Turned Out Nice Again

by Louis Barfe

  Stewart knew that between them, he and Monkhouse could make the show a big hit. As such, he felt entitled to be paid well, but even he was surprised with the outcome of the salary negotiations:

  Billy Marsh, my agent, didn’t know anything about negotiating for producers. Michael [Grade] had been my agent. Billy said ‘What is the show?’ I said ‘It’s a forty-five-minute game show, called Family Fortunes, it’s going to be for twenty-five programmes or something like that.’ He asked how much I was getting at the moment. I was getting about £1,200 a programme – this was a sitcom, you did one a week. Billy Marsh didn’t know that. He said ‘Will you be happy if I get you that?’ I knew I was going to do twelve a week, but I didn’t think he had in mind that I’d get that per programme. He turned round and said ‘I’ve got it – £1,250 a programme.’ I was doing twelve a week. No producer or director to this day gets paid per programme for game shows.

  The thing about ATV was that there was an understanding, that if anybody’s salary was above a certain amount, it had to go to the board for approval. My salary was going to come out at £30,000 for this series, and the maximum was £25,000. So, Jon Scoffield came to me and said ‘How can we work it out?’ I knew that I was going to get it off the ground, and when it’s all up and running they’d get someone else in. I said ‘How about this – if I agree to take the £25,000 instead of £30,000, I have first option on every other series?’ Without a doubt, I was the highest paid producer in Britain by about eight miles because of what Billy had done.3

  The anticipated success ensued, but Stewart’s contract caused headaches when tensions grew between the producer and the host:

  I really liked Bob, but I was very strict with him. I would not let him do his blue jokes on a family game show. One night, I was horrified. We had a celebrity edition and the two families were Lord Montagu and Lord Bath. It was for charity, but they wanted to do it because it was early in the spring and it was a plug for the houses for the summer. It was the old Lord Bath. The question was ‘Can you name one of the films of Humphrey Bogart?’ Someone said ‘The African Queen.’ Bob looked up at the board and said ‘Can we see Johnny Mathis up there?’ I promise you. Everybody laughed. Of course they laughed. But in the break, I went up to him. I said to the floor manager ‘I don’t care, that’s coming out, and Bob will do a retake saying “Can we see The African Queen?”’ This happened on two or three occasions.4

  At the end of the series, Jon Scoffield – by now head of light entertainment – called Stewart in and informed him that Monkhouse had asked for a new producer. Stewart replied that they had a deal. Faced with the choice between ditching a popular host from a big hit show and paying the producer a family fortune of his own not to produce the show, Scoffield took the latter option. Stewart returned as producer when Monkhouse moved to the BBC in 1983, and Max Bygraves took over as host. ‘I said to Max “Don’t take the job, because then I’ll have to come back,”’ Stewart jokes, adding that ‘Max was not a success. Max will admit that it’s not the kind of show he should do. With scripted material, Max would have the audience eating out of his hand.’5

  The show was put on ice for a couple of years until it was revived in 1987 with Les Dennis as host, and still Stewart’s original contract stood. ‘Billy Marsh rang up and asked “Anything in this for Bill?” and another 35 grand came up. Billy said “Look, they’re going to get fed up with this eventually. We’re going to have to sort this out. I’ll write a letter, and let’s sell them this letter.” Which we did for another £35,000. So I got paid for about five series I never did. It was great.’6

  On balance, Stewart was a bargain for Central when he delivered another smash success US game show import for the Saturday night programme roster. The Price is Right had been a staple of the schedules for CBS in the US since 1972. The game itself, mostly based around the contestants trying to guess the value of the prizes, was almost irrelevant. What mattered was the show’s wild atmosphere and raucous audience response. Each member of the audience was a potential contestant, and only knew they were taking part when the host Bob Barker called their name and invited them to ‘Come on down!’

