by Louis Barfe
Among Wiley’s output for The Two Ronnies were the spoof public information broadcasts. These featured Barker, often as a pompous jargon-bound official spokesman explaining a ludicrous concept, or as someone making an appeal on behalf of a charitable cause, such as the Loyal Society for the Relief of Sufferers of Pismonunciation, ‘people who cannot say their worms correctly, or who use the wrong worms entirely, so that other people cannot underhand a bird they are spraying’. As Wiley, Barker worked alone, and when the handwritten script for the famous ‘Fork Handles/Four Candles’ sketch – in which Corbett plays a hardware salesman tormented by Barker as an ambiguous customer – was auctioned in December 2007, it realized a price of £48,500. Complementing Barker’s solo performances were Corbett’s monologues, in which the diminutive Scottish comedian sat in a large leather armchair, and told a rambling, digressive story, written for many years by Spike Mullins, before David Renwick took over the job.
As the network’s big hit Saturday night comedy show, The Two Ronnies could have what it wanted in terms of resources, Stanley Baxter’s LWT spectaculars being perhaps the only shows that were more labour-intensive. ‘One year, when I was the production manager, the filming was set in the south of France,’ Plantin recalls. ‘The script demanded it. Barker and Corbett were in their ascendancy and were very empowered with Bill [Cotton]. I don’t mean that in the wrong way. They were bringing in the audience for the BBC and they could call the shots. It was a major piece of work. We were there probably a week and a half and we did the rest in the UK. We took down twenty people, we were shooting all over Marseilles, and it was very good fun. I can’t deny it.’29
Nonetheless, Plantin maintains that it was money well spent, as these filmed elements were what made The Two Ronnies stand out from the other variety-led comedy shows of the time:
They were big budget shows, two days in the studio, at least. The element that became the differential, in my view, was the pre-filming, which was, I think, from the very early days, a month. A month’s filming. This is an entertainment show. You had the running film story, ‘Charley Farley’, ‘Piggy Malone’ or whatever. They were big production numbers, like making a mini-film. I remember as a production manager once, driving to some location down in Dorset and thinking ‘Fuck me’ as I came over the hill and saw the crew and the gear. I thought ‘It’s like the circus has come to town.’ It was big. There wasn’t another show that was using proper lighting, proper costume design. This was very much driven by Barker and Corbett. A lot of people say that Barker was the only hammer there, but Corbett was [too], in a different way. He had very high standards. Everything would be rehearsed very, very thoroughly. He [Ronnie C.] was slick and thorough. At the end of the day, Terry Hughes, Barker and Corbett set the bar high. It paid off.30
Another important LE contribution to the BBC’s Saturday night lockdown was Jim’ll Fix It, a people show par excellence, which ran from 1975 to 1994. Ask Pickles had an element of wish fulfilment, whereas with Jim’ll Fix It, that was the whole point. Reuniting brothers was just a matter of booking the right flights. In contrast, Jimmy Savile, indefatigable charity worker and marathon-running disc jockey, could make dreams come true. Already a major personality through his work on Radio Luxembourg, Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, Jim’ll Fix It turned Savile into an icon – a surrogate mad uncle for at least two whole generations. Bedecked with jewellery and garish clothing in a manner that was a gift to lazy impressionists, those lucky enough to have their letter picked out and brought to life went home with a bit of Savile-style bling of their own, a gigantic, square silver medallion with the legend ‘Jim Fixed It For Me’ emblazoned on it.
