‘Yes,’ he’d say, ‘I can see the flags there on Duke’s meadow. Oxford are just going up, about a length ahead. No, I see Cambridge are coming up now.’ He used to do his commentary from those flags.
When he retired, they had a leaving party for him and someone said, ‘That chap over there is the man who works the flags at Duke’s Meadow.’
‘Oh,’ said John, ‘I’ll go and talk to him.’
He went over to the chap, who didn’t recognise him, and John said, ‘Look, you’re the man who does these flags. How on earth do you do it? You must have a tremendous knowledge about rowing. You’re so accurate, you get the exact distance and everything.’
‘Oh,’ the chap said, ‘it’s quite easy. I listen to John Snagge on the radio!’
One other thing about the Boat Race. John and I were on the towpath one Friday before the race. We’d gone to watch the crews, and a lady came up to us and said, ‘Oh, do tell me something. I’m very keen on the Boat Race. I’ve been coming for thirty years and I shall be on the towpath again tomorrow. But tell me one thing. Why are the same two teams always in the final?’
Then, of course, things are said wrong on the air; a lot to do with royalty, funnily enough. Max Robertson once, at the Guildhall, said, ‘Here comes the Queen of Norway wearing an off-the-hat face.’
Audrey Russell said, ‘The Queen Mother is looking very lovely in dark black,’ which is an interesting colour.
Stuart Hibberd was known as ‘The Golden Voice’, and I think he used to do them on purpose. There was a chap called Ernest Lush, who would play the piano in an interlude if a programme underran, and Stuart said once, ‘Now there will be an interlush from Ernest Lude!’
They would go to the Pump Room at Bath for chamber music and, inevitably, Stuart said, ‘We’re now going over to the bathroom at Pump!’
At the opening of Parliament once, they cued over to Henry Riddell, who was one of the commentators, and he said, ‘I’m sorry but you’re too late. The Queen’s just gone round the bend!’
You see, I said an awful lot of stories were to do with royalty, and there are two about them I must tell you.
About twenty-five years ago we used to do a radio programme called Sporting Chance. We would go to all the forces all over the world, when we had them then, and on one occasion we were with the Royal Air Force in Germany. We did this sporting quiz with them, and then they asked me if I would like to go around the hospital.
So I went round with the Commanding Officer and talked to the various men and when we came to one ward, the officer said, ‘A marvellous thing happened here about four months ago. The Queen Mother came. She went all down the ward, talking to everybody, and she came to a chap who was writhing in pain on the bed. She said, “What’s wrong with you, my man?”
‘“Ma’am, I’m in terrible pain,” he said. “I’ve got the most awful boil on my bum.”
‘“Ooh,” she said, “I hope it doesn’t hurt,” and was absolutely sweet; never turned a hair and was very sympathetic.
‘She passed down the ward, saw the other people and left. And, of course, when she’d gone, the sister came back and gave this chap a tremendous bollocking.
‘“How dare you talk like that in front of royalty. Make something up; say you’ve sprained your ankle, or anything, but never use a word like that again.”
‘“Sorry, sister,” he said, “I realise I shouldn’t have done it. I’ll never do it again.”
‘Unfortunately for him, a few weeks later Princess Margaret came out to inspect one of her Highland Regiments. She went down the ward and came to this chap and said, “What’s wrong with you?”
‘He remembered what he had promised the sister and he kept his word.
‘“Ma’am, I’m in terrible pain,” he said. “I’ve sprained my ankle.”
‘“Oh,” said the Princess, “the boil on your bum is better, is it?”’
You know what happens when a visiting President or King comes to stay at Buckingham Palace. They fly to Gatwick, where the Duke of Kent meets them on the royal train; they come to Victoria and their door opens slap opposite the red carpet.
The Queen greets them and presents the royal family and the Cabinet, and then the Queen and the President go out to the forecourt, where the Queen’s company of Grenadier Guards presents arms.
The national anthems are played and the President inspects the Guard of Honour. Then he and the Queen get into an open Victoria carriage and they clip clop back to Buckingham Palace, drawn by six Windsor Greys. Prince Philip and the wife get into one behind.
This happened some time ago, I’m assured, and all the procedure went exactly as planned: the royal train, the greetings, the bands playing and the Guard of Honour. Then the President and the Queen got into the open Victoria carriage and off went the six Windsor Greys.
The Queen was waving as they went along Buckingham Palace Road, and so was the President, when unfortunately one of the Windsor Greys let out a rather rude noise.
‘Sorry about that,’ said the Queen.
‘Ah,’ the President said. ‘The honesty of you British. Had you not apologised, I would have thought it was one of the horses!’
I told you that I used to do these things on In Town Tonight when I described the train. This was because In Town Tonight in the late forties and fifties was the top programme of them all, including television, because television couldn’t be seen outside London until 1950. So there were very few television viewers and there used to be twenty-two million listeners every Saturday night to In Town Tonight.
Anybody who was anybody, who came into London – politicians, film stars, businessmen – appeared on the programme. They were interviewed by John Ellison in the studio, but it was all very stilted because the whole thing was scripted. For instance, if a Mrs Smith had done something and was being interviewed, John would say, ‘How are you, Mrs Smith?’