  British executives had toyed with the idea of bringing the show over, but had dismissed the possibility, as Stewart relates:

  The Price is Right had been hawked around in this country for quite a while, but nobody would touch it, [because] they didn’t believe you could get British audiences to behave like that. I said ‘You’re mad. Firstly, I used to work at Butlins. Secondly, have you never seen “Last Night of the Proms”? There are middle-class kids standing there singing their heads off.’ People will behave like that if you let them. But if you get 300 people in a TV studio, and the first thing you say to them is ‘Before we start, in case of fire, the doors are over there and over there’, immediately, you’ve got your work cut out. That’s why you very rarely hear laughs in the first minute of a sitcom. Writers learn not to put them in. The audience is trying to get over a warm-up of dirty jokes and being reminded that there might be a fire in the place.7

  By 1984, Britain was deemed ready for such a frenzy, but Stewart knew he needed a good host. His ideal candidate was Leslie Crowther, long-serving Black and White Minstrel Show comedian, sitcom actor and a seasoned ringmaster with several years’ experience making children behave on Crackerjack. Unfortunately, Stewart’s bosses dismissed Crowther as ‘old hat’. Matthew Kelly was in the frame, but unavailable, while Russ Abbot was unwilling to make the three-year commitment that was being asked. Finally, Central suggested the affable rock and roller Joe Brown. Despite being, in Stewart’s estimation, ‘one of the nicest guys, and fun’, the producer knew Brown would be wrong for the show. Eventually, Stewart suggested that two pilots should be made, one with Brown, the other with Crowther, and that Jon Scoffield should pick the best. In the interest of fair play, Stewart offered to let another producer make the Brown pilot, but Scoffield said he trusted Stewart to give both hosts ‘a fair crack of the whip’. Scoffield had to admit that Stewart had been right about Crowther: ‘Joe was smashing. He was fun and people liked him, but he wasn’t in control, whereas Leslie [was] . . . When Leslie put his arm round an old lady and said “We want you to win that fridge,” he meant it.’8

  With Crowther in place as host, Stewart himself took charge of the warm-up. He spent some time thinking about how to get the audience ramped up to the required fever pitch, before inspiration struck:

  Leslie and I were out to dinner one night in Nottingham before the series started, just he and I, and there was a table with about twelve people on it. The bloke whose birthday it was looked to me like a military type. As the cake came out, all the people around the table suddenly started singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Not only did they do that, they were all standing up singing that. Suddenly, other people in the restaurant started joining in. I thought ‘I’ve got it, that’s what we’ll do.’ So the floor manager used to come out and, sweet phrase he used to use, ‘Please be upstanding for our producer, William G. Stewart.’ As they stood up, I played a recording from the Albert Hall of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, so we had 8,000 people singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and the people in the studio joined in. By the time Leslie came out, they were in a frenzy. I had also seen at Butlins that if people came to an event in groups, they were more likely to let their hair down. So three-quarters of that audience came in coach parties from all over. They were coming from Cornwall, Glasgow, Northern Ireland. It took them two days to get here for this bloody show. It was a phenomenon. It was huge fun.9

  The patriotic choice of warm-up music might have surprised many at the IBA who regarded the programme as the brashest, most Americanized thing ever to appear on British television. The unease of the regulator was not matched by the viewing public. It alternated in the Saturday night schedules with Yorkshire Television’s 3-2-1, in which host Ted Rogers attempted to guide couples towards the star prize of a car or holiday and away from the booby prize of a dustbin, with the
aid of guest stars who came on, did a turn, then read a hellishly cryptic riddle. The show had been going since 1978, and had continued to be very popular: during its 1983–1984 run it was almost always one of ITV’s top ten programmes, usually occupying the number six spot with an audience of between 10 and 13.7 million. In its first week, The Price is Right matched 3-2-1’s biggest audience. In week two, another 600,000 viewers had joined in. In week three, the unthinkable had happened, and The Price is Right had knocked Coronation Street sideways to clinch the top spot, with an audience of 16 million.

  The show even went to Blackpool for a summer season, in 1985, but this venture proved to be a victim of its own success. It had been decided that the prizes had to be as good as those in the TV show, so Leslie Crowther’s agent Jan Kennedy had arranged a deal with Great Universal Stores. Unfortunately, no one had reckoned with the Blackpool underworld, which produced crib sheets with the correct prices on, meaning that the prizes were always being won.

