by Louis Barfe
Smith found the stress of fire-fighting far too much and soon decided to leave the show:
At the end of the second show, I thought ‘I can’t take this.’ I’d given my life for it, I don’t mind doing that, but I need to feel there’s some kind of structure to what I’m doing. It was really getting to me. I went to see David after the second show had been taped, I went up to his office and said ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I want to resign.’ He said ‘That’s just as well, as I was going to fire you.’ I said ‘At least we agree on that one.’ He took over, and then there was a huge furore in the press, about Bruce, about the ratings going down. It was nothing to do with me, but I learned for the first time what it’s like to be the focus of press attention. Michael Grade said to me ‘Why not go off to the States, just get away from it all?’ So London Weekend paid for me to go off to the States. It was a sort of busman’s holiday, as I ended up directing a series for cable television over there.42
The year that saw the Big Night take its bow also saw the final curtain for two warhorses of the light entertainment schedules, with the BBC broadcasting the last Black and White Minstrel Show on 21 July 1978 and Thames pensioning off the talent show Opportunity Knocks on 20 March 1978 after a seventeen-year run. Anachronistic even when it had started in 1958, by 1978, changing attitudes had rendered the Black and White Minstrel Show unacceptable and offensive. Many within BBC light entertainment had long felt uncomfortable with it. ‘I remember saying that we shouldn’t be doing the Black and White Minstrel Show on the grounds that it might be racially offensive, at a departmental meeting, which infuriated Bill Cotton,’ recalls Roger Ordish, who was, at the time, seeing Gloria Stewart, a black actress, who had appeared in Hair. Stewart had hit the headlines in September 1969, when she auditioned for the show as a protest and was refused a part. The show was finally axed when James Gilbert – a producer with a distinguished record in comedy – became head of light entertainment in 1978, on Bill Cotton’s elevation to BBC1 controller. ‘I was embarrassed by the Black and White Minstrel Show and when I got into a strong enough position in the BBC, I had that show cancelled,’ explained Gilbert in 2000.43
Many words have been written and spoken about the perceived evils of the programme, quite often by people who have never seen a complete edition, but if intent counts for anything, it was not a racist show. Its latter-day producer Ernest Maxin went on to produce Kids International with the express intention of promoting racial harmony, having seen the flipside himself, as a Jewish boy growing up in east London. The main problem seems to be that the show, having been created when blackface was still regarded as acceptable, then lived on into a time when this was no longer the case, with its continued success making BBC bosses reject reasoned and overdue requests for it to be taken off. Without the blackface make-up, the most offensive thing about the show would have been the corniness of the jokes told by toothy Birmingham comedian Don MacLean each week. Unfortunately, without the blackface, the show didn’t work. A one-off had been made in 1968 under the title Masquerade, but it received a disappointing response and the idea was not pursued.
The evils of racism are self-evident, but by the end of his TV career, the toxicity of Hughie Green was proving almost as offensive to many who encountered him. The smarm, schmaltz and fake sincerity of his early years on television had given way to a far less palatable bitterness and a tendency to bring his right-wing political views into everything. The height of his hubris came in December 1976 when he closed one edition of Opportunity Knocks with a rendition of his patriotic anthem ‘Stand Up and Be Counted’, aided by the Wimbledon Operatic Society and a horde of sea and air cadets. Royston Mayoh, who had worked with Green since the ABC days, had tried to remind him gently that such antics had little to do with entertainment, but Green felt his massive ratings earned him the right to editorialize. He was allowed one outside broadcast per series, and Thames’s former controller of programmes Jeremy Isaacs recalled in 2001 that ‘he didn’t suggest Battersea Park or Blackpool fairground or wherever. He would suggest a nuclear submarine base . . . There was absolutely no way in which Hughie could be entitled to give vent to his political opinions in a show that was supposed to be about “was little Jeannie better than little Tommy at conjuring?”.’44
It was Isaacs who finally wielded the axe. According to Thames producer Dennis Kirkland, a critical moment came when Green provoked Thames’s head of light entertainment Philip Jones to a shuddering rage. Jones and Kirkland had been having a quiet drink in the bar at Teddington, while on the other side of the room sat a heavily inebriated Green. Green summoned Jones with a crooked finger, and Jones decided to ask Kirkland to accompany him for moral support. There was already bad blood between Green and Kirkland, stemming from a disagreement during Kirkland’s brief association with Opnox (as the show was known within the industry), and as the pair approached the star, Green asked Jones ‘Why have you brought that flat-footed cunt with you?’ In an attempt to defuse the situation, Kirkland replied that he didn’t have flat feet, but Jones told Green that he wouldn’t hear anyone speaking of his producers in such a manner. Green had clearly thought he was unassailable. Never the pleasantest of men – the spectrum of show business loveliness running from Hattie Jacques at one end to Green at the other extreme – he had alienated and upset a great many people, to the point that when he pushed his luck once too often, there was no one willing to support him.
