Turned Out Nice Again Page 7
One radio producer of this time stood out as a beacon of forward thinking. Patrick Kenneth Macneile Dixon, known universally as Pat, was the Oxford-educated son of a Glasgow University professor. A journalist and an advertising copywriter before joining the BBC in 1940, his professional institutionalization completely failed to eradicate his rebellious streak. Reputed to have a Confederate flag hung on his office wall at Aeolian Hall, he was the first call for the less conventional thinkers in entertainment. Among other achievements, he produced Third Division for the Third Programme, a Muir and Norden-scripted sketch show that included Peter Sellers’s first performance of ‘Balham: Gateway to the South’, a spoof travelogue of the unlovely south London suburb that found a wider and very appreciative audience when it was resurrected for the 1958 Parlophone LP Best of Sellers.
It was Dixon who first recognized the talent of the newly demobbed Spike Milligan, who was, with Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, part of a group that congregated at a Victoria pub called the Grafton Arms, run by scriptwriter and ex-Army major Jimmy Grafton. Dixon urged his seniors to give Milligan, Sellers, Secombe and Bentine a chance. However, the job of producing the resulting radio show – called Crazy People, after the original title of The Goon Show was rejected by the upper echelons – was given to a junior colleague, Dennis Main Wilson. Roger Wilmut, chronicler of the Goons’ history, suggests that ‘the combination of an avant-garde producer [like Dixon] and crazy comedy’ was too rich for the variety bosses’ blood,16 but if so, they had seriously misjudged Wilson, himself one of the great eccentrics of broadcasting. One of his later colleagues, Roger Ordish, remembers him as ‘a wonderful man’ and ‘mad’ to boot, a trait that seemed to show through most obviously in his speech patterns:
Dennis had this wonderful way of talking that was semi-comprehensible. Digressions within digressions within digressions. He had some sort of nervous breakdown. Afterwards, he was working on a series with Barry Humphries, who asked ‘This nervous disorder, how, precisely, did it manifest itself?’ Dennis replied ‘Barry, I won’t bore you. Needle nardle noo, voom voom, the Goons, Neddie Seagoon, voom voom voom, I started to talk nonsense.’ I remember once, at the BBC Club, in a dramatic gesture, he seized me by the shoulder while explaining something, and tore my shirt accidentally. ‘Roger! I’ll buy you a new one . . . As I was saying . . .’ carrying on, with the shirt flapping in the breeze.17
Born in Dulwich, Wilson had joined the BBC’s European Service in 1941, before being called up into the Royal Armoured Corps. Despite his anti-establishment tendencies, Wilson gained a commission in the Armoured Cavalry. After the war, while working for the Control Commission in the British Zone of occupied Germany, he found himself back in radio as head of light entertainment at the newly established Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, under the controller Hugh Carleton Greene. Returning to London and the BBC, Wilson found a berth in the variety department, overseeing auditions of the numerous comedians who were emerging from the Forces.
One was the comedian and scriptwriter Bob Monkhouse, who recalled Wilson giving off ‘a definite whiff of March Hare’ when they first met, during an audition at Aeolian Hall.18 The regular auditioner was, according to Monkhouse, given to tough marking. Five per cent was a pass, and 20 per cent was the highest he ever awarded. Minding the shop on the day of Monkhouse’s audition and unfamiliar with the procedure, Wilson gave the comedian 101 per cent and promptly collapsed, missing a Gershwin medley by Monkhouse’s RAF colleague, the jazz pianist Stan Tracey. This, then, was the man that the BBC, in its infinite wisdom, regarded as a safe pair of hands to keep the wild and wonderful Milligan in check.
