Turned Out Nice Again Read online

  Reith’s wariness towards performers was echoed by the uncertainty many variety managers, agents and performers felt about broadcasting. It was possible to tour with the same act for years, but radio was seen as a voracious consumer of new material, with the added disincentive of poor remuneration. Many bookers put clauses in artists’ contracts forbidding them from broadcasting. Walter Payne, head of Moss Empires, refused to have anything to do with the BBC until 1925, when a limited amount of co-operation began. As a result, the wireless had mostly to make do with second-rate or untried performers. One of these was a Liverpudlian comedian, Tommy Handley, who began his broadcasting career in a revue called Radio Radiance in 1924. With the wealth of experience he was able to gain in these pioneering days, he didn’t remain second-rate for long, and within fifteen years of his radio debut, he was the top broadcasting comedian.

  For a long time, the BBC avoided frivolity altogether on Sundays. Taking 1 November 1924 as a typical Sabbath, broadcasts on 2LO – the BBC’s London station – began at 3pm with Big Ben, followed by a march from the Band of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and continued through the classical repertoire, culminating in two broadcasts by De Groot and his Piccadilly Orchestra including highlights from Verdi and Wagner. As the twenties gave way to the thirties, the BBC was forced to take the lighter end of its output more seriously because of the growth of commercial stations like Radio Paris, Radio Normandie and Radio Luxembourg, which were beaming their signals over from the Continent. Free of regulation and the wrath of Reith, they had no need to be solemn. Unsupported by licence fee funding, they took in advertising, and manufacturers were keen to get their names on variety shows. Davy Burnaby, one of the stars of the long-running Co-Optimists revue of the twenties, could be found on Radio Luxembourg in the mid-thirties, leading the ‘Rinsoptimists’ in a show sponsored by Rinso detergent. His merry band included the young Welsh banjoleist Tessie O’Shea. Meanwhile, George Formby – son of the bronchial northern turn and purveyor of cheeky, but never smutty comic songs – was a regular in Feen-A-Mint Fanfare, sponsored by one of the leading laxatives of the day. Without much competition from Reith’s organization, the continental stations had the lion’s share of the Sunday listenership.

  The development of variety at the BBC had also been hampered by the absence of a dedicated executive. Although a revue and vaudeville department was created in March 1930, it remained the province of the director of drama, initially R.E. Jeffrey, ‘an ex-actor of the boldly extrovert school’.32 Eventually the mantle passed to bearded, swordstick-toting Val Gielgud, brother of actor John. The most important early innovator in radio drama, he regarded his variety responsibilities as a nuisance, and was greatly relieved, in 1933, when Reith took them away and gave them to Gielgud’s friend, Eric Maschwitz, editor of the Radio Times.

  Maschwitz was ideally suited to being the BBC’s first director of variety, being as much a lyricist, playwright and novelist as he was a journalist. Born in Birmingham, he was educated at Repton and Cambridge, devoting more time to his Footlights membership and his extra-curricular writing than to his studies, so that he considered himself lucky to have scraped through his finals.33 He moved to London after graduation, published his first novel and married the revue artist Hermione Gingold, which gave him a thorough grounding in handling performers. In need of more regular work, he had, at the suggestion of his friend Lance Sieveking, another pioneering BBC producer, applied to join the Company, becoming an assistant in the outside broadcast department in 1926. This proved to be a very temporary appointment, as his writing skills made him the ideal internal candidate for the job of managing editor at the Radio Times, keeping the brilliant but disorganized editor Walter Fuller in line. Unfortunately, Fuller died of a heart attack within weeks of Maschwitz’s appointment, and he suddenly found himself in the editor’s chair.

  Maschwitz’s dual song- and playwriting careers began while he was still at the Radio Times, as a favour to Val Gielgud – his main selling point being that as a BBC staff member he wouldn’t need extra payment for such work. He wrote a technically complex radio play based on Compton Mackenzie’s novel Carnival, which ‘used so many studios that we practically tied Savoy Hill in knots’.34 Nonetheless, it was judged a success and soon Gielgud was in need of a musical. Maschwitz had been introduced to an impecunious young composer called George Posford, and they collaborated on a show called Good Night, Vienna. Maschwitz admitted that ‘the story included almost every sugary cliché imaginable’ but praised Posford’s ‘fresh and tuneful’ score.