The final show went out on 20 March 1978, but he refused to go quietly. He masked his obvious upset by ramping up his trademark fake bonhomie and winking – which were by now so exaggerated that he was virtually a parody of himself. He also indulged in heavy self-justification, launching into speeches that reminded newspaper critics of the number of television stars and hit records that the show had produced. He told viewers that while the show was coming to an end he wasn’t retiring, because ‘I can’t afford to’. In reality, the decision was made for him. Green had taken on the BBC and lost in 1949, when a radio version of Opportunity Knocks was dropped after just one series. During the court battle, head of variety Michael Standing went on record to describe Green as being ‘vain as a peacock’. That time he had bounced back, but this time the phone never rang. His career was over. He was part of a consortium to oust both Thames and LWT in the 1980 franchise round, but the application was not taken seriously by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Green’s exit from the show was further marred by a drink-driving conviction and a legal action taken by a former contestant, who had been disqualified after alleged vote-rigging, concerning remarks made by Green to the studio audience off-air. His reputation was further harmed after his death, when it emerged that he had been violent and cruel to his family, while fathering a string of illegitimate offspring, including Paula Yates.
Thames’ replacement for Opnox was a radical departure. In place of the winking, smirking, apparently wholesome Green came a cheeky, irreverent disc jockey with a penchant for ‘naughty bits’, fulfilled by the presence of a scantily clad multiracial dance troupe called Hot Gossip. The Kenny Everett Video Show was, in the eyes and ears of practically a whole generation, a vast improvement on the show that had preceded it. Green had oozed insincerity and made constant references to ‘your show’. Everett eschewed a studio audience, and the only laughter to be heard came from the crew. That he could make jaded professionals continue to laugh on the second or third take is a testament to his own ability and that of his writers, Barry Cryer and Ray Cameron. Like Spike Milligan, Everett poked fun at his employers, making constant disparaging references to ‘Lord Thames’. This not entirely accurate extract from his autobiography gives a flavour of the great man’s attitude:
‘My name is Philip Jones and I’d like you to do a TV show for Thames, starring you, with anything you’d like in it. We will, of course, pay you a vast amount of money for the privilege of using Your Extreme Wackiness on the tube.’
Me: ‘Not today, thanks’.
Well, maybe it wasn’t e
xactly like that, word for word, but you get the general gist. I really didn’t want to do any television work . . . [but] he called again and offered even larger cheques . . . [and] I caved in under the weight of zeros.45
Everett, born Maurice Cole in Liverpool on Christmas Day 1944, had been an enfant terrible of broadcasting ever since he had been sacked from the pirate ship Radio London for sending up evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong, one of the station’s regular advertisers. In 1970, he had been sacked by BBC Radio 1, ostensibly for making a remark about the Minister of Transport’s wife passing her advanced driving test by bribery, but more likely because of his obvious distaste for the Musicians’ Union and their rigid enforcement of ‘needle time’ restrictions on pop radio. Many looked for a motive behind his antics, and when he appeared at a Conservative Party event in 1983 advising the bombing of the Russians and kicking Michael Foot’s walking stick away, it was thought that his true animus had been found. It seems likely, however, that Everett’s only true motivation was mischief.
