A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
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a bare studio in which guest stars, house band The Frantic Five and presenters Josephine Douglas and Pete Murray mingled informally with the audience of jiving teenagers. (‘A hundred cats are jumping here!’) The cameras lingered on the exuberant dancers as much as on the acts, and prizes were offered to couples who ‘cut the cutest capers’.
Square folks were aghast. ‘I feel thoroughly disgusted that the powers-that-be give time to exhibitions such as this. I cannot imagine that any decent-minded girl would permit herself to be pulled around in such a way, even to the extent of allowing herself to be thrown at times over the shoulders of the males taking part,’ fumed an outraged citizen of Penarth.61 Success was assured.
Early editions established the format, with Tommy Steele a regular draw. Ten shows in, shaggy-haired, surly ‘Six-Five Specialist’ Jim Dale arrived, graduating from warm-up man to main attraction. Uneasy with what he saw as the forced adulation the audience lavished upon him, he adopted a serious, unsmiling countenance as a defence mechanism. The twelve-million-strong audience, seeing their own youthful sullenness transformed by the cameras into cool belligerence, adored him even more, and television began following the movies in turning previously mortifying awkwardness into an alluring detachment.
Good soon became restless, feeling restricted by the ‘jolly, hearty’ element imposed on his programme (Freddie Mills’s ‘healthy activity’ spot was fine, but ramrod-backed guests such as Regimental Sergeant-Major Ron ‘Tibby’ Brittain quashed the groovy mood somewhat). The nugatory wage the BBC paid him didn’t help matters either. He upped sticks in 1958 for the more indulgent, independent pastures of ABC, the weekend-only independent broadcaster for the midlands and the north. ‘I want to bring a breath of excitement to television,’ he claimed in the publicity for Oh Boy!, ‘the fastest, most exciting show to hit TV’ which launched directly opposite the Special in June of that year.
Escaping the Beeb’s square tendency, Good made Oh Boy! about the music only – up to eighteen numbers in forty minutes with minimal fluff in between, accompanied by a wilder house band, Lord Rockingham’s XI. Thirteen weeks in, it was netting five million viewers, helped by hot footage of Cliff Richard that was condemned in the press. ‘His violent hip-swinging during an obvious attempt to copy Elvis Presley was revolting – hardly the kind of performance any parent could wish their children to witness,’ raged, of all institutions, the NME. ‘Remember, Tommy Steele became Britain’s teenage idol without resorting to this form of indecency.’62
Most of Oh Boy!’s viewers were poached from Six-Five. Good played up the inter-channel rivalry wherever he could, issuing dire warnings of industrial espionage: ‘Remember that spies are everywhere – ours as well as theirs – and a source of leakage will not remain hidden for long.’63 The Special rattled on without Good on the footplate, but the strain was beginning to show. A hasty September revamp went for all-out, show-stopping gigantism. A lavish new set – ‘the biggest in European TV’ – was built. Three new house bands were hired. Six female hosts – the ‘Six-Five Dates’ – shared presentation duties. Rock and skiffle were jettisoned in favour of beat music. It was all to no avail, and the Special’s journey ended on relatively desultory ratings of four and a half million.
Good’s innovations continued on the other side with Boy Meets Girls, featuring Marty Wilde and the sixteen Vernons Girls in a setting Good promised was ‘less frantic and less noisy than Oh Boy!’ The show’s main historical claim was the British debut of Gene Vincent, in a career doldrums after ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, whom Good remodelled in a leather-and-medallion rebel biker image, even, according to legend, egging him on to accentuate his motorbike injury with the off-stage exhortation, ‘Limp, you bugger, limp!’
When he tired of that, he went off in the opposite direction with Wham!, introducing ‘The Fat Noise’, a gargantuan house band which produced ‘the fattest, roundest sound that has ever come to television.’ But nothing was working, and Good departed for the USA, to finally hit real paydirt at the ABC network with Shindig! and set The Monkees on their path to self-destruction with the chaotic TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee.
Good returned to the UK sporadically throughout the next few decades, engineering various Oh Boy! revivals to put a spring in the step of middle-aged Teds, but he became increasingly estranged from contemporary pop with every slight return. Finally, in 1992, Jack Good left the music television business he’d been instrumental in creating, in as unexpected a way as he’d entered it – he joined a Carmelite hermitage in Texas.
THE STRANGE WORLD OF GURNEY SLADE (1960)
ITV (ATV)
The sitcom eats itself.
Who and what is Anthony Newley?… This brown-haired, blue-eyed searcher after truth hovers and flits in and around and above the world of show business like a creative helicopter.
Radio Times, 9 November 1961
THOUGH IT STILL HANDLED rock ’n’ roll with all the aplomb of Stan Laurel taming a cobra, television did as much as cinema and radio combined to bring big, brash all-round American entertainment to the chilly front rooms of ration-squeezed Britain. The size, confidence and polish of those variety showcases were swiftly imitated by home-grown entertainers who got their suits reupholstered, their smiles re-pointed and their accents suspended somewhere between New England and the Old Kent Road. The alien sheen of these imitation Yanks – the brittle charm of Brucie, the oily palms of Michael Miles, the messianic humility of Hughie Green – caused amusement and unease among viewers accustomed to the polite cough and the if-you-please of English stage tradition.
Comic and singer Anthony Newley, from out of the Hackney Marshes via the Italia Conti stage school, acknowledged the incongruity of the transatlantic manner. He developed a penchant for running a self-deprecating commentary on his own act. On a UK tour to promote his film Idol on Parade, he stood by the screen as the opening credits rolled, talking them down, one by one. (‘“Directed?” The director couldn’t direct traffic! “Photographed by?” He nipped out to Boots the chemist …’64) Television, the most self-referential medium yet hatched, snapped him up.
Newley’s TV accomplices were writers Sid Green and Dick Hills, who had constructed specials for Sid James, Roy Castle and, disastrously, Eamonn Andrews. Initially billing themselves as the grand ‘SC Green and RM Hills’, they soon relaxed into ‘Sid and Dick’, names more appropriate to their modern, laid-back writing style. ‘They admit cheerfully that they belong with the coffee shop and back-of-the-envelope script writers,’ reported the Mail, ‘rather than the agonised pacers around kidney-shaped desks in grey flanelled rooms.’65
Newley’s attitude to comedy writing was similarly easygoing. ‘How do I define humour?’ he pondered at the behest of the TV Times. ‘I don’t. I wouldn’t dare.’66 After two reasonably successful Saturday Spectaculars for Lew Grade’s ATV in early 1960 – one featuring copious amounts of Peter Sellers – Newley, Hills and Green tackled the still maturing world of the sitcom, applying their skills in the same sideways-on manner. Given carte blanche to fill six half-hours how they fancied, they wrote, designed and shot the whole series in seven weeks. Newley was keen to point up the trio’s ground-breaking intent. ‘We hope to achieve humour without setting out to be deliberately funny.’67
An estimated twelve million viewers settled down at 8.35 p.m. on 22 October for the first episode of The Strange World of Gurney Slade. What they saw went roughly like this. We open on the front room of a terraced house, wherein Gurney Slade (Newley) is an unwilling participant in a Grove Family-style