by Louis Barfe
Boyd was certain that the presence of Gill Stribling-Wright, a Parkinson alumnus known affectionately to colleagues as ‘Granny’, as producer would reassure even the most vociferous doubters. Even so, and with his beloved Cilla at the helm, Birt remained unsure of the show. ‘John Birt was very nervous: “They can’t kiss, they must stay in separate hotels, are you sure we should be making this?”’ says an amused Boyd. ‘The great John Birt wasn’t sure whether to commission it. I told a bit of a fib at this point, [that] I’d heard that Noel Edmonds was going to try a dating game on his show, so I said “If we don’t air this, this autumn, the BBC will beat us with a very similar dating show.” Which was rubbish. Later, John said “Was that true?” I said “No, but it got it shown.” He would have stalled it. It was right in the middle of the mid-term review. It wasn’t the done thing, he didn’t want to be embarrassed by this tacky game show.’ Even when the show opened to an audience just shy of 13 million viewers, Birt maintained the pressure on Boyd and his team. ‘If I could only find some of my John Birt little sticky notes that you used to get on a Monday morning – “A bit tacky, Alan.” Cilla kept it clean. Any sign of any tackiness, Gill wouldn’t have had it, we were in safe hands.’17
Bell’s pet project as LWT’s controller of entertainment in the dark days of retrenchment was the reintroduction of the big Sunday night variety show to the ITV schedules. Amazingly, with the savings being made in other areas, the funds were available to give the project a seven-week run at the start of 1983. Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End was available, and so was Jimmy Tarbuck, one of the original hosts of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The theatre had no other commitments, so Bill McPherson’s glitzy sets could be left standing, and the show could benefit from three whole days of preparation, by then an unheard-of luxury back in the studios. On Friday, the technical set-up took place, with rehearsals following on Saturday and Sunday, before a live transmission on Sunday night. This level of preparation was crucial to Bell’s stated desire to achieve a pre-recorded standard of slickness on a live production.
From the start, Live from Her Majesty’s proved that there was still a massive audience for variety on television, pulling in between 12 and 13 million viewers week after week. The calibre of the guest artists helped, including transatlantic stars like soul group Gladys Knight and the Pips and crooner Jack Jones, as well as home-grown favourites like Des O’Connor, Max Bygraves, Cleo Laine and Dusty Springfield.
Sadly, the show is best remembered today for the tragic event that occurred on 15 April 1984. Tommy Cooper was in the middle of his act when he suffered a massive heart attack and slumped backwards into the curtains. Harold Fisher was the drummer in Alyn Ainsworth’s band, with an uncomfortably close view of proceedings from the orchestra pit. ‘I was just below him. The horrible thing was that the [sound] balancer who was outside in the scanner thought that it was part of the act. He sort of sank to his knees and what you were hearing was this death rattle, the poor sod. So, he turned it up. He did most of his act, as I remember and then he sank to his knees. They cued the band and the adverts came on. It was unbelievable.’18 Behind the scenes, Jimmy Tarbuck’s manager Peter Prichard, a trained first-aider, did his best, but to no avail. The show had to continue in front of the curtain for some time after its resumption, because of the mayhem behind it.