Many were called, but few were chosen. To stand out from the thousands of letters that were destined for the pile of bin bags in producer Roger Ordish’s office, a request had to be unusual, preferably with a strong visual aspect. The scouts who wanted to eat their lunch on a roller coaster were a perfect example of this. Some ‘fixits’ were unashamedly sentimental, for example the surprise that was arranged for a mad-keen Frankie Vaughan fan who played piano at an old people’s home; courtesy of Jim’ll Fix It, she got to meet her idol, the old folks got a cabaret performance from Vaughan and the home was given a new piano. Ordish also remembers with great fondness an opera-based fixit with Arthur Davis of the Welsh National Opera. ‘There was a lovely little bit . . . when this beautiful little girl wanted to be Mimi [from La Bohème]. It was a clever choice, because Mimi doesn’t actually sing during “Your Tiny Hand is Frozen”. She just has to sit there and her hand is taken by him.’31
Ordish – or, as Savile always referred to him, ‘Dr Magic’ – was the producer for the show’s entire nineteen-year run, and describes it as ‘a wonderful thing to do’. He regards it as a perfect example of the pride that producers took in their work. ‘It was very lowbrow, a very simple programme, but we always wanted it to be good. I really think that when I started there, most people thought “What I make is good, and I’m not going to make it if I don’t think it’s good.”’ Lowbrow it may have been, but Savile proved irresistible to some surprisingly elevated guests, including poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, who read a group of children the first poem he had ever written, at the age of six. ‘That was terribly funny,’ Ordish remembers. ‘“Ere John, I’ve got one for you,” said Jim. “Roses are red, violets are grey, got the wrong colour, never mind, eh?” Betjers weeping with laughter: “Lovely, wonderful.”’32
The producers behind most of these successful new shows were part of the generation that had joined the Corporation in the sixties, as Alan Boyd recalls. ‘The seventh floor at Television Centre was where a lot of the younger entertainment producers were: the Alan Boyds, the Roger Ordishes, Vernon Lawrence, Brian Whitehouse, Jim Moir, Terry Hughes. The Top of the Pops floor, the Jim’ ll Fix It floor. The fourth floor were the senior ones – the John Ammonds and Michael Hurlls. The seventh floor was the noisy floor that was still going at eleven o’clock at night. We’d have a lot of funny lunches in those days. God knows how much we must have drunk at lunchtime, I hate to think.’33
Drinking was part of the working culture in those days. Leading by example, the head of light entertainment had his own private bar in the Television Theatre, known, from the days of Tom Sloan’s leadership, as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. Back at the Centre, the Club bar was, in Jim Moir’s description ‘a marketplace. The back bar, until it was invaded by incomers from news, was very much the LE bar, and it was there that at lunchtime you would meet your colleagues. The bar was a social hub for the exchange of professional anecdotes, bonding, and which talent you should be allying yourself with. You would see artists in there before they went down to record shows. You’d hear what was going on. It was a rip and read newsroom for yourself for what was going on in light entertainment.’34
Some indulged more than others, among them Roger Ordish. ‘I was a boozer, certainly, too much, excessive. It was a way of life. Everything you did concerned having a drink. Of course, you didn’t have to drink. I think that if you think drunk and edit sober, you can get some good stuff, as with other mind-altering substances. But you must have the editing sober bit, that’s very important. I was a bit of a barrack room lawyer as well. I wasn’t a terrible troublemaker, but rather than say the right thing at a departmental meeting, I would say the wrong thing. I just had fun. I wanted to enjoy myself. I wasn’t a layabout, because I worked very hard.’
