrester was a tough little guy – he had been a fighter pilot in the war – and Pauline was an elegant woman. Larry went onto Hollywood, [where he] wrote stuff [and] also wrote a couple of rather exciting novels, one of which was filmed with Racquel Welch. The two of them were very good researchers – newshounds. Larry, Pauline and I would spend days going through the newspapers, looking for stories and making something out of them. People would request songs and performers, bits of old film, test match victories, heavyweight boxing. One viewer requested his brother’s favourite tune before he went to Australia. He said ‘I haven’t seen him for twenty-five years, but we write to each other. He loved that song.’ We thought ‘Fine, we’ll do that, but we’ll also get the brother back and reintroduce them.’ It was the first British show of that kind.27

  Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game was another true ‘people’ show, and its massive popularity aided the BBC in one of its most important matters of strategy. By the late sixties, Saturday nights had become the main battleground in the war of family entertainment, and the idea was that a balanced but enticing Saturday evening schedule should be constructed, so that as many viewers as humanly possible would be hooked from teatime until closedown. It helped that the BBC had, in that pre-satellite and subscription era, access to most of the major sporting events for Grandstand, ensuring a massive inheritance of viewers, chiefly the dads. ITV’s sporting offerings were relatively meagre, as Brian Tesler was forced to acknowledge when ABC began producing World of Sport for the ITV network in 1965. From Len Marten reading the football results to Parkinson, via The Gen Game and Doctor Who, the BBC held all the cards on Saturday night.

  The variety department was invariably responsible for BBC1 Saturday night comedy. Impressionist Mike Yarwood’s series Look – Mike Yarwood and Mike Yarwood in Persons were important fixtures throughout the seventies, but the longest running and best remembered of all the Saturday night comedy shows was The Two Ronnies. The show’s principals, the rotund, wordy Ronnie Barker and the small, but forceful Ronnie Corbett, had first been paired in The Frost Report, most famously with John Cleese in the ‘I look up to him . . . I look down on him . . . I know my place’ sketch on class, written by John Law and Marty Feldman. Prior to this, Corbett had been primarily a cabaret comedian and performer, working first at Winston’s club in London’s Clifford Street with female impersonator Danny La Rue and Barbara Windsor, then at La Rue’s own club in Hanover Square. Meanwhile, Barker had been best known for a variety of roles on radio in The Navy Lark and his appearances in the Jimmy Edwards sitcom Seven Faces of Jim. Unsurprisingly, given the Frost connection, both Barker and Corbett had performed in their own shows for London Weekend. In 1969 and 1970, Barker had appeared as the lecherous peer Lord Rustless in two series of Hark at Barker, while Corbett had starred in The Corbett Follies, a series that showed off his cabaret pedigree.

  Nonetheless, it was James Gilbert at the BBC who pulled off the coup of putting them together in their own show. Gilbert, who had been with the Corporation as a producer for a decade and was now climbing the executive ladder, did the commissioning and initial nurturing, but the production of the show was given to Terry Hughes. Hughes was one of the few BBC light entertainment producers to cross the variety and comedy divide. Although he cut his teeth on programmes like The Val Doonican Show and Cilla, working alongside John Ammonds and Michael Hurll, he brought Michael Palin and Terry Jones’s Ripping Yarns to the screen in the late seventies. Consequently, he was the perfect producer for a show that combined comedy sketches that ranged from simple talking heads – such as Ronnie Corbett’s chair monologues and Ronnie Barker’s cod public information announcements – to lavish musical numbers, with a weekly filmed serial and special guests. ‘Terry was very s
uave, laid-back, and very good with artists indeed,’ says Marcus Plantin, who joined the show’s production team in the mid-seventies. ‘Some producers feel they have to impose themselves very heavily rather than delegate. He was a very good delegator. He knew how to get the right people. He certainly knew how to handle talent, very, very well.’28 In later years, the guests were invariably female singers of the calibre of Barbara Dickson and Elaine Paige, but in the show’s early years, there was also room for vocal groups and spesh acts, such as the novelty drummer Alfredo.

  That was about the only change of format during the show’s sixteen-year run. In the first edition, transmitted on 10 April 1971, the signature elements were all in place: the opening spoof news headlines, Ronnie Corbett’s chair monologue, the filmed serial and the musical finale. In those early years, The Two Ronnies had a significant input from writers like Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, but the star of the writing team was indubitably Gerald Wiley – aka Ronnie Barker – who had used the pseudonym on the Frost shows at LWT to ensure that his scripts were selected on merit alone. In the production office, there was much fevered speculation as to the real identity of Wiley – his scripts were so good, he had to be a well-known name working under a pseudonym. Among those in the frame were the playwrights Peter Shaffer and Tom Stoppard. The truth was revealed when Wiley invited Frost and company to the Chinese restaurant opposite the LWT studios at Wembley. When Barker arose and announced that he was Wiley, one of the wags present declared that ‘Nobody likes a smartarse.’ The deception had been perfect. Barker the actor had been observed in rehearsals misinterpreting Wiley’s lines and taking correction on the proper delivery.