‘I’m feeling very well, thank you, Mr Ellison.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘I come from Hemel Hempstead.’
She read it straight out and it was very dull. So Peter Duncan, the producer, thought they would break this up with a three or four minute live spot in the middle of the programme, either funny or exciting. They asked me to do it, and I did one hundred and fifty of them over four years. It was on most Saturdays and every night was a ‘first night’, because if it is live – that is, at the time and not recorded – you can’t say, ‘Sorry, I’ll do that again.’ You had to get it right.
The very first one was from the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. I was given a chair and a very dim light and I sat alone, surrounded by Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer, Mahon the Trunk murderer, and Dr Crippen, and it was terrifying. I was all alone and silent. I tried walking around and the floorboards creaked and something hit me on the head – it was a hangman’s rope!
Then, when I went to sit down, I heard a strange noise and I thought it was them, but it wasn’t: it was the tube running underneath. It was very frightening. I was only there on In Town Tonight for four minutes, but I stayed up until midnight. So it was a very eerie experience, and I’ve never been down the Chamber of Horrors since.
I did all sorts of things. I was very keen on the theatre so I went up on stage with the Crazy Gang during one of their shows. They invited me to take part as the victim in their Barber Shop sketch. I sat down and they poured coloured dyes all over me; they put soap down my mouth and poured water on me. I had to keep talking all the time because the audience were roaring with laughter so much. It made no sense and I could hardly speak with the soap in my mouth, but it was great fun to do.
They were marvellous to work with, except you had to be a bit careful around them. Bud Flanagan was a great, warm-hearted comedian but he did practical jokes all the time. Jack Hylton, who presented their shows, used to go off racing in the daytime. So he always kept a smart city suit hung up in Bud Flanagan’s dressing room, and when he came back in the evening he would
change into it, before going round the theatres to see his other shows.
Bud had the idea of employing a tailor to come in each day for about a week to take a little bit off the bottom of Jack’s trousers and sew them up again. Jack noticed nothing for about four days and then he began to let out his braces until after about seven or eight days he discovered what was going on!
Once I was in Bud’s dressing room and he helped me on with my overcoat and said, ‘Good night. Nice to have seen you.’ The next day, to my horror, as I handed it in at a function at a rather posh hotel, I saw written inside: This coat has been pinched from Bud Flanagan. Please inform the police at once.
I did what I think was my favourite broadcast when I wheeled a street piano outside the stage door of the Victoria Palace and by arrangement Bud Flanagan came out. When they cued over to me, he put his hands on my shoulder and together we sang ‘Underneath the Arches’, which is the only tune I can still play on the piano. That was a great moment, and I don’t think there is anybody else alive now who ever sang ‘Underneath the Arches’ with Bud, because dear old Chesney Allen is dead.
I did funny things like going on the stage when Jimmy Edwards was doing his act with a tuba. I was told that if you suck a lemon in front of people in a brass band, they all dry up. So I asked if he’d mind if I interrupted his act on a Saturday night to see if he could go on playing. Which I did.
I walked out on stage and said, ‘Jimmy, I challenge you to go on playing while I suck this lemon.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘It’s quite easy.’
He started off going … [tuba noises] … marvellous stuff – and gradually, as I sucked and sucked, he went … [splutter! splutter!] … and he couldn’t play. So that worked!
I was the hind legs of a donkey at the London Palladium with Tommy Trinder, and once they put me inside a pillar box. They searched the whole of the British Isles and they found one big enough to take me, outside the Post Office at Oxford. The idea was to help the Post Office at Christmas time and when the letters came through to say, ‘Well, that one should have had another stamp on it; that one’s badly addressed,’ and so on.
So I got inside with my microphone and I was talking away and you could hear the noise of the letters dropping in, and when my stopwatch showed that I had got about thirty seconds to go, I said to the listeners, ‘I’m just going to stand up now,’ and I could hear the clip clop of high heels coming.
I saw a woman’s hand about to post a letter and I put my hand out and took it. The poor lady fainted!
I went out in the street, disguised as a tramp, with a hidden microphone and sang ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. That needs a lot of moral courage, to go out in a crowded Strand, as it was on a Saturday night, and start singing. So if I ever see someone singing now, I try to give them something – ten pence perhaps – because I know what they’re feeling. In fact, I think I earned about thirteen pennies in three minutes, which wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing.
I was even hypnotised once, which I won’t go into great detail about, but roughly, if you are going to be hypnotised, you have to agree that you want to be hypnotised first. This chap got me under and he made me laugh as if I was crazy. I knew I was laughing and I couldn’t stop until he clicked his fingers and just said, ‘Right. Open your eyes.’
We put it out on the air and it sounded perfectly all right to us but the telephone never stopped ringing with people either saying it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, or saying it was disgraceful, it was maniacal and the devil had taken hold of Mr Johnston! So that was unfortunate, but it is one of the penalties of doing things ‘live’.
