A History of Television in 100 Programmes

The first step on the road to the modern drama series was taken by what critic Grace Wyndham Goldie, later to run the BBC’s current affairs department, called ‘an interesting experiment in presentation’.12 Mileson Horton had made a name for himself in the mid-1930s writing ‘Photocrime’, an immensely popular series of whodunit photo-stories starring the intrepid Inspector Holt, published in Weekly Illustrated. These bare bones procedurals, simply told and visually direct, were just what TV producers were after. Horton was hired to script a series of twenty-minute Holt adventures for the small screen.

Take a typical episode of Tele-crime, ‘The Fletcher Case’. A man’s body is found sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, with a gun in his right hand. It looks like an open-and-shut suicide case for Inspector Holt. Just as he’s about to leave the scene, the phone rings. Holt’s constable answers: it’s the victim’s niece. The victim, it turns out, was left-handed! Murder! It’s a race to the family house to stop the killer striking again. But too late! Another family member has been offed. Holt assembles the suspects and hears their stories.

After fifteen minutes of this, Holt and company fade from the screen, replaced by the gently smiling face of continuity announcer Elizabeth Cowell: ‘Well, who did do the murder? Viewers have now all the evidence necessary to detect the criminal.’ There follows a few moments’ reflective pause for the audience to flex their minds, then it’s back to the house for a rapid denouement.

The guess-the-culprit interval was an early bit of audience participation that didn’t last the pace (although it was revived for Jeremy Lloyd and Lance Percival’s 1972 panel game Whodunnit?). The rest of Tele-crime, though, set the mould for the detective series, the backbone of popular TV drama ever since.

The crime thriller, like most genres, is a self-concealing art: done well, the writing and direction are taken for granted; done badly, they’re sitting ducks. ‘In an affair of this kind,’ observed Wyndham Goldie, ‘nobody expects any depth or subtle characterisation, but the people in the story must be made just sufficiently interesting for us to care which of them is hanged.’13 Television evolves not with quantum leaps of genius, but by continuous tinkering. Tele-crime may have long vanished into thin air, but look at the foundations of any current drama series and you might just glimpse the smudgy, over-lit face of Inspector Holt.

COOKERY (1946–51)

BBC

The first celebrity chef.

THE FIRST PERSON TO sling a skillet in the studio was French restaurateur, novelist and boulevardier Xavier Marcel Boulestin. He essayed suave hob-side demonstrations wearing a double-breasted suit during the BBC’s 1930s infancy in programmes like Bee for Boulestin and Blind Man’s Buffet. However, the cult of the celebrity chef – the omnipresent gastronome as relaxed in front of the camera as at the oven door – began with Philip Harben.

Rotund, neatly bearded and rarely seen out of an apron, Harben emerged from the post-war landscape of ration coupons and meat queues to become an ever-present face on TV via his first series, the sensibly-titled Cookery. Harben rustled up austerity lobster vol-au-vents and welfare soufflés for the vicarious pleasure of families struggling on one slice of condemned corned beef a week, but few recognise just how many aspects of the twenty-first century tele-cookery landscape owe him their existence. Without Harben, we may never have witnessed these culinary devices:

THEATRICALITY – The son of film actors, Harben knew how to put his recipes, and himself, across to best effect in the muffled turmoil of early television, keeping the stream of patter going as the sheets of flame leapt from his flambé pan. ‘He stands almost alone,’ remarked an awed Reginald Pound, ‘a precision instrument of self-expression.’ 14

MERCHANDISE – Not content with putting his grinning, bearded face on jars of Heinz pickle and packs of Norfolk stuffing, Harben supplemented his meagre BBC salary with the launch of Harbenware, heavy gauge saucepans with a special ‘Harbenized’ non-stick coating, bearing labels festooned with his grinning, bearded face.

BACK TO BASICS – The ridicule endured by Delia Smith for demonstrating how to boil an egg was nothing new to Harben, who devoted the lion’s share of one programme to making a cup of tea. Pot-warming temperatures, infusion times, even the height from which to pour the water onto the leaves were discussed at rigorous length.