Almost the only producer never to touch a drop was the suave, unflappable Terry Hughes. ‘Terry Hughes never had a drink. He took a lot of stick for it, but good for him. Of course, I didn’t think so at the time,’ admits Roger Ordish.35 Alan Boyd adds Jim Moir’s affectionately mocking description of Hughes: ‘He was the model in the shop window, he’d come out in the morning. He was always immaculate with the blazer and the freshly pressed jeans. He still is if you see him today. Terry was that then and had all the girls after him.’36
ITV’s first serious attempt to dent the BBC’s sup
remacy on Saturday nights came in 1978, when LWT director of programmes Michael Grade poached the Generation Game host Bruce Forsyth for £15,000 a programme, an unheard-of fee back then. Grade’s big idea was to use Forsyth as the anchor for a complete evening of entertainment. Under the banner of Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night, viewers could expect quiz games, celebrity guests and interviews, situation comedy and, Forsyth’s forte, audience participation. The sitcom elements were to be shamelessly nostalgic, with revivals of ‘The Glums’ from Take It From Here – featuring Jimmy Edwards reprising his role as Pa Glum, aided by Ian Lavender and Patricia Brake – and Charlie Drake’s sixties series The Worker alternating fortnightly. The main game show contribution was Steve Jones’s Pyramid Game. Computer games like Space Invaders were all the rage at the time, and Brucie aimed to tap into the zeitgeist with ‘Teletennis’, in which members of the public attempted to control a bat and ball video game with their voice. Then there was the resident dance troupe, 32 Feet, under the direction of Brian Rogers. To get it all on screen needed three very experienced producers: David Bell – by now LWT’s head of light entertainment – as executive producer with responsibility for the variety side, head of comedy Humphrey Barclay producing the sitcom segments and Richard Drewett in charge of the chat side of things. Then there were the writers, a stellar combination of established craftsmen like Barry Cryer and Garry Chambers with up-and-comers like Colin Bostock-Smith, Andrew Marshall and David Renwick. With a team like this, Forsyth a proven banker and something for everyone in the mix, the show couldn’t possibly fail. Nonetheless, nothing was left to chance, and director Paul Smith remembers the preparations being long and arduous:
The show started in September, and from April or May, I did nothing but sleep and do this show. I dedicated my entire life. It was David’s concept, I think, and it was incredibly adventurous. I was the studio director [as well as doing] things like Rod Hull on location, and it was a massive undertaking. It was two and a half hours, absolutely enormous. It had to be a two-day recording. I had to post-produce it, rehearse the dancers and all that. I had no life at all. Great fun, but what hard work.37
Despite being one of LWT’s junior LE staff, Smith’s reputation was already very strong. He had worked with Birmingham-born comedian Jasper Carrott on a series and several successful specials, and he had persuaded director of programmes Michael Grade that there would be a large public audience for outtakes – previously a private pleasure for those working in television:
It grew out of what we’ll call the Blue Peter elephant [when a baby elephant disgraced herself all over the studio floor], which of course technically is not an outtake, because it appeared in the programme, but it wasn’t intended. I saw it and it stuck in my mind. I used a short showreel made by a BBC VT engineer, even though I was selling it to ITV, because I didn’t know how to go about collecting these clips. At least the BBC, because of the centralization, had collected them. They’d got about eight or ten clips. He edited them together for me, I took them to Michael and said that’s what I want to do, and he got it immediately. He wanted Roy Castle to introduce it first of all, his first suggestion. In retrospect it wouldn’t have been a good idea. It needed somebody who could cope with good narrative. I can’t remember whether Roy Castle wasn’t available, but Michael came back and said ‘I’ve had a better idea – what about Denis Norden?’ I was only a junior director/producer, so I said ‘Sure Michael, whatever you want,’ but he was the right choice, without a shadow of a doubt.
