Double Bill (Text Only). Bill Cotton
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was a useful prop – a director could shoot it from every possible angle. If the director was a beginner, he or she invariably got the camera cables crossed and ended up in a complete tangle. But it was all valuable experience.
By 1956 Boo and I had lived at Ham Island for six years. We arrived there as newlyweds and soon became a family – Jane was born on 26 September 1951 and Kate on exactly the same day two years later. I did myself no favours with Boo when in one of my more jocular moods I explained the identical birth-date of two of my children at a dinner-party: ‘If you work it back, it’s Boxing Day,’ I said. ‘After all, Christmas Eve, you drink, Christmas Day, you eat, so what’s left for Boxing Day?’ My wife’s laughter was dutiful but mirthless. I used to remind Dad every year as 26 September approached that it was the children’s birthday. Every year he would ask, ‘Which one?’ and every year I would say, ‘Both.’ And every year he would say accusingly, ‘You never told me that!’
We had thoroughly enjoyed living on the Island but now the children were getting near school age and Boo thought it was time to move nearer to town so that I wouldn’t have as far to drive to work. Our chance came when an old friend of my brother, Bob Snell, told us of a new development called Parkleys his firm had built at Ham Common near Richmond. Bob and Ted had been at school together and served in the RAF as pilots at the same time. Bob’s parents lived abroad, he spent his leaves with us and had become one of the family. He had moved into one of the new flats and there was another one on sale at £3500, which he assured me was a good investment. Boo and I went to see it. It had an open-plan living- and dining-room, two doubles and a small single room. There was, alas, no river at the bottom of the garden, but there were shops within walking distance. Boo was all for buying it, and I agreed, though I feared we might not get our money back if we wanted to sell it. Nevertheless her enthusiasm was irresistible.
The day we moved house, our bulldog, Bessie, had puppies. We’d always had dogs, starting with a Pekinese who was king of all he surveyed till one day he picked a fight with a boxer and a sheepdog and lost. So we decided to get a bigger dog; hence Bessie. Boo had arranged to make the actual house-move with the help of a friend, Patsy, while I was at work – in the morning I would leave from Ham Island and later come home to a new flat in Ham Common. It was a plan that suited a male chauvinist like myself down to the ground – or it would have done if Bessie hadn’t interfered with it. The bungalows on Ham Island were built on stilts against the possibility of flooding and Bessie chose to deliver her litter underneath the bungalow. I had to crawl around in the mud, passing one puppy after another up to Patsy. At last we got all the puppies out, eight of them. We couldn’t keep eight puppies in a flat, so we held on to two and the vet took the others. I left Ham Island for the last time feeling like a mass murderer.
Meanwhile, as part of Dad’s contract while he was waiting to get the Band Show on air, he was asked to present a musical programme produced by Francis Essex called The Tin Pan Alley Show. It was not a happy experience, though we had a few laughs along the way – wherever Dad was there was jollity. The problem in this instance was that he didn’t much like the show’s format and wanted out, and by God, he could be mulish when he wasn’t getting his own way. I swore at the time I’d never work with him again because it would obviously end in tears and I told Ronnie Waldman so.
Eventually I graduated as a full-blown producer and director on Off the Record, a show in which we put television pictures to records of current musical hits. We weren’t allowed to play the actual records because the BBC had an agreement with the Musicians’ Union who, naturally enough, wanted us to use live musicians rather than recordings. The show’s presenter, Jack Payne, was, like my father, a band-leader of pre-war vintage. He could be very awkward and difficult to handle, but coping with temperamental band-leaders was a skill I’d absorbed with my mother’s milk, so after a few preliminary skirmishes we got along fine.
It was on this show I was introduced to the world of special effects. Nowadays, they are an integral part of most shows, though all the fancy technical stuff is usually done after the programme has been recorded. But back in the fifties, when all shows were live, we had to put in the special effects during transmission as we went along. I remember Frankie Vaughan apparently walking through a series of doors while singing ‘Green Door’ – not an easy effect to create when all television was black and white. Frankie just lifted and put down his feet on the spot and the illusion was created that he was moving through space from one door to another. These days it would be laughably simple to get that effect but at that time it seemed like magic.
I recall in my early days in the department producing a show featuring the singer Carole Carr. Basically, we had three types of shot: long, mid-shot and close up. At that time, there was no such thing as a zoom lens – the camera had to be moved physically nearer or further away from the star. I started on a long shot and Carole looked so lovely I decided to track in closer as she sang her heart out. I called for the cameraman to move nearer. Nothing happened. I added what I thought was more authority to my voice and ordered the cameraman to move in. Still nothing happened. I was beside myself with fury until someone in the gallery said in a quiet voice, ‘If he does track in, there’ll be a terrible mess in the stalls. His camera’s at the front of the circle.’ Another lesson learned.
I had my first success as a television talent-spotter when I was working on Off the Record. I had a friend called Hugh Mendl who worked for Decca Records and whom I’d known since my days as a song-plugger. He asked me to go and see a young rock and roll star who was appearing in Soho. We found ourselves in a reclaimed public toilet that posed as a club in the heart of Frith Street. We ordered a drink and settled down to wait for the boy to come on stage. Suddenly at our table appeared a bouncer the size of a house who said the manager was aware we were auditioning in his club and he’d like to see us in his office. I refused his invitation – the reason being that he terrified the life out of me. We found ourselves on the street and called it a day. Hugh, however, was nothing if not tenacious and pestered me until I went along to another club where the boy was appearing. He was a sensation. I asked Hugh what recordings he’d made. ‘None,’ he replied, ‘but if you’ll give him a spot on your show I’ll record him tomorrow.’ We shook hands on it and Tommy Steele had his first recording, ‘Rock with the Caveman’, on the show the following week. I knew this was a big star in the making.
Discovering Tommy Steele presented me with an ethical dilemma. The man who wrote Tommy Steele’s hit was Lionel Bart, who when I came on the scene hadn’t found a publisher for the song. I had not divested myself of my interest in music publisher Michael Reine, but I had promised the Head of TV Entertainment, Ronnie Waldman, that I would not take advantage of my position in the BBC to advance the interests of my private company. I felt it right that I should not tell my partner at Michael Reine, Johnny Johnston, about the existence of Lionel Bart or the brilliant song Tommy Steele was turning into a hit. And that’s why we didn’t sign up Lionel Bart, who of course went on to write ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be’ and Oliver. Johnny was not best pleased.
By now, my dad’s show was nearing its transmission date. The combination of Billy Cotton as presenter and the Silhouettes worked a treat. Jimmy Grafton wrote the comedy script; there were some instrumental numbers and a guest spot. Brian Tesler had got an ideal television format, infinitely flexible, and Dad was smart enough to stick with it for his entire television career. He may not have been the best song and dance man in the business but when the audience saw the sweat on his forehead they knew he was giving everything he had to entertain them, and they loved him for it.
Because office space was at a premium at the unfinished Television Centre, I worked from a caravan behind the scenery block in the carpark. It was a little like a holiday camp, and the occupant of the next caravan along was a brilliant young producer called Jack Good who was busy working on an idea that was to revolutionise pop programmes. He named it Six-Five Special and proposed employing a quite original production technique. The perceived wisdom at the time was that none of the technology which transmitted the programme – cameras, lighting, microphones – should be visible to the viewer, who was supposed to assume the event was taking place in a corner of the living-room. It was a hanging offence to allow the tip of a microphone to appear in shot, and if one of the technicians was inadvertently picked up by the