  To their surprise, the morning after the broadcast, film producer Herbert Wilcox called offering £200 for the film rights. It became one of the first musical talkies to be made in Britain, starring Jack Buchanan and Anna Neagle, the future Mrs Herbert Wilcox. It was a success in West End cinemas, but a possibly apocryphal story suggests it was less well received elsewhere. Passing a south London cinema where it was showing, Maschwitz is reported to have asked the commissionaire how it was faring. ‘About as well as Good Night, Lewisham would do in Vienna’ came the reply.

  Maschwitz liked to present himself as a dilettante, to whom things happened largely by happy accident. This belies his considerable natural talent, charm and ability to negotiate a path through the already problematic politics of the BBC. Broadcasting House had opened in 1932, and Colonel G. Val Myer’s design was perfect for broadcasting in all but one regard: its size. Even from the outset, it was too small for the Corporation’s ever-expanding activities, which included the start of the Empire Service (later External Services, now World Service) that year. When Maschwitz took over in 1933, variety had two dedicated studios in the basement of the new building – BA for general ‘vaudeville’ programmes, BB for the use of the BBC Dance Orchestra, under the direction of Henry Hall since February 1932. Nonetheless, Maschwitz ‘began to gaze longingly across Langham Place at St George’s Hall’.35

  Once the home of David Devant and John Nevil Maskelyne’s magic shows, it had been dark for some time, and Maschwitz suggested that the variety department should take it over. Initially sceptical, the engineers conducted acoustic tests and declared that it was not merely adequate for broadcasting but perfect. Maschwitz moved his gargantuan desk (actually a boardroom table that had been rejected by the BBC governors) and his staff into the building. This phalanx included new, dedicated producers like John Watt, brought over from the BBC’s Belfast outpost by Gielgud; former schoolmaster Bryan Michie, who went on to discover Morecambe and Wise for his Youth Takes A Bow show; and Harry S. Pepper and John Sharman, a pair of hoofers who had both learned their trade in concert parties.

  The decision to get out was a mark of Maschwitz’s shrewdness. He noted that, at Broadcasting House, the BBC was ‘undoubtedly on the way to becoming a trifle “grand”’, with the weekly Programme Board meeting assuming ‘the hushed solemnity of a Cabinet conference’. St George’s Hall provided ‘a pleasant sense of escape’ for the variety department, described variously by Maschwitz as ‘surely the most assorted and co-operative collection of characters ever assembled’, and ‘my band of incorrigible bohemians’.36 Unsurprisingly, they thrived in the old theatre atmosphere, away from the sleek, austere modernity of BH – as the new building was and remains known to BBC staff.

  Apart from the dance bands, early radio variety had consisted of revues, concert parties and monologues, and these continued well into the thirties with Music Hall, produced by John Sharman, and Harry S. Pepper’s Kentucky Minstrels. This programme was very much a continuation of the family business for Pepper, son of Will C. Pepper, who had been running blackface minstrel concert parties since the 1890s. Although no make-up was needed for the radio version, the songs remained the same, drawing on the Stephen Foster catalogue. Not that Pepper was always looking to the past for inspiration. He was the main instigator of Monday Night at Seven and its successor Monday Night at Eight, a portmanteau show combining variety, the ‘Inspector Hornleigh Investigates’ detect
ive stories and ‘Puzzle Corner’, hosted by fellow producer Ronnie Waldman.

  There was innovation in the air too. Producer Max Kester introduced Marx Brothers-style humour to the British airwaves in Danger – Men at Work, which he also wrote, while John Watt pioneered a semidocumentary approach in Songs from the Shows, where the stories behind famous compositions were explained. Despite these great strides, variety moguls like GTC boss George Black were at best dubious of broadcasting. From October 1928, Black had allowed live relays from the Palladium and the venture was successful enough for Oswald Stoll to join in shortly after. However, in 1931, when the economic downturn had kicked in fully, Black pulled out. It took all of Maschwitz’s charm and persuasion to restore relations and show the variety moguls that broadcasting was an additional shop window for their artists, not a rival outlet, allowing relays to resume.

