Turned Out Nice Again Read online

  Other producers were less successful in their attempts to make a splash. In particular, designer Richard Greenough, who had helped create the sets for How Do You View?, recalls producer Walton Anderson’s disastrous production of Carissima, transmitted on 25 November 1950:

  We had two days in both studios at Alexandra Palace. We did an act in each, and there must have been a short interval while they all rushed down the corridor. It all went very well for the first day and part of the second day when he realized he was never going to get through it. The decision was taken in the end to just do it, and the first two-thirds were very good, but the last bit, which hadn’t been rehearsed, wasn’t. One of the sets hadn’t been put up, and people were a bit hysterical at the end of it.25

  A far worse crime, in official circles, than making cast and crew hysterical and putting a botched show on the air was the fact that the whole affair had gone £579 10s 3d over budget. This was a considerable overspend, considering that the average house price at the time was around £1,900. As late as 1953 the total budget for three months of light entertainment was £42,166, a large proportion of which went on orchestrations. Producers were encouraged to use stock arrangements wherever possible to cut costs, but the desire to do things properly made LE an expensive business. In 1952, programme controller Cecil McGivern suggested replacing some multi-artist variety bills with single-artist shows using the biggest international stars, indicating that they would probably cost roughly the same.

  Along with Anderson, Richard Afton was another producer of the pioneer era apparently incapable of reaching the heights of Ward and Mills, but his relative inadequacy didn’t stop him from being an ogre. His main contributions to the schedules tended to be straightforward variety bills, usually relayed from a theatre as an outside broadcast (OB). When he tried anything more advanced, he came a cropper, as Richard Greenough suggests:

  He was a monster. I worked a lot with him. Well, I got landed a lot with him, really. He was all right, provided he could aim three cameras at an act. At Alexandra Palace, he did a rather complicated sitcom with Norman Wisdom, about a school [Cuckoo College, a one-off sixty-minute show transmitted on 13 May 1949]. There were four rooms with a corridor in between. He succeeded in missing every single shot, so all the gags never got seen, because he was always late with it. But sticking cameras in front of something, that was kind of fine. He was good at getting a bill together and he created the Television Toppers [a dance troupe]. He married the one at the end, as I remember.26

  It was one of Afton’s shows that resulted in animals being banned from the studios, after the Ministry of Agriculture had to approve the dressing room for a dog act. Producer T. Leslie Jackson later had to get special permission to use a one-man band with a monkey as a contestant on What’s My Line.

  Pat Hillyard was not the ideal leader for this bold, experimental outfit. Cecil McGivern, the autocratic, awkward controller of the television service, realized this all too well and, at one point, upbraided Hillyard for being too much of an administrator – one of the BBC’s infamous ‘grey men’ – and not enough of an impresario. A breakthrough came when Hillyard brought his radio colleague Ronnie Waldman over to television, primarily as a producer, but also, nominally, as his deputy. It was a blessing in disguise for all concerned when, in October 1950, Hillyard took three months’ medical leave and left Waldman in charge as acting head of LE. Hillyard never returned to the job – once he had recovered, he rejoined the radio variety department, becoming its head in December 1952.

  The Oxford-educated, theatre-trained Waldman was the impresario the department needed so desperately, and an able administrator too. He had to be. For all Hillyard’s efforts, Waldman’s first impression was that he had inherited a department close to collapse. Waldman had an ear for comedy, an eye for a lavish spectacle and, always important, a sure hand when it came to BBC politics. He knew that budgets were not elastic, but he was willing to fight for enough money to enable his producers to do their jobs properly. He knew that inexpensive programmes had their place, but that to do everything on the cheap was a false economy. In 1951, he rebuffed vigorously an attempt by the grey men to impose a cost of £725 an hour on all light entertainment programming. Waldman knew the value of proven hits, but was quick to press the case for innovation. In short, he was an inspirational figure for a directionless department, the right man in the right job at the right time.

