A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
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to tread. In 1956 Granada converted an old BBC radio format into a prospective early evening panel hit. The panel took its cue from Does the Team Think?, Jimmy Edwards’s pastiche of The Brains Trust, which consisted of four comedians battling to out-gag and upstage each other. For My Wildest Dream the urbane Terry-Thomas led the panel, with his three ‘dreaming partners’ Tommy Trinder, David Nixon and Alfred Marks. Acting as ‘peacemaker’ was Kenneth MacLeod. It’s worth taking a close look at this particular programme, which handily features all the symptoms of lazy thinking, over-egged whimsy and misplaced trust in star power that marked out the format at its worst.
The panel’s objective was to determine, by diligent questioning, the secret fantasies of the humble folk wheeled before them. Inevitably, since most people’s fantasies tended towards the predictable (‘win the pools’, ‘go out with Marilyn Monroe’), a bit of creative bending of the rules crept in. Hence a woman appeared claiming she wanted more than anything to put a mouse in a guardsman’s boot, while another contestant longed to tickle a point duty policeman under the arms. Such bewildering dollops of ‘unbelievably fatuous’49 whimsy would, the producers hoped, be spun into comedy gold by the dreaming partners.
This turned out to be optimistic. What happened was that four comic minds, all too aware of the humourlessness of the situation, trod water ever more frantically until panic set in. One reviewer captured the mood of an early edition. ‘Last night there were intolerable bouts of shouting by all four of the panel and the chairman, and one at least of the challengers was made the butt of what could hardly be called humour. It did remain a little doubtful whether some of the quarrelling was genuine or faked because it seems to come to a peak each time before a break for advertisement.’50 Shouting, bullying, artifice: these vices would prove hard to suppress. My Wildest Dream was ‘not merely negatively silly but is positively revolting.’51 It started to appear later and later in the evening schedule, and the panel calmed down a bit, but the brickbats continued to the bitter end. (‘The most actively unpleasant panel show in commercial television.’52)
A second wave of panel shows in the seventies was more self-consciously refined. BBC2 games like Face the Music and Call My Bluff were all drawing room erudition and cravatted anecdote. Once again many entries were wireless in origin (in this case Radio 4), but the TV transfer brought certain behavioural tics to the fore. ‘On Face the Music,’ noted Clive James, ‘Bernard Levin takes a sip of water after getting the right answer. It is meant to look humble but screams conceit.’53 This extra level of gamesmanship was often in danger of edging the nominal subject of the programme out of the frame entirely.
The third wave began in the nineties with Have I Got News for You and its many derivatives, and this time it stuck. A few years’ craze became several decades’ industry. Where once strutted eccentrics who’d fallen into the role (Gilbert Harding, Nancy Spain, Lady Isobel Barnett), ‘panel show contestant’ was now a fully furnished vocation for comedians with the right voice, cultural references and agent representation. Precious little else had changed, though. In 2014, BBC Director of Television Danny Cohen tried to redress the archaic gender balance of the genre by outlawing all-male editions. Bow ties became polo shirts, but the panel show remained essentially a gentlemen’s club.
ITV (Associated-Rediffusion/ABC/Thames)
The talent show girdles the globe.
THE HARD-BITTEN, SELF-MOTIVATING MEN and women who work the reality talent contests would have no need of anything as mimsy as a patron saint, but come the Judgement Day Live Final they’d be granted the protective arm-round-the-shoulder, whether they wanted it or not, of Hughie Green.
A juvenile song-and-dance man turned compère, stunt pilot and international aerospace hardware salesman, Green created radio talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1949 for the BBC Light Programme, though its brash tone proved too gamey for Broadcasting House. Sensing foul play in the cancellation, Green expensively sued the BBC, lost, and took the format to Radio Luxembourg for a two-and-a-half-year stint, before presenting a TV version to Associated-Rediffusion, where he presented a trial run in the summer of 1956, during which time he was declared bankrupt. The motley assortment of talent he initially offered was summed up by Bernard Levin: ‘Nobody on the edition I saw actually made a model of Wembley Stadium out of butter, but there was a man who spent his entire time hopping.’54
The following January, at the height of its Reithian pomp, the BBC broadcast It’s Up To You, a fortnightly talent parade from their northern studio. A panel of judges poured praise and scorn on a line-up of eccentric amateurs including, in the first edition, a man from St Helens who tied his braces round his neck and sported a lemon in his left ear, leaving the panel bewildered. ‘The thing I found distracting about this man,’ complained one judge, ‘was the lemon in his ear.’55
Over on the commercial channel, Hughie was permitted to take show business as seriously as he liked. His contestants were no half-daft party tricks but honest folk with an honest hunger for fame and, on occasion, the talent to honestly acquire it. Success was determined by a postal vote, with a touch of immediacy provided by the mysterious ‘clapometer’, which purported to measure the level of the studio audience’s applause. Green’s default mode of address was a transatlantic unction so treacly its hapless recipients found themselves bogged down to the point of immobility. As one critic remarked, the effect of the Green charm offensive was to leave ‘you feeling – for all the smooth assurances that we were watching new talent get its biggest break – that it was the impresario we were expected to admire’.56 The pattern was set for New Faces and its twenty-first century descendants. Many contestants went on to carve decent careers for themselves (Les Dawson, Pam Ayers, Paul Daniels, Su Pollard, Lena Zavaroni and Freddie Starr among them) but the acts were increasingly a means to an end – that end being the furthering of the talent show brand and those behind it.
A man of colossal ambition, Green found national dominance unsatisfactory. In 1970, after two successful international editions of the show with Norway, Sweden and Denmark joining the UK via crackly satellite feeds, he announced his determination to tackle ‘probably the biggest challenge television light entertainment has had to face’: the creation of a global TV talent show. ‘A communication satellite would mother a world star,’ he predicted, biblically. On New Year’s Eve 1973 he hosted the Opportunity Knocks Concorde Special from the flight deck of the supersonic craft as it zipped over the Bay of Biscay, though the acts themselves were, disappointingly, located in the usual studio.
The following year megalomania set in for keeps, as Green commandeered his own show to deliver an unbalanced anti-union rant, pushing the boundaries of celebrity privilege out of sight. It was only natural that Hughie’s global stardom should peak with ‘a 13,500 mile link-up via the Indian ocean satellite’57 as OppKnox HQ, London joined its newly-created sister franchise at the Channel 7 studios in Sydney, and Hughie’s Aussie counterpart Johnnie Farnham (like Hughie, a former cabaret man with national smash hit ‘Sadie the Cleaning Lady’ under his belt).
With a studio complete with audience and full orchestra apiece, Hughie and Johnnie batted the banter back and forth across the heavenly void, with plenty of well-wrangled applause to cover the time delay. Five previously successful contestants from each country, including Pam Ayers and Frank Carson for the Brits, competed for the special Satellite Trophy. A brave new world beckoned, a globe unified in the name of talent. Nation shall mark spinning plates out of ten unto nation.
Within two years, all the gimmicks used up, Opportunity