Turned Out Nice Again Read online

  They were a contrasting pair. Leslie was quiet, Lew was a larger-than-life character, who enjoyed playing the part of the mogul, complete with a gigantic cigar. While no one of his stature could ever be completely free of enemies, Lew Grade inspired a great deal of loyalty and affection from across the board. If the Grade organization was a dictatorship, as rivals sometimes alleged, it was a largely benign one. The business side of things was important, but it was just the means. Entertainment was the end.

  Everyone had a Lew Grade story, many of which were apocryphal. One that wasn’t, by his own admission, involved a juggler at the Finsbury Park Empire. Grade asked the performer how much he was getting. ‘Twenty-five pounds’ a week came the answer. Grade replied that this was preposterous, and that he could easily get forty. ‘Who’s your agent?’ Grade asked. Came the reply: ‘You are, Mr Grade.’ Lew got the headlines, but Peter Prichard, who began as an office boy with Hymie Zahl in 1947 and worked for the Grades from 1954, is in no doubt about the quiet one’s status. ‘Leslie was the best of all of them,’ he asserts.

  As well as representing the biggest names, the Grades had another ace in the hole. Traditionally, circuit bookers and promoters built the bills, leaving the agencies to take their 10 per cent. With business in decline, though, the bookers wanted to reduce their risks, as Peter Prichard explains:

  The whole of light entertainment changed during the war. The theatres weren’t taking the gambles. They were frightened of opening because of the bombing. People like the Grades convinced the theatres to let them package the shows. The risks were high, but the rewards were good – 65/35 was about right. You had the power then of putting your own shows in, but you were still governed by the actual theatre companies. They wouldn’t take anything, they’d only take what they wanted. ‘We don’t want that act, we’ve had a bad report.’ But the agents, really, became producers. The only one who didn’t was Harry Foster, because he didn’t believe in it. He’d send his acts to Leslie Grade for him to package. That was a problem for Foster’s, but all the others took the gamble.4

  By the end of Tess and Bill’s run, Billy Cotton’s bankability had increased massively, due to radio exposure. He and the band had been broadcasting regularly since the early thirties, but on 5 February 1949, the first Billy Cotton Band Show had gone out. This programme was to cement Cotton’s reputation as something of a national treasure, and was to be one of the first all-new shows of post-war radio variety. For the next twenty years, his theme tune ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ and his raucous shout of ‘Wakey Wakey!’ – inspired by the musicians’ lethargy on that first Sunday morning after a week of late nights on the road – became synonymous with the smell of roast beef, as Cotton Junior acknowledges:

  If they’d put that show on at about four o’clock in the afternoon, it would have come and gone without anybody noticing. But it just happened that he hit on that catchphrase, which was an accident. It gave the wife the thing of saying to the husband or to the children ‘be home before Billy Cotton shouts “wakey wakey”’. And then what followed was half an hour where nobody had to listen, really. It just created an atmosphere of jollity in the room.5

  Other shows came along to refresh the radio variety roster, keep the millions listening and continue fostering a national sense of unity, as the wartime warhorses came to their natural ends. The direct replacement for ITMA, starting in April 1949, just three months after Handley’s death, was Ray’s a Laugh. It was a sketch show with situation comedy elements, starring Ted Ray with a supporting cast that occasionally included the young Peter Sellers. Ted Ray, like George Formby, hailed from Wigan, but they were very different performers. Formby relied on songs rather than patter, whereas Ray (real name, Charles Olden) was a gag merchant, although he did have musical leanings, having begun his performing career by inverting his surname and going out as ‘Nedlo the Gypsy Violinist’. Ray’s a Laugh was one of the major hits of post-war radio comedy and ran from April 1949 to January 1961, but while Ray was undoubtedly a skilled comedian, the material was safe, domestic and gentle, as one listener, John Fisher, recalls:

  One joke particularly stays in my mind. One weekend, Ted Ray and Kitty Bluett, to whom he was married on the show, went to Paris. Kitty said to Ted, ‘I’m just going downstairs to look at the magazines.’ He said, ‘Darling, you can look at magazines at home.’ She replied, ‘In French, magazine means shop.’ That was the standard.6

