by Louis Barfe
Doubtless there were efficiencies that could have been made, but there was a perception that Birt was putting in place a bureaucracy to police the new order, funded by money that would have been better spent on programming. One who perceived this from the sharp end was Roger Ordish:
The rot started with Birt, there’s absolutely no question about it. The whole thing was wrecked by one man. It was incredible. It was ludicrous. The things that I know are facts, are so incredible that people wouldn’t believe them. In our department, the only bit I can vouch for, there was a head of variety, a head of comedy and a head of the group. Birt arrived, everybody had to be swept away, even Jim Moir. David Liddiment arrived, with the encouragement of Birt. We had nine people called head of something, of whom Michael Leggo was one. You can’t be head of something unless you have an office with an outer office and a secretary who says ‘He’s in a meeting.’
Then, useful places were removed. We had a room and it had in it all the media you could want, so if you had a tape from Japan or Madagascar you could look at it, you could convert it to something else. Gone. To make way for the head of thinking about what I do or whatever it is. Unbelievable. We had a man called Tony James who was brilliant at sorting out your budget on the back of a cigarette packet. He’d say ‘We can do it, you can do each show for £8,000, provided you don’t try and spend up to the £8,000, give me back what you can because we can use that on something else.’ It worked. He was replaced with fourteen people. All of whom had to have offices and computers and so on. How can Birt say ‘We are now spending more money on programmes than we used to’? That’s the biggest lie. ‘I have increased the number of heads in light entertainment from three to nine, and that’s cutting down on bureaucracy.’ Is it?5
In 1993, Jim Moir was ousted as head of light entertainment, having held the post for six years and been head of variety for five years before that. It was the end of an era. From Pat Hillyard onwards, all BBC Television heads of light entertainment had been internal appointments, steeped in the lore of the Corporation, men who knew the system and how to work it to the advantage of their staff. ‘There was an ethos, an atmosphere, a collegiality, a feeling of the regiment within light entertainment group,’ Moir observes. ‘I wasn’t there under Ronnie Waldman, but I was a successor in the group that he ran, I worked with people he’d worked with, so I felt the spirit had been handed on. We all thought of ourselves as being part of the family firm.’6
Moir’s replacement, David Liddiment, had spent his entire career at Granada, taking over as head of entertainment in 1987 when Johnnie Hamp retired (Birt himself had been a Granada trainee, having been passed over for a BBC traineeship). Liddiment had a good record for commissioning hit shows and nurturing talent. He did a lot to bring future influential performers like Steve Coogan, Caroline Aherne and John Thomson to television, originally in north-west-only regional shows. With his credentials not being at issue, his appointment went down badly mainly thanks to the universal esteem in which his predecessor was held by his colleagues. Liddiment also suffered because he was perceived to represent the ill wind of needless change.
He maintains that the change was necessary. ‘I joined the entertainment department, which was in decline,’ he says. He also notes that there were massive financial differences between his two employers. ‘People were paid more money. Certainly stars were paid more money. Not being a commercial environment, the money consciousness that was part of the Granada culture – Granada was quite a mean company, it always looked after costs very tightly – wasn’t there at the BBC. We still had a deal with Jimmy Savile for Jim’ll Fix It, which was past its sell-by date. We still had The Paul Daniels Magic Show, which was past its sell-by date.’7
One of his first moves was to rename the light entertainment group. ‘He arrived, and he sent out a memo to the staff where he said “The light has to go,” and my feeling is that he spoke truer than he knew,’ quips Jim Moir, who had moved to become deputy director of corporate affairs.8 Liddiment stayed just two years at the BBC, returning to Granada as director of programmes at the newly acquired LWT. ‘I found the BBC a very political place, a lot of people spent a lot of time plotting their next move, their next foot on the career ladder. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but there was an opportunity to go back to Granada, and as somebody who had worked a lot in entertainment, London Weekend was an exciting place to go to and I was working with a group of people I’d worked with for many years. I wouldn’t have left if I’d been happy. I went to the BBC probably expecting to be there for the rest of my life. Anybody of my generation who grew up in television, the BBC was the pinnacle.’9