One other thing we tried. You know you can see an advertisement in the paper saying: ‘Meet me under the clock at Victoria at eleven o’clock.’ Who reads these? Who puts them in? We thought we’d try it out and I knew the editor of the Evening News, so I said, ‘Would you put this in on Friday night? Don’t tell anybody and we’ll see what happens.’ The notice was:
Well set-up young gentleman with honourable intentions invites young ladies seeking adventure to meet him on the steps of the Criterion Restaurant, Lower Regent Street, 7.15 p.m. Saturday. Identified by red carnation and blue and white spotted scarf. Code words: ‘How’s your uncle?’
I thought we must have a password, because I couldn’t believe anyone would come, and at least I could go out and shout, ‘How’s your uncle?’ to passers-by.
So, I’d been doing cricket at Lord’s and came down in a taxi about quarter past seven, and said to the taxi driver, ‘Hurry up, I’m a bit late.’
He said, ‘I can’t do anything, Mr Johnston. Piccadilly is very crowded.’
So I said, ‘Well, I’ll get out,’ and I made my way through the crowds and into the front of the Criterion and then looked out through the revolving door into Lower Regent Street and it was absolutely jam-packed.
Police were holding everybody back. There were young ladies, some beautiful and some not so beautiful, and dotted among the crowd, young men with blue and white spotted scarves and red carnations. I told the listeners, ‘This is going to be chaotic, but I’ve got to go out there and try to interview these ladies.’
So I went out and there was a loud roar of ‘How’s your uncle?’ and I interviewed some of them and they all swore that they knew nothing about it being a broadcast. They’d wanted to see what this adventure was and, very nice of them, they weren’t disappointed that I was neither well set-up, young, or a gentleman.
But it showed that the ad worked and it got an amazing reaction. The People next day had headlines on the front page: ‘STUPID BBC STUNT STAMPEDES PICCADILLY’ … ‘disgraceful Brian Johnston’ … and so on.
So I had my tail between my legs a bit on Monday morning when I went to see my boss, expecting a rocket. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I obviously made a porridge of it.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘they always say we’re a staid old Auntie BBC, but as soon as we do something unusual they attack us, so we’ll support you, Brian.’
So I said, ‘Thanks very much,’ and left the room.
I had this awful habit then (and I’ve still got it) of ringing people up and pretending to be someone else. A few minutes after I’d left the room, the telephone rang and my boss picked up the receiver and said, ‘Yes.’
And the voice said, ‘Inspector Wilson here from West End Central Police Station. I want to complain.’
My boss said, ‘Look, Brian, we’ve had enough of this. Would you mind ringing off.’ Bang! He slammed the phone down.
Of course, the chap rang back about two minutes later and said he really was the Inspector!
My son Barry has put together a little montage of four things that I did. The first one is when I went to the circus at Harringay. They had an act where a horse went cantering around and people from the audience were invited to try and get up on him. They were helped up, to see if they could kneel and then stand on his back and, if they fell, there was rope they could hold on to.
This went on for about ten minutes and then a clown, who was sitting in the audience disguised as an ordinary member of the public, would always come up and do somersaults and all sorts of things. He ended his act by pretending to fall off. You see, he was an expert rider and, as he fell, he used to pull a little tape which released his trousers and they always fell off as he landed in the ring.
They said to me, ‘Right. You can do that.’ So I want you to imagine a packed Harringay Circus seeing a BBC man losing his trousers, and this is what happened:
[The theatre audience hears a tape recording]
Ringmaster: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now “on the air” and tonight we have a distinguished guest with us, Mr Brian Johnston of In Town Tonight, and he’s going to have a go.’
Brian: ‘Well, here we go. I am approaching the horse. I’ll just give him a pat. That’s all right. Now, up we go and we are going to try and get up there. Give me a leg up, can you? Whoa! Whoa! No! I’m
not up yet!
‘Right. I’m cantering around. I’m just sitting up on the horse now and he’s going very nicely, a nice steady canter. He’s a good horse. And now in a moment I’m going to try and get up on all fours, which is what one has to do, and I’m sitting up … Argh! Steady with that whip!
‘I’m on all fours now, rather like a cat. I think I’m doing pretty well. But now comes the moment in every circus when you have to stand up on a horse. I’m going to hold on to the rope with one hand, which I’m doing. I’m going to stand up with one leg. I can’t get up! I’m standing up … I’m standing up!’
[Cheers from the circus audience]
‘Argh! … Oh No!’
[Roars of laughter]
‘I’m afraid to say my trousers have come off!’
[More laughter]
Well, they had fallen off, and imagine the reaction. It had quite a funny sequel. About a week later, some friends of mine went there, and the clown came out and did his usual act and lost his trousers, like I did. They heard someone behind them say, ‘Oh, look at that chap. He’s copying what Brian Johnston did on Saturday night!’
Next, I discovered there was a strong lady called Joan Rhodes. She was a smashing blonde, with bristling muscles, but she was very strong. She used to get telephone directories in her stage act and tear them in half – she was huge, with big hands.
An Evening with Johnners Page 4