  It fell to Take It From Here to push back the boundaries, with scripts by Frank Muir and Denis Norden that combined cleverness and erudition with a dogged refusal to let a good pun pass by. (In a sketch about the return from university of a Punch and Judy man’s son: ‘You were very lucky to get him in at the Royal College of Puppets and Marionettes.’ ‘Well, naturally I had to pull a few strings.’7) Before his wartime service in the Royal Air Force, Norden had been one of the youngest cinema managers in London, working for a period at the cavernous, luxurious Trocadero, Elephant and Castle. Muir had no previous show business form, but both emerged into civilian life intent on becoming comedy writers. Fate brought them together in the Cinephone arthouse cinema on Oxford Street, when they were the only people to laugh at an apparently straight line of dialogue. Both were tall, urbane, witty, clever men, and these qualities came through in the comedy they wrote together.

  The series had grown out of a Forces-based radio show called Navy Mixture, which had featured the Australian comedienne Joy Nichols and, oddly for a Navy show, an RAF veteran, ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards. Edwards possessed a very distinguished war record, a handlebar moustache and a masterfully comic way with a trombone and a music stand. In particular, he could get belly laughs simply by spinning the top of the music stand as if it were a radar dish,8 and treating the trombone as though it were a rifle at a clay pigeon shoot. He played up to his real-life reputation as an enthusiastic drinker with props such as a xylophone with a note that turned into a beer pump, despatching the resulting liquid with glee, with the line ‘You go join your friends. All rendezvous in Jim’s tum.’ Then there were the signature gags, many of them patently Muir and Norden creations, from their combination of erudition and groanworthiness. Peering at sheet music, he wondered aloud about the piece’s provenance: ‘Paganini? Paganini? Oh, page nine.’ His on-stage character was bombastic, but strangely lovable.

  To go with Muir, Norden, Edwards and Nichols, Australian comedian and occasional Navy Mixture performer Dick Bentley was enlisted. Later Nichols left to be replaced by June Whitfield, then at the start of her career as one of the most versatile comic actresses Britain has ever seen; singer Alma Cogan, ‘the girl with the laugh in her voice’, was also signed up. With this versatile cast, Take It From Here (or TIFH, pronounced TIFE) majored in parodies of movies of the day. For many, though, the highlight of the programme was ‘The Glums’, a weekly slice of life from the home of a work-shy, bibulous patriarch (Edwards), his five-watt bulb of a son, Ron (Bentley), and Ron’s screechy but well-meaning fiancée, Eth (Whitfield).

  Another post-war radio variety smash was Educating Archie, which is best described as an early sitcom despite the presence of variety show elements like musical interludes. As the title suggests, the situation for the comedy was the education of a naughty schoolboy called Archie, but Archie Andrews was no ordinary schoolboy. If his performance had ever been described as ‘wooden’, it would have been no more or less than the truth, as he was a ventriloquist’s dummy. The man with his hand up Archie’s back was Peter Brough, like Kenneth Horne of Much Binding in the Marsh fame, a businessman who went into entertainment.9

  During the show’s ten-year run, from June 1950 to February 1960, the job of educating Archie was taken on by a series of ‘tutors’, beginning with the Australian comedian Robert Moreton. Later, the tutorial role was taken on by Tony Hancock, at the start of his radio career, and Max ‘I’ve arrived, and to prove it, I’m here’ Bygraves. A female foil was also on hand, in the form of Beryl Reid or Hattie Jacques, both skilled comic actresse
s rather than variety performers. It was Reid who, rather cruelly, highlighted Brough’s worst professional shortcoming. Asked if you ever saw his lips move, she replied ‘Only when Archie’s speaking.’ Although the idea of a ventriloquist making his name on radio seems odd to modern, multimedia-savvy eyes and ears, there had been a precedent in the US, with Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. Indeed, the lack of visibility was a positive boon to the technically limited Brough.

  He stood in stark contrast to Arthur Worsley, arguably the best ‘vent’ act Britain ever produced. Active on the halls from the fifties and later on television, Worsley never spoke as himself, leaving his dummy Charlie Brown to do all the talking. Lesser ventriloquists make a joke out of their inability to say ‘bottle of beer’, but Worsley mastered the difficult plosive ‘B’ without ever moving his lips. Such was Worsley’s skill that it was almost possible to suspend disbelief and think that the dummy really was speaking independently. One sound engineer is reputed to have asked Worsley to move the microphone closer to Brown’s mouth. And yet Worsley never became a major star, while Brough did, as well as being a shrewd exploiter of early merchandizing opportunities.