Just as Liddiment was abandoning the BBC, Jim Moir staged a remarkable resurgence, becoming controller of BBC Radio 2 and giving it a profile it hadn’t possessed since the days of the Light Programme. Moir was both clever and lucky to survive. In light entertainment, Birt’s reforms had come just as some of the most experienced producers were retiring. Stewart Morris had retired in 1991, bowing out with a Bruce Forsyth special before heading into an Indian summer of freelancing for LWT, and Yvonne Littlewood produced her last show in 1990 – a gala for the Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday. Others, who could normally have expected to spend another decade or more at the Corporation, took early retirement when it was offered, among them Roger Ordish, who left the Corporation in 1996, after producing Paul Daniels’ Secrets, the magician’s BBC swansong. In the Liddiment reforms, the old head of variety job had been renamed head of light entertainment and been given to Michael Leggo. Leggo had worked under Ordish at the start of his career, and this led to friction when the roles were reversed, as Ordish recalls:
It was Leggo. They say ‘Sorry. We have no shows to give you,’ and you say ‘Yes, but that’s only because you won’t give them to me. You’ve got shows to give to other people. What you’re saying is “I don’t want you here.”’ That’s always the problem. You get a new boss and they want their producers to be people whom they appointed, who are grateful to them, to put it mildly. [People who] will look to their leader rather than saying ‘I taught you everything you know.’ There’s that terrible hurt of not being wanted, but really of course it’s a much better thing to do.10
Panel games continued to thrive throughout the 1990s, particularly those made by Hat Trick, the company founded by former BBC radio LE trainee Jimmy Mulville and his then wife, Denise O’Donoghue. For Channel 4, they made Whose Line Is It Anyway?, an improvisation show hosted by former barrister Clive Anderson. It made the reputation of south London-born comedian Paul Merton, who consolidated his fame as a panellist on the topical quiz Have I Got News For You.
A Hat Trick production, it began on BBC2 on 28 September 1990, with Angus Deayton – from Radio 4’s Radio Active – as host, and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop as Merton’s rival team captain. There was very little particularly original about the format: Radio 4’s The News Quiz had been running since 1977. Meanwhile, at BBC Bristol in 1981 and 1982, Colin Godman had produced two series of a topical BBC2 quiz called Scoop, with contributions from film critic Barry Norman, musical comedian Richard Stilgoe, humorist Miles Kington and Hislop’s Private Eye elders Willie Rushton and Barry Fantoni. Have I Got News For You simply had the advantage to emerge at a time when regulation in broadcasting was being loosened, making it possible for satirists to get away with more than had previously been possible. The second series of Scoop had coincided with the Falklands War, and some of the most important stories of the week had been declared off-limits, much to Godman’s frustration.
Have I Got News For You made full use of its freedom, and proved popular enough to make the move to BBC1 in 2000. Along the way, it had substituted a tub of lard for an absent Roy Hattersley, had former spy David Shayler contribute to the show by satellite as he was not permitted to enter the UK, and brought the word ‘allegedly’ into national usage as a disclaimer for any dubious proclamations. The show survived Deayton’s sacking in 2002, following a sex
and drugs scandal, and continues with guest hosts, contracted until the end of 2009. Deayton’s firm grip on the proceedings is, however, often missed, and the quality of the guest-hosted editions is wildly variable.
As the nature of mainstream television entertainment changed during the nineties, elements of old-school variety re-emerged in Channel 4’s comedy output, previously the heartland of ‘alternative’ humour. The most literal manifestation was a 1991 series, Packet of Three, and its sequel Packing Them In, starring Frank Skinner, Jenny Eclair, Henry Normal and, later, Kevin Eldon. Part-sitcom set in a down-at-heel provincial variety theatre, part stand-up comedy-led variety show, it ran for two series but was overshadowed by another Channel 4 series of the era.