Apart from supplying the music for Live from Her Majesty’s, Alyn Ainsworth was producing music for most of LWT’s big shows, having taken over as the company’s main musical director from Harry Rabinowitz. The expansive, expensive Ainsworth sound was an integral part of LWT’s light entertainment in the eighties, and the embodiment of the idea that while costs could be cut in other areas, some things required and justified a large, ongoing investment. Visiting American stars were all full of praise for his orchestra. Sometimes the big names would take issue with an aspect of the music, and it wasn’t unknown for bandleaders to pass the blame very publicly and unfairly onto individual musicians. Ainsworth wasn’t like that, as Harold Fisher – who, with bass player Paul Westwood and guitarists Paul Keogh and Chris Rae, formed Ainsworth’s rhythm section for most of the time at LWT – remembers:
He loved his band. He would never let somebody insult his band or try and take over. He would always take the can for the band and sort the problem, if there was one. With producers and artists, he was absolutely magnificent. He would never let you take shit. It was his band, he was so proud of it and he assumed responsibility. Quite often, you get bandleaders who pass the buck and let you roast. Throughout the eighties to 1990, we did so many TV shows – two or three a week. That band was a cracking band.19
Over at the BBC, magic was to become an important part of BBC1’s counter-attack on ITV’s new-found dominance of Saturday nights, but it had been a staple of television variety since the Alexandra Palace days. In particular, the close-up magic of card tricks and sleight of hand were suited to the intimacy of the medium. The Polish-born mental magician Chan Canasta had been a presence on BBC television since 1951, but television’s first star magician was David Nixon. His initial small-screen success had nothing to do with his magic, coming as a result of being a panellist on What’s My Line. Already well established as a conjuror on the variety circuit, his skills came before the television audience in the BBC series It’s Magic. Later, he moved his shows over to Thames before the lung cancer that had dogged him for many years claimed him in December 1978. His demise coincided with the rise of his successor as the king of television magic, almost as though there was room for only one in the whole business.
Paul Daniels was, in some ways, Nixon’s polar opposite. In the assessment of actor, comedian and variety historian Roy Hudd, ‘David [Nixon] was not a great magician but his affability and warm personality made him an entertaining one.’20 Daniels was and remains an excellent technician, but he lacks warmth. There is a touch of arrogance and aggression in his professional manner that means he is destined to be respected by audiences and colleagues, but never truly loved. To be fair, this may be a calamitous misjudgement of the man himself. A young magician, barely out of short trousers, met Daniels at a magic convention. He asked if he could show Daniels a trick. The professional watched patiently, then offered two pieces of advice. One was a technical tip on the trick itself. The other was never to work for free, at which Daniels handed the boy a pound.
The Middlesbrough-born son of a cinema projectionist, Daniels’ interest in magic began as a schoolboy. After National Service, he turned professional, forming an act with his first wife. Following several years honing his act on the club circuit, his first television break came in 1970 with an appearance on Opportunity Knocks. This was followed by bookings on Granada’s hit Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club. It was the BBC, however, who gave Daniels his own series, beginning in 1979, under the auspices of producer John Fisher, himself a skilled magician.
Although Daniels was the headline act, The Paul Daniels Magic Show was also a showcase for the best magical talent from around the world. One of the most memorable guests was San Francisco-based ‘bubble magician’ Tom Noddy, who appeared in October 1982, defying physics by blowing cube-shaped bubbles. ‘It helped, I think, that I was a magician,’ John Fisher explains. ‘I had an editorial sense both of what Paul should be doing or could be doing, and of who was out there in the big, wide world, vis-à-vis magic guests and speciality acts. Sadly you can’t earn a living in this country really as a spesh act, but if you go to Europe and America [you can]. The great thing was that we had a platform to give these acts time. “My god, did that guy really do that thing with those ten bubbles?” The following day, the whole country was talking about Tom Noddy, or Hans Moretti being pierced in a cardboard box with eighteen swords.’21
The show also contained a very strong historical element, with Daniels recreating great illusions from history, most famously the bullet-catching trick that had killed Chung Ling Soo at the Wood Green Empire in 1918. Daniels replicated it without i
ncident in November 1982, aided by the late magician’s original assistant, Jack Grossman. There was one occasion in 1987, however, when viewers were left with the unmistakable impression that something extremely unpleasant had happened to the star of the show, as John Fisher relates:
We were asked to do a live Halloween show. Paul and I said ‘If we’re going to do a Halloween show, we should attempt to send a shiver down the spine of the audience.’ So we went to a National Trust property down at Godalming. We didn’t have a proper audience. We had a group of twelve celebrities. John Humphrys was amongst them. We had an appropriate guest from America who specialized in macabre magic. We did a Houdini seance. All that sort of stuff was pretty standard, but we were going live, but the idea was to finish with Paul going into an iron maiden [with] inner spikes, and then the timer being set at the bottom of the screen. He had a minute, two minutes to get out, but we had no intention of bringing Paul out. The door slammed shut and nothing happened. Did we tell presentation? I don’t think we did tell presentation. We might have given them a hint. We didn’t play the sig. tune, I think we played some credits.
