Raising Laughter E-Book

Robert Sellers

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 525

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The 1970s were the era of the three-day week, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the winter of discontent, trade union Bolshevism and wildcat strikes. Through sitcoms, Raising Laughter provides a fresh look at one of our most divisive and controversial decades. Aside from providing entertainment to millions of people, the sitcom is a window into the culture of the day. Many of these sitcoms tapped into the decade's sense of cynicism, failure and alienation, providing much-needed laughter for the masses. Shows like Rising Damp and Fawlty Towers were classic encapsulations of worn-out, run-down Britain, while the likes of Dad's Army looked back sentimentally at a romanticised English past. For the first time, the stories behind the making of every sitcom from the 1970s are told by the actors, writers, directors and producers who made them all happen. This is nostalgia with a capital N, an oral history, the last word, and an affectionate salute to the kind of comedy programme that just isn't made anymore.

Leseprobe

First published 2021

This paperback edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Robert Sellers, 2021, 2023

The right of Robert Sellers to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75099 837 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: 1970

Chapter Two: 1971

Chapter Three: 1972

Chapter Four: 1973

Chapter Five: 1974

Chapter Six: 1975

Chapter Seven: 1976

Chapter Eight: 1977

Chapter Nine: 1978

Chapter Ten: 1979

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express his sincere thanks to the following people. All of whom gave their time and assistance with great generosity of spirit.

This project dates back a number of years and sadly some of those who contributed have since passed away. I would like to pay special tribute to them and their services to comedy. They made us laugh, the greatest gift, and always will.

Daniel Abineri, Raymond Allen, Trevor Bannister, Humphrey Barclay, David Barry, Patricia Brake, Richard Briers, Duggie Brown, Ian Carmichael, Tony Caunter, Eric Chappell, Roy Clarke, Brian Clemens, Dick Clement, Con Cluskey, Dec Cluskey, Brian Cooke, Ray Cooney, Jilly Cooper, Wendy Craig, John Howard Davies, Priscilla Dunn, Norman Eshley, Ian La Frenais, Ray Galton, Liza Goddard, Mike Grady, Robin Hawdon, Melvyn Hayes, Philippa Howell, Nerys Hughes, Susan Jameson, Martin Jarvis, John Kane, Diane Keen, David Kelly, Matthew Kelly, Carla Lane, Bob Larbey, Peter Lewis, David Mallet, Troy Kennedy Martin, Brian Murphy, David Nobbs, Francoise Pascal, Su Pollard, Jeff Rawle, David Roper, Peter Sallis, Tony Selby, Mike Sharland, Alan Simpson, Harold Snoad, Peter Spence, William G. Stewart, Richard Stilgoe, Christopher Strauli, Eric Sykes, Peter Tilbury, David Warwick.

Introduction

For many of us who grew up in the 1970s, it was a great time to be a kid. We raced around on Chopper bikes, recreated the Second World War in the garden with our Action Man doll or Airfix toy soldiers, read comics like 2000 AD and Commando, played Scalextric or Subbuteo with dad, sucked on Spangles and guzzled down gallons of strawberry Cresta – ‘It’s frothy, man,’ went the ads. All of this to a great soundtrack of glam rock, prog, disco and punk.

TV wasn’t bad either. It could get a bit soulless on Sunday afternoons when the only thing on the box was either a religious service or some old codger trout fishing, but every night at prime time there was always something guaranteed to make you laugh: Morecambe and Wise, Benny Hill, Dave Allen, Dick Emery, The Two Ronnies, Tommy Cooper, and a sitcom. In the 1970s the sitcom was seen as the main ingredient of the television week. Most nights there was one on either the BBC or ITV (just two channels back then), sometimes on both and you could finish watching one and be able to turn over just as another was about to start. They were prolific and hugely popular. It’s no surprise to learn that out of the top twenty most watched television programmes in Britain in the 1970s nine of them are comedies, with six of them being sitcoms.

Why did the sitcom flourish during the 1970s? Well, the general population needed cheering up somehow. For all the nostalgia, the 1970s was a bleak time in the UK’s social history. Endless industrial disputes and strike action, power cuts, a three-day week, and other governmental failings left the economy flailing; by the end of the decade rubbish was piling up in the streets and dead bodies went unburied. The sitcom, then, was a welcome relief for the whole family, something that everyone from grandparents to children could enjoy and watch together.

As well as giving us some much-needed laughs, the sitcom also said much about the socio-political changes occurring at the time. Shows like Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part dealt with the thorny issue of race relations, often with too crude a palette for many tastes. Ideas of class and snobbery were highlighted in comedies as wide ranging as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads and The Good Life. While workplace politics was scrutinised in shows like Are You Being Served? and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Sexism and chauvinism and the role of women in society played a major part, too. This was a decade that started with women as sex objects for lecherous middle-aged bus drivers but finished with To the Manor Born’s Penelope Keith as a prototype Margaret Thatcher.

It’s no accident then that the 1970s constitute a ‘Golden Age’ in television comedy, with the highest proportion of classic and popular sitcoms than any other decade. Just think of all those catchphrases: ‘You stupid boy’, ‘I’m free’, ‘Don’t panic’, ‘Ooh, Betty’, ‘You dirty old man’, ‘I ‘ate you, Butler’, ‘You silly moo’, ‘Don’t mention the war’, ‘Ooh, Miss Jones’, ‘I didn’t get where I am today …’, ‘Power to the people’. The ’70s was truly the decade of the comedy catchphrase. It also gave us some of the most beloved comedy characters, from Basil Fawlty to Captain Mainwaring, Rigsby to Frank Spencer.

Here’s a question – what exactly is a sitcom? In essence, they present much-loved characters in cosily familiar settings week-in, week-out. Vince Powell, the man behind ’70s sitcom hits like Bless This House and Mind Your Language, believed a successful sitcom had to contain two certain ingredients: firstly, the situation and the characters must be believable. Secondly, it must have areas of comedy, drama and even pathos.

So, what’s the difference between a sitcom and say a comedy series? The defining feature is that back in the 1970s the majority of sitcoms were recorded in front of a live studio audience. Some of the actors never liked or came to terms with the process, but an audience was essential, and very few sitcoms ever worked without an audience.