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL DISHES – Harben got away from the standard Mayfair dinner party aspirations of TV cookery to celebrate Britain’s regional food in 1951’s Country Dishes, rustling up everything from Cornish pasties to jellied eels. If technology had allowed him a global culinary excursion he’d have made one – instead he brought the resident chef from NBC’s Home show to the UK for a national dish swapping session in 1955’s Transatlantic Exchange.

SLUTTY INGREDIENTS SCANDAL – Delia’s controversial dalliance with frozen mash and other timesavers was pre-empted in 1954 when Harben rustled up sole bonne femme using haddock and milk instead of the traditional Dover sole and wine. An outraged telegram from catering students at Blackpool Technical College reached the Director General within hours. ‘The BBC permits Harben to clown with classical French dishes in a way which exposes the British kitchen to a justifiable scorn,’ 15 they raged. Whatever, they demanded, would the Americans think if this got out?

NUTRITIONAL CRUSADE – Getting the nation eating properly was another Harben innovation. This being 1949, however, the problem was that folk weren’t eating enough. Specifically, Harben attacked the ‘sparrow-sized breakfasts’ of Britain’s working men. ‘We cannot stay a first-class power if we give up eating a first-class breakfast,’16 he told the press, encouraging British men to get up earlier and fry their own bacon if necessary. Harben’s Great British Breakfast was possibly unique in food campaigns for also recommending a few post-prandial minutes with a newspaper and a cigarette.

PRIMADONNA ANTICS – Every great TV chef must exhibit a total lack of humour at a crucial moment. Harben set the template in 1957 on the set of The Benny Hill Show. He’d sportingly played the stooge before to the chaotic Mr Pastry and rebarbative Fred Emney, but Hill took a step too far. ‘They submitted a sketch to me which I considered degrading. The whole thing indicated that I couldn’t cook. That’s no joke to me.’17

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY – Beating Heston Blumenthal by over forty years, Harben stocked up on microscopes, slide rules and calculus tables for his 1964 ITV series The Grammar of Cookery. With technical advice from microbiologist A. L. Bacharach and editions called ‘The Three Faces of Meringue’ and ‘Egg Liaison’, he took cookery to new heights of sophistication. ‘If you are a great cook, madam,’ he claimed, ‘you are a singer of songs, a poet, an actress, a painter, a pianist. You are Maria Callas, you are Cilla Black, you are Vanessa Redgrave all rolled into one. And the world is at your feet.’18

CAVALCADE OF STARS (1949–52)

DuMont (Drugstore Television)

Vaudeville begets the sitcom.

AS TELEVISION PROGRESSED FROM esoteric technology to worldwide medium-in-waiting, one question dominated: what the hell are we going to put on it? The Manchester Guardian held a competition asking just that in 1934. Winning suggestions ranged from high mass at St Peter’s to a chimps’ tea party, ‘MPs trying to buy bananas after hours’, and ‘Mr Aldous Huxley enjoying something’.19

In America, such wild fancies became real. There was the 1944 show that led one critic to gush, ‘This removes all doubt as to television’s future. This is television.’20 ‘This’ was Missus Goes A-Shopping, a distant ancestor of Supermarket Sweep. A more solid solution to the content problem was sport. Entire evenings in the late 1940s consisted of the sports that were easiest to cover with the new stations’ primitive equipment: mainly boxing and wrestling. On the other hand, figured New York-based programmers, there was a whole breed of people who were past masters at filling an evening with entertainment off their own bat. They were just a few blocks away, doing six nights a week for peanuts.

Vaudeville stars like the Marx Brothers had dominated pre-war cinema comedy, touring a stage version of each film across America to polish every line and perfect every pratfall before they hit the studio. Television wanted vaudevillians for the opposite quality: bounteous spontaneity. The big, big shows began with NBC’s Texaco Star Theatre, hosted by Milton Berle. Through a mess of broad slapstick, elephantine cross-dressing and taboo-nudging ad libs, Berle became the first of television’s original stars, with his loud and hectic shtick penetrating the fog of the early TV screen like bawdy semaphore from the deck of an oncoming battleship. No marks for élan, but plenty for chutzpah.