  Eventually, the novelty wore off, but even at its lowest, The Price is Right was still good for an audience of 10 million. However, in 1988, Stewart was told by Central that they were going to try a season without The Price is Right. The first Crowther heard of it was when a journalist called at his house for a comment on Central’s decision to drop the show.

  The Price is Right was successful largely because it took to the air at the end of a massive recession and at the start of one of the most aggressively acquisitive times in our nation’s history. The recession of the early eighties had affected ITV massively, with a downturn in advertising revenue. In 1982, Michael Grade left LWT to seek his fortune with the US production company Embassy, to be succeeded as director of programmes by former current affairs boss John Birt. Whereas Grade was an old-fashioned showman, Birt had become known for his relentless pursuit of logic. He was a man to whom hunches were anathema. Under Grade, the company might have pulled its horns in a little, and tried to trade through the slump, but Birt went for the scorched earth approach. As LWT’s historian David Docherty put it, ‘he believed that the only way to keep the company going was to assemble an emergency schedule of comparatively inexpensive, high-ratings programmes’.10 Some already-recorded situation comedies and dramas were held over so that they would appear on the following year’s balance sheet. The new economic climate meant that the massive variety spectaculars favoured by David Bell had fallen out of favour. In particular, the Birt purge marked the end of LWT’s long, happy and fruitful association with Stanley Baxter.

  In their place came game shows and people shows, very much the province of Alan Boyd, who was now head of light entertainment under controller of entertainment David Bell. Game shows, in particular, could be made on a production line basis, as William G. Stewart had found to his profit on Family Fortunes. Once the set, lighting, sound and equipment were primed for one show, several could be made in one session, with only minimal adjustments. Alan Boyd explains: ‘Even when I was at the BBC, we would make four Blankety Blanks in a weekend: two on the Saturday, two on the Sunday. Jeopardy and some of these other shows, they were so designed by the American system to be manufactured at the rate of five or six a day.’11 Bruce Forsyth made fun of the system in almost every edition of Play Your Cards Right, telling the audience that they were ‘so much better than last week’. The punters roared with laughter and approval, secure in the knowledge that they were the previous week’s audience and, depending on the workload in that particular session, probably the following week’s too.

  Cilla Black figured heavily in the eighties reinvention of LWT’s light entertainment output. The Liverpool-born singer had moved from the BBC to ATV in the seventies, in an ill-advised shift away from variety into sitcom, with Cilla’s Comedy Six. After that, her television work had been restricted to guest appearances, including one in the opening run of Live from Her Majesty’s, LWT’s successful eighties attempt to rekindle the spirit of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Fortunately for her, she had a fan and ally at the top of LWT in the form of fellow Scouser John Birt, and it was a case of waiting for the right show to emerge. As Alan Boyd explains, that show turned out to be Game for a Laugh’s better-behaved sister:

  The team, as they were developing Game for a Laugh, saw other ideas. We kept putting them aside, saying that’s an idea for another show. It was originally called The Good News Show, and I didn’t like the title. I said ‘It’s not about good news, it’s about people who do wonderful things. They come and get a surprise, then they get a golden gong or something. We basically say “Surprise surprise, you’ve been good.” There’s a title in there.’12

  Boyd arranged a meeting with Black and her husband/manager Bobby Willis. At first concerned about overexposure, Willis assented to a six-show run. Black’s main concerns differed from those of her husband. ‘She said “Can I sing?” I said “No,”’ Boyd recalls. ‘She said “Can I have a different costume every part?” I said “No, not on a show like this.”’ Boyd allowed her to sing the theme tune, a decision that became a gift to impressionists.