  He had the good fortune to arrive in television just as the obvious need for alternative facilities was being met, allowing the scope and scale of productions to be expanded. In 1949, the BBC bought thirteen acres upon which to create a purpose-built television studio complex. The land was part of the former Franco-British Exhibition site at Shepherd’s Bush, the famous White City from which the greyhound stadium and the tube station took their name. Unfortunately, post-war building restrictions meant that work could not begin immediately. So, as a temporary solution (albeit one that was to last for nearly forty-two years), the redundant Gaumont-British film studios in nearby Lime Grove were purchased for £230,000 from the Rank Organization, which was concentrating its production at the Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

  The first Lime Grove studio was opened for children’s programmes on 21 May 1950 by Mrs Attlee, wife of the Prime Minister. It was named studio D, continuing the sequence from Alexandra Palace. In all, there would be four studios at Lime Grove: D, E, G and H. One studio was designated F, but it was never used for production, instead becoming the main scenery store. The absence of studio C is explained by the BBC’s love of initials and acronyms. The central control room, through which all output was routed to the transmitters, was referred to as the CCR, and senior engineers felt that a studio C would result in confusion. (There had in fact been a pre-war plan to use the derelict theatre at Ally Pally as a studio, for which the designation C was to have been used.)

  Studio G was chosen as the home of light entertainment, and it came into use on 23 December 1950, with a programme called Gala Variety, produced by Michael Mills, hosted by comedian Bill Fraser and featuring singer Dolores Gray, ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews, comic Jimmy James and a young magician called Tommy Cooper. At 112 feet by 54 feet, studio G was a vast improvement on the cramped studios at AP, if a little narrow, something that would prove less than ideal for audience shows. For now, though, Mills and designer Richard Greenough revelled in their new-found freedom. The set resembled a squared-off circus ring, with all action taking place in the centre. Mills had Fraser make his big entrance in a sports car ‘just to show we had the room’.27

  The following year was Festival of Britain year, and the nation began the curious business of harking back to the Great Exhibition of 1851, while looking forward to the bright future. Mills caught the spirit of nostalgia with a series called The Passing Shows, which made full use of the new studios. Each of the five programmes covered a decade in the history of entertainment from the turn of the century onwards. Whereas most entertainment shows before had been, by necessity, modest, these were big, ambitious productions, as was Mills’s subsequent series of dramatized biographies of entertainment legends such as C.B. Cochran and music hall star Marie Lloyd. Frank Holland, then the assistant property master, remembered the prop store being ‘filled from floor to ceiling with props for a Passing Show. Just one show . . .’28 All of these sets needed to be changed while the show was live on-air. No wonder the designer described them as ‘terrifying . . . the scene boys had their shirts sticking to them’. Happily, they came off without a hitch. ‘Yes, they were memorable,’ Yvonne Littlewood recalls. ‘They were enormous for that time, but they were very successful. They drove everybody crazy, but they were good.’29

  At this point, in 1951, there were ten light entertainment producers employed by BBC Television: Richard Afton, Walton Anderson, Henry Caldwell, T. Leslie Jackson, Bill Lyon-Shaw, Michael Mills, Douglas Moodie, Graeme Muir and Bryan Sears. Based at Lime Grove, their output was supplemented by
contributions from the regions. Bristol had a young man called Duncan Wood, on his way to becoming one of the best situation comedy producer/directors there has ever been. In Glasgow, there was Eddie Fraser, while Broadcasting House in Leeds had local boy and ex-Army major Barney Colehan. Colehan had come over from radio, where he had been producer of Have a Go! with Wilfred Pickles. His first network contribution was an outside broadcast of Victorian-style music hall from the City Varieties Theatre in Leeds. The Good Old Days remained a big hit show until his retirement in 1983.