The biggest question of all is, what made those sitcoms from the 1970s especially unique and special? Hopefully you’ll have a good idea by the time you’ve finished this book. In it we take a look at every single sitcom from that decade, with contributions from actors, writers, producers and directors. Not all of those 1970s’ sitcoms were great, far from it – some were bad, some were downright weird and others make you scratch your head and go, what the hell were they thinking? Today, many of them represent a different world. Back in the ’70s, television comedy and light entertainment was still very much rooted in the British traditions of music hall and variety. And television was made differently back then, too. The BBC, for example, was a totally different organisation than the one we have today. Those at the top, whether as the head of comedy or light entertainment, all seemed to have the power to make decisions, and it was very much the same situation over at ITV. Now, that seems to have gone, replaced by committees, focus groups and endless processes to go through. The industry has become huge and unwieldy compared to what it used to be. Does that make it better or worse, or maybe just different?

Chapter One

1970

Britain can proudly lay claim to producing the first ever regular half-hour sitcom. Pinwright’s Progress was broadcast live from the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace every fortnight, beginning on the evening of 29 November 1946. Like many of the sitcoms that were to follow, Pinwright’s Progress saluted the hard-working British labour force, set as it was in a high street store. Ironically, it’s doubtful that anyone actually working in a shop was in a position to see it, television sets being prohibitively expensive at the time.

Only ten episodes were ever made and while a sprinkling of sitcoms did come after, it was the arrival of Hancock’s Half Hour in 1956 that is generally acknowledged as the birth of the British TV sitcom. The show’s creators, Galton and Simpson, must then be considered as the genre’s grand architects. Alan Simpson and Ray Galton first met at Milford Sanatorium in 1948, where they were both undergoing treatment for TB. Listening to comedy shows on the wireless, both concluded that they could do a better job and so began a remarkable writing partnership.

With Hancock’s Half Hour the aim was to produce ‘a comedy with no jokes,’1 in the words of Galton. Instead, the humour derived from the interplay between the characters and their reactions to the environment and situations in which they find themselves. And in Tony Hancock the writers had the perfect vehicle. ‘Tony didn’t do verbal jokes, really,’ explains Simpson. ‘He did comments, he did irony and sarcasm.’2

For several years Galton and Simpson formed part of a scriptwriting agency that also included Spike Milligan, Johnny Speight and Eric Sykes, which was run from offices five floors above a greengrocers’ shop on Shepherd’s Bush Green, west London. The pair arrived one morning to find an associate reading one of their scripts. ‘Honestly, I don’t understand your stuff,’ he said to them. ‘There’s not one joke in here I can pinch.’3

The impact of Hancock’s Half Hour cannot be underestimated. Running on the BBC across seven series until 1960 and garnering huge audiences, the show became the yardstick by which other sitcoms were measured. Far from resting on their laurels, in 1962 Galton and Simpson created one of the most beloved of all TV comedies in Steptoe and Son, which explored the fraught and often tragic lives of father and son rag and bone men. It was a concept that played to the writers’ strength of exploring relationships between people trapped or living in close confinement. ‘It never appealed to us writing for a large ensemble of actors,’ says Ray. ‘Didn’t want that at all, just two guys in a room and what they get up to was enough for us.’4

Steptoe and Son broke new ground by introducing a note of gritty realism and by having established actors in the leads rather than comedians. Wilfrid Brambell, who began his career at Dublin’s famous Abbey theatre, played Albert Steptoe, a grimy and grasping layabout who ate pickled onions in the bath and thought nothing of putting dentures back into his mouth after they’d fallen in horse manure. Harry H. Corbett’s Harold aspired for the finer things in life and an existence beyond the gates of the family business, but his every effort was rendered useless by the need to care for his father. A much-admired actor in the 1950s, Corbett played Shakespeare and Ibsen at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and was an exponent of the Method style of acting, whose techniques he brought to bear in his interpretation of Harold Steptoe. ‘Harry was always examining the part to try and bring a new edge to it,’ says Alan. ‘In rehearsals he could give three or four different performances, while Wilfrid was from the old school of acting, where you learnt your lines and played them the same way each time.’5

The popularity of Steptoe and Son was such that half the UK population regularly tuned in. Harold Wilson even successfully pressured the BBC to move a transmission of one episode from the day of the 1964 General Election fearing that Labour voters might prefer to stay in and watch it rather than go out to the polling station. Then, after four series and at the peak of its popularity, Galton and Simpson pulled the plug in 1965. ‘We simply got fed up with it,’ confesses Ray.6 It was becoming increasingly difficult to come up with fresh storylines and the writing duo had begun to diversify into movies, including a stint in Hollywood that didn’t quite work out.

Fittingly, it was to be Steptoe and Son that kicked off what many people regard as the golden age of British sitcom when it returned to television screens early in March 1970.

Galton and Simpson are unclear as to exactly whose idea it was to bring them back, perhaps Tom Sloan, then the BBC’s head of light entertainment. Whoever it was, the writers took kindly to the notion, as enough time had passed and there was a wealth of new possibilities with the dawning of a new decade. They were, however, at first daunted about the new series being broadcast in colour. ‘We were very worried about it,’ confesses Ray, ‘because we thought it might take away the greyness and the bleakness of it all.’7

In the intervening five years little had changed at Oil Drum Lane; the family coffers were routinely empty and Harold remained a virtual prisoner in his own home, unable to leave the clutches of his father, who’d feign a heart attack every time he so much as sniffed the scent of freedom. Interestingly, Galton and Simpson were never tempted to kill off the old bugger and thus free Harold, or to change their financial situation. ‘We never ever thought of doing what they did in Only Fools and Horses, turning them into millionaires,’ says Alan. ‘And I think John Sullivan realised he’d made a mistake there because he almost immediately had them lose it all again.’8 It’s true, the British public much prefer the underdog, they like to see their sitcom characters struggle. ‘Success is not funny, is it?’ says Ray.9 And he’s absolutely right.