Suddenly the BBC switchboard went bananas. We’d obviously found a way to include an announcement later in the evening, but suddenly I was told I had to put Paul on camera fast and record him looking at the audience, so that could be played back in the next gap between programmes. I don’t know how many complaints were registered, but I think it was some kind of record. Paul and I felt totally vindicated.22
The stunt and the reaction to it caused a predictable fuss. Fisher had the support of BBC1 controller Michael Grade, who had been warned about the plan by Fisher the night before, when he accompanied his uncle, Lew Grade, to an appearance on Terry Wogan’s chat show, of which Fisher was executive producer. Nonetheless, Jim Moir called Fisher to express grave doubt that he would still be head of variety on Monday morning, and that, far worse, one of them would have to go on Open Air, a BBC1 daytime programme presented by Eamonn Holmes, which gave the green pen mob a chance to grill BBC executives on live television over perceived shortcomings in programming. On one edition, Bill Cotton had been pilloried over the Black and White Minstrel Show, even though the last series had been almost a decade earlier. Everyone dreaded the call to appear on it. Fisher calls it a ‘stupid, misguided’ programme, while Moir recalls the alternate title he gave it: ‘I never called it Open Air. I called it Open Wound. [It] was a bit like [an] instantaneous magistrates court, or kangaroo court. It was a great thing apparently for governance and accountability, but it was occasionally hard enough to bear. It’s bad enough to make errors, it’s bad enough to have a professional catastrophe, without being paraded for a serious drubbing by Irate of Tunbridge Wells, with the gleeful co-operation of a production team [from] somewhere else [in the BBC]. There again, if you put yourself up there, you’ve got to take the flak.’23
Fisher remembers being in his office at 7am on the following Monday, determined to be in the building before Moir. From his office window, he could see Moir in his office, but had decided not to make the first move. ‘He’s going to have to call me. At quarter to eight, and normally I wouldn’t be in the office until quarter to ten, the phone rings, and very nervously I pick up the phone. ‘Can I speak to John Fisher? It’s Lew Grade. I just want to thank you. You made me such a happy man on Friday night. To do the show was a wonderful experience. Anything I can do for you. I hope we meet again.’ He didn’t know I was in the office at that unearthly hour. It must have impressed him that at a time when no one else in the BBC was in their office, I was. Eventually, I don’t know whether Jim Moir came up to see me or I wandered down to see him, but we both burst out laughing, because he had the Radio Times open in front of him.’24 BBC1 was committed to a week of live outside broadcasts from the CBI Conference, and so Open Air was off-air. Moir and Fisher kept their jobs.