On 25 May 1990, Vic Reeves Big Night Out sprang onto British screens for the first time, its star already billed as ‘Britain’s top light entertainer and singer’. At first, the epithet appeared ironic, but as the series unfolded, it became apparent that a very deep and real love of traditional variety underpinned the surreal flights of Reeves’ creator Jim Moir (no relation), and his comedy partner, former solicitor Bob Mortimer. In its gorgeously warped way, each half hour was pure LE: Reeves’ entrance each week, singing an unlikely song – such as The Smiths’ ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ or ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ – in cabaret style, was a tip of the hat to every male singer who ever had his own show from Andy Williams to Val Doonican. In best chat show tradition, there was a house band, albeit dressed as jockeys for no apparent reason, and a gigantic host’s desk, clad with horse brasses. The mock-talent show ‘Novelty Island’ was Opportunity Knocks’ deranged cousin, the brown raincoat-wearing voyeur and pervert Graham Lister trying week after week to score a victory. There was also Judge Nutmeg’s ‘Wheel of Justice’, with overtones of Noel Edmonds’ ‘Whirly Wheel’; not to mention the ill-concealed plugs for dubious meat products and dangerous gewgaws made by Reeves and Mortimer’s own company, an echo of every star who ever took a freebie. The high-pitched, mithering Stott brothers, Donald and Davey, returned regularly in a variety of LE-related guises: as inept magicians, chat show hosts and as the presenters of This Is Your Life. Then there were the random ‘acts’ or ‘turns’ who cropped up, all played by Reeves and Mortimer. Among them were Talc and Turnips, the Aromatherapists, and a performance art duo called Action Image Exchange, whose long, pretentious introductions were followed by meaningless dances while wearing home-made Sean Connery masks.
Perhaps the clearest indication of Reeves and Mortimer’s sense of comic heritage came at the end of the second show of series one. Bob, claiming to be eighties pop star Rick Astley, was all set to close proceedings with a rendition of ‘She Wants to Dance With Me’. Midway through the song, Reeves emerged from the background, dressed in flat cap, horn-rimmed glasses and brown raincoat, holding a carrier bag, just as Eric Morecambe had in the later Thames shows. Shouting ‘Wahey’ and slapping Mortimer’s face, Reeves brought the show to a grinding halt.
Although Moir’s Vic Reeves act had been honed and developed in South London pubs, such as the Goldsmith’s Tavern in New Cross, his and Mortimer’s comic outlook was recognizably north-eastern, from the Teesside hinterland between Tyneside and North Yorkshire. Jimmy James had occupied similar absurd ground fifty years earlier. The club influence is obvious: the line about Asbley being a treat for pensioners is straight from the vocabulary of a working men’s club entertainments secretary. Reeves and Mortimer, aided by Harry Enfield’s scriptwriters Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, as well as Fred Aylward as the lab-coated mute savant Les, celebrated that whole earthy world of entertainment, but with a post-modern spin.
By 1993, Reeves and Mortimer had taken their world of surreal LE to BBC for The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, the spoof panel game Shooting Stars, and 1999’s underrated Bang Bang It’s Reeves and Mortimer, where clubland surfaced again in a spoof documentary set in a Hull nightspot. Various attempts to entertain the punters fail miserably. One of these is an ‘erotic’ night with ‘rude food’, including a vodka-based cocktail called ‘Simply the Breast’, garnished with an umbrella and an uncooked chicken breast. Later, the club’s resident compère ‘Kinky’ John Fowler, played by Reeves, runs a disastrous talent night and forms a boy band called Mandate, before running amok in the club with a gun.
A decade after Reeves and Mortimer made their Channel 4 debut, another young comedian, Peter Kay, was on the channel displaying his allegiance to clubland, north-western style, in the situation comedy Phoenix Nights. Kay himself played the petty, mean, pompous, wheelchair-bound club owner Brian Potter, but the contribution of his co-writer Dave Spikey, playing the compère Jerry Dignan – known professionally as Jerry ‘the Saint’ St Clair – must not be overlooked. Potter has almost no scruples, Jerry is a hypochondriac, a worrier and a man of conscience. In many ways, Phoenix Nights, in its affectionate presentation of the club scene, is a direct descendant of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club.