Much has been documented about the ‘supposed’ fractious relationship between Corbett and Brambell, but the writers found them a delight to work with. ‘We had no real problems,’ says Alan. ‘Although Wilfrid could be quite acerbic at times.’10 He was also some distance from the ‘dirty old man’ he played on screen. Brambell was a bit of a dandy in real life, usually dressed in a waistcoat with beautifully creased trousers and shiny shoes, with an accent that could cut glass. His transformation into Steptoe was simple yet brilliant; he’d stop shaving for a couple of days before a recording and use another set of false teeth. Brambell was just 50 when the series first started but already wore false teeth. This new set was specially made and all blackened up, and Brambell simply popped them into his mouth for the performance. His tatty clothes came courtesy of BBC wardrobe. ‘And when the show was finished,’ recalls Alan,

he’d go into his dressing room and after about twenty minutes emerge like a butterfly. He’d be shaved, have his proper teeth in, immaculately dressed with a cane and an overcoat dragged over his shoulders, hair in a slick parting, and he used to stride out and walk past the audience, if they were still mingling around, and they wouldn’t recognise him. While Harry, who used to dress better on the show than he did in real life, used to come out and everybody recognised him immediately.11

On one occasion Brambell was refused permission to enter the BBC bar, dressed as he was in his posh togs. ‘They telephoned me,’ remembers Ray, ‘and said, ‘There’s a gentleman here claims he’s Wilfrid Brambell, doesn’t look anything like him.’ I had to go across and say, yeah that’s him.’12

And then there was the famous catchphrase, ‘You dirty old man’, which the writers slipped into one of the scripts and it got such a laugh they decided to use it again. That, of course, can lead to problems, when a catchphrase becomes so famous audiences are expecting it and writers become either reluctant to use it or use it too much. ‘It can become too much of a gimmick,’ says Alan. ‘But at times it was so right you couldn’t think of anything else that would be better. I don’t think we used it that often.’13

Neither Corbett nor Brambell contributed to the scripts in any way. It had been much the same with Hancock, who contributed no ideas of his own. ‘Tony never used to ring up and say, here, what about if this week he does so and so. Never, not once,’ says Alan.14 In many ways the 1970s scripts of Steptoe and Son are superior to their 1960s counterparts, with a higher proportion of them standing out as classics, like ‘The Desperate Hours’, which saw a pair of prison escapees hide out at Oil Drum Lane, and ‘Divided We Stand’, where Harold builds a partition in the house, effectively quarantining him from his father. This was an idea based on a story that Ray’s brother told him years before about relatives in a brewery who hated each other so much they built a wall inside their house. Then there was ‘A Star is Born’, in which Albert ends up an unexpected sensation at a local amateur dramatic production. ‘That was the terrible thing about the old man,’ says Alan:

He’d always win. It wasn’t very true to life, but if ever Harold took up a hobby, the old man could do it better, anything, didn’t matter what it was. He beat Harold at things like monopoly and scrabble. In the snooker episode if you remember he turned out to be a crack billiards player.15

Having written the script, Galton and Simpson always made sure to be present for the first day of rehearsal and then for the actual day of recording, making the odd suggestion and maybe altering the odd line. ‘We’d sit in the control room, watching all the camera angles,’ recalls Ray. ‘If you’re on the studio floor you can’t get the whole picture.’16 Alan even took on the role of ‘warm-up man’ and kept the audience laughing and engaged in between set ups. Most shows generally had a ‘warm-up man’ to welcome the audience and to explain what was happening when the crew stopped for any retakes that were necessary, costume or scenery changes and the moving of cameras and sound booms to the next set that was going to be used. This was because a large number of the audience had probably never been to a studio recording before and it was rather different from going to the theatre, with which they may have been more accustomed.

The success of Steptoe and Son second time round came as something of a surprise to the writers. ‘It was in the second batch that we got the highest viewing figure ever,’ claims Alan. ‘Twenty-eight and a half million.’17 Such was its success that a spin-off film was made in 1972 and proved a massive hit. ‘They used to send us the box office results every week, because we had a share of the profits,’ says Alan. ‘And it broke eighty-four box office records in the UK.’18 A second movie was hurried into production but when that opened in 1973 it struggled to even get its cost back. Alan has a theory as to why the second film flopped so badly:

I suspect, and I’ve got no reason for thinking this but it’s the only satisfactory explanation, I think everybody flocked to see the first one because it was a big thing on television still, and they must have been disappointed with it so when the second picture came out, they didn’t bother to go and watch it.19

It’s ironic because the second film is much more in tune with the TV series. ‘And from our point of view a far better film,’ says Ray.20 It’s also a lot broader as Albert and Harold fight off local gangsters, invest in a decrepit greyhound and hatch a plot to pass Albert off as dead and claim on his life insurance. It’s a beautifully judged film, although Alan reveals that Brambell hated the director. ‘He thought he was a coarse brute.’21

It’s also probably the best example of how to turn a sitcom into a movie, despite the writers’ protestations that they always found the transition from TV to film a difficult one. ‘First of all, you’re going against all the things we wanted, like the claustrophobic atmosphere,’ says Ray.22 By their very nature films are expansive. ‘We used to find the biggest problem with film was construction,’ admits Alan, ‘because you’d be used to doing thirty minutes and in a strange way you don’t need any construction with thirty minutes. If a script lasted twenty pages, the first scene could last nineteen pages, especially with Steptoe, whereas a film needs construction, it needs peaks and lows, and I don’t think we ever mastered that.’23

There were just as many complexities involved when it came to adapting Steptoe and Son for the American TV market. ‘We first went over there in 1967,’ recalls Alan. ‘And the first thing they asked us to do was Americanise the script, which took us about half a day, replacing yes with yeah and elevator instead of lift, the usual stuff. They said, that’s fine, thank you very much, it will take a week now for us to read it, so you just sit round the pool and enjoy yourself. And that’s what we did.’24

When a production meeting was finally called the executives expressed a major problem as to where they were going to locate the show. ‘If they put it in New York people might say, oh it’s Jewish,’ recalls Ray. ‘In Boston they’d say they’re Irish. If it was Chicago, they’re Italian. In Los Angeles, they’d be Mexican.’25 The executives were at pains not to upset any particular ethnic group. ‘They were very sensitive,’ says Alan. ‘They didn’t think the Mexicans and the Jews would be happy if it was suggested that they were poverty stricken.’26

After much debate Ray suggested, ‘What about making them black?’ One of the executives stood bolt upright in his chair. ‘Oh wonderful, great idea, but impossible.’ The political climate of the time just wasn’t right, according to Alan. ‘Any black characters on TV had to be doctors, politicians, they had to be upwardly mobile. Then about four years later we were called by Turner Productions, who’d picked up the option, and they said to us, would we mind if they cast it black, and we said, “Well, wonderful, we thought of that four years ago.” They said, “You couldn’t do it four years ago, but you can do it now.”’27

