by Louis Barfe
It was inevitable that when I was billed as being the highest-paid entertainer on television, that the knives would come out. What was disappointing was that the BBC, going through this huge period of change, didn’t have the confidence to get up and say ‘This show is performing really well. Can’t you see that we have changes in the broadcasting environment, and all channels are gradually clicking down?’ And that’s what was happening. When you look at the stats, we were no less successful, in terms of our decline, on a pro rata basis, than Cilla Black was. We had one really bad one, which I think was a 6.5 [million, but] ITV had a live blockbuster something, and the critics latched onto that. And because Peter Salmon was a coward, he didn’t go public and say ‘I’m very happy with House Party, it’s still doing this, it’s an important part of the schedule, this, that and the other’ and I’ve always despised him for that. It wasn’t just what happened to me, it was so demoralizing to the production team. We were made to feel as though we were a show in decline, when [it was] the whole genre.41
In the eighties and nineties, Cilla was not solely responsible for keeping ITV’s end up on Saturday nights. LWT had also produced You Bet, first with Bruce Forsyth at the helm, then later with Matthew Kelly and Darren Day. The idea of the show was that members of the public bet a celebrity panel that they could undertake a strange, arcane, amusing or dangerous activity or challenge in a set amount of time. In one of the more sedate challenges, a contestant claimed to be able to distinguish different bass guitars by their sound alone, which he then attempted to do, aided by a blindfold and legendary session musician Herbie Flowers. Later, it added Gladiators – an endurance test in which Spandex-clad he-men and hardbody women attempted to knock each other out of contention with gigantic cotton buds – to its Saturday night roster, with massive success.
Meanwhile, in Manchester, Granada had latched onto a Dutch programme created by Joop van de Ende42 called The Soundmixshow, in which contestants impersonated famous singers, aided by massive efforts of make-up and costume to make them look and sound like their heroes. Retitled Stars In Their Eyes, a pilot was made, but Granada’s head of entertainment David Liddiment insisted on some changes before proceeding to a series:
[It] was a great idea, [and] it had worked in Holland. Having made the pilot, I believed I could see how we could make it better. We made a very conscious decision to invest very heavily in the show. It stood out on the screen in terms of production values – lighting, design, sound quality. It was an expensive show. In the original Dutch show, contestants had sung to pre-recorded backing tracks, effectively karaoke. We brought in Ray Monk as musical director, absolutely recreated the sound of the original record. Everybody sung live, which we made a big deal of. I took a conscious decision to put that level of resources into it because we had, in my view, a long way to go to establish our credentials on the network as a major supplier of light entertainment. What was exciting was that the lighting design, the camerawork, everything on that show was done by Granada staff. We had a very highly skilled staff, because it was a fully staffed television station with four big studios and five crews. They were honed on drama because that was the company’s specialism, but they loved doing music and entertainment more than anything else because it gave them more scope for creativity. We had a couple of lighting directors who loved to do light entertainment and worked very hard to get this glossy polished look.43
Liddiment also believes that the choice of presenter was crucial. Given that the show hinged on amateur performers giving a professional performance, Leslie Crowther stood out as the man most likely to set them at their ease, combining a wealth of show business experience – from Crackerjack to The Price Is Right – with an affable manner. Not that Crowther got the job without making some concessions. The terms were laid out at a highly memorable dinner at L’Escargot with Dianne Nelmes and Jane MacNaught from Granada, as his agent Jan Kennedy remembers: ‘The West End was blanketed with snow, so bad I couldn’t walk out in my stiletto heels, so I had two carrier bags on my feet, marching out like a washer woman with a scarf on. The reason we had that dinner was to tell Leslie he wasn’t to dye his hair so much and he wasn’t to wear glasses. Poor Leslie got hammered by us. It was hysterical.’44
Crowther kept dying his hair, but acquiesced on the glasses, and proved to be the perfect host for the show, which made its debut in July 1990. He would probably have continued to present it evermore, had he not been involved in a terrible car accident on the M5 in October 1992. Despite being an alcoholic – something he later conquered – on the day of the accident he had not touched a drop, and fatigue was identified as the cause. Russ Abbot came in as a temporary host of Stars In Their Eyes, but when it became clear that Crowther would not be able to return to the show, Matthew Kelly – who had made his name on Game for a Laugh – took over the job permanently. Despite being an actor by training rather than a comedian, Kelly shared Crowther’s ability to set the contestants at ease, and hosted the show for eleven highly successful years before returning to the stage.
Throughout the eighties, the light entertainment establishment had been under assault from a new breed of performers and writers, who thought the old guard were, at best, outmoded and, at worst, offensive. The initial crucible of the revolution had been the Comedy Store, an unprepossessing room above a strip club in Soho. The infamously brutal master of ceremonies there was a Liverpudlian Communist called Alexei Sayle. Most prolific was Ben Elton, co-writer of The Young Ones and sole author of Happy Families. Almost all were university-educated, but not necessarily from an Oxbridge background. Almost all were very right-on and had a raft of jokes about the likes of Jimmy Tarbuck and Bruce Forsyth, their unashamed allegiance to the Conservative Party and their cosy, chummy world of golfing pals. One of the most barbed was this broadside from Alexei Sayle: ‘Like all good comedians, I love a game of golf, and I often take part in the P.W. Botha Pro-Am Celebrity Golf Classic. You know the sort of thing. Strictly for charity, Water Rats versus Martin Bormann’s Escaped Nazi War Criminal Showbiz Eleven.’45
The latex puppet-based satire series Spitting Image was no less brutal in its attitude to the elder statesmen of entertainment. In the mid-eighties, LWT had persuaded Jimmy Tarbuck to branch out into chat show territory with Tarby and Friends, which Spitting Image spoofed in April 1986 as Tarby and Friend, consisting of Tarbuck interviewing Michael Caine about the pay cheques he had received from his films, in front of a rank of audience seating that was empty apart from a puppet of Bruce Forsyth, clapping enthusiastically. In the same edition of Spitting Image, Tarby’s fellow chat host Russell Harty was seen to be interviewing ‘Page 3’ model Samantha Fox’s breasts, both of whom were considering solo careers. Another episode included a sketch about BBC LE music maestro Ronnie Hazlehurst’s attempts to write a requiem mass.
It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that much of the ammunition aimed at the old-school variety dinosaurs was loaded by the same executives who employed them. At the BBC, each programme has a number. Shows made in London by the comedy department of the light entertainment group bore the prefix LLC. Variety shows were catalogued as LLV. Almost every ground-breaking comedy show made at the BBC in the eighties, and into the nineties, from The Young Ones to A Bit of Fry and Laurie, was a variety department production, classified LLV, and had been nurtured by head of variety Jim Moir. The motivation had been his desire to differentiate the BBC’s two television channels. Through the seventies, and into the eighties, where BBC1 would have a full variety show, BBC2 tended towards intimate revue and singer-based programmes, but all were recognizably mainstream:
Controllers, from [Bryan] Cowgill onwards – certainly Paul Fox – realized that they needed to compete with ITV. They saw the worth of LE and placed it in their schedules to great effect. Particularly on BBC1 and also increasingly on BBC2. There was no real difference between entertainment on 1 and 2. It was the big stuff on 1, and the smaller stuff, the quirky stuff on 2. Not the big hitters. Stuff that
would make you smile. I sat down and began to think that there was a need to differentiate entertainment on 2 from 1, and with Brian [Wenham – BBC2 controller from 1978 to 1982, then director of programmes, BBC TV, from 1982 to 1986]’s approval, I went out and got Rory Bremner, French and Saunders, Victoria Wood and Alexei Sayle. They began to transform BBC2 and it began to be a place that was identifiable for a particular form of comedy.
It was clear to me that these people were definitely punching their weight, and I wanted them on my team. I had a meeting with French and Saunders, and it took me a year to bring that meeting to fruition. A year later they actually signed on the dotted line, and that’s an association with the BBC that lasts today. Alexei Sayle was a difficult kettle of fish. I called him into my office. He sat there in front of me – he’s a threatening looking chap, and I didn’t know if he was going to become the mad axeman. I just said to him ‘I really admire your talent, can we work together to make you a success on BBC2?’ He said ‘Thank you for that’, went away and made Alexei Sayle’s Stuff which was another piece of landmark BBC2 comedy. That’s one of the joys of being a light entertainment impresario. Spotting the best talent and bringing it on from wherever it was.46
The first BBC TV light entertainment producer to spot the new wave of talent was Paul Jackson, the Bristol University-educated son of What’s My Line and This Is Your Life producer T. Leslie Jackson and a successful producer of The Two Ronnies in his own right. Despite being steeped in traditional LE, Jackson lobbied hard to be allowed to bring new blood to the screen. His persistence resulted in two specials in 1980 and 1981 under the title Boom Boom Out Go The Lights, showcasing the likes of Alexei Sayle, Keith Allen and Tony Allen, not to mention Nigel Planer, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson.