  The most lasting success of the Maschwitz era was a show he created himself, the Saturday evening magazine programme In Town Tonight, ‘devised to provide a shop window for any topical feature that might bob up’. The first edition was something of a shambles, apart from the final item, where the bandleaders of the day returned to the ranks and played (as they had at the silver wedding party of Christopher Stone, the first presenter to make a feature of playing gramophone records on the radio). It improved quickly and remained a fixture in the Saturday evening radio schedules until September 1960. Most memorable of all was its opening sound montage, featuring a Piccadilly flower-seller yelling the programme’s title, and sound effects of the London traffic, all of which came to a halt when announcer Freddie Grisewood issued the command ‘STOP!’, making way for Eric Coates’s evocative ‘Knightsbridge March’.

  In the summer of 1937, Maschwitz accepted an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to become a Hollywood screenwriter. His four years as director of variety had turned the BBC from a grudging provider of jollity into an entertainment powerhouse, and it was John Watt’s job to carry on the work.

  The radio had represented a major change in the way the British people were entertained. Previously, making your own entertainment had been a popular option. In pre-music hall days, better-off families often had a piano or a harmonium in the front parlour, around which everyone would congregate to sing. Poorer families usually had no such luxury, but banjos, ukuleles and harmonicas could be found reasonably cheaply, while rhythmic accompaniment could be improvised on a pair of spoons or bones. The music halls, variety theatres and later the cinemas provided entertainment for all, with seats at prices that ranged from reasonable to exorbitant. Most importantly, it was mass entertainment, entertaining thousands at a time. However, broadcasting could entertain millions at a time without them having to leave their homes. Of course, those in miserable, drab abodes will have wanted to leave them as often as possible and enter the escapist world of the local Empire or Gaumont, but as living standards improved, this became less of an issue. Broadcasting also represented good value. A radio licence cost ten shillings a year at a time when the cheapest seat in the Odeon Leicester Square was two shillings and sixpence. This counted for a lot in the depression that stretched from 1929 to the start of the Second World War.

  During Maschwitz’s reign at St George’s Hall, the development of a new mass medium had been gathering momentum. Between 1924 and 1930, John Logie Baird’s experiments in television had progressed from transmitting a crude image of a Maltese cross a few yards to sending real drama and variety, of an admittedly limited nature, over long distances. The picture had only 30 lines of resolution, compared with the 625 in a modern standard-definition television image, but it proved a source of fascination to the early adopters of the day, who built their own sets or bought a Baird ‘Televisor’ for 25 guineas. The only thing Baird was missing was a decent-sized transmitter, and the obvious answer was to approach the BBC. Unfortunately, the appeal of television wasn’t so obvious to Reith, who took against Baird in no uncertain terms, while the Corporation’s chief engineer Peter Eckersley admitted to grave misgivings over the technical quality of Baird’s efforts. So the initial approach was rebuffed.

  Eventually, after much negotiation, the BBC agreed to facilitate test transmissions from 30 September 1929, using the 2LO radio transmitter on the roof of Selfridges department store, for half an hour each morning with additional trials after closedown. At first, sound and vision could not be transmitted simultaneously, 2LO having only one frequency. Consequently they were broadcast in alternating two-minute chunks. The twain met when the twin-wavelength Brookmans Park transmitting station replaced 2LO in early 1930, and soon the first play with synchronized sound and vision was broadcast – a production of The Man with the Flower in His Mouth by Luigi Pirandello. By 1932, the experiments had moved from Baird’s premises on Long Acre into the new Broadcasting House.

  Entertainment found a home within the new medium from the off, and the gents from St George’s Hall were roped in to organize the pioneering shows, originated in the basement of Broadcasting House. One example of an early TV variety show was Looking In, broadcast on 21 April 1933 at 11.12pm. Written by John Watt, with music by Harry S. Pepper, it featured Anona Winn – later to become famous as one of the panellists on Twenty Questions – and a dance act by the Paramount Astoria Girls.37 The 30-line transmissions continued until September 1935, but the need for higher definition was obvious. A wing of the Alexandra Palace building in Wood Green was acquired for studios and a transmitter mast. The Palace, known to the public as Ally Pally, but in the abbreviation-heavy BBC as AP, had been built in 1873 as an exhibition centre and show place. It was intended to be north London’s answer to the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, but was a white elephant from the start. Its lowest ebb came during the First World War when it was used as an internment camp for prisoners of war and other enemy aliens.