Sanford and Son starred Red Foxx as the cantankerous Fred Sanford and Demond Wilson as his frustrated son Lamont. It ran from 1972 to 1977 on the NBC network and was a ratings smash, although Galton and Simpson hardly had anything to do with it. ‘The first season they used some of our scripts,’ says Alan. ‘But in the end, they did what they always do, get a team of writers in and write their own.’28

Back in Britain Galton and Simpson decided to call time on their creation. The final episode was a Christmas special aired on Boxing Day 1974. One of the reasons for not wanting to do any more was the fact that a little bit of tension had started to creep into the relationship between the two actors. ‘Nothing terribly serious,’ admits Alan. ‘But it was noticeable that they were getting a bit short with each other. The old man would say things like, “God, I was acting when he was a f***ing nipper.”’29

Brambell’s habit of taking a few drinks during rehearsals leading to the odd fluffed line also began to irk Corbett. Remember these were two very different people, with very different working methods. They also led totally separate lives, hardly seeing each other outside of the studio. ‘We never socialised with them either,’ says Alan. ‘Harry used to socialise with us during the day, he’d come to our office and we’d have lunch quite often, but we never, ever went to his house.’30 His wife didn’t allow it, according to Ray. ‘I think his wife discouraged show business people being there.’31

Another reason for stopping was that eight series in total was probably enough. ‘It was becoming harder to come up with completely fresh subjects without plagiarising yourself,’ admits Alan. ‘So, we thought, well, perhaps now the time has come.’32

That wasn’t quite the end, however. In 1977 Corbett and Brambell flew to Australia to appear in a sell-out touring theatrical production. After several months on the road, they landed in Christchurch, New Zealand, for the second leg and were invited on to a local breakfast TV show. Whether or not he was homesick, tipsy or plain mischievous, Brambell replied to an innocuous question about the merits of Christchurch with a four-letter outburst and the station hurriedly cut transmission and went to an ad break. Embarrassed, Corbett stormed out of the studio vowing never to work with his old partner again. Four years later Corbett was dead at just 57.

Galton and Simpson always resisted returning to their most famous TV creation but in 2006, after much pestering by Ray’s new comedy writing partner John Antrobus, ‘Murder at Oil Drum Lane’, a new Steptoe and Son play, was produced in London. ‘I said to Antrobus that the only way I would be interested in doing a play, was that Harry murders his old man,’ reveals Ray. ‘Accidentally, but nevertheless, skewered him.’33 The play, which ran for a limited season at the Comedy Theatre, brought the Steptoe and Son saga to a fitting end.

Interestingly, that wasn’t the first time Albert had been killed off. At the end of the third series back in 1964, Brambell suddenly announced out of the blue that he wouldn’t be available for the next series because he was going to Broadway to appear in a musical called Kelly, which was expected to run for years. ‘We had a choice to either cancel the show or recast,’ recalls Alan:

And Ray and I, probably out of sheer pique, decided to open the next series with a funeral. At the graveside you see Harold looking miserable, and we find out the old man has finally dropped dead. We take Harold back to the house, and Harry would have played it beautifully, all the little bits in the house reminding him of the old man, and his own guilt, that he didn’t do enough and all the rest of it. Then there’s a knock at the front door and he opens it and there’s a boy standing on the doorstep, about 21 years old, saying, ‘Harold Steptoe, my mum told me that if ever I was in any trouble to come and look you up.’ And it turns out that he’s Harold’s son. So, it was going to be Steptoe and Son, but down a generation. And we’d even cast it, we were going to ask David Hemmings.34

In the end, the musical Kelly was a disaster and closed after just one performance and Brambell came scurrying back saying, ‘I’m ready to do another series now.’

***

The first ‘new’ sitcom of the decade appeared just two weeks after the return of Steptoe and Son over on BBC 2 and arrived very much from left field. File under fascinatingly forgotten, Charley’s Grants was a satirical piss-take of the arts grants system from the pen of N.F. Simpson, a surrealist playwright closely associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. Writing support came from John Fortune and John Wells, a fine comedian best remembered for his impersonation of Denis Thatcher and as one of the original contributors to Private Eye.

The plot revolved around the machinations of an on-his-uppers aristocrat, played by rotund character actor Willoughby Goddard, who attempts to solve his financial difficulties by scrounging grants from Hattie Jacques as head of the Heritage Trust. Keeping this highly creative bunch of artists in order was producer Ian MacNaughton, who’d recently scored great success with Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He didn’t manage the same here, Charley’s Grants lasted just six episodes.

Meanwhile, over at BBC 1 something very big indeed was happening. Michael Mills, the station’s Head of Comedy, had recently enjoyed a short break in Italy. Wandering around the ancient ruins of Pompeii, Mills nudged his companion and joked that he half expected Frankie Howerd to come loping around the corner. It was back in 1963 that Howerd took the London stage by storm in the ancient Rome-set musical A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to The Forum. Obviously, Mills’ memory of Howerd as a comedic slave had not dimmed, and seized by the possibilities of using such a character as the basis of a sitcom, he approached Carry On writer Talbot Rothwell to come up with a pilot script.

Mills’ rather highbrow hopes was for something based loosely on the comedy works of the Roman-era playwright Plautus. Rothwell briefly looked through a Penguin translation of Plautus Mills had lent him, tossed it away and fell back on what he was best at, innuendo and coarse humour. Rothwell created a world that revolved around the daily life of Lurcio, a mischievous Roman slave in the somewhat chaotic household of senator Ludicrus Sextus and his wife Ammonia. Rothwell was to admit later that he wrote the script with Kenneth Williams in mind but Mills remained adamant that Howerd do it. The comic liked the material well enough but voiced reservations about whether it was too bawdy for the nation’s living rooms. Howerd never saw himself as a blue comedian and couldn’t abide filth; the last thing he wanted to do was offend the public. In the end he came to regard Rothwell’s scripts as, ‘vulgar without being dirty’.35

The pilot aired in September 1969, with the Radio Times describing the new show as, ‘A sort of Carry On up the forum’. Predictably, Mary Whitehouse scolded it for being both sordid and cheap. The public thought so too and lapped it up. A series was quickly commissioned, going out after 9 p.m. at the close of March 1970.