The first series was well received and a second series followed, but with one major difference – Crazy People was dropped in favour of The Goon Show, the title Milligan had wanted all along. The path was clear for a revolution in radio comedy. Never before had logic been dispensed with so comprehensively. Never before had regular characters been killed off week after week only to reappear almost immediately (‘You dirty rotten swine . . .’). Never before had a Wurlitzer theatre organ been driven across the Sahara desert, changing key as it changed gear. However, while much has been made of the revolutionary effect of The Goon Show, and quite rightly too, it retained some elements of the traditional BBC comedy show. It had a live announcer to top and tail – first Andrew Timothy, then the put-upon and much-loved Wallace Greenslade, who claimed to be above it all, but would always end up being dragged into the action, to the detriment of his dignity. The early shows contained several sketches separated by musical items, but even when the series moved over to one continuous narrative per show, the musical items remained: a spot from Dutch jazz harmonica virtuoso Max ‘Conks’ Geldray and a vocal number from the Ray Ellington Quartet.
Where The Goon Show differed was by having, in Milligan, a writer who regarded nothing as sacred. Numerous others, including the cast, co-writers and rebellious BBC producers, were only too happy to help him in his quest, but Milligan was the show’s life force and conscience. It was aided too by being phenomenally popular, which meant that the BBC couldn’t simply bury it. The influence this popularity brought was not merely internal. Just as, later, the Beatles inspired more young boys to pick up guitars than just about any band before or since, The Goon Show was responsible for a whole generation of comedians and comic writers.
What made such an uncompromising, surreal show such a massive hit? The timing counted for a lot. After years of grinning and bearing it for the sake of morale, the nation was ready for something iconoclastic. At the start of its run in 1951, austerity was still the order of the day, and some vital supplies were still on the ration. So, it was a release to hear the Goons blowing things (and, to be fair, each other) up and generally painting authority as something to be mocked. The Goon Show often followed a simple pattern: Neddie Seagoon, played by Harry Secombe, would be tempted by an improbable or heroic scheme, only to end up broke, broken or both. However, because every show got from the start point to its illogical conclusion in vastly differing ways, they were never criticized for being formulaic. The authority figures were cowards, most notably the corrupt, yellow-bellied Major Dennis Bloodnok. Some of the characters – such as the George Sanders-esque con man Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and his lackey Count Jim Moriarty – were out for whatever they could get. Their pickings diminished greatly as the series went on, rendering them ever more destitute, to great comic effect. Meanwhile, others like Eccles and Bluebottle displayed a touching faith in authority and humanity. Arguably, the masterstroke was to have Seagoon oscillating wildly between the two: constantly outclassed by Grytpype-Thynne’s evil intelligence, but only too happy to take advantage of Eccles and Bluebottle when it suited his needs. In its own gloriously warped way, all human life was there in The Goon Show.
The Goon Show was a trailblazer in another sense, as it put the spotlight on the writers in a way that no show had done before. For most of variety’s history, writers had been at best unsung heroes, at worst downtrodden skivvies. Not for nothing did Denis Norden once describe writers as ‘comedians’ labourers’, while Hancock’s Half Hour co-creator Alan Simpson remembered that when he and Ray Galton got their first BBC break, ‘writers were hardly heard of in those days’.19 Even with the huge hit status of ITMA, it is unlikely that the name Ted Kavanagh meant much to most of the listening public. George Formby insisted on a co-writing credit on all of his hit songs, despite contributing nothing to the compositional process. The punters were allowed to think that their favourite stars came up with all of their own funnies, and it was a potent belief, as Eric Sykes discovered when he began writing for Frankie Howerd and asked producer Bryan Sears for a credit in the Radio Times. ‘He patted me on the shoulder and he smiled the smile of a hungry crocodile, and then he said “All Frank’s fans believe he makes it up as he goes along. Ergo, if they had an inkling that it was all written for him he’d lose an awful lot of his fans.”’20 Sykes knew Sears wasn’t bluffing, as his own f
ather, a massive Howerd fan, truly believed that Howerd was ad-libbing all the time and had trouble comprehending that anyone, least of all his own son, could be responsible for the words Howerd spoke.
