A History of Television in 100 Programmes

Paddy Chayefsky, 1956

AS TELEVISION BEGAN COLONISING the lounges of urban America, Hollywood started to panic. Playing to their strengths, the big studios began turning out product that emphasised the things TV couldn’t provide: colour, star power, and most of all, size. The big screen was filled with big names in big adventures; pageants, epics and melodramas in which the safety of lives, societies, even the world hung in the balance. The challenge was made: fit that lot into your ten inches of bulbous glass.

Many programmes valiantly, if foolishly, tried to compete. Wiser heads moved in the opposite direction. Paddy Chayefsky, scion of a Russian Jewish family in the Bronx, was one of the first and best writers to size up what the small screen could and couldn’t show. A moderately successful playwright, he moved into television in 1952 when the US government lifted restrictions on new TV stations, causing audiences to rocket. As Chayefsky saw it, ‘television, the scorned stepchild of drama, may well be the basic theatre of our century.’25 (#litres_trial_promo)

TV imitations of cinema condemned themselves to a lazy, second rate status, the lack of resources perpetually showing them up. ‘You cannot handle comfortably more than four people on the screen at the same time,’ he wrote. ‘The efforts of enterprising directors to capture the effect of five thousand people by using ten actors are pathetic.’26 (#litres_trial_promo) From his very first TV efforts, Chayefsky took a clear look at how life could convincingly be crammed into that tiny box.

It was during the rehearsals for The Reluctant Citizen, a play about an elderly Jewish immigrant, that Chayefsky found the scenario for his greatest TV work. Due to the cost of Manhattan real estate, NBC augmented their rehearsal studios at 30 Rock with any spare bit of space going in the city. Hotel ballrooms in daylight hours were a prime source. While mooching around one of these during a break, Chayefsky’s eye fell on a sign put up for a singles night: ‘Girls, please dance with the man who asks you. Remember, men have feelings too.’ This intimation of painful male shyness caught Chayefsky’s imagination, and he soon began writing ‘the most ordinary love story in the world.’27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rod Steiger played the title role, a good-natured but reticent Italian-American butcher in the Bronx shamed by friends, family and customers for his enduring single status at thirty-six. (‘I’m a fat, ugly little guy and the girls don’t go for me, that’s all.’) One night he’s all but forced into going to a singles dance by his domineering mother. (‘Why don’t you go to the Waverley Ballroom? It’s loaded with tomatoes!’) The evening looks like being yet another slog of rejection and heartache, until a lairy guy offers him five bucks to take ‘a real dog’ off his hands. Marty is disgusted by the idea, but finds the girl in question, Clara. He asks her, genuinely, for a dance and they bond over their shared misfortunes. (‘You don’t get to be good-hearted by accident. You gotta be kicked around long enough and hard enough, then you get to be like a real … a professor of pain, you know?’)

The rough, natural dialogue with its repetitive, drowsy poetry was a revelation. The final scene, in which Marty finally plucks up courage to spurn his deadbeat pals, phone Clara and ask her out, was partly improvised by Steiger when the real dialogue slipped out of his head on the night. It fitted in seamlessly. His performance impressed director Elia Kazan enough to land him a part on On the Waterfront, and a star was born. Cinema may have had TV looking over its shoulder, but ‘movie star’ remained the top job.

‘The basic limitation of television is time,’ thought Chayefsky. ‘Television cannot take a thick, fully woven fabric of drama. It can only handle simple lines of movement and consequently smaller amounts of crisis.’28 (#litres_trial_promo) That said, Marty packed a great deal into well under an hour. Its wonderfully minimal effects included an exterior shot of the ballroom made from cardboard and light bulbs. When Marty followed the distraught Clara out onto the ballroom fire escape and asked her to dance, the tender moment was undercut by some incidental laughter from elsewhere in the building. Marty was a basic affair, but basic didn’t mean simple.

Two years later Marty became the first TV drama to be remade for the big screen. With Ernest Borgnine in the lead, real Bronx locations and an expansion of the ‘cantankerous aunt’ subplot, it was a mighty success and took several Oscars, including Best Picture and Screenplay. Chayefsky had achieved that rarest of fames: the TV writer as household name. In a Nat Hiken comedy sketch, Phil Silvers played one half of a pretentious theatregoing couple who mistake the apartment of a dysfunctional, blue collar family for an off-off-Broadway venue. As they settle on the sofa, the nonplussed residents start squabbling at top volume. Silvers knowingly remarks to his wife, ‘obviously by Paddy Chayefsky’.

The TV networks moved their centres of production across country to Hollywood, and Chayefsky fell out of love with the medium he’d championed. The easy, trusting commissions he’d had in the early years gave way to the business-driven pseudo-science of corporation men, with whose ideas the writer was expected to compromise willingly. Many of Chayefsky’s pitches got no further than the pilot stage, including a 1965 sitcom version of Marty starring Tom Bosley.