The Corporation’s main response to ITV’s sudden supremacy on Saturday nights had been to promote the man who had done so much to build up ratings on a Saturday morning with Multi-Coloured Swap Shop – Radio 1 disc jockey Noel Edmonds. Behind the move was Jim Moir, who had succeeded Robin Nash as head of variety25 in November 1981, and Edmonds remembers ‘the brief to me was to do the next generation Simon Dee show’. Like Dee, Edmonds was a major force on the wireless:
All I ever wanted to do was be on the radio. I fell in love with the pirate ships, and the power of radio. There’s a little bridge between Swap Shop and the Late Late Breakfast Show, where I was doing Top Gear and aviation programmes for the Beeb. Jim Moir sat me down and in that Jim Moir way, he said ‘Look, do you want to be a television presenter or do you want to be a TV star?’ I said ‘I quite like doing my motoring programmes,’ and he said ‘Fine, I don’t have a problem with that. You’re an extremely good television presenter, but if you want to come into my department, you have to make the decision now.’ He said ‘I think you’ve reached that point in your career where you decide what you want to do, and I think I can make you highly successful in entertainment.’ We had a running gag for twenty-odd years that we did quite well together.26
The job of producing this high-stakes show was given to tough old pro Michael Hurll, and the first Late Late Breakfast Show went out on Saturday 4 September 1982. Alongside the Dee Time aspects of celebrity guests, interviews and pop performances, were added hidden camera tricks played by Edmonds’ ‘Hit Squad’ and breathtaking stunts performed by viewers in the ‘Give It a Whirl’ segment. Both features were a clear challenge to Game for a Laugh’s supremacy, and were popular from the start of the show’s run. However, despite Hurll’s experience and Edmonds’ popularity, the first series failed to catch on in other ways. Edmonds had been given a girl Friday in the form of Scottish comedienne Leni Harper, but the chemistry was noticeably absent. ‘I’m not quite sure what they were expecting of her,’ muses Edmonds. ‘Bless her, I don’t think she had a specific role.’ Perhaps most damning of all, she lacked glamour, Edmonds describing her as being ‘quite like Olive Oyl’. Also involved was John Peel, a Radio 1 colleague but not a great show business mate of Edmonds’, who took care of outside broadcasts, looking quite clearly as though he wished he were somewhere, anywhere else.
On its second run, beginning in the autumn of 1983, the show improved gradually. Peel was still on the OBs, still appearing to display a considerable distaste for what he was doing. Nonetheless, even that early on, many were wondering whether Hurll, the great risk-taker, wasn’t pushing his luck with some of the stunts on the show. The matter came to a head in the edition of 10 September 1983. The previous week, the ‘Whirly Wheel’ had decided that a chosen punter would attempt to fly a one-man gyrocopter. While the wheel choosing the lucky viewer was legitimate, the wheel choosing the stunt was carefully rigged, so that the production team knew what they would be doing and where they would be next week. On this occasion, the wheel had malfunctioned – it had been intended to select a motoring stunt. The net result was that the gyrocopter stunt had to take place at Santa Pod racetrack, a venue of tangential relevance, where the following week’s OB had already been arranged.
The chosen viewer’s inability to get the gyrocopter more than a few feet in the air made it a weak sideshow compared to the real spectacle of experienced amateur racing drivers trying to leap over a line of cars. Numerous drivers attempted to break the record of 232 feet, including Richard Smith, whose only achievements turned out to be a fractured pelvis as well as head, neck and back injuries when he ploughed into the line of cars, rolled over and landed where spectators had been standing – until they saw his Jensen hurtling towards them. Peel was audibly shaken and heard to swear on the soundtrack, while Edmonds visibly changed from amused and amazed to horrified and stunned, as he tried to deal with the incident. The stunt resulted in serious questions being asked about the show internally and in the press. As is usually the way, this adverse coverage meant audience figures for the next show soared by over a million. By the time the show came off the air in
1986, a further 3 million had been added, taking the ratings over 13 million regularly, matching Game for a Laugh at its peak.
The growing popularity of the show saved it, and by the 1984 run, the show had found the formula that would last until its demise. Peel was replaced by fellow Radio 1 presenter Mike Smith – who was much more in tune with the host and tone of the show. Both were unashamed populists and both were nuts about helicopters. ‘In the end, it worked brilliantly with Smitty and I, where he was on the OB.’ Smith usually opened his contributions by complaining about being somewhere cold, wet and often dangerous, while Edmonds had a cushy number in the studio. Peel had done the same, but the difference was that he usually meant it. ‘We had the slightly feisty thing with the big screen and it was decided that was how it would work, that apparently there was a bit of animosity there. There’s nothing worse than working with people in a live context if you can’t trust each other. Smitty and I did trust each other, and we didn’t try and top each other.’27