  When television arrived at AP, the technology was far from finalized. Baird had developed a system capable of 240 lines, initially using a messy and cumbersome process involving a film camera from which the film was developed instantaneously, but by the time he achieved this, he no longer had the field to himself. In 1931, the HMV and Columbia record companies had merged to form Electric and Musical Industries, or EMI. HMV had been an early leader, but by the time of the merger, the Columbia side of the company was making the running in research and development, thanks to a restless inventor called Alan Dower Blumlein. By the early thirties, Blumlein had invented a system of electric recording that beat the existing American-made Westrex system hands down without infringing a single patent, and had developed the method of stereo disc recording that would finally be adopted by the industry in 1958. To focus on television, EMI joined forces with the Marconi company, with work proceeding at EMI’s Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, under Isaac Shoenberg. By 1936, Shoenberg’s team, in which Blumlein played a vital role, had succeeded in producing a purely electronic system, and one that was capable of a 405-line picture using cameras known as Emitrons. A date of 2 November 1936 was set for the launch of the BBC’s new high-definition television service, using the Baird and Marconi-EMI systems on alternate weeks. Baird won the toss to go first.

  However, the planners had reckoned without the first director of television, Gerald Cock, who as head of outside broadcasts for BBC Radio, had been used to turning thoughts into action quickly. He decided that the Radiolympia exhibition in August 1936 would be an ideal showcase for the new service. The technicians insisted the equipment wouldn’t be ready and the producers said there wouldn’t be enough programme material, but, somehow, programme chief Cecil Madden conjured up the required elements and the service was on air over two months early, broadcasting both to the exhibition from Alexandra Palace and from the exhibition itself. After a hiatus, while the lessons of the experiment were absorbed and limited test transmissions took place, the launch proper went ahead as planned. At 3pm on 2 November, the Baird system went on air with speeches from BBC chairman R.C. Norman, Postmaster General the Rt Hon. G.C. Tryon, Television Advisory
Committee chairman Lord Selsdon, and Baird chairman Harry Greer. Then, accompanied by the BBC Television Orchestra under the baton of Hyam ‘Bumps’ Greenbaum, Adele Dixon sang a song composed for the occasion, called ‘Television is Here’:

  A mighty maze of mystic, magic rays

  Is all about us in the blue,

  And in sight and sound they trace

  Living pictures out of space

  To bring a new wonder to you.

  Following Miss Dixon were the black American dancers Buck and Bubbles. Television had launched with a variety show. A bill of only two acts, but the intent was clear. Greenbaum conducted a sound-only orchestral interlude between 3.30pm and 4pm, when it was back to the top for the benefit of viewers on the Marconi-EMI system. So, the second programme on British television was a repeat.

  Baird’s system was capable of high-quality pictures, but it was held back by the intermediate film technique, which limited camera movement and angles, while also requiring a large investment in film stock and processing. Moreover, the ‘Spotlight’ announcement studio required the announcers to wear heavy make-up. Intermediate film was only a stopgap while Baird developed suitable electronic cameras, but the Marconi-EMI system had already achieved this with its Emitrons, so from February 1937, the Baird system transmissions were discontinued.

  In terms of programming, one of television’s earliest successes was the magazine programme Picture Page, created and produced by Madden, and first broadcast as a test in the hiatus between Radiolympia and the full launch. Picture Page was effectively In Town Tonight in vision, with topical items and guests introduced by the Canadian actress Joan Miller. Miller ‘connected’ the viewers with the various guests, on a prop switchboard with a television screen in the front panel. No actual recordings of the pre-war run survive,38 but the odd Picture Page item does exist on the demonstration film that was shown each morning before live programmes started. One of these includes a gorgeous moment where announcer Leslie Mitchell is shown how to eat healthily from the nation’s hedgerows by an aged military gentleman. Sprinkling his chickweed liberally with pepper, Mitchell almost chokes on his first mouthful.