In the fifties, however, the situation changed. Frank Muir and Denis Norden – described by Alan Simpson as ‘the governors’ – were regular panel game personalities. Eric Sykes became a household name when he began performing as well as writing – having been jointly responsible, with dance-band singer turned scriptwriter Sid Colin, for most of the hit run of Educating Archie. Meanwhile, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson made occasional appearances in the radio episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour and had their pictures in the credits of the television version. The growing power of the writers was encapsulated in Associated London Scripts, the agency-cum-talent nursery-cum-dosshouse that Milligan, Sykes, Galton, Simpson and Howerd established in premises over a greengrocer’s in Shepherd’s Bush.
Also in the front rank of comedy writers at this time was the partnership of Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin. The pair had been contemporaries at Dulwich College, but they did not meet until adulthood. Monkhouse had sold his first jokes at the age of 14, by waiting outside the stage door of his local theatre, the Lewisham Hippodrome. After being demobbed from the RAF, he had established himself as a comedian, using his uniform, at the suggestion of Peter Brough, to win the audience’s sympathy. However, that wasn’t enough to win over one tough audience on a radio broadcast from the East End, after which Monkhouse was sure his career was in ruins. Fortunately, it transpired that the listening millions had missed hearing him dying on his feet as the network had faded the programme early in favour of a cricket commentary. The following week, he did a new act based on interruptions, and was a smash hit. Moreover, as he was making his name as a performer, he and Goodwin were building a reputation as reliable suppliers of comic material to the profession, producing gags and scripts to order for radio personalities Tommy Trinder, Bernard Braden and Cyril Fletcher, among many others. The likes of Muir, Norden, Galton, Simpson, Monkhouse, Goodwin and Sykes would, in time, establish comedy writers as celebrities in their own right.
As engineers, producers and performers returned from the war, it became possible to think about the resumption of the BBC Television Service. The pre-war equipment needed a fair bit of work to get it back into shape. A similar effort of refurbishment was required in televisually equipped homes, as sets were tested to see if they had survived seven years in mothballs. They were few in number: by 1947, only 14,560 television licences had been issued, at £2 a time, compared to 10.8 million radio licences, which were still only 10 shillings a year. On 7 June 1946, Jasmine Bligh, one of the original television announcing team, stepped from a car outside Alexandra Palace and asked viewers if they remembered her. A repeat of Mickey’s Gala Premiere followed, but the big spectacle was on the following day, when outside broadcast units relayed the Victory Parade.
Although some expertise had been built up before the war, everyone involved in television in the immediate post-war era was a pioneer, pushing and stretching the aged equipment until it broke. At first, however, the programme content of the revived service remained roughly the same as it had been before hostilities. Picture Page returned, the simple single-act shows of the pre-war era also came back and the pre-war International Cabaret concept was refined by producer Henry Caldwell into a package under the title Café Continental. ‘Anything to do with France was Henry,’ recalls Yvonne Littlewood, then a secretary at Alexandra Palace. Café Continental was presented in the round, with the audience situated on tables around the wall of the set. The opening shot each week took the viewer into the ‘club’, as if emerging from a carriage, greeted by Père Auguste – a real-life Kensington restaurateur – who hosted the show with Hélène Cordet. At the end, the opening was reversed, and the guest would be ushered back to their carriage, with the closing caption being written on the blind. The gloved hand that came into shot to pull the blind shut was invariably that of a burly scene shifter, rather than a continental lady of leisure.
One of the problems that held television light entertainment back in the immediate post-war era had also hampered the early history of radio entertainment, namely, the absence of specialist producers. Heavyweight drama producers like George More O’Ferrall, Michael Barry and Robert Barr sometimes had to turn their hands to producing variety shows. Even the head of the Television Service, Maurice Gorham, took a hands-on interest, at one point questioning whether it was right to pay a male dancer £25 a week, considerably more than many staff members. The Light Entertainment department didn’t exist until 1948, when a radio executive, Pat Hillyard, was seconded to become the first head of LE. There was also a lot of snobbery within the Corporation, a hangover from the high-minded pre-war days. Variety was a necessary evil, and television was the BBC equivalent of the salt mines. To work in television variety at this time was virtually to be a pariah.