Even if Green had done himself out of a job, there was still a market for talent shows on television, as LWT showed when it launched Search For A Star just over a year after opportunity had knocked its last at Thames. The host was Steve Jones, fresh from The Pyramid Game, which had survived the collapse of Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night to become a big hit in its own right. Television can be daunting for an inexperienced performer, so great pains were taken to ease participants in, as Steve Jones recalls:
Brian Rogers would choreograph [everyone], including the comics, showing them where to look and all that, for four or five days before we did the show. Then there would be a complete dress run the day before the show. They came on, we did the show, with mock juries – there was a real jury around the country on the night. We did the actual show, played it back the next day to the acts and said ‘This is where you went wrong. This is why you shouldn’t do that . . .’ All of the advice from Brian Rogers, Alyn Ainsworth, and then the following night they’d record the show. You probably wouldn’t get that now. They did the whole show twice, really.46
Back at the BBC in 1979, the victorious Alan Boyd had his plate full with the Generation Game and a new game show based on an American format called The Match Game, in which a contestant was given a sentence with a missing word, which they had to supply. They were faced with a panel of six celebrities, gaining points for each celebrity who supplied the same word. Boyd called in Terry Wogan from the Radio 2 breakfast show to host it, retitled it Blankety Blank, made a joke of the pitiful prizes the BBC was allowed to give out – worst of all being the Blankety Blank cheque book and pen consolation prize, a triumph of the nickel plater’s art – and received flak from all angles. ‘It was fun because the BBC weren’t sure they wanted it,’ he asserts. ‘The board of governors were complaining, they didn’t think it was really the BBC, and it was all silly. Bill Cotton got me in one day and said “Do we have to have this long thin microphone? Do we have to call it Blankety Blank?” We made it much funnier. The [American] producer came over and said “Ohh, you’ve destroyed my show.”’47
Despite his reservations, Cotton was never one to turn up his nose at a palpable hit, so he entered into a small wager with Boyd, betting the producer a bottle of champagne if the ratings hit 10 million. ‘One day, I was called into the office. It was Queenie [Lipyeat, PA to Tom Sloan then Bill Cotton]: “Bill Cotton wants to see you immediately.” I thought “Oh shit, this is Blankety Blank. The board of governors have now decided it’s gone too far.” Bill just put two bottles of champagne on the table. I said “Well thank you, what’s that?” He said “20 million. One for each 10.” Nothing happened after that.’48
The original plan had been to nab Boyd for the Big Night at LWT, but he proved resistant to David Bell and Michael Grade’s overtures. ‘Michael Grade tried to get me in ’78 [recalls Boyd]. They always said my name was in the telephone directory, because he was so sure I was coming.’ By 1980, however, the lure of the South Bank proved too much. ‘It was David [Bell] who persuaded me. One of the reasons they wanted me, Michael Grade said, and Brian Tesler eventually said, “You get Alan Boyd: A, you get the guy who’s making the Gen Game and is killing us, and B, you hope to get another hit from him.”’49
Plan B worked like a dream. Jeremy Fox, founder of the production company Action Time and son of former BBC1 controller Sir Paul Fox, brought Boyd a format called The People Show, based loosely on NBC’s Real People, which introduced members of the public with unusual hobbies or interests to a US television audience. Boyd tinkered with the proposition, adding elements of the venerable American show Truth or Consequences, where contestants who answered questions wrongly had to perform a daft stunt as a forfeit, and the hidden camera aspect of Candid Camera. One of the elements that Boyd brought over from Real People was the idea of having four young, relatively unknown hosts. Selina Scott, then a newsreader at Grampian in Scotland, came down for two meetings, one with Boyd, one with David Nicholas at ITN, who offered her News at Ten. ‘I thought “She’s very posh, not going to get her hands dirty,”’ admits Boyd, but fortunately, he had another candidate. ‘I’d seen Sarah Kennedy on a telethon or something, and thought “She’s mad, she’ll roll her sleeves up.” She came in and got interviewed in a funny big hat.’ Next came bearded, gangling actor Matthew Kelly and Irish journalist Henry Kelly. The fourth position remained unfilled until one of the show’s researchers, Jeremy Beadle, asked to be considered: ‘He said can I be one of the hosts on the pilot? I can do all the games. He did the famous mouse in the box, and he did it so well, he looked at me and I said “Oh, all right then, Beadle, you can be the fourth host.”’50