  Not all of the big post-war radio variety shows followed the sketch and situation template. Others were purer variety shows, interspersing stand-up comedy and other acts. Broadcast weekly from factory canteens, Workers’ Playtime had begun in May 1941 as a morale booster, at the instigation of minister of labour Ernest Bevin, and continued until October 1964. A spot on the show was an important first broadcasting step for many acts, although many remembered that a mention of the foreman’s name always got a bigger laugh than any gag, however well timed.

  If Workers’ Playtime was the Ford Model T of pure radio variety, the Rolls Royce was Variety Bandbox, which began in February 1944 and ran continuously until April 1951, returning for a final hurrah between October 1951 and September 1952. The show was built around a resident comedian, the longest lasting of whom was Frankie Howerd, although Derek Roy, Reg Dixon and Beryl Reid also served. One 1950 edition of the show began with the organastics of Jerry Allen before Howerd’s first appearance, giving bandleader Billy Ternent an English lesson:

  HOWERD: Now let’s turn to grammar. Example 1. ‘I were glad to come in here tonight.’ That’s wrong, isn’t it? ‘I were glad to come in here tonight.’

  TERNENT: Of course it is. It should be ‘I were glad to come in here this evening.’

  HOWERD: ‘I were glad.’ Is that right?

  TERNENT: Yes.

  HOWERD: Think! Oh, thrice think!

  TERNENT: Well, you was glad, wasn’t you? . . . I’ll bet you can’t conjugate.

  HOWERD: At my peril, what is conjugate?

  TERNENT: The next station to Notting Hill Gate.10

  This exchange was followed by a six-minute spot from Australian soprano Barbara Lee, then it was the turn of ‘one of the up-and-coming personalities that the last year or so’s broadcasting has produced’ – Peter Sellers. He began his act with a pantomime called ‘Sellerinda’, in which he played all the parts, including impressions of most of his Ray’s a Laugh colleagues and the cast of Much Binding in the Marsh. From the recording, it is clear that the studio audience is in fits, but heard more than five decades after its original transmission, this seems to be more to do with the repetition of the various characters’ catchphrases and the cracking pace at which Sellers rattles through them. That said, the voices are uncanny. In time, his material would improve.

  Closing the show was ‘that unfailing prophet of doom and destruction, the fugitive from Wagga Wagga’, Bill Kerr, with his musings on the potentially unpleasant contents of postage stamp adhesive:

  I don’t suppose you know what was in the stuff you were licking, and I don’t suppose the people that make it know what they’re mixing. As long as it’s sticky, it’s all right. I don’t want to worry you, but flypaper’s sticky. You know what that does to flies, and they only walk on it.11

  The BBC’s North region, with its base in Manchester, was also an important contributor to the radio variety schedules, under the direction of entertainment head Ronnie Taylor. Taylor had the respect of performers and producers because he had been a writer himself and, like Eric Maschwitz, he combined executive life with an impressive output of highly broadcastable scripts. One of Taylor’s young producers was John Ammonds, who had moved north to get away from the hierarchy of Aeolian Hall, the new, post-war premises of the variety department in London. ‘A job came on the [notice]board for “Variety producer, Manchester, North region”,’ Ammonds relates. ‘I thought it would be a good thing, because I didn’t want to do dance bands and Music While You Work, and the chance of a scripted show coming up was a bit remote. I talked it over with my wife and applied.’

  On the interview board were Taylor, and the regional head of programmes, B.W. Cave-Browne Cave. ‘A marvellous name. I’d met Ronnie once, at Aeolian Hall. They asked all sorts of questions, then the chairman turned to Ronnie and said “Are there any questions you’d like to ask Mr Ammonds?” and Ronnie said “No, I know John’s work terribly well.” That was fairly typical, as I found out later, and I got the job. Ronnie was marvellous. I have no hesitation in saying that he was the nicest and cleverest boss I ever worked for at the BBC.’ Ammonds’s first production starred Ken Platt, a magnificently lugubrious comedian, whose catchphrase was ‘I’ll not take my coat off – I’m not stopping’. ‘Ronnie said “I’ve had to go ahead and cast it, I think you’ll be quite pleased.” His mother was Thora Hird, and his girlfriend was played by Billie Whitelaw, so it wasn’t a bad cast.’12