Up Pompeii was a personal triumph for Howerd. Much of the programme’s success was down to his ability to seamlessly break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience, a typical example being when Ludicrus remarks that his daughter Erotica is, ‘delightfully chaste’, Howerd turns to camera muttering, ‘Yes, and so easily caught.’

Howerd brought all his personal angst and insecurity to the role. Regular cast members and guest stars were to remark how nervous and tense he was before a recording. The show’s producer David Croft claimed that he had to reluctantly get rid of quite a number of talented artists simply because they didn’t get on with Howerd, or Howerd didn’t get on with them. ‘If Frankie wasn’t happy you haven’t got a show.’36 One senses that Croft and Howerd did not get on. ‘When the audience arrived, he was magic. He was absolutely wonderful. And then two minutes after the show was over, he was horrible again.’37

A ratings winner, a second series was hurried into production and arrived on screens that autumn. This time Rothwell was assisted by The Army Game’s creator Sid Colin, but the jokes remained pretty much the same. The script’s reliance on broad humour, stale puns and double entendres drew criticism from some quarters. Mills defended the programme against such snobbish attacks, that something so common did not have a place on the BBC. ‘Up Pompeii is outrageous, of course,’ he said. ‘And the innuendo is awful. You wouldn’t be able to do it except for three things – one, it’s funny, which excuses almost anything, and two, it’s Frankie Howerd. If it were Benny Hill or Terry Scott doing the same script it would be horrid, but because it’s Frankie with that pursed-up, outraged schoolmistress look, it’s marvellous. Thirdly, it’s done very well, with great style, lovely sets, good costumes and good artists. So, it doesn’t look like a tatty music-hall sketch that’s been put on to get a dirty laugh.’38

After fourteen episodes Howerd declared himself fed up with the show. It had run its course, he felt, and concerns began to take root about being swamped by the character; that people think Lurcio instead of Frankie Howerd. He did though agree to resurrect the character a year later in a film spin-off, shot for just £200,000 at Elstree studios on sets left over from Charlton Heston’s film of Julius Caesar. Ending up the eighth most popular film at the 1971 UK box office, it spawned two cinematic sequels that followed a variation of Lurcio through history, not dissimilar to what Blackadder later did: Up the Chastity Belt (1971) was set in medieval times, while Up the Front (1972) took place during the First World War.

All three films were directed by Bob Kellett with Ned Sherrin acting as producer. Sherrin’s relationship with Howerd was uneven at best. When Howerd was given time off shooting to attend Elizabeth Taylor’s legendary 40th birthday party in Budapest, he returned nursing a hangover and found little sympathy from Sherrin, who insisted he went straight back to work.

Lurcio was to return in a one-off BBC Easter special in 1975 called Further Up Pompeii, with much of the original cast and a script by Rothwell, who had not worked on any of the movie outings. It was directed by David Croft, who again did not enjoy the experience much. Besides taking an age to learn the script, Howerd had other odd habits. He wore not the most realistic wig, but insisted that the make-up department pretend this wig was in fact his natural hair and plonk his stage wig on top. Then after a young male assistant refused to go anywhere near Howerd’s dressing room, Croft began only using female assistants, who didn’t face the same problems. Despite all this, Croft saw a master comedian at work: ‘He played the audience as a master fisherman plays a trout. He had complete control. They loved him. He was magic.’39

Then, in a bid to exploit the cult status Howerd was to enjoy shortly before his death, ITV revived the show in 1991 for another one-off special. But the old magic just wasn’t there any more.

April

David Nobbs began his career in comedy as a writer for the iconic 1960s BBC satirical show That Was the Week that Was. On the strength of its success, Nobbs and his then writing partner Peter Tinniswood were asked by the BBC to come up with a sitcom for one of the show’s regular cast members, Lance Percival:

They wanted Lance to be as free as the wind, to go and do whatever he wanted to do, there were no other main characters. That was the brief, which of course was a complete and utter disaster. That is a brief that possibly only Jacques Tati and Chaplin, and people of that ilk, can survive; even Hancock had to have regular characters each week. It was impossible.40

Nobbs quickly recovered from that setback and by 1970 was established as a top comedy writer, working for the likes of Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Dick Emery and Ken Dodd. He returned to the world of sitcom with Shine a Light, written with Peter Vincent and David McKellar for Yorkshire Television. ‘And it was awful. And it’s a shame that it was awful because it really could have been very good.’41

The setting is a lighthouse, stationed miles out to sea, manned by elderly Timothy Bateson and his junior, played by Tony Selby. It’s no surprise that in such a confined space the pair get up each other’s noses, spending much of their time finding new ways to disagree with one another. ‘In some senses,’ says Nobbs, ‘a lighthouse is a wonderful place for comedy because characters are trapped. But looking back on it, if you compare it to say Steptoe and Son, in that show they’re trapped by something far more interesting than the fact they’re entirely surrounded by water, they’re trapped because they need each other and they can’t get away from each other, which is brilliantly dramatic. I think it was too easy to have people trapped in a lighthouse.’42

It was certainly a brave idea, but with such a limited subject everything ended up taking place on virtually the same set. ‘I do think we made a big mistake only having two main characters, it wasn’t enough,’ Nobbs admits. ‘And neither of them on the surface were very likeable, neither of them had much warmth, so I think we’d shot ourselves in the foot before we started. As the most experienced writer I should have seen some of the mistakes but we were all in it together. We were sort of doomed.’43

Nobbs doesn’t blame the two actors, they simply played what they were given. Bateson was a veteran performer, who’d appeared in the first British production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955, while Selby would make a name for himself later in the decade with the army sitcom Get Some In. The only respite in the action came from an occasional visiting captain of a supply ship and, in one episode, a relief lighthouse keeper, played by John Le Mesurier. ‘We created a marvellous gag for John,’ recalls Nobbs:

His character read Dickens all the time, but because you couldn’t take much luggage to the lighthouse, he read it from memory. He’d say, ‘Excuse me, I’m reading,’ and he’d got no book. And then he’d laugh to himself, ‘Oh he is a master isn’t he,’ and the whole thing sprang to life. We were capable of writing a good sitcom, we knew how to write funny lines and character situations, and we had quite good plots, but there just wasn’t enough light and shade, and there wasn’t enough charm to sustain it.44

It was doomed, as Nobbs puts it, and lasted all of six episodes.