  These men grew in stature and expertise as the medium they worked in became more prominent. In the earliest days of television, the paucity of receivers in use meant that mistakes could be made without ending a performer’s career. By 1953, however, 2,142,452 households had television licences, a 15,000 per cent increase on six years earlier. There had been two motivators behind the growth. One was gradual, as the transmitter network was rolled out nationwide. The Sutton Coldfield mast brought TV to the Midlands and a little further afield (with reception reported in Longridge, Lancashire, 115 miles away) from 17 December 1949. The northern transmitter at Holme Moss followed on 12 October 1951, then the Scottish station at Kirk O’Shotts on 14 March 1952, before Wenvoe brought television to Wales and the west of England from 15 August 1952. The other cause was more sudden: many people acquired sets in time to watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

  The broadcasting effort for the Coronation was mostly concentrated on the outside broadcast of the ceremony and procession, but the light entertainment department also did its bit with a show called All Our Yesterdays. Co-written by producer Michael Mills and veteran Ealing screenwriter Angus MacPhail, it presented excerpts of entertainment from the previous four Coronation years, beginning with Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837, before coming to the present day. Pat Kirkwood revived her triumphant Marie Lloyd depiction from The Passing Shows for the 1911 segment. Yvonne Littlewood gives a flavour of the show: ‘We restaged things from the early part of the century like [excerpts from the musical comedies] Flora Dora and Tell Me Pretty Maidens, and, when we got up to date, which was 1953, there were excerpts from London shows that were running, like the original Guys and Dolls and South Pacific with Wilbur Evans. [We had] Max Adrian and Moira Fraser doing a thing, and a musical in the West End, Love from Judy with Jeannie Carson. We did all this live. It’s an absolute mystery to me how we did it.’30

  It was into this increasingly professional creative hothouse that younger producers like Brian Tesler came. Tesler had the distinction of being the department’s first graduate trainee. ‘Graduates in those days went into news and current affairs, to work with [deputy head of talks] Grace Wyndham Goldie,’ he explains. His own entrée had been through Forces Radio in Trieste during his National Service, working in student revue at Oxford, and composing some successful songs with his friend and contemporary Stanley Myers, later to become an acclaimed film composer. ‘We sold half a dozen songs in about ten minutes to two music publishers,’ Tesler recalls. ‘They were recorded and used on television.’ This experience proved crucial when Tesler applied to the Corporation, while in his final year of study. The appointments officer at Broadcasting House didn’t even make eye contact with the young would-be producer until the end of the interview:

  He was just asking me questions, filling in a form, and at the end of it said ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me that might be of interest?’ and I said ‘Well, I have written some songs and they have been recorded and broadcast.’ And he stopped, and for the first time, looked up at me and said ‘Broadcast? On the BBC?’ He suddenly started paying attention, and arranged for me to meet Ronnie Waldman.31

  In his final term at Oxford, Tesler tipped Waldman off about an open-air revue he was staging, featuring a young Maggie Smith, whose father was a local schoolteacher. Waldman sent Graeme Muir, an actor turned producer, who took his wife, the actress Marjorie Mars, with him for the evening. Tesler, showing early signs of the shrewdness that would take him to the top of the executive tree in television, ‘got Graeme and Marjorie plastered on champagne, and he gave Ronnie a rave review’. But Tesler was to find other senior producers more cynical about his credentials: ‘They were old pros, and the only reason they thought I, as a graduate with no show business experience at all, could have got into the BBC light entertainment department was because I had to be the illegitimate son of Ronnie Waldman himself. “Why else? They’re both Jewish, they’re both dark, he’s got to be, there’s no question about it.”’32

  New producers cut their teeth on fifteen-minute, single-act shows, mostly under the Starlight banner, and Tesler was no exception, beginning with a show at Alexandra Palace with Pat Kirkwood. ‘After that, I did a couple of small shows there, including one with Pet Clark. We all did Pet Clark,’ he observes. He began on a six-month attachment, after which the normal procedure was to enter the pool of available producers, unless he somehow proved to be indispensable.