Other broadcasters followed suit, including DuMont. The odd one out of the networks, DuMont originated from TV manufacturing rather than broadcast radio, so had to search harder to find celebrities, and struggled to keep them. Cavalcade of Stars, their Saturday night shebang, was a case in point. It was originally hosted by former Texaco stand-in Jack Carter, then Jerry Lester, both of whom were poached by NBC as they became popular. Desperation was setting in when they came to Jackie Gleason. Gleason, having bombed in Hollywood, was working through the purgatory of Newark’s club circuit when DuMont offered him a two-week test contract. Gleason had worked in TV before, starring in a lacklustre adaptation of barnstorming radio sitcom Life of Riley, so had his reasons to be wary. But that was someone else’s script. Cavalcade was 100% Jackie.

Every show needed a sponsor. Cavalcade, lacking the might to pull in big time petroleum funds, was sponsored by Whelan’s drugstore chain. Each edition was preceded by a strident, close-harmony paean to the delights of the corner pharmacy, under the bold caption ‘QUALITY DRUGS’. Then on came The Great One in imperial splendour with a retinue of his ‘personally-auditioned’ Glea Girls. Often he’d daintily sip from a coffee cup, roll his eyes and croon ‘Ah, how sweet it is!’, his public chuckling in the knowledge that the cup wasn’t holding coffee. After his opening monologue – a combination of double-takes, reactions and slow-burns as much as a string of verbal gags – he’d request ‘a little travellin’ music’ from his orchestra, and to the resulting snatch of middle eastern burlesque, he slunk around the stage in a possessed belly-cum-go-go dance before freezing stock still and uttering the immortal line, ‘And awaaaaay we goooo!’ After all that, the programme actually started.

This indulgently whimsical ceremony wasn’t unique to Cavalcade, but on Gleason’s watch it grew into a kind of baroque mass, initiating the audience into his comic realm. The logic of replicating the communal aspect of stage variety on such a private, domestic medium seems odd today, but a large proportion of Gleason’s working class audience, unable to afford their own TVs, watched en masse in the bars and taverns of the Union’s major cities (DuMont’s limited coverage never reached the small towns), creating their own mini-crowds who joined in with gusto. Vaudeville’s voodoo link with the audience could cross the country this way. Performer and punter were in cahoots.

Cavalcade wasn’t all Pavlovian faff. The main body of the show boasted as much meat as that of its star. Dance numbers and musical guests were interspersed with extended character sketches taken from life – Gleason’s life. At one end of his one-man cross-section of society was playboy Reggie Van Gleason III. At the other, Chaplinesque hobo The Poor Soul. Somewhere in between came serial odd job failure Fenwick Babbitt and The Bachelor, a pathos-laden mime act in which Gleason would prepare breakfast or dress for dinner with all the grace and finesse you’d expect from a long-term single man, to the melodious, mocking strains of ‘Somebody Loves Me’. Hobo aside, Gleason had lived them all.

Gleason’s fullest tribute to his Bushwick roots was the warring couple skit that became known as ‘The Honeymooners’. Gleason played Ralph Kramden, a short-fused temper bomb of the old-fashioned, spherical kind; a scheming bus driver with ideas beyond his terminus. He lived with his more grounded wife Alice in a cramped, walk-up apartment at 328 Chauncey Street, a genuine former address of Gleason’s and possibly the most accurate recreation of breadline accommodation in TV comedy. In this washboard-in-the-sink, holler-up-the-fire-escape poverty, Kramden and his unassuming sewage worker neighbour Ed Norton (Art Carney) sparred, plotted and generally goofed around. The working-class- boy-made-good was talking directly to his peers about life as they knew it, as surely as if they were sat at the same bar. The aristocracy of executives and sponsors that made it technically possible didn’t figure in the exchange at all. They delivered the star, and then made themselves scarce until the first commercial break. It would be television comedy’s struggle to preserve this desirable set-up against tide after tide of neurotic, censorious meddling from above.

Cavalcade of Stars became DuMont’s biggest show. Naturally, this meant Gleason was snapped up by CBS within two years. His fame doubled, and that of ‘The Honeymooners’ trebled. It broke out to become a sitcom in its own right, but oddly never achieved quite the same level of success outside its variety habitat. Meanwhile Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca and a stable of future comedy writing titans seized the vaudeville crown with NBC’s Your Show of Shows.