***

Norman Wisdom had been unquestionably Britain’s biggest comedy film star during the 1950s and early ’60s, but as time wore on his seaside-type humour began to look stale and shop-worn and he turned instead to television and his first sitcom, which was for ITV. The hope was to move away from his slapstick-clown persona towards a more sophisticated style of comedy, but Norman proved a fruitless exercise with a plot that could have derived from any number of his movies. Wisdom plays a man bored to death of his soul-destroying, nine-to-five job working for the Inland Revenue and leaves to pursue his love of music, which inevitably leads to a series of accident-prone situations.

The pedigree of the show looked solid enough. Wisdom’s former marquee value alone should have been enough to grab a sizeable TV audience, and the writers were Ray Cooney and John Chapman, the brains behind a number of stage farces. I contacted Cooney, who predominately wrote for the theatre, with the intention of grilling him about his one and only TV sitcom. He very kindly got back only to apologise profusely that he couldn’t remember a damn thing about Norman, it had been entirely erased from his memory banks. ‘We only did a pilot anyway, didn’t we?’ he said. I had to inform Mr Cooney that in fact six episodes were made. ‘Six!’ he bellowed over the phone incredulously. ‘We made six of them! Good God. Well, there you go.’45

***

ITV really hit paydirt with the gentle comedy For the Love of Ada that paired two old comic veterans together, Irene Handl and Wilfred Pickles, who had been a big radio star in the ’40s and ’50s. Handl ranks among that group of character actresses that Britain regularly used to churn out; instantly recognisable, comforting and quite potty. Appearing in numerous films and TV comedies from Hancock’s Half Hour to The Italian Job, it was For the Love of Ada that gave Irene her biggest success, even though she was nudging 70 at the time.

The basic premise is boy meets girl, the twist being that the boy and girl in question are claiming their old age pensions! During a visit to her husband’s grave, Irene’s Ada meets the very gravedigger who put him six feet under, Pickles’ Walter. The two begin an unlikely friendship, which over time blossoms into love and eventually marriage. Irene herself never married in real life. Those who worked on the show remember her constant companions being two chihuahuas that she brought to rehearsals inside a discreetly curtained cage.

This affair comes as something of a surprise to Ada’s daughter, played by Barbara Mitchell, and son-in-law Jack Smethurst, later the uber bigot Eddie Booth in Love Thy Neighbour. And there are tangible glimpses of that infamous character to come in Smethurst’s repeated outbursts of ‘Bloody Nora’ and other choice bits of dialogue. In bed with his wife, Jack complains he hasn’t had it for a long time. ‘Is that all you think about, sex and chips?’ she complains. ‘I don’t get enough bloody chips either,’ is the weary response.

For the Love of Ada came courtesy of one of the 1970s’ most prolific writing partnerships, Vince Powell and Harry Driver. The two first met when Powell put an ad in a newsagent’s window for a straight man for his comedy double act and Driver answered. Working the northern club circuit, it looked like their association was doomed when Driver contracted polio in 1955 and spent eighteen months in hospital. Paralysed from the waist down, Driver spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Unable to perform comedy, the duo decided to write it and got their break furnishing scripts for Harry Worth before working on shows such as Coronation Street.

The pair established themselves as a comedy writing force, devising a succession of hit sitcoms: George and the Dragon (ITV, 1966–68) starred Peggy Mount as an indomitable housekeeper to a rich, retired colonel; Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width (ITV, 1967–71) was about a pair of tailors of contrasting religious and political views running a business in London’s Whitechapel; and Two in Clover (ITV, 1969–70) paired Sid James with Victor Spinetti as two insurance company clerks who ditch the rat race to run their own farm.

Coming up with the idea of For the Love of Ada, Powell and Driver encountered misgivings from television executives that audiences might find a love affair between geriatrics unappealing or not very funny. The writers’ first choice to play Ada, the 51-year-old Beryl Reid, refused the role on the grounds she didn’t want to play a pensioner. But the British warmed to this senior romance and four series were made in rapid succession, ending with a Christmas special on Boxing Day 1971. Just a month later the cast reassembled for a disappointing feature film version, financed by Tigon, a company associated more with the horror genre and films such as Witchfinder General.

Although in its manner and execution Ada was excessively British, the theme of people finding love in later life was a universal one and the format was picked up in America by ABC and ran for twenty-two episodes under the title A Touch of Grace during 1973. It was never screened in Britain.

***

Meanwhile, the BBC tried to entice audiences with the medical-set The Culture Vultures, which had more than a whiff of the famous Doctor film series about it. Not least in the casting of super-smoothie Leslie Phillips as Dr Michael Cunningham, senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Hampshire. Phillips, who appeared in four Carry On movies and took over from Dirk Bogarde as the Doctor series’ regular medical nincompoop, brings all of his poised comedy elegance to the role of a laid-back rogue whose passion for gambling and physical pleasures invariably leads to clashes with his seniors, in particular stuffy Professor George Hobbs, played by Peter Sallis.

A medical drama of a different kind occurred halfway through production when Phillips was rushed to hospital with an internal haemorrhage. ‘It shook me a little,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been seriously ill in my life.’

Although Phillips continued with rehearsals from his hospital bed and managed to return to the studio for filming, he was far from fit and the series had to be halted after just five episodes.

May

The month of May saw the welcome return to ITV of a couple of old favourites that had begun life in 1968 and were still huge ratings winners. First another Powell and Driver hit, Nearest and Dearest, which teamed the music-hall comedians Jimmy Jewel and Hylda Baker as warring siblings who inherit a Lancashire pickle factory.

Inspired casting this may have been but the two veterans did not get on. According to Powell, it began at the recording of the very first episode when Hylda objected to a scene in which Jewel was getting all the laughs. Later she, ‘went berserk,’ in Powell’s words, that the episode finished on a close-up of Jewel. ‘Stop the show,’ she screeched, waving her hands in front of the cameras. ‘I’m not having this. I’m the star of the show, not him.’ To pacify matters it was decided to end with both of them in the final frame. But the die was cast. ‘From that day on, it was open warfare,’ remembered Powell. ‘For the next five years during the run of the series, they barely exchanged a word, save for the ones which were written for them in the script.’46

When Baker was the subject of This Is Your Life in March 1972 and the cast of Nearest and Dearest was introduced, Jewel was conspicuous by his absence. Hylda got her revenge by not showing up for Jewel’s This Is Your Life two years later.

