Double Bill (Text Only). Bill Cotton
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and influence. Now the balance of power had shifted and to a marked degree he depended on me. Radio was still his great love but the proceeds didn’t pay the rent. His main source of income was the variety theatre. Television paid good money, provided the band with regular work and gave him huge publicity – so he just had to knuckle down and accept that I was now in the driving seat.
For my part, I was simply happy to be able to repay Dad for all he had done for me. He knew he could trust me; I would never put him in a situation on television where he was asked to do something he couldn’t do well. I was determined to exploit his strengths and build on the solid foundations his producer Brian Tesler had laid down. Our biggest problem was the one facing all general entertainment shows: how to find an adequate supply of interesting and talented guests. I looked around for a pianist, preferably someone who played the piano like the bloke down the pub. I mentioned this one day to Richard Armitage, who had taken over the Noel Gay agency. He told me about a young man EMI had just recorded and fixed it for me to hear him in Richard’s office. He was actually called Trevor Stanford but was renamed Russ Conway by EMI. The name stuck and I was glad to sign him because he played just the sort of music I was looking for. And he was to become a big star.
I was due to produce the Six-Five Special show from Barry in South Wales, so I booked Russ to appear on it. I wanted to see how he looked on camera. It was a disaster. The studio was filled with fans of the reigning king of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan. That’s what they’d come for, skiffle music, not honky-tonk piano-playing, so the applause was underwhelming. His confidence shattered, Russ dashed off the set and headed for the railway station. When I caught up with him in town, I managed to convince him that life on The Billy Cotton Band Show was going to be better than that. And it was, thanks partly to a song he’d composed called ‘Side Saddle’ which sold well and fitted the show like a glove. So Russ went from strength to strength, for quite apart from his good looks and pianistic virtuosity he got on well with my father. Jimmy Grafton wrote a duet for them called ‘What Will They Do Without Us?’ with flexible lyrics that could be adapted for different occasions: the chemistry between them was magical. Some of this magic must have affected me, for I seemed to have a capacity to communicate with Russ from a distance without benefit of wires. On the studio floor, he could look quite solemn while he was playing, so I’d mutter to myself, ‘Smile, you bastard!’ and at that instant, uncannily, he would look up at the camera and break into a broad grin.
The demands my father made on his orchestra were very heavy. They were committed to a season fifty weeks long on radio, television and in the theatre; they had to cope with a wide range of music thrust onto their stands at very short notice; and in addition they were expected to fool around as foils during my Dad’s comic routines. Some critics sniffily claimed that musically they weren’t outstanding. For my money, their work-rate, versatility and sheer discipline made them unique.
We also needed a new female vocalist, because Doreen Stephens had left to seek her fortune elsewhere. Johnny Johnston recommended a singer called Kathie Kay who had first appeared on the stage at the age of four and within ten years had appeared in every London theatre, including the Palladium. Then at the age of seventeen she retired, married a Scotsman and had three sons. She still did a certain amount of recording, and one day someone influential in the BBC overheard one of her records, so she started a second career in television and on radio. But her children took priority over her career, so she refused to make her home in London and instead travelled many thousands of miles every year between there and Glasgow. She wasn’t prepared to go on the road with the band, either, so Dad agreed that while her children were growing up she should confine herself to radio and television engagements. As the years went by, Kathie grew ever closer to Dad and became his main pillar of support until he died.
Dad, of course, had been in the entertainment business for so long that he knew everybody, so getting star guests for the show wasn’t too great a hassle. Max Bygraves was always good value. On one occasion we had two enormous puppet-heads made of the porcine stars of Pinky and Perky, a very popular show at the time. The sight of Max and Dad wearing these heads and performing a dance routine was hilarious, and we resurrected the routine later on for a Royal Variety Performance. Dad was absolutely dependent for his patter on cue cards scattered around the studio, and Max used to read out Dad’s words in a different order to produce utter chaos. On one awful occasion, the teleprompter roller stuck, and Dad was reduced to reading the same cue again and again until the contraption freed itself. But the public loved it; he could have done anything and they would have roared in appreciation.
Coping with the script for a fifty-minute show made great demands on my Dad’s memory – he was, after all, a band-leader not an actor. On one occasion, he kept muffing his lines and our rehearsal time was fast running out. I pressed the button on the production desk which enabled the studio to hear me and announced with a sigh that we would have just one more run-through of the routine. Unfortunately I forgot to take my finger off the button as I turned to the people in the control room: ‘If he’d learned the bloody script we could get on.’ Back came the unmistakable voice of the star: ‘If you are so clever, why don’t you come down here and do it?’ I immediately went down to the studio floor where the band members who were used to the rough edge of my Dad’s tongue looked expectantly at my getting some of the same treatment in a flaming row. But I was so appalled at my tactlessness that I immediately apologised: ‘I am sorry, Dad, I shouldn’t have said that.’ A broad grin spread across his face: ‘If I’d learned the bloody thing, you wouldn’t have had to, would you?’ I turned to the band, most of whom I’d known since I was a little boy, and in a spirit of camaraderie gave them the two-finger salute. In all the years I worked with my father, that was the one and only time we got near to a row.
Dad was a man’s man who was very much at home with the ladies. Alma Cogan was one of his favourites – and mine. I’d known her since my days as a song-plugger and I could always rely on her to help out if we were stuck for a star guest, even though she was under contract to commercial television at the time. She was utterly without any sense of her own importance. I recall visiting her home one evening and finding Cary Grant sitting chatting to Sammy Davis Jr while in another room Alma was saying encouraging words to a penniless songwriter. She treated everybody the same.
On the eve of one show, our main guest dropped out and I was really desperate – I rang everyone I could think of, except Alma, who had appeared just a few weeks before. In the end I called round to the flat where she lived with her mother and sister. It was very late and she had been out working, but within minutes she volunteered to fill the gap. We sat up into the early hours working out a routine based on the song ‘He’s Funny That Way’. It worked very well and we put it on an LP for Columbia records.
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