Gleason himself wasn’t immune to the odd misstep. In 1961 he hosted the high-concept panel game You’re in the Picture, in which stars stuck their heads through holes in paintings and tried to determine what they depicted. The première bombed so hard that week two consisted entirely of Gleason, in a bare studio with trusty coffee cup to hand, apologising profusely for the previous week. He was reckless, chaotic and hopelessly self-indulgent, but he instinctively knew when he’d failed to entertain. He was also relentlessly determined, signing off his marathon mea culpa with a forthright, ‘I don’t know what we’ll do, but I’ll be back.’ Television couldn’t wish for a better motto.

CRUSADER RABBIT (1950–1)

NBC (Television Arts Productions)

TV’s first bespoke cartoon.

AMERICAN CARTOONS DOMINATED FORTIES cinema. The heart-on-sleeve perfectionism of Disney and the demolition ballets of Warner Brothers were known, loved and merchandised throughout the world. But when television began to look like a viable proposition, the animation giants kept their distance: too small the screen, too monochrome, and most important, too cheap the going rate. It might be good for the odd commercial or as a place to dump black-and-white shorts even the dankest fleapit would no longer touch, but cartoons made especially for TV? The idea might have seemed a joke to the main animation studios, but there was a gap in the media market waiting to be filled. This one snugly accommodated an adventurous animal.

Crusader Rabbit and his faithful sidekick Ragland T ‘Rags’ Tiger were a pairing in the short-smart/big-dumb cartoon tradition that had its origins in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Their creator was Alex Anderson, nephew of the self-styled Woolworth of cinema animation, Paul Terry. Anderson reduced his uncle’s cheap and cheerful formula even further, basing his methods on a sequence in Disney’s behind-the-scenes cartoon feature The Reluctant Dragon which showed an embryonic cartoon in animated storyboard form – simple cuts from one still drawing to the next, smartly timed to the soundtrack. Anderson took the idea and applied it to a finished series.21

Together with old friend Jay Ward handling production duties, Anderson formed Television Arts Productions. Equipped with an army surplus Kodak film camera and several veteran draughtsmen, TAP began production, leaving no corner uncut. Single poses lasted on screen for anything from one to fifteen seconds, and loops of motion were reused with shameless regularity. Verbal gags did most of the work, but mouth movements were minimal – in the pilot, a fast-talking radio announcer blatantly hides his behind a sheet of paper.

The pilot impressed NBC enough to commission a series, at $2,500 per episode – in the labour-intensive animation world, about as cheap as you could get. Crusader Rabbit rode out, sponsored by that great friend of early TV innovation, Carnation Evaporated Milk, at 6 p.m. on 1 August 1950. The show aired every weekday for the best part of a year, pitting the tenacious pair against adversaries Dudley Nightshade, Whetstone Whiplash and Achilles the Heel.

As production stepped up, Ward’s talent came to the fore. While Anderson supervised the visuals, Ward took charge of the dialogue recording sessions, coaching the voice talent and editing to keep things as snappy and fast-moving as possible. This was a practical necessity – with budgets this tight, editing in sound only made economic sense – but it gave a quickfire ebullience to the otherwise static show, emphasising verbal gags in a way which would shape Ward’s later output and TV animation in general.

It also instigated a less happy animation tradition. Jerry Fairbanks, Television Arts’ commercial partner in the Crusader Rabbit venture, turned out not to be as financially secure as he claimed. An uneasy NBC sequestered all 195 Crusader Rabbit cartoons as collateral.22 Ward and Anderson found themselves without a franchise, their stake in the original and rights to the characters having been legally spirited away. This sort of custody battle, with the creators forever on the losing side, would become a feature of TV cartooning, where the bottom line drags heavily. Crusader Rabbit would eventually be reborn, via other hands, in 1957.

Ward started afresh, in tandem with cartoon veteran Bill Scott, to create a plethora of wisecracking properties that took Crusader Rabbit’s chattering statue model and upped the wit, tempo and volume. This began with a blockbuster that aped its progenitor’s character template – The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Meanwhile William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, ex-MGM animators who brought Tom and Jerry to life and were briefly engaged by Ward for a legally embargoed Crusader Rabbit revival, borrowed the limited animation style for their own work. The Ruff and Reddy Show, in which a smart little cat and a big stupid dog engaged in pose-to-pose capers, was followed by Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and flatly coloured, ever-blinking cartoon versions of sitcoms like The Honeymooners (The Flintstones) and Bilko (Top Cat). Even Uncle Paul Terry was lured to the small screen for, among others, Deputy Dawg. Vast empires of severely restricted motion conquered television with phenomenal speed – sideways on, with feet reduced to a circular blur, passing the same three items of street furniture every five seconds.