Nearest and Dearest became one of Granada’s most successful shows, running for forty-six episodes from 1968 to 1973; an estimated 20 million were watching in 1971. There was even a stage version put on at the Blackpool Grand during the summer season. Written by Powell and Driver, it played to capacity audiences and starred both Jewel and Hylda, who far from burying the hatchet brought their mutual animosity for each other on to the stage every night, trading insults that the audiences loved, believing them to be all part of the show.

There was also the by now obligatory cinema version, made by Hammer Films, and released in 1972. The following year the series was adapted for the American market as Thicker than Water, with Julie Harris and Richard Long as the squabbling siblings. Networked by ABC, it was cancelled after thirteen episodes.

***

Rivalling Powell and Driver as ITV’s most prolific comedy writers were Brian Cooke and Johnnie Mortimer of Man About the House and George and Mildred fame. Their first big success came in 1968 with Father, Dear Father, a generation-gap comedy that was inspired by the state of television around the late ’60s. ‘You had Steptoe and Son, Alf Garnett and a number of other working-class shows,’ says Cooke,

So, we said, what about doing one where we get a middle-class family. We made the lead character a writer of rubbishy novels, gave him two daughters, a dog and a nanny, very middle class. And we went to Thames [the franchise holder for ITV serving London and the surrounding area on weekdays] and said, ‘We know the guy who would be perfect for this, Patrick Cargill.’ And they said, ‘Who’s Patrick Cargill?’ We said, ‘You know, the doctor in Hancock’s “The Blood Donor”, that’s Patrick Cargill.’47

Cargill fitted perfectly the role of supercilious author Patrick Glover, left to bring up his two nubile teenage daughters in trendy Hampstead when his wife runs off with another man. But there was an unforeseen situation, unforeseen, that is, by the writers. ‘We didn’t realise that Patrick was gay,’ admits Brian. ‘Looking back on it now, it was obvious.’48 The penny finally dropped after they wrote an episode featuring a gay window cleaner and their script was sent back. The producer William G. Stewart told them, ‘Patrick won’t do it.’

‘Why not,’ asked Brian. ‘It’s perfectly good.’

‘He won’t do it because there’s a gay in it.’

‘So.’

‘Well, you know,’ said Stewart. ‘He’s a bit …’

‘We should have realised,’ admits Brian, ‘because he was always with four or five different fellas, all younger than him. That shows you almost how naïve we were.’49

Cooke and Mortimer began their careers as cartoonists. Brian worked for years writing the storylines for the Daily Mirror strip The Larks, ‘whose only claim to fame was that it was underneath Andy Capp’.50 Besides paying the mortgage, writing those strip cartoons was a great training ground for life as a sitcom writer. ‘We were used to selling humour,’ says Brian. ‘And that was a good start, we knew the value of a gag.’51

Moving from strip cartoons to radio in 1965, Cooke and Mortimer wrote several episodes of The Men from the Ministry, a parody of the British civil service, and Round the Horne. Their TV break arrived in 1966 when Frank Muir, then a producer at the BBC, told them one day, ‘You are the dirtiest writers in radio and I’ve got a dirty TV show that you’re perfect for.’ The show in question was a Whitehall-set sitcom called Foreign Affairs starring Leslie Phillips, Ronnie Barker and Richard O’Sullivan. ‘It’s being written by somebody but they’re not very good,’ said Muir. ‘Can you have a look at it?’ Cooke and Mortimer took the script away with them, did a total rewrite and sent it back. ‘That’s great, we’ll do that,’ said Muir. ‘And here’s the next one.’ In the end the pair were asked to write the entire series and were quickly poached by Thames Television, where they ended up working for most of their careers. ‘Philip Jones was the head of light entertainment at Thames and he was a genius,’ affirms Brian. ‘He didn’t discover us, he let us discover ourselves.’52 Their first offering was Father, Dear Father.

Not only did Cooke and Mortimer create the show, but they insisted on writing every single episode. Brian explains the secret to making sure a long-running sitcom never goes stale:

What you do is you people your sitcom, you begin to add various new characters. We introduced, for instance, Richard O’Sullivan as one of the girl’s boyfriends. We introduced a brother, played by Donald Sinden. You have Glover’s agent who’s naturally a gorgeous female and he fancies her like mad. All that’s essential to keep the whole thing fresh. But you’ve got to be careful because otherwise you’ll spread things too much. You’ve got to keep a sense of gravity around the people you start with, while introducing other elements.53

And there was the dog, of course, a large and lumbering St Bernard named after Glover’s favourite author, H.G. Wells. ‘He was easy to work with,’ says Brian. ‘Apart from the time he did try to mount one of the girls during the course of a show; he had a real go – and it’s there on screen.’54

But it was Cargill’s show and he excelled. ‘I think of all the people I worked with,’ states William G. Stewart. ‘I learnt more in the area of comedy from Patrick than anybody. He was the most accomplished actor in comedy that I ever came across. And because of Patrick’s stature in the business, we were able to attract big name guest stars, people like Rodney Bewes, Ian Carmichael, Beryl Reid and June Whitfield.’55

Each episode was recorded in front of a live studio audience, and not everything always ran smoothly. In one scene, Patrick had to light a cigarette from a lighter that looked like an antique gun. On the first try the damn thing didn’t work, so it had to be explained to the audience what was happening and Patrick tried again. ‘Fifteen times it didn’t work,’ recalls Brian. ‘We were up in the control room and said to the producer, “Let’s just forget it.” Anyway, the sixteenth time it worked and the audience burst into spontaneous applause, and we had to do it again otherwise the viewers at home wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.’56

In spite of such hiccups, Brian believes having that live audience was essential, not least because of the special atmosphere it brought to all of the recordings:

I prefer a live audience, a lot of the actors don’t, but it is the immediacy that you get. I worked a lot in America and over there they had a machine where you had someone twiddling knobs to produce laughs to sweeten a show. They do that in Britain now, but back then they didn’t. And I talked to this guy who had this machine and said, ‘Where do you get the laughs from?’ And he said, ‘From shows my father used to work on like Milton Berle and Jack Benny.’ And I said, ‘That means that all the people laughing on this show are probably all dead.’ And he said, ‘Oh yes.’ That’s creepy.57

