Double Bill (Text Only)

Jack Good came up with the idea of letting the viewers see all the inner workings of television: cameras moving around, lighting rigs being adjusted, scenery pushed into place. It was an unheard-of innovation and some members of the department found it hard to swallow. Josephine Douglas, who was the co-producer and presenter of the show, came into my caravan in tears one day. She felt that Jack was taking all the magic out of television and blowing away its mystery. She pleaded with me to talk to Jack to persuade him to revert to the old formula. I did talk to him and thank God I wasn’t able to change his mind, because he had hit upon a way of revitalising television. He stayed with the BBC for a while and then left to join ITV to produce Oh Boy! which launched Cliff Richard’s television career.

After Jack Good had gone, we took turns in producing Six-Five Special, and it fell to me to produce the first show from outside London. We transmitted it from the town hall in Barry in South Wales. The guest presenter was Lonnie Donegan who had very pronounced ideas about what he wanted to do, which included doing without the other presenter, Pete Murray. Lonnie insisted he could handle it on his own. In the end we reached a creative compromise: Lonnie would do a little of what he wanted and a lot of what I wanted. This is what being a producer is all about; he carries the can and in the end what he says goes, however big the star with whom he’s working. Compared to the Television Centre, the makeshift studio in the town hall was relatively small so I told the local BBC man that in order to allow as many people as possible to enjoy the show, we’d let in one audience to watch the run-through and another to attend the actual transmission.

There was only a thirty-minute gap between the run-through and transmission which meant we required a slick and orderly audience turn-round. At the due time, the red light went on and we were live on air. As we’d planned, I cued the number one cameraman to track in on Lonnie. He didn’t move. I was bawling down the intercom at the floor manager until another cameraman turned his camera round and showed me his colleague’s predicament. The first audience were so keen to see the show they refused to leave after the run-through, but the second audience had been allowed in and the camera was pinned against the studio’s rear wall by a mass of screaming teenagers. For the first five minutes of the show, the pictures were all over the place, but we eventually sorted it out and the viewers assumed the chaos was the style of the show.

In 1957 Brian Tesler, having produced sixteen of Dad’s shows, announced that he was leaving the BBC to join Lew Grade at ATV. The BBC therefore needed another producer to do the Cotton Show. Unbeknown to me, Dad had spoken to Ronnie Waldman to ask if I could take the show over, but Ronnie told him he and I had an agreement that I would not be asked to do shows with my father. Ronnie promised Dad he’d look around for a suitable replacement. I got home that evening to find my father sitting comfortably on the settee entertaining my wife with some of his numerous stories. Just a little suspicious, I asked him whether there was anything particular on his mind. He replied that he’d just come for supper – indeed, he’d brought it with him: smoked salmon and a good bottle of wine. So we had a very enjoyable evening.

At eleven o’clock he stood up, glanced at his watch and uttered one of his ritual phrases: ‘Time a decent man was akip in his bed.’ Then as he reached the door, he turned, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Why won’t you produce my show?’ I was completely unprepared for that question and it took me a few moments to realise I’d been bushwhacked. Eventually I said, ‘Dad, the producer of a show is in charge of it, and that often leads to arguments with the performers. I wouldn’t want to argue with you and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to win.’

‘OK,’ he replied, ‘you have my word that I will never argue with you in public; we’ll have all our discussions in private. Is it a deal?’

Of course it was. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse and I realised I didn’t want to. So ‘Produced by Bill Cotton Junior’ was the credit at the end of The Billy Cotton Band Show from April 1957 and for the next four years.

Thus ended my first year in television. I still went back to the office in Denmark Street occasionally and kept an eye on what was going on. Johnny was by then the uncrowned king of the TV jingle, though the music business generally was on the back burner. But every now and again, someone would record a song from our catalogue which ended up on the B-side of a hit, and then the royalties would roll in. It might be the A-side of a record the public wanted, but the B-side got the same royalties.

Back at the Television Centre, having completed a series of Off the Record, The Show Band Show and some music specials under the generic title of Summer Serenade with Geraldo and Frank Chacksfield, I was accepted as a full-blown producer/director. Around the department there were some mutterings about nepotism, but nothing serious. If anybody hinted at it, I would be quite brazen and unapologetic. In all walks of life, from the professions to the trade unions, being the child of an established father has its advantages. Sure, doors open and you get to walk through them, but the important thing is what you do with the chances you’ve been given.

Our boss, Ronnie Waldman, was a great talent-spotter and he laid the foundations of a department which in the 1960s and 1970s regularly out-performed ITV, the channel supposedly set up in order to be the nation’s main entertainment outlet. Elitists both inside and outside the BBC who had greeted the arrival of ITV with relief because they thought it meant the BBC could concentrate on education and information, leaving entertainment to the commercial sector, were forced to eat their words.

Some of my colleagues had come over from radio: Duncan Wood, who produced Hancock and Steptoe and Son; Johnny Ammonds, who was responsible for shows featuring Val Doonican, Morecambe and Wise and Harry Worth; and Dennis Main-Wilson, who was the glue that held together Till Death Do Us Part and The Rag Trade. Dennis was an extraordinary character; he’d been blooded on The Goon Show and became inured to the good-natured ridicule of Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. Dad christened him Dame May Whitty which fitted perfectly his rather fussy and punctilious manner – but no one doubted that he was a great producer.

Some of that first generation of television producers were imports from the theatre: Jimmy Gilbert, for example, who had written the successful West End show Grab Me a Gondola. He became one of the most distinguished television producers of situation and sketch comedy, and later whenever I had a risky new show to launch I entrusted it to him in the absolute confidence that if it was workable at all, Jimmy would bring it off. There was also the occasional producer who had started his career as an engineer or floor manager and moved up through the ranks. Outstanding among them was T. Leslie Jackson, who master-minded This Is Your Life and What’s My Line? Ronnie Waldman used to hold a producers’ meeting every Monday morning during which we discussed and critically analysed the previous week’s output. One of the most vocal contributors was George Inns, who had produced Jewel and Warriss’s 1950s radio hit Up the Pole. He suggested a solution to what had become an intractable programme problem and in the process launched one of the great television and theatre shows. Every year there was a Radio Show at Earls Court or Olympia which was set up along the lines of the Motor Show and exhibited the latest models of radio and television sets. For a couple of years, we had built a makeshift studio at the show from which we broadcast some of our television programmes. Our producers hated it because the audience kept invading rehearsals and there were numerous technical breakdowns. Frankly, it was a mess, an embarrassment to the department, yet it was unthinkable that the BBC’s Television Service should ignore an exhibition dedicated to selling television sets.

For ages, dear George had been plugging his pet idea of a black-and-white minstrel show, and yet again on this occasion he went through his usual routine, insisting that the Radio Show would be an ideal setting for his great project. We all groaned, but nobody could come up with a better notion, so George was given the go-ahead. The Black and White Minstrel Show was born, and as is often the case in television, everybody in the business hated it except the audience. It became and remained a huge success. It was the BBC’s first entry for the Montreux Television Festival and swept the board. In the end, political correctness decreed that the idea of blacked-up performers was racist, so the show died and has never been replaced.

Meanwhile I had turned my attention to the upcoming series of my father’s show. It was to go out fortnightly on BBC1, alternating with The Vera Lynn Show. Once I became Dad’s TV producer, the dynamics of our relationship changed. Throughout my childhood and schooldays, I had hero-worshipped him. During my time in the army and my career as a music publisher I had been quite dependent on his patronage, support 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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