THE BURNS AND ALLEN SHOW (1950–8)

CBS

Still in its infancy, the sitcom goes postmodern.

You know, if you saw a plot like this on television you’d never believe it. But here it is happening in real life.

George Burns

THE COMEDIAN WILL ALWAYS beat the philosopher in a race – he’s the one who knows all the short cuts. In the case of postmodernism, that enigmatic doctrine of shifting symbols and authorless texts, the race was over before half the field reached the stadium.

George Burns and Gracie Allen were a dedicated vaudevillian couple. In 1929, the year before father of deconstruction Jacques Derrida was born, they were making short films that began by looking for the audience in cupboards and ended by admitting they’d run out of material too soon. While Roland Barthes was studying at the Sorbonne, Gracie Allen was enlisting the people of America to help look for her non-existent missing brother. A decade before John Cage’s notorious silent composition 4’33”, Gracie performed her Piano Concerto for Index Finger. And a few years after the word postmodernism first appeared in print, Burns and Allen were on America’s television screens embodying it.

The Burns and Allen Show began on CBS four years after the BBC inaugurated the sitcom with Pinwright’s Progress. In that time very little progress had been made. Performances were live and studio-bound. Gag followed gag followed some business with a hat, and the settings were drawing rooms straight from the funny papers. Burns and Allen’s set looked more like a technical cross section: the front doors of their house and that of neighbours the Mortons led into rooms visible from outside due to gaping holes in the brickwork. The fourth wall literally broken, George (and only George) could pop through the hole at will to confer with the audience. If anyone else left via the void they were swiftly reminded to use the front door. ‘You see,’ George explained to the viewers, ‘we’ve got to keep this believable.’

While Burns muttered asides from the edge of the stage, Allen stalked the set like a wide-eyed Wittgenstein, challenging anyone in her path to a fragmented war of words. From basic malapropisms to logical inversions some of the audience had to unpick on the bus going home, Gracie would innocently get everything wrong in exactly the right way. She sent her mother an empty envelope to cheer her up, on the grounds that ‘no news is good news’. She engaged hapless visitors in conversation with her own, unique, logic (‘Are you Mrs Burns?’ ‘Oh, yes. Mr Burns is much taller!’). Gracie was, admittedly, a Ditzy Woman, but this was the style in comedy at the time – Lucille Ball played a Ditzy Woman, and she co-owned the production company. Besides, Gracie’s vacuity could be perversely powerful – she was frequently the only one who seemed sure of herself. In her eyes she ranked with the great women of history (‘They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it!’).

While Gracie defied logic, George, in his mid-fifties but already the butt of endless old man gags, defied time and space. With a word and a gesture, he could halt the action and fill the audience in on the finer points of the story while Allen and company gamely froze like statues behind him. During Burns’s front-of-cloth confabs the viewer’s opinion was solicited, bets on the action were taken, and backstage reality elbowed its way up front. The story’s authorship was debated mid-show: ‘George S. Kaufman is responsible for tonight’s plot. I asked him to write it and he said no, so I had to do it.’ When a new actor was cast as Harry Morton, Burns introduced him on screen to Bea Benaderet (who played his wife Blanche), pronounced them man and wife, and the show carried on as usual. On another occasion, George broached the curtain to apologetically admit that the writers simply hadn’t come up with an ending for tonight’s programme, so goodnight folks.

Even the obligatory ‘word from the sponsor’ entered the fun. The show’s announcer was made a regular character: a TV announcer pathologically obsessed with Carnation Evaporated Milk, ‘the milk from contented cows’. These interludes, knocked out by an ad rep but fitting snugly within the framework provided by the show’s regular writers, exposed the strangeness of the integrated sponsor spot by embracing it. The show kept on top of the sponsor, and the sponsor became a star of the show – a very sophisticated symbiosis.