  All of the big post-war hit shows were broadcast on the Light Programme, which had been complementing the Home Service since 29 July 1945. Early in the war, it had been conceded that more entertainment for the Forces was needed, and so, on 7 February 1940, the Forces Programme was born, becoming the General Forces Programme in 1944. Unsurprisingly, this relatively breezy, cheerful network proved popular with non-military audiences, so in peacetime, the GFP gave way to the Light.

  The idea of a ‘light’ network would have been unthinkable in the Reith era. The Reithian-model BBC had been built deliberately on mixed programming. A red-nosed variety show could be followed by an improving talk, with the hope that some listeners might forget to switch off, and thus be educated almost by osmosis. While the idea of hiving off all of the ghastly lowbrow shows was superficially appealing, it reduced the chances of such serendipity. Or, as one radio producer summed it up, rather sniffily:

  If one wanted to keep one’s listening light, one had merely to retune one’s set when something serious came along [. . .] The creation of the Light Programme . . . quickly put an end to all that. As the natural successor to the Forces Programme, the Light catered for those who wanted levity all the time, purely for background listening . . . No longer was it necessary to take evasive action if one wanted to avoid the first rate.13

  Comments like these were unfair, as, in reality, the old-model BBC, admirable though it was at the start of broadcasting, would have carried on haemorrhaging listeners to the revitalized continental stations. The Light Programme was a ratings success from the start, and while there was a lot of light musical filler like Music While You Work, some of the comedy output, like Much Binding in the Marsh, truly deserved to be described as first rate. The BBC soon realized that having one very popular network would buy the goodwill to attempt other, less popular, but artistically worthwhile, works elsewhere, and set up a third network alongside the Home Service and Light Programme for this very purpose. The inauguration of the Third Programme on 29 September 1946 did create a clear hierarchy: Light – lowbrow, Home – middlebrow, Third – highbrow. Although the bulk of the Third Programme’s output was music and drama, it opened with a comedy programme: an arch, self-referential satire on the whole business of radio called How to Listen, written by and starring the humorist Stephen Potter, with help from the comedienne Joyce Grenfell.

  While e
xperimentation was allowed on the Third Programme, the mainstream variety output was expected to conform to stringent regulations. These were enshrined in the famous ‘green book’, as the BBC Variety Programmes Policy Guide for Writers and Producers was known. Issued in 1949, it is best known for declaring:

  There is an absolute ban upon the following:

  Jokes about:

  Lavatories

  Effeminacy in men

  Immorality of any kind

  Suggestive references to:

  Honeymoon couples

  Chambermaids

  Fig leaves

  Prostitution

  Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on

  Animal habits, e.g. rabbits

  Lodgers

  Commercial travellers

  Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to or jokes about:

  Pre-natal influences

  Marital infidelity

  Good taste and decency are the obvious governing considerations. The vulgar use of such words as ‘basket’ must also be avoided.14

  The ‘green book’ has been held up over the years as an example of the stuffiness and lack of humour exhibited by the BBC. In fact, its author, head of variety Michael Standing, was all too conscious of its absurdity. In 1976 he admitted to comedy writer Barry Took that he ‘had a chuckle when he was writing it’, but Standing observed that while ‘many of the things in it must today seem absolutely ludicrous . . . public standards at that time were very different from now’.15

  Standing’s fiefdom was Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, to which the variety department had decamped on its return from wartime evacuation in Bristol and Bangor. A return to St George’s Hall was out of the question, as it had succumbed to Luftwaffe bombs on 11 May 1941. Aeolian Hall was to remain the home of BBC radio entertainment until 1975. Under Standing was the assistant head of variety, a bluff Australian called Jim Davidson. A former musician, he took special interest in the dance band programmes, but showed his knowledge to be patchy. He interrupted one BBC Show Band session with a request for ‘arco brass’ – ‘arco’ being the musical term for bowed strings. Cyril Stapleton, the conductor, was well used to Davidson’s ill-informed interference and told the brass to switch to cup mutes.