  The first series, beginning on Sunday 6 May 1984, was to be transmitted live, and Boyd decided that Black needed a co-host, settling on rotund actor Christopher Biggins. ‘I said “In live television you need a foil like the American talk shows. The Ed McMahon thing – when you’re in trouble, you can use the foil to get yourself out of it.” It was exactly as I had done with Larry and Isla, in reverse this time.’ The end product had something for everyone. ‘We had Cilla being put in the middle of a rock in the middle of the Channel somewhere, with helicopters saving her. We had Cabbage Patch kids, we had nuns,’ Boyd relates.13 The show was closer in spirit and intent to Ask Pickles than anything. It made a speciality of flying long-lost relatives from the other side of the world, in the interest of warming the hearts of the Sunday-night viewing millions. In so doing, it recast Cilla as the nation’s nosey, but well-meaning auntie.

  Unfortunately, while the show lasted for over fifteen years, the coupling of Black and Biggins was not destined to last more than two series. ‘His agent wanted him to have equal billing, wanted it to be Cilla and Biggins’ Surprise Surprise. I said no, Cilla’s the star, Biggins, you’re not. Biggins never knew this, to be fair. When eventually I said no, and the agent said “Well, we’re not doing the deal,” Biggins was very angry and sad that his agent had been demanding this. I think he left that agent shortly afterwards. Agents who push their luck with me get nowhere. I just say “Thank you, goodbye.” They then try and rescind where we’ve got to and I say “You can’t rescind. Bye.”’14

  With Surprise Surprise established and Cilla more bankable than she had been for years, the next step was Blind Date, synthesized from elements of an American show called The Dating Game and an Australian show called Perfect Match. In it, a contestant had to choose one of three potential suitors purely on the basis of their voice and the answers they gave to a series of loaded questions. Cilla was the natural choice, but Boyd decided to chance a pilot with somebody else. ‘We hadn’t gone for Cilla the first time for the simple reason that Bobby had said Cilla didn’t want to do too many shows,’ Boyd explains.15

  The host for the pilot – which had been titled It’s a Hoot – was comedian Duncan Norvelle, who had, in many ways, turned show business orthodoxy on its head. Over the years, there had been many privately gay performers who pretended to be heterosexual for fear that admitting otherwise would be career suicide. Danny La Rue’s partner Jack Hanson was also his manager, but in press interviews La Rue stressed the professional nature of the relationship, and told journalists of his sadness at missing the boat when it came to marriage. In contrast, the heterosexual Norvelle camped it up something rotten in public, with his ‘Chase me’ catchphrase, and went to some pains to conceal the fact that he was happily married.

  Norvelle’s pilot was a disaster, Boyd recalls. ‘He never understood the logistics. He’d look at the camera and say “Aren’t I pretty?”, he never understood the angles. It
was hysterical. It took about six days to edit it. Gill Stribling-Wright [the show’s producer] tried it and tore her hair out.’ Even if Norvelle had handled the show with aplomb, there would have been other obstacles. John Birt let his inner Catholic prude get the better of him and had expressed grave reservations about the show. In turn, he had shown the tape to the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s David Glencross, who echoed Birt’s concerns about the tone of the show, and the taste (or lack thereof) with which it was carried off. Boyd prepared himself for a hard sell to get his original choice as host, and was surprised by the receptive response:

  Bobby and Cilla came in, sat in my office at LWT and I said ‘I’ve got a show for you.’ Bobby said ‘We’ve got a show we’d like to make.’ I said ‘Do you want to show me your show first, Bobby? Or shall I show you my show?’ So, of course I put in the Australian show. It was called the Perfect Match. And he said ‘But that’s the show we want to make.’ I said ‘But I thought you didn’t want to do more than twelve shows a year,’ and he said ‘Well, if we stop Surprise Surprise . . .’ I said ‘No, I don’t want you to stop Surprise Surprise. Will you do this as well?’ I told them the truth about Duncan Norvelle. I said ‘We didn’t come to you because we were led to believe that you wouldn’t do more.’ Bobby said ‘Okay, we’ll do twelve and we’ll do sixteen Blind Dates.’ We did it. We did two or three pilots, she got to learn the logic. No you can’t sing, no you can’t have different dresses.16