Another grounded project was The Man Who Beat Ed Sullivan, about a hick Ohio entertainer whose marathon variety show becomes a national sensation. (Chayefsky didn’t help his case by insisting that the variety show within the play should actually be a full-on, three-hour spectacular in itself.) It wasn’t until 1974 that Chayefsky arranged his televisual disaffection into a film script about a suicidal newsreader, a power-crazed producer and a corporate conspiracy: his valedictory masterpiece, the cellar-dark satire Network. It was a damning testimony against the medium’s worst excesses by one of its pre-eminent craftsmen; television’s finest humane miniaturist denouncing its increasingly inhuman gigantism. Promoting the film, Chayefsky had three sad words for his alma mater: ‘Television? Forget it.’29 (#litres_trial_promo)

SMALL TIME (1955–66) (#ulink_05595b47-ee27-55ea-9bc9-65d99a42f444)

ITV (Associated-Rediffusion)

Giants of children’s television assemble.

CHILDREN HAVE ENJOYED A special relationship with television since the very first transmissions. The BBC gave them their own playground in the schedules with Watch with Mother, in 1950, where they could enjoy the company of clattering puppet mules, unintelligible folk assembled from garden implements and the very biggest spotty dog you ever did see – all chaperoned by jolly matriarchs dispensing orotund vowels through shatterproof smiles. With its sailor suits and spinning tops and crumpets on the trolley, it was childhood as the Edwardians would have recognised it: the childhood, more or less, of the programme makers, handed down like a careworn teddy bear. When ITV arrived a few years later, its TV crèche was decorated in unmistakeably bolder, more modern style.

Beginning as a fifteen minute segment in Associated-Rediffusion’s weekday Morning Magazine line-up, Small Time soon gravitated towards its natural teatime home, and grew into a proving ground for a vast swathe of children’s TV talent. Many of the segments – Booty Mole, Snoozy the Sea Lion, Gorki the Straw Goat to name a few – would live on only in a few very keen baby-boomer memories. A few, though, added up to as great a legacy as one TV slot could hope to spawn.

The Adventures of Twizzle starred a Pinocchio-esque boy puppet who could extend his limbs at will. The stories, from the pen of Roberta Leigh, were brought to life by puppeteer Joy Laurey, but of more historic note was the show’s producer, future ‘Supermarionation’ chief Gerry Anderson. Another artificial lad, Torchy the Battery Boy, arrived a few years later courtesy of the same team. The results could only be described as ‘sub-marionation’: strings were thick as mooring cables, movements spasmodic. But this was the style, or lack of style, of the times. ‘Production values’ existed neither as jargon, nor as values. The job was done with the means to hand: nothing more and nothing less.

Puppets of the glove variety formed the second line of teatime attack. These were several degrees sprightlier, and occasionally wittier, than their dangling cohorts. Pussycat Willum, a doe-eyed kitten, became Small Time’s eager, if slightly mawkish, figurehead. But the strand’s undoubted star turns were Ollie Beak and Fred Barker. This portly owl and calcified dish mop of a cockney dog were the creations of Peter Firmin, operated by Wally Whyton and Ivan Owen respectively. Their main human foil was Muriel Young, announcer on Rediffusion’s opening night and a primly tolerant foil for the duo’s impromptu shenanigans. More raucous yet were The Three Scampis: Bert Scampi (operator Howard Williams) and his animal pals, hedgehog Spike McPike (Wally Whyton) and aristocratic fox Basil Brush (Ivan Owen). Again, Firmin was the man behind the sewing machine.

Firmin had been introduced to television by Rediffusion’s young stage manager and part-time prop maker, Oliver Postgate. In 1958 Postgate, tiring of organising other people’s programmes, created one of his own. Alexander the Mouse was a whimsical tale of a rodent with royal aspirations, set behind the skirting board of an old house, the first of what would be a long line of wistfully remote Postgate worlds. Firmin painted the characters and sets, which were stuck to metal strips and ‘animated’ live on air by dragging magnets about under the table. This attempt to undercut even the ultra-cheap Crusader Rabbit production technique had the catch that, according to Postgate, ‘hardly a programme went out without … a hand coming into shot or a mouse coming adrift.’30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Postgate’s next attempt, the Willow Patterned Journey of Master Ho, took a more conventional approach to movement. Cut-out figures were manipulated in stop motion in a makeshift studio in Postgate’s North Finchley back bedroom, shot and edited on a 16mm film rig made of Meccano and string for £175 per ten minute episode. In 1959 he reunited with Firmin to create their first classic story. Ivor the Engine was a gloriously melancholy tale of the sole locomotive of the idyllic Merionethand Llantisilly Rail TractionCompany Limited. Firmin’s watercolour evocations of the Welsh mountains were exquisite, but the tone Postgate’s narration took, hitting a plaintive, nostalgic note halfway between John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas, was the greatest innovation. Moving away from the stiff-backed, once-upon-a-time scene-setting of previous children’s programmes, Postgate injected poetry and personality, trusting small children to engage with something more than a bland narrative of mild peril that ended in time for supper.

