Turned Out Nice Again

The Story of British Light Entertainment

Louis Barfe

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848877573
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

With a cast of thousands, including Peter Cook, Ken Dodd, Dusty Springfield, Spike Milligan, Rolf Harris, Bruce Forsyth and Reeves and Mortimer, Turned Out Nice Again reveals a world of comedians and cavorters, dancing girls and crooners. From the early days of vaudeville, via the golden age of radio, to live television spectaculars, the rise of the chat show and alternative comedy, Louis Barfe pulls back the curtain of variety to reveal the world of light entertainment in all its glory.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Empires, moguls and a man called Reith

2 A wizard time for all

3 Strictly commercial

4 ‘Albanie – douze points’

5 ‘Can you see what it is yet?’

6 Saturday night’s all right for fighting

7 My auntie’s got a Whistler

8 ‘Let’s get the network together’

9 Weekend world

10 Goodbye to all that

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Canterbury Hall. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library.

Dan Leno. Author’s collection.

The Co-Optomists. © BBC/Corbis.

Horace Percival and Tommy Handley. © BBC/Corbis.

The Windmill Girls. Mary Evans Picture Library.

Nude revue bill. Author’s collection.

The Goons. © BBC/Corbis.

Take It From Here rehearsal. Popperfoto/Getty Images.

Danny Kaye programme cover. Author’s collection.

Danny Kaye programme. Author’s collection.

Poster for The Crazy Gang’s Young in Heart. Author’s collection.

Poster for Billy Cotton’s band. Author’s collection.

Poster for Mike and Bernie Weinstein’s Showtime! Author’s collection.

Poster for Dickie Henderson’s Light Up the Town. Author’s collection.

The Albanian Eurovision delegation. Courtesy of Terry Henebery.

Ernest Maxin, Kathy Kirby, Bill Cotton Junior and Tom Sloan. BBC Photo Library/Referns.

That Was the Week That Was. Author’s collection.

The George Mitchell Minstrels. Author’s collection.

Dusty Springfield. Dezzo Hoffman/Rex Features.

Duke Ellington. David Redfern/Redferns.

Shirley Bassey and Tommy Trinder. Getty Images.

Bruce Forsyth and Sammy Davis Junior. Getty Images.

Rolf Harris. ITV/Rex Features.

Michael Parkinson and Harry Stoneham. Author’s collection.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Author’s collection.

Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. Courtesy of Barry Fantoni.

The Comedians. Courtesy of Granada.

Les Dawson. Getty Images.

Lord Grade, Fozzie Bear and Frank Oz. Getty Images.

Jimmy Savile. Getty Images.

The Price is Right board game. Author’s collection.

Noel Edmonds and Mr Blobby. New Group/Rex Features.

Strictly Come Dancing. © Topfoto/PA.

Introduction

What is light entertainment? Over the years, the term has baffled even its most distinguished practitioners. Scriptwriter Denis Norden once noted the glee with which its detractors asked ‘whether “Light Entertainment” fell into the same insubstantial category as “Light Refreshments” and “Light Housework”’. Norden also recalled Eric Maschwitz – novelist, songwriter and a distinguished head of BBC Television’s LE department – ‘loath[ing] the term and . . . prowl[ing] his office in shirtsleeves and thin red braces enquiring “What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? Or Dark Entertainment?”’¹

Although inextricably linked with television, the expression predates broadcasting. It first occurs in The Times in September 1796, in a review of a Haymarket Theatre production called A Peep Behind the Curtain. By the early twentieth century, it had come to describe the genteel, frothy productions that dominated the West End stage. In 1945, James Agate published an anthology of his theatre reviews called Immoment Toys: a survey of light entertainment on the London stage, 1920–1943.

In broadcasting terms, however, light entertainment is a development from the earthier productions of the variety theatre and music hall, and as radio and television have expanded and diversified, the concept of ‘variety’ has expanded and diversified too. In the forties and fifties, when television was growing up in public, it meant acts or ‘turns’: magicians; whistlers; light-opera singers; crooners; women who couldn’t sing very well, but had big knockers (one female singer’s bill matter was a coarse, leering ‘All this and four octaves!’); performing animals; animals whose unique selling point was their refusal to perform (dog owners will know that deadpan is not their natural tendency); and comedians who claimed to have a giraffe in a shoebox.