The main difference is that the comic artifice of the Wheeltappers was a frame within which genuine acts performed, while Phoenix Nights was completely fictional, and the acts were creations of Kay, Spikey and their collaborator Neil Fitzmaurice. Among them was the stunningly tactless psychic (spelled on a hand-painted banner as ‘pyskick’) Clinton Baptiste, played by Alex Lowe.
After offending everyone he picks on, with the disclaimer ‘I’m only telling you what the spirits are telling me’, Baptiste gets his comeuppance by choosing a burly audience member and declaring that he was ‘getting the word . . .nonce’.
While younger comedians were happy to take their cues from traditional LE through the nineties, mainstream TV entertainment producers tried to distance themselves from the big shows that had gone before. By 1999, even Noel’s House Party, once the iron horse of the BBC1 Saturday night schedules, was declared past its sell-by date. The manner in which the decision was reached and handled continues to rankle with Noel Edmonds:
The last two years were hell, because the Birt thing had really kicked in, we didn’t have enough money to do what we wanted to do, the viewer doesn’t go ‘Oh that’s quite a nice Gotcha bearing in mind that Noel’s had 15 per cent year-on-year cuts in the budget. They’re all doing very well.’ They just look at it and think ‘It’s not as good as it used to be’. It [the BBC] was a rudderless ship, and all of the key people eventually went. There was just a lack of confidence within the BBC, and I’m not the only person – a lot of people in current affairs, sports department – listen to Des Lynam about it, that’s why he was off. It was an unhappy end.11
However, the clearest indication for Edmonds that BBC LE wasn’t the big happy family it had once been came from some way below senior executive level:
They outsourced all of the security and reception at Television Centre. One Saturday, I turned up and the girl behind the desk asked me who I was and which production. I thought ‘Hmm, I’ve done 150 of these shows.’ It still was the premier entertainment show, and just behind her on the wall was a picture of me.
As Noel’s House Party was waning, a major hit was waxing at ITV, in the form of the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. In 1997, David Liddiment had replaced Marcus Plantin as director of programmes at the ITV Network Centre, and it was to him that the independent producer Celador took a quiz format called Cash Mountain, developed by David Briggs, Steve Knight and Mike Whitehill, who had been creating competitions for Chris Tarrant’s breakfast show on London’s Capital FM. The quiz itself wasn’t the innovation – it bore a striking resemblance to Double Your Money; it was the size of the prize. Also new was the presence of three lifelines: ‘Phone a Friend’, ‘50/50’ and ‘Ask the Audience’. Throughout the history of British television, prize levels had lagged behind those offered in the US. For many years, the Independent Broadcasting Authority had set the value of a small British family car as the upper limit. The BBC could not justify using licence money to buy big prizes, and could not accept obvious freebies under product pla
cement rules, and so was forced to be even less generous than ITV. Some hosts, such as Terry Wogan and Les Dawson on Blankety Blank, made a running joke out of the poor quality of the prizes. In 1993, the Independent Television Commission removed the upper limit. It was theoretically possible for a show to offer a top prize as large as £1 million, but nobody was in a position to do so. Celador finally hit on the idea of recruiting contestants via premium rate telephone lines.
At first, Liddiment was unconvinced, despite the enthusiastic backing of ITV’s head of entertainment Claudia Rosencrantz, but when Celador’s founder, ex-LWT producer Paul Smith, invited him to play the game with £250 of his own money, against a potential top prize of £2,000, Liddiment grasped the idea. Unsure of which answer to pick, he phoned a friend, then went 50/50 before deciding that an Aborigine was most likely to live in a wurley, rather than eat it, hunt with it or play it. He was right, and he doubled his money. A pilot programme misfired due to inappropriate incidental music and over-bright lighting, but once these had been fixed, Liddiment was ready to commission the show to run five nights a week, hosted by Chris Tarrant: