Turned Out Nice Again Read online

  That Picture Page was a small-scale variety show masquerading as an interview programme is underlined by the other programme Miller and Madden worked on: International Cabaret. In it, as the title suggests, continental speciality acts working in London’s clubs trekked up to AP to perform for the tiny number of viewers lucky or rich enough to afford a television set. Miller linked the acts from her switchboard, which now featured a placard saying ‘Grand Hotel’ instead of a television screen. The edition of 12 March 1937 showcased The Bryants (billed as ‘silent comics’), an acrobatic outfit called the Seven Menorcas, singer and dancer Lu Anne Meredith and the Knife-Throwing Denvers.

  Unencumbered by the mutual suspicion of the early days of wireless, even the big stars came up from the West End to feed the new medium. Stanley Lupino and Laddie Cliff, with pianist Billy Mayerl – billed by the Radio Times as ‘the Three Musketeers of musical comedy’39 – were televised from Alexandra Palace in late January 1937, just as their show Over She Goes was packing them in at the Saville Theatre. Mayerl made a return visit to Ally Pally in March for a self-explanatory series called Composer at the Piano.

  Older performers also got a look-in, with Old Time Music Hall, produced by Harry Pringle. One edition in March 1937 starred Fred ‘I’m the Black Sheep of the Family’ Barnes40 and Harry Champion, both of whose stars had shone brightest in the days before variety. Meanwhile, Harry S. Pepper transferred his radio minstrelsy to television with The White Coons Concert Party, first transmitted on 23 January 1937. Along with Pepper and Doris Arnold on their two pianos, and banjo dervish ‘Lightning’ Joe Morley, comedian Tommy Handley – already a wireless veteran – made his first television appearance.

  The size and scope of the shows was limited by the size of the studios: Alexandra Palace A (the Marconi-EMI studio) and B were both 70 feet by 30 feet. Really big shows could be staged by linking them, but performers had to rush down the corridor separating the studios between scenes. Another limitation was the technology of the time, the Emitron cameras having a limited depth of field. However, taking an outside broadcast unit to a theatre enabled larger-scale spectacles to reach the small screen. One such outing was organized for 12 September 1939, for the premiere of the new musical comedy I Can Take It at the Coliseum, starring husband and wife performers Jessie Matthews and Sonnie Hale. Viewers were promised ‘a medley of boiled shirts, fashionable dresses, wisecracks, and opulence’41 as distinguished guests were accosted in the foyer by announcer Leslie Mitchell; this was to be followed by fellow announcer Lionel Gamlin interviewing Matthews and Hale in their dressing room and then, finally, the opening of the show itself.

  Sadly, the viewers would have seen nothing but blank screens. On 1 September 1939, in anticipation of the declaration of war, the Television Service closed down. The primary reason was the fear that the Alexandra Palace transmitter would be an invaluable navigational aid for the Luftwaffe. The instruction was to close at noon, but a Mickey Mouse cartoon, Mickey’s Gala Premiere, went out as planned at 12.05pm, followed by the test card for fifteen minutes, then closedown.42

  War brought television to a temporary halt but it didn’t kill off radio completely, though rationalization was required. The National and Regional Programmes were merged immediately into a single programme – the Home Service – transmitted nationally on just two wavelengths. Again, the idea was to fox the Luftwaffe. If all transmitters were using the same frequency, it would be harder to use them for directions. The variety department was evacuated, at first to Bristol, its work now of vital importance in maintaining morale. Through the disarray of the move, organist Sandy MacPherson almost single-handedly kept the schedules going from the Compton theatre organ in St George’s Hall, playing tuneful light music wherever a gap had opened up. Once the new shop was set up, the pre-war hits continued their runs.

  The biggest hit was the comedy show Bandwaggon, starring ‘big-hearted’ Arthur Askey and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch. The series had started badly in January 1938, facing cancellation after only three shows. It was rescued when its stars took over the writing themselves and moved the bulk of the action to a fictitious flat on the roof of Broadcasting House, where they lived with a menagerie that included a goat called Lewis and a cockerel called Gerald (almost certainly an homage to the BBC’s director of television, Gerald Cock). Characters such as the charlady Mrs Bagwash and her daughter Nausea were introduced, along with catchphrases like ‘Ay theng yew’ and ‘proper humdrum’, and soon the show became a firm favourite. The two stars were contrasting, but complementary characters: Askey was an earthy Liverpudlian concert-party performer with a love of corny jokes, while the Cambridge-educated Murdoch was urbane and well-spoken. However, they accounted for only twenty minutes of each show (which sometimes lasted an hour, sometimes forty minutes), the rest consisting of fairly straight items like ‘Mr Walker Wants To Know’, in which an actor called Syd Walker presented moral dilemmas and asked ‘What would you do, chums?’

  This slot was ideal in wartime, as it could be used to underline matters of national importance, such as security. In the show of 30 September 1939, barely a month after the outbreak of war, Walker demonstrated the dangers of listening to gossip. The rumour was out that the Germans had sunk HMS Rodney. Eventually, it emerges that a small freighter has been sunk, but that the captain and all the crew have been saved. The captain’s name? Rodney.

  War changed the flavour of the comedy slightly too. In peacetime, head of variety John Watt had commented that ‘it is said that there are only six jokes in the world, and I can assure you that we cannot broadcast three of them’. (Proscribed topics included marital infidelity, stuttering and deafness, although Watt was unsure how deaf people were able to complain about programmes they couldn’t hear.) By October 1939, he’d decided that there had been ‘an addition to the list of permissible jokes in the person of Hitler’.43 In the same show as Mr Walker’s careless talk dilemma, Murdoch and Askey made full use of the concession:

  MURDOCH: Let’s tell them the joke about old Nasty’s father and mother.

  ASKEY: No, the censor had that out this morning, if I remember rightly.

  MURDOCH: Yes, in any case, Big, remember what we agreed. We were going to give old Nasty a rest this week and talk about something else for a change.

  ASKEY: Yes, but I feel you’d like to say something about him, you know. He’s pinched a lot of our publicity, hasn’t he? I mean, he’s had his name in the paper every day this week.

  MURDOCH: Anyway, Mrs Bagwash isn’t worried about him.

  ASKEY: Oh, she doesn’t care a hoot. She said to me this morning ‘It’s no good those Germans sitting up in those balloons over London trying to frighten us, because they can’t.’44

  This influential series came to an end in November 1939, and the job of entertaining the nation fell to other comedy shows, such as Happidrome and Garrison Theatre. Three service-based comedy shows played an important part too: from the fictitious HMS Waterlogged came Navy Mixture with Eric Barker and Jon Pertwee; the Army contributed Stand Easy with Charlie Chester; while the Royal Air Force pitched in with the most enduring of the three, the sublime, whimsical Much Binding in the Marsh, written by its stars, Kenneth Horne, and, on vital war work, Richard Murdoch.

  However, the true successor to Bandwaggon in the listeners’ affections had begun in July 1939, under a title borrowed from a newspaper headline about ‘Old Nasty’: It’s That Man Again. That man was Askey’s fellow Liverpudlian Tommy Handley, by now a consummate radio performer. With almost everyone apart from the Daily Express acknowledging that war was just around the corner, Ted Kavanagh’s pun-laden, quick-fire scripts included a German spy character, Funf, from the second show; he was played by Jack Train, speaking sideways into a glass tumbler for a telephone effect. Just how quick-fire ITMA was is remembered by John Ammonds, who joined the BBC as a 29-shillings-a-week sound effects operator in 1941, aged 17. After a month’s training in London, he received the call to go west:

 
They said ‘How do you fancy going to Bristol for a month?’ I didn’t realize that would be the start of about thirty years in light entertainment. We did ITMA live. It makes me shudder to think of that now. Most of the effects were done at the microphone because we couldn’t time it on disc. That was an incredible experience with all the teamwork. I’ve got a picture of me somewhere, blowing bubbles into a bowl for the ‘Don’t forget the diver’ sound effect. Horace Percival [who played the Diver] on one side, Tommy on the other and me with a BBC soup bowl. It was very fast-moving for its time, although all the puns are a bit tiresome now.45

  It soon became apparent that Bristol was not the safe haven that the BBC variety department had hoped for. Ammonds remembers the air raids being worse than those he’d experienced in London. One night, the sound effects library took a direct hit. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but a safer berth was soon found at Bangor on the north Wales coast, and the variety department moved there in April 1941. Ammonds’s memories of the place are very fond: ‘I spent an incredible two and a half years in Bangor, learning show business. No university could give me the instruction I had in that time. I was working with Jack Buchanan, Evelyn Laye, Robb Wilton and all these big stars of the time.’

  Bangor proved to be ideal until London was deemed safe enough again in the summer of 1943, though Ammonds does recall one incident there:

  One night, a German bomber must have got lost coming back from bombing Belfast, and jettisoned a couple of bombs on Bangor. We were in the middle of transmission, from a church hall. On the archive recording, suddenly you hear this crunch. They took us off the air, because they didn’t want the Germans to know where we were. Charlie Shadwell was conducting, Kay Cavendish and Paula Green were singing ‘It Ain’t What You Do, It’s the Way That You Do It’, and the German pilot must have taken heed.46

  By May 1944, ITMA had the ears of 40 per cent of the listening public, and it was credited with a major role in keeping morale high on the home front. Once the euphoria of victory had passed, however, it became clear that the world of variety had changed forever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A wizard time for all

  Victory in Europe came on 8 May 1945, and the response was a massive national sigh of relief, followed by the sort of party that can only come after nearly six years of having very little to celebrate. Hubert Gregg, who had written ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’, wrote a song about getting lit up when the lights went on in London, and many followed the lyrics to the letter. Trafalgar Square was awash with drunken revellers, some up lamp-posts, others in the fountains. For the first few hours of peace, at least, the nation was happy to entertain itself.

  The post-war era of radio variety began at 8.30pm on Thursday 10 May 1945, with V-ITMA, purporting to be a live relay from the seaside town of Foaming at the Mouth. It opened with an exhortation to wave flags and greet Mayor Handley as he gave a speech from the balcony of the town hall. Some of the local urchins chose to greet the Mayor with their catapults while other more civic-minded children suggested that he was ‘a jolly decent chap’ who was ‘going to give us a wizard time’.1 For the next four years until his untimely death, Tommy Handley did give the nation a wizard time, and when he passed on, his was a hard act to follow.

  ITMA and radio variety adjusted to peacetime conditions very swiftly, despite losing many humorous targets with the demise of the Nazis. Radio was still the dominant entertainment medium, television being off-air until the summer of 1946 and, even then, some years away from being a mass medium. Live variety was important, but it took a couple of years of peace to get back to full strength in its metropolitan heartland, while in the provinces it never regained its former glory.

  Many stage performers had been working in theatres of war, entertaining the troops at the behest of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). Slowly, the West End began to regain an element of its pre-war vitality with the return of some of the biggest names. The Palladium passed on the reunion of the Crazy Gang, which proved to be the gain of the Victoria Palace. On 17 April 1947, Bud Flanagan, Jimmy Nervo, Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold opened in Together Again, as big a success as any of their earlier shows. The Times welcomed their return fulsomely, declaring that ‘together, these comedians are irresistible. Gravity, which may hold its own against Flanagan or against Nervo and Knox or against Naughton and Gold, cannot co-exist with the mere idea of them as a gang.’ This was no hyperbole. By 1949, all of the Crazy Gang were getting on a bit, with Naughton and Gold in their early sixties, but their miscreant child tendencies remained fully intact and, on their night, they were quite able to defy the forces of nature, being one themselves.

  When Together Again came to an end on 29 October 1949, bandleader Billy Cotton and ample Welsh singer ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea brought in their touring show, Tess and Bill, to fill the gap. Agent Leslie Grade offered both stars the option of a salary or a percentage, as Billy Cotton’s son Sir Bill Cotton remembers:

  My father said ‘I’ll take the salary if you don’t mind,’ because he had to pay twenty men at the end of the week. He’d lost quite a bit of money by then. She took a percentage. They went round and round the country, and it was a hell of a good combination. Tessie O’Shea was wonderful. She was a pain in the arse, but she was a great performer. Eventually, she put the show in at the Victoria Palace. She’d got 65 per cent of it or something, and the old man said to her ‘You’re very silly.’ They booked Jimmy Wheeler and Reg Dixon to come in with them, to boost it, but by this time, they’d been to the Metropolitan Edgware Road twice, the Golders Green Hippodrome twice and all the London theatres. The old man said ‘They won’t pay a pound or whatever it was to see a show that they’ve already seen for 4s 6d.’ It didn’t do very well.2

  Cotton’s agent Leslie Grade was part of a new breed of variety agents. For much of the history of show business, artist representation had been the province of a plethora of one-man (or woman) operations in miniscule offices on or just off London’s Charing Cross Road. Turns would call at a grille in the door, ask if there was any work for them and be informed either one way or the other without necessarily entering the office. There were a few large agencies, with correspondingly magnified clout. Harry Foster’s agency in particular stood out from the herd, partly because it had expanded by taking over another significant rival, Hymie Zahl’s Vaudeville Agency. It was also the London affiliate of the gargantuan William Morris agency in the US. So, when Val Parnell brought Danny Kaye over to headline at the Palladium, the deal was done through Foster’s.

  However, in the years immediately after the Second World War, Lew Grade and his brother Leslie had built up an agency that was, in time, to dominate show business. The Grade ascendancy is the classic immigrant success story – Lew proving that a clever Russian Jewish boy could come from nothing to be one of the most powerful men in his chosen field. With rumours of pogroms circulating and the certainties of old Russia disintegrating, Isaac and Olga Winogradsky had left the Ukrainian town of Tokmak in 1912, with their two sons, five-year-old Louis and two-year-old Boris, and ended up in Whitechapel, east London. Back home, Isaac had been the proprietor of a couple of very early cinemas, but in Whitechapel he had to find work in clothing factories, where the hours were long and the pay was low. In 1916, a third son, Lazarus, was born, and by 1921 Isaac had his own workshop, elevating the family from grinding poverty to merely extreme poverty.

  Louis had distinguished himself at school, particularly with figures, but had reluctantly been drawn into the family business. His head for arithmetic soon got him out of the machine room into book-keeping for a larger textile company, but his heart was never in it. His escape came in the mid-twenties with the Charleston craze. He and Bernard (as Boris had become, after a period as Barnet) were naturals at the new dance, and showed their skills extensively in the local ballrooms. They won almost every competition they entered and eventually turned professional. For professional purposes, Louis ang
licized his name to Louis Grad, but when a poster for a Paris engagement misspelled his surname as ‘Grade’, he kept the misspelt version.

  By 1935, after nearly a decade on the stage, the physical nature of the work was getting to him. He also realized that the Charleston had a finite shelf life and that he wasn’t a good enough dancer for anything else. So he decided to become an agent, joining the office of Joe Collins, then a show business colossus, now better known as the father of Joan and Jackie. He proved so good at the job that the firm became Collins & Grade. The secret of his success was being at his desk by 7am. By the time Collins arrived, his partner had done a morning’s worth of deals already. Bernard, who had adopted the stage name Delfont, joined briefly before striking out on his own. Then kid brother Leslie, as Lazarus had become, came in as office boy before he too went into business on his own. When Leslie was called up for service in the RAF, it looked like his agency would have to close, but big brother stepped in. Lew’s own military service had been cut short by water on the knee – an industrial injury for a dancer – so he was available. Moreover, his relationship with Collins had become fractious, so he was looking for a way out. With £10,000 invested by cinema owners Sid and Phil Hyams, Lew and Leslie Grade Ltd was founded and Leslie went to war knowing his business was in safe hands.3 When they were reunited, the agency went from strength to strength.