Planer, Mayall and Edmondson would, with Jackson as producer, take the alternative invasion of BBC television to the next level with The Young Ones, which made its BBC2 debut in 1982. A pilot had been made the previous year, but had not been given the green light to progress to a series until Channel 4 showed an interest in Edmondson, Mayall and Planer as part of the group that had broken away from the Comedy Store to found their own Comic Strip club. With a series of half-hour Comic Strip films in development for Channel 4 – the new network scheduled to bring minority interests, innovation and Countdown to television from November 1982 onwards – The Young Ones was rushed into production. Despite the panic, the series hit the screens in an assured, confident, noisy and, to many viewers, revolting manner. Set in a scrofulous student house, it concerned the petty squabbles of the four equally sociopathic but utterly different housemates – pretentious poet Rick (played by Mayall), violent heavy metal fan Vyvyan (Edmondson), hippy Neil (Planer) and Mike ‘the cool person’ (played by Canadian actor Christopher Ryan) – and was a curiously effective hybrid of variety show and situation comedy. The central narrative of each episode was interrupted by musical interludes from bands of the day like Motorhead and Madness, and stand-up comedy from Alexei Sayle, nominally playing the housemates’ sinister Polish landlord. Although the show came from within the heart of the BBC’s variety department, the scripts by Mayall, his girlfriend Lise Mayer and their Manchester University contemporary Ben Elton, were full of digs at older LE stars. Rick’s obsession with Cliff Richard was not meant to reflect well on the Christian singer. One episode turned into an homage to, then a demolition of, the cosy self-sufficiency sitcom The Good Life:
NEIL’S FATHER: Why can’t you be in one of those decent situation comedies that your mother likes?
[The Good Life titles play, but Vyvyan emerges through them shouting]
VYVYAN: No, no, we are not watching the bloody Good Life. Bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody. It’s so bloody nice. Felicity ‘Treacle’ Kendal and Richard ‘Sugar-Flavoured Snob’ Briers. What do they do now? Chocolate bloody Button ads, that’s what. They’re nothing but a couple of reactionary stereotypes confirming the myth that everyone in Britain is a lovable middle-class eccentric and I! HATE! THEM!
. . .
RICK: Well, you can just shut up, Vyvyan. You can just about blooming well shut up! Cause if you’ve got anything horrid to say about Felicity Kendal, you can just about bloomin’ well say it to me first. All right?
VYVYAN: Rick, I just did.
RICK: Oh! Oh! You did, did you? Well, I’ve got a good mind to give you a ruddy good punch on the bottom for what you just said. You’re talking about the woman I love.
NEIL: Yeah, and me. I love her too.
NEIL’S FATHER: Yes, well, I agree with the spotty twerps on that one. Felicity Kendall is sweetly pretty, and just what a real girlie should be. Why, speaking as a feminist myself, I can safely say this: that Felicity Kendal is a wonderful woman, and I want to protect her.