Fortunately, as with radio, pioneering specialists with a great belief in entertainment and the possibilities of the medium began to emerge. The first was Michael Mills, who had joined the BBC before the war as a sound effects operator, but gone to serve in the Royal Navy, with an attachment to the Free French Navy. Yvonne Littlewood, who had been a secretary at Broadcasting House before moving to Alexandra Palace as secretary to the personnel assistant, remembers Mills’s arrival well:
He was supposed to be back on 1 January [1947], and he was three days late. When Michael joined, because he’d been doing kind of revue-type shows for the Navy, they gave him a title of ‘producer, light entertainment’. Drama producers such as George More O’Ferrall, Michael Barry and Robert Barr – who was a good writer – used to come to Michael and say ‘I’ve got this variety show and I don’t know what to do about it,’ and Michael used to say ‘Well, I’d start with a running order if I were you, and this is the sort of running order I’d do.’ He was fumbling around himself, but they’d all say ‘Thank you, you’ve helped me so much.’ He said it was really the blind leading the short-sighted.21
Mills gained a reputation as a ferociously hard worker and also something of a firebrand. Unhappy with his allotted personal assistant, whom he felt couldn’t keep up, he found himself begging the personnel office for extra support, where his pleas were fielded by Miss Littlewood:
Michael was a real whirlwind and I think this lady, who was married and lived in Muswell Hill, found him heavy weather, and she certainly didn’t want to do late hours. He used to ring me up endlessly saying ‘I’ve got this running order for tomorrow and I’ve got nobody to type it.’ I said ‘Michael, we don’t have anybody to send you.’ Eventually I got so fed up with it, I said ‘If you will stop ringing me up and wait until 5.30, I’ll come and do it myself, but please don’t ring me up any more.’ And so I went and did it, the best I could. Anyway, then, this lady finally decided she’d had enough, she resigned and quick as a flash I applied for her job. I remember Mr Budd [Miss Littlewood’s boss in the personnel office] asking ‘What do you want to go and work in production for?’ I replied that was really why I had joined the BBC. He said ‘Well, you know you’ll have to be downgraded if you go to production from the job you’re doing now.’ I said ‘So be it.’ My salary went down from £4 16s 10d a week to £4 12s 10d. The first show I did for Michael was on 14 June 1947, called Variety Express, and we lasted eight years together.22
Another early specialist was Bill Ward, who had been a pre-war television sound mixer, before moving into production. With no precedents and no one initially to tell them whether they were going wrong, Mills and Ward set the standard for television entertainment, and set it as high as their limited resources would allow.
One of Mills’s most memorable early programmes was a full production of the Vivian Ellis musical Jill Darling in February 1949, which stretched the facilities at Ally Pally to their full extent and possibly a little more. ‘We did act one in studio A, then we had a mini-interval, during which we all went to studio B, wher
e we did the second act. While we were in there doing the second act, they changed the scenery in A and we went back to do act three in A. Can you imagine doing something like that live?’ asks Littlewood. To complicate matters further, Mills decided that the studio was of an inadequate size for some of the long shots, so he ‘used to open the sliding door and put the camera in the passage, so he could get the shots. He was always pushing forward the boundaries, and they realized we’d have to move.’23
Meanwhile, Bill Ward was responsible for How Do You View?, a Terry-Thomas vehicle that was the first successful and truly original comedy show on British television. Thomas, whose real name was Thomas Terry Hoar-Stevens, had begun as a film and cabaret performer before the Second World War, developing the upper-crust cad character that would sustain him through the rest of his career. Running for five series between 1949 and 1952, it was an early satire on the medium itself, with Thomas supported by his butler Moulting, played by Herbert C. Walton, and his chauffeur Lockit, played by the young Peter Butterworth. Some of the comedy came from the fact that Thomas could not really afford either; indeed, he did not have a car. Leslie Mitchell, already a TV veteran, interviewed Thomas about various fictitious experiences, the first time that a straight announcer had crossed over to the comedy side, but certainly not the last. In one edition, Thomas claimed to be an expert on old London street cries. The first series was written by the star, but later Talbot Rothwell – yet to find ‘infamy’24 as the most prolific writer of Carry On screenplays – and Sid Colin took over.