  Fortunately, his salvation came from one of the sub-genres emerging within light entertainment, the panel game. In 1950, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman – US producers who would come to dominate the game show format market – had set the benchmark with What’s My Line, where a panel of celebrities tried to guess the jobs done by various members of the public, aided only by a short mime and their own hunches. At the BBC, the task of making the show less brash for genteel British viewers fell to T. Leslie Jackson, remembered by his colleague Tesler as ‘a strange, interesting and very lovely man’. The chosen host was Irish sports commentator Eamonn Andrews, and while the show made his name in Britain, the real star was on the panel. Panellist Gilbert Harding, already a familiar voice on radio from his appearances on Twenty Questions and The Brains Trust, became known and loved by the television audience, despite or possibly because of his extreme grumpiness.

  One of the main virtues of the panel game was its relative cheapness. No lavish set was necessary. At the outset, What’s My Line’s total weekly budget was a mere £200, compared to £2,500 for a Passing Show. The fees were £20 for the regular panellists and 18 guineas for other panellists. The chairman received between 20 and 25 guineas, and the guest celebrity – whom the blindfolded panellists had to identify – could count on 10 guineas for their exertions. Other shows were needed when What’s My Line took a breather, and Tesler took the lead:

  In 1953, during my six months, What’s My Line was having its first ever summer break. Once it started, it had been on continuously. Ronnie Waldman introduced me to another old friend of his, Gordon Crier, a great radio name who worked then for an advertising agency. He said ‘Get together with Gordon Crier and come up with a game. He has some good ideas.’ He had an idea called Why? It was very simple. You had the host, a team playing the adults, and a team who were going to be the children. A parent would make a statement such as ‘You’re to do this or that’, the child would say ‘Why?’ and they had to justify it. Somehow, the host decided who had won within a certain time. Madness. We had Richard Attenborough, Brenda Bruce, Bob Monkhouse, Bill Brown the politician. Terrific cast, lousy idea. We thought it went all right, but only just. Of course the public wanted What’s My Line, and if it was going to be something else, it had to be something as good. Patently it wasn’t. The switchboard was swamped with complaints. Of course, the title was an absolute gift to the critics, and in those days television was very important. It was front-page news. ‘This show went on last night. Why?’

  The next day, I was called in by Cecil McGivern, the first time I’d met him. I said ‘I’m sorry about last night.’ He said ‘Don’t be sorry. You’ve got to try new things. Keep persevering with it. It’s got the germ of an idea. It’ll never be as good as What’s My Line, but it’s a different show. How old are you?’ I said I was 24. He said ‘Right, be 24. Don’t try and copy other people. We want young ideas in the business.’ I went out of his office on an absolute high. I thought ‘What a marvellous guy,’ because he had a terrible reputation
for being tough and brutal.

  Instead of sending me into the pool, Ronnie said ‘We need some new panel games, I’ll keep you on for six months, however long it takes to find some new games.’ So we advertised to the public, asking them to send any ideas in. One of them was the germ of Guess My Story, and there were several others, such as Tall Story Club. We did a run of six weeks and we got at least three games out of that run and I went on to produce two of them.33

  Tesler was also involved in comedy, notably And So To Bentley, a Frank Muir and Denis Norden-written sketch vehicle starring Australian comedian and Take It From Here regular Dick Bentley. Like How Do You View?, television itself was a frequent target for the series. Announcers were drafted into the action alongside Bentley and his supporting cast, which included Peter Sellers. One edition charted the progress of Cyril Purseglove, a television weatherman who rather let fame get to him. Not that it was Muir and Norden’s first satire of the medium. In January 1951, they had scripted Here’s Television, with the groansome subtitle Comparisons are In-Video. At the time, a short animated film showing the Alexandra Palace and Sutton Coldfield transmitter masts against a map of the British Isles made frequent appearances on BBC television. Muir, Norden and Michael Mills opened their show with a new version, in which washing wafted in the breeze on a line lashed between the two.