VYVYAN: Well, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it called that.47
Jackson also produced alternative comedy’s debut on BBC1, collaborating with Geoff Posner, another open-minded young producer who had come up through the BBC LE ranks in the traditional manner. Having a decade of folk club and theatre experience under his belt, as well as a series and several successful specials for LWT, Jasper Carrott was far from a new face when he joined the BBC for Carrott’s Lib in 1982. The crucial difference was that he was paired with younger performers like Nick Wilton and Rik Mayall, as well as new writers like Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, later to become founding writers for Spitting Image and the editorial backbone of Private Eye. ‘The one person I went out and scalped, within eight weeks of being given the job of head of variety, was Jasper Carrott,’ Moir recalls. ‘I went up and met him in his agent’s house near Birmingham. He didn’t need the work. He was incredibly successful, he had an association with LWT. His concert tours were phenomenally successful. He didn’t need the money or the exposure. I remember I cheekily said to him “Yes, but you do need to exercise your God-given talent before the biggest audience, so get off your rusty dusty and come and do some television for me.”’48
The show was completely live on Saturday nights and unafraid of controversy, which was in plentiful supply in the immediate aftermath of the Falklands War. Listings writers are fond of referring to any comedy that isn’t Terry and June as ‘anarchic’, but there was a genuine edge to Carrott’s Lib. In many ways, it was the closest any broadcaster has ever come to channelling the original spirit of TW3. In Jim Moir’s judgement, ‘It was breathtakingly brilliant, because it was so funny, so contemporary. It hit all the nerve endings, it was sharp-edged. His show that went out just after the election – mind-bendingly good.’49
Between series of The Young Ones, Jackson left the BBC to set up his own company, Paul Jackson Productions, which developed a Young Ones-flavoured all-female sitcom called Girls On Top for Central Television – starring Tracey Ullman, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders – and the Elton-penned family saga Happy Families for the BBC. However it was for LWT (who made it) and Channel 4 (which showed it) that Jackson produced the biggest alternative comedy showcase of all, Saturday Live. For this show, the cavernous studio 1 at LWT’s complex on the South Bank of the Thames was filled with an audience, fairground rides and some of the most promising up and coming talent on the scene, both in the US and the UK. Over on BBC2, Des O’Connor Tonight and The Bob Monkhouse Show had been doing the same in their own relatively quiet way, giving comedians like Garry Shandling and Kelly Monteith their first UK television exposure, not to mention appearances from future US talk show demi-gods David Letterman and Jay Leno. However, while those programmes were chat shows, Saturday Live was a big, brash, noisy variety show. The pilot show was transmitted in January 1985: traditional in form, but amazingly revolutionary in content, the apex of everything that Jackson had been trying to bring to the small screen since Boom Boom Out Go The Lights.
Many performers came to prominence in Saturday Live and its successor Friday Night Live, not least Harry Enfield, in his regular spot as the Greek kebab shop owner-cum-philosopher Stavros. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who had first
emerged in the Cambridge Footlights class of ’81 – appearing in The Cellar Tapes at the Edinburgh Festival along with Penny Dwyer,50 Paul Shearer, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson – had also consolidated their television experience with regular appearances on Saturday Live. By 1987, their literate, absurdist humour was thought ripe for its own showcase, and a pilot show was commissioned. The choice of Roger Ordish, best known for his work on chat shows and Jim’ll Fix It, as producer may have come as a surprise to some observers, but in many ways he was perfect for the job. He had been schooled in university revue at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early sixties, before performing in a mid-sixties ATV stab at satire called Broad and Narrow. Ordish recalls how it came about: ‘Jim Moir was trying to find the right person to do them, and he was talking to John Lloyd. He said “You ought to try Roger Ordish. He’s their kind of person.” Jim was a bit surprised. I said “I’d love to,” and he said “Well, let’s see if it works.” I suppose I was identified with another kind of thing, whereas I felt that this was my sort of thing and the others weren’t.’51 The pilot went out on BBC1 on Boxing Day 1987 in a late-night slot. It went well enough to lead to a BBC2 series just over a year later in the prime 9pm comedy slot.
In its own way, A Bit of Fry and Laurie was as subversive a show as any of the more obviously abrasive offerings. Under the veneer of well-spoken wordplay and absurdity was a pure and rather beautiful rage against the machine of late eighties/early nineties Britain. Under the Thatcher government, the market was God and businessmen the new religious leaders. As a counterbalance, Fry and Laurie depicted businessmen as clueless idiots who swaggered around the boardroom swigging Scotch like it was going out of fashion, and saying ‘Damn’ rather a lot. As the Thatcher government was privatizing everything it thought it owned and making much of the word ‘choice’, BBC2 viewers were treated to sketches in which government ministers, dining in posh restaurants, had their cutlery taken away and replaced with hundreds of plastic coffee-stirrers. All were completely useless for the job in hand, but the diner had so much more choice than before.