Since then, the broadcast definition of variety has expanded to include quiz shows, ‘people’ shows, chat shows and talent shows. In the sixties and seventies, television became the dominant force in entertaining the nation, and, before the fragmentation of audiences caused by home video and the advent of satellite television, an exceptional programme could capture and captivate half the UK population.

As a child growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, I absorbed it all. One of my earliest memories is of Tom O’Connor presenting Thames Television’s London Night Out, complete with the Name That Tune quiz segment. The Muppet Show, The Good Old Days and The Morecambe and Wise Show and anything featuring Les Dawson were required family viewing. The Royal Variety Performance and the Eurovision Song Contest were (and are) non-negotiable annual appointments to view. When Tommy Cooper took his final, fatal bow on Live From Her Majesty’s, I was watching the show with my great-grandmother, unsure of what had happened until the newsflash immediately after. Family holidays were spent in British seaside resorts where real live variety lived on in pier theatres – on one jaunt, when I was nine, I was taken to see Tommy Trinder doing his stand-up act, as well as Jimmy Edwards and Eric Sykes in the comic play Big Bad Mouse. Trinder addressed his audiences as ‘You lucky people’. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how lucky I’d been to see him and Edwards in action while I could.

As I moved from impressionable youngster to objectionable teenager, I turned my back on old-school entertainment in favour of rawer, more alternative fare. It was that period just after The Young Ones when Brucie and Tarby were being painted as, at best, cosy old farts gagging their way round the golf course, and, at worst, close friends of the common enemy, Mrs Thatcher. Bob Monkhouse was just a smarmy game show host, a fake-tanned snake oil salesman. One Christmas, a violent row blew up because I wanted to watch something dangerous and alternative, while the rest of my family wanted to watch Russ Abbot. Majority rule and family gerontocracy had their way, so I sat with them all, declaring Abbot to be about as funny as piles and determined not to laugh. I lasted about three minutes before cracking a smile. Now, on Christmas Day, I rue my posturing, there being vast stretches of tedium in the modern festive schedules during which I’d happily crawl across broken glass for a glimpse of Bella Emberg dressed as Wonder Woman.

By the early nineties, television had turned its back on the old-school entertainers, but in doing so revealed the alternatives to be the new establishment. Ben Elton was on the way to writing musicals with another common enemy, Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Stephen Fry was rapidly becoming the human equivalent of a much-loved listed building. Meanwhile, Bob Monkhouse showed his true colours as a clever, thoughtful man of comedy with an incendiary performance on Have I Got News For You, and a funny, and unexpectedly candid autobiography. At this point, I realized I’d been a fool. It’s perfectly possible to love both Adrian Edmondson and Bruce Forsyth. After all, what was Saturday Live if not Sunday Night at the London Palladium with knob and fart jokes?

Variety has been pronounced dead many times, but the truth is that the genre will never truly die. It just keeps evolving. What follows is the story of that evolution, from Victorian singalongs to the Saturday night spectaculars.

CHAPTER ONE

Empires, moguls and a man called Reith

The acme of light entertainment was reached between 8.55pm and 10pm on Christmas Day 1977, when 28 million viewers tuned into BBC1 to watch the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show. From the opening spoof of US cop show Starsky and Hutch, to the closing sequence in which Elton John played the piano in an empty studio – TC8 at BBC Television Centre, to be precise – for Eric and Ernie dressed as the studio cleaners, over half the nation was present. Variety had come a long way in the century and a quarter since its birth.

The birth took place at the Canterbury Arms in Lambeth and, in time, Charles Morton, the Canterbury’s licensee, became known as ‘the father of the halls’. Morton, born in Hackney in 1819, had been in the pub business since his early twenties; he had been landlord of the Canterbury, situated just south of the River Thames between St Thomas’s Hospital and the railway line into the newly built Waterloo station, since December 1849. At his previous establishment in Pimlico, he’d gained a reput...