At the same time, Michael said to me about Jasper Carrott. He’d seen him doing some after-dinner speaking, he asked me to go and see him, and see what I thought. I went to see him in Coventry and said sign him up. We did a transmittable pilot, which became one of a series of half hours called An Audience with Jasper Carrott. We did them back to back, one day Jasper Carrott, the next It’ll Be Alright on the Night, in the same studio. Same set, just changed a couple of things. A very productive two days for London Weekend.38
Back at Television Centre, Generation Game producer Alan Boyd had to find a replacement for the departed Forsyth. To avoid invidious comparisons, he chose the antithesis of Brucie, the camp horse-toothed Midlands comedian Larry Grayson. ‘It was counter scheduling against Bruce,’ he explains. ‘There was no point in doing a lookalike. You had to do it the opposite way.’ The main difference between the two hosts lay in their respective grasp of the show’s mechanics. Forsyth got it, Grayson didn’t. ‘Bruce was driving forward all the time. Larry we realized could half manage it if he was pointed. You literally had to manage him in his eyeline. If you see the tapes, you’ll see him look off to camera right, you’ll see him look – that’s to the producer – “What do I do next?” or “Did I do right?”’39 Marcus Plantin, who directed the Grayson Gen Games before becoming producer, reinforces Boyd’s recollection: ‘Bruce’s ultimate skill is that, without savaging the public who take part, he can lift them, drive them and energize them. Bruce was producing it as he went along. It wasn’t Larry’s nature, he wasn’t a driving force, he was reactive.’40
Bruce had also enjoyed the assistance of his wife, Anthea Redfern. Although Grayson was not the marrying kind, Boyd decided that a female foil was more necessary than ever. While he was trying to figure out who he could pair with Grayson, Boyd found himself having to pay a sudden visit to his ill father in Edinburgh:
He’d gone to bed, so I was watching television at eleven o’clock at night, and it was The Birthday Show or something, hosted by Isla St Clair. I thought ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting, wonder if she’d be right as the foil for Grayson?’ So I got her down, interviewed her, liked her, saw that magic in her eye, thought ‘Here’s someone different, with a bit of bounce.’ Had my father never had an attack of angina, it wouldn’t have happened. I never knew of her until that day. She was the magic little girl next door. From Anthea, who was all dresses and twirls, here was the tomboy, who could do the games, where Larry couldn’t. Isla was in control, not him. That was the clever part. Larry was just bumbling around having fun.41
Beginning his tenure as Generation Game host on 23 September 1978, Grayson had a couple of weeks’ head start before the first Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night on 7 October. Forsyth was his ebullient self from the off, opening with a check that all the regions were safely gathered in and ‘Let’s Get the Network Together’, a jaunty song about the federal nature of ITV. Naturally, the viewing figures for Bruce’s inaugural ITV show were high, but the following weeks saw vast numbers returning to the BBC. The show that couldn’t fail had failed.
There were some good things in that first show, not least Forsyth’s unorthodox interview with American singer/comedienne Bette Midler, in which both ended up crouching on the floor rather than using the plush chairs the props department had provided. The presence of Rod Hull and Emu brought a welcome element of danger, ‘The Glums’ proved as delightful as they had been thirty years earlier and The Pyramid Game showed the form that would eventually make it a hit show in its own right. Unfortunately, to get to these highlights, the viewer had to wade through large stretches of, at best, tedium and, at worst, some of the most cringingly embarrassing items ever mounted in the name of television entertainment. A segment at a bar where members of the public tried to impress Forsyth with their joke-telling fell into the tedium camp, while at the embarrassment end of the scale there was a fancy dress competition won by a woman dressed as the Post Office Tower. Somewhere in the middle, ‘Teletennis’ proved to be a very strange way of spending even part of a Saturday night, with the contestants whooping and yodelling to control their computerized paddles. Why they couldn’t have just had joysticks like anybody else has never been adequately explained.
In retrospect, the show’s biggest problem was that it attempted to be too many things at once. Not far behind that was the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality that seemed to pervade its genesis; keeping viewers’ attention for two hours on a Saturday night took more than just the considerable force of
Bruce Forsyth’s personality, but for far too much of the programme, that was all they had. ‘The show wasn’t nailed down,’ confesses director Paul Smith:
Here’s how bad it was, honestly, and I kid you not. I would have Russ Abbot as a guest, say, and scripts would come over my left shoulder, as if I was directing the news. Myself and the vision mixer were reading them, ad-libbing [the shots]. Stuff was going on that no one had ever seen. I’m talking to the lighting director, everybody, because nobody knew what was going on. It was disorganized, because it was so ambitious. Bruce was being treated with huge kid gloves, and I think in the end there should have been more ‘Listen, Bruce, you’re a huge talent,’ which he is, ‘but come on, there needs to be a certain discipline here.’