Before the programme made it to the airwaves, Boyd changed the title, albeit not quite in the way he intended originally. ‘The night before we did the pilot, I couldn’t sleep. Ray Moore, the sadly missed voice, who used to be one of my promotion voices when I was a trailer maker [was on the radio]. He suddenly said “Oh, you’ll be good for a laugh.” I thought “That’s a good title,” scribbled “Good for a laugh” and went to bed. I got in next morning, said to the graphics guys “I think I’ve got a title. Instead of The People Show, we’ll call it this.” I said “What is this? Good for a Laugh? Game for a Laugh? Game for a Laugh.” I couldn’t read my own handwriting. It changed entertainment for years afterwards.’51
Indeed it did, but some claimed it was not a change for the better. In the first show, transmitted on 26 September 1981, a crane smashed through a car roof in a hidden camera stunt, while presenter Sarah Kennedy judged a male beauty contest at a nudist colony. In show two, members of the audience were taken to sunbathe between the runways at Heathrow Airport. Meanwhile, in the studio on show seven of the run, members of the audience were asked to put their hands into boxes and feel the unknown objects, within one of which was the swimmer Duncan Goodhew’s bald head. The show’s detractors argued that these antics were cruel and exploitative. Meanwhile, the tabloid press latched onto the nudist colony item as an example of television at its most shocking, despite the fact that the item had been carefully filmed to show rather less than the same papers were used to displaying on their third page.52 The viewing public en masse had no such qualms. Game for a Laugh finally wrested control of Saturday nights from the BBC after more than a decade. ‘It destroyed my old show, the Generation Game, on the other side,’ Boyd recalls with relish.53
CHAPTER NINE
Weekend world
By the time that ITV had taken ownership of Saturday nights, ATV – in name at least – was in its death throes, having been regulated out of existence by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in the 1980 franchise round. Representing the Midlands alone since 1968, the company still made most of its major productions outside the region at the Elstree studios, which had never gone down well with the regulator. The IBA decreed that ATV should close Elstree in favour of new studios in the east of its region at Nottingham,1 that local investment should be sought and that a new name s
hould be chosen. On 1 January 1982, ATV became Central.
There had been internal change before the franchise reshuffle. It was an IBA rule that no one over seventy was allowed to serve as a director of a programme contractor, so in 1977, Baron Grade of Elstree had resigned as chairman of ATV. Although he remained in charge of ATV’s parent company, Associated Communications Corporation, he turned his attention increasingly towards film-making. Around the same time, Bill Ward, who had headed the production side of ATV since the start, also retired. Ward received a warm send-off in an Elstree studio where Jack Parnell and the massed ranks of producers sang ‘Bill’ from Show Boat to him, accompanied by the full ATV orchestra.
The new company inherited several hit shows from its predecessor, not least the Bob Monkhouse game show Family Fortunes, which had made its debut on Saturday nights in early 1980, before moving to Friday nights the following year. The idea was that two families competed against each other to guess the most likely responses to certain questions, as given by 100 people in a survey. The answers were displayed behind Monkhouse on a ‘computer’ display named Mr Babbage (actually just a graphical device driven by electrical relays, not unlike the pre-digital destination boards at major railway stations), and if an answer was given that had been mentioned by nobody in the survey, it was marked by a noise that can only be described as that made by a MiniMoog synthesiser on a baked bean binge.
The format had been originated in the States, under the title Family Feud. William G. Stewart had a strong track record in situation comedy and variety, but had never produced a game show until asked by ATV’s director of production Francis Essex to visit America and see the show in action. At first he was baffled to be chosen, but the logic soon became clear. ‘I asked “Why me? I don’t do game shows.” [Essex] said “Well the thing about these game shows, the big ones, is that the producer runs them from the floor.” I’d run all my things from the floor and I was very good at warm-ups, having been a redcoat.’ The prospect of an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles also appealed to Stewart as a fledgling independent producer with transatlantic contacts to maintain. ‘I went, and I have to say I was so impressed with the slickness of how this thing was run. A man called Dickie Dawson was the presenter. I thought “Yeah, I could do this, and I’d enjoy it.” I only went for the ticket, and when I came back, they told me it was Bob Monkhouse. Somebody at LWT wanted it for Bruce Forsyth. They tried to do a swap for Play Your Cards Right. Bob didn’t want to do the swap. He also said “I don’t like this title. What about Family Fortunes rather than Feud?” I liked Bob Monkhouse enormously, so I did it.’2