While not a classic by any means, Father, Dear Father was hugely popular. ‘It got great reviews,’ recalls William G. Stewart. ‘And several times got to number two in the national ratings. It was always number one in the London region. And it was great fun to make. We were like a real family.’58

After seven series and forty-nine episodes the show finally came to an end in 1973. ‘Patrick and I went to Philip Jones one day,’ says Stewart, ‘and said, “We both feel we can’t do any more.” Philip was a little disappointed, but Patrick wanted to stop at the top.’59

That didn’t prevent a feature film spin-off being made, of course, which Cooke and Mortimer wrote in three weeks by reworking the first two episodes. Featuring the original cast and costing, according to Stewart, the princely sum of £116,000, it opened in May 1973. However, this wasn’t to be entirely the end of the Father, Dear Father story. One afternoon, Brian received a phone call from a producer in South Africa. At the time Britain weren’t selling television shows to that country due to apartheid, but this producer had taken all the Father, Dear Father episodes and dramatised them on radio with a cast of local white actors:

And this producer said to us, ‘You haven’t got any more have you?’ We didn’t because we’d moved on to other shows by then, and he said, ‘Well would you mind if I write them?’ We told him to go ahead and he wrote something like 170 new episodes, they went out every week. And when the movie came out over there it out grossed Jaws, they were queuing round the block to see the heroes that they’d heard on radio, which were completely different from the ones that were in the film.60

Still, this wasn’t quite the end. In 1978 Cooke and Mortimer were asked by the 7 Network in Australia, where numerous British sitcoms and comedy shows had played successfully, to make a down under version. The scenario they came up with was that Glover and nanny jet off to Sydney to stay with a previously unmentioned brother. This brother suddenly ups and leaves, and Glover is left to look after the house and – wait for it – two attractively nubile teenage daughters! Cooke and Mortimer happily wrote the first two episodes and then left the remaining twelve to be authored by other writers.

They’d been less happy with a one-off television special called Patrick Dear Patrick that was broadcast back in 1972. ‘That was a right f*cking rip-off if I ever saw one,’ blasts Brian:

And not only that, he [Patrick] produced a record called Father Dear Father Christmas. It was a full LP with the children, the dog, and we looked at it in astonishment because we didn’t know anything about it. It had all our characters on it and we said, ‘What is this?’ ‘Oh, we’re terribly sorry,’ they said. We let it go, we weren’t that arrogant. Patrick gave us a copy each and for years and years I played this record every Christmas for my family, who hated it.61

***

There were a few other hold-over shows from the late ’60s that carried into the 1970s, still pulling in audiences. Dear Mother … Love Albert was very much a personal project for its star Rodney Bewes, who not only created this show about working-class aspiration, but also co-wrote it with Derrick Goodwin. Bewes plays a young innocent northern lad who comes down to London and scrapes a living as a confectionery salesman, only in his letters back to his mother he romanticises and exaggerates the painful truth of his humdrum existence. The scenario derived from Bewes’ own real-life letters to his mum when he arrived in London from Yorkshire and worked odd jobs to pay for his studies at drama school. The series began in 1969 and ran on ITV over the course of four series, ending in 1972.

There was Mr Digby, Darling from Yorkshire Television, which reunited Peter Jones and Sheila Hancock from the hit sitcom The Rag Trade (BBC, 1961–63). This time Jones works at a pest extermination company called Rid-O-Rat and Sheila is his devoted secretary. The show ran from 1969 to 1971 and the idea behind it was based on an observation the writers Ken Hoare and Mike Sharland made while working at the BBC. ‘There were a fair number of middle-aged secretaries working for bosses in their fifties,’ says Mike. ‘They often had an office marriage, non-sexual, but with many of the problems of a real marriage. He was inefficient, she was over-protective, he was lazy, she would cover for him.’62 It was an idea both writers intended to develop at some point in the future. Their chance came when an old friend, the writer Sid Colin, was setting up the Light Entertainment department at Yorkshire Television, and asked them to join.

Ken and Mike had worked with Peter Jones in the late ’60s on the successful BBC show Beggar My Neighbour (announcers had to be very careful how they pronounced that one!) and liked him enormously. ‘Peter was sometimes far funnier than he ever knew,’ confirms Mike, ‘and he was ideal for the Mr Digby character. Rehearsals were a muddled joy and I think Peter left more laughs in the rehearsal room than on the screen.’63

Both Sheila and Peter had a great audience following and Mr Digby, Darling took off straight away and ran for three series.

Lastly, Me Mammy chronicled the adventures of Irishman Bunjy Kennefick, a successful London executive desperate to take advantage of a bachelor’s existence but hampered by his ever-present, domineering mother. Written by Irish playwright Hugh Leonard and starring celebrated Irish actor Milo O’Shea, this gentle comedy mocked institutions like the Roman Catholic Church and English misconceptions of the Irish. Among the fine supporting cast was Ray McAnally, Yootha Joyce and David Kelly.

Me Mammy was one of the first shows to take advantage of the BBC’s brand spanking new rehearsal rooms in North Acton, later dubbed ‘the Acton Hilton’, which opened in May 1970. Here the rehearsal spaces were exactly the same size as the BBC studios, each included its own green room, and there was a wonderful restaurant on the top floor. ‘It was very glamorous,’ remembers David Kelly:

These were rehearsal spaces made for the purpose, no scout halls or Territorial Army rooms, and we shared it with Dad’s Army. I think we were the first two in there. There was no bar, but being Irish a bottle of wine was sneaked in and during lunch we used to drink it using cups and saucers, which went down very well. I remember John Le Mesurier passing by with a certain envy saying, this must be the Irish table. Eventually we brought in bottles of wine quite openly and finally the BBC saw sense and opened a bar in the restaurant.64

This saved the actors the needless journey of going to the rather ropey pub next door, although they were not averse to downing a few pints in there. Kelly recalls a condom machine that stood outside the saloon bar. ‘And some wag, no doubt Irish, had written on it – “This is the worst chewing gum in London!”’65

Running on the BBC from 1969 to 1971, O’Shea and Leonard decided to call it quits after three series of Me Mammy, agreeing that the format had run its course, despite the fact it was still attracting a large audience.

June

Yorkshire Television’s Albert and Victoria