As the sixties ran on, Small Time’s big talents slowly dispersed to the four corners of television: Anderson and company to forge a puppet dynasty, Postgate and Firmin to carve a homely niche in animation, Brush to Saturday night ubiquity, and Young to produce acres of glam rock television. The strand’s last significant signing was Pippy the Tellyphant, a pantomime elephant operated by husband-and-wife team Jimmy and June Kidd, which cost an unprecedented £300 to construct. Pippy provokes few nostalgic reveries these days, while her cheaper, humbler companions, strapped for cash but bursting with ideas, have taken their place in the TV annals. The hearts and minds of millions were won over with cardboard and felt.

THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW (1955–9) (#ulink_57e69bae-91f8-5639-9ac6-52f144a7dd31)

CBS

Sitcom comes of age.

‘Andrew Armstrong, Tree Surgeon’? That’s a television idea? Well, who knows. Look what they did with a fat bus driver.

Bilko’s Television Idea, 12 February 1957

BY THE MID-1950S, SITCOM was already being dismissed by critics as a fad on the wane. It had come a long way in the few short years since its simple beginnings, from the down-to-Earth compactness of The Honeymooners to George Burns hurdling the fourth wall and Lucille Ball’s international stardom with I Love Lucy. Despite this tide of invention, or perhaps because of it, when inspiration began to flag for so much as a season, critics sprang up to predict the death of the American sitcom. The trouble was, as John Crosby observed when hailing The Phil Silvers Show, ‘every time you start to count out situation comedy as a dead duck, something comes along.’31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko was a new kind of sitcom hero, eight times smarter than the average viewer could hope to be, and a thousandth as honest and hardworking as they claimed to be. Bilko’s essential good nature, fatherly love of his reprobate army platoon, and Phil Silvers’ winning smile were all trotted out as redemptive justifications for the popularity of this good-for-nothing snake, but it was simpler than that. The double-crossing, dissembling, greedy slacker had the American dream down pat – his country was the one serving him.

Though it was, like all sitcoms, an ensemble effort, Bilko had two major creative forces. The fast-talking vaudeville comic Phil Silvers had steadily built up a solid but unspectacular profile since the war, specialising in sketches that showcased his knack for speedy patter and swift ad-libs, usually playing against a taciturn and bewildered stooge. He was paired by CBS executive Hubbell Robinson with writer Nat Hiken, who had moved from local radio comedies to TV variety sketch shows. Steeped in the desperately inventive chicanery of the Broadway milieu, especially its notoriously disingenuous press agents, Hiken saw Silvers in a similarly underhand role. After considering set-ups ranging from baseball team manager to stockbroker to Turkish bath attendant, they settled on the immortal master sergeant.32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Initially titled You’ll Never Get Rich after the lyric from the song ‘You’re In the Army Now’, Hiken’s creation was to its rival sitcoms what Bilko was to his rival sergeants. Previously, one plot reversal had been considered quite enough for the average sitcom’s twenty-four minutes. Hiken put in at least one more, sometimes two or three. Hitherto simple plots of swindling and misapprehension doubled and quadrupled before the viewer’s eyes, finally to be snapped shut again by some spectacularly deft sewing up of strands in the closing seconds. At script meetings, Hiken had a compulsive habit of creating little origami animals as he outlined a plot.33 (#litres_trial_promo) Whether it was incidents at an army post or scrap paper, the skill was the same – artfully precise manipulation.

The cast ranged in experience from seasoned actor Paul Ford as Bilko’s just-dumb-enough colonel, to complete non-professionals – filthy nightclub comic Joe E. Ross played childlike Mess Sergeant Rupert Ritzik, and hopeless slob Maurice Gosfield played hopeless slob Private Duane Doberman. The bulk of the lines inevitably went to Silvers, but there was a fine balance at work here: Bilko’s corporals Henshaw and Barbella oscillated between willing henchmen and disapproving moralists; the excitable Private Paparelli could often out-talk his sergeant; the chorus of rival sergeants occasionally got one over on their nemesis. The scenes when Bilko and Colonel Hall were alone together remain among the best in sitcom, a perspicacious fox inexorably pulling the wool over the eyes of a sappy bloodhound.

Hiken assembled a crack team of writers around him, including a young Neil Simon, but his obsessive nature meant he could never leave a script alone, often rewriting it into a completely new show. The Writers Guild, suspicious of the prevalence of Hiken’s name on the credits, tried to lobby for the other writers, only to be told by those writers that he really did have significant input to almost every programme.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Hiken also made regular appearances on the studio floor to fiddle with minuscule details of staging. With so much depending on one man, it was inevitable that later seasons began to slip from the early stratospheric heights.

The decline showed in the increasing use of guest stars. Where previously celebrities would be satirical inventions like inane comedian Buddy Bickford or rock ’n’ roll sensation Elvin Pelvin, now the real-life likes of Ed Sullivan, Mickey Rooney and Kay Kendall would turn up. Setting the pattern for countless comedies hence, it began as a display of the show’s popularity and became a sign of flagging inspiration. The quality level remained high, but the platoon’s move for its final season from Fort Baxter, Kansas to the Californian heat of Camp Fremont held a sad irony.

US television’s big east-to-west move would affect sitcom as much as drama. Though set in Kansas, Bilko was really a New York show, drawn from the Broadway melting pot, infused with Jewish humour and recorded at the old DuMont studios. Over the next few years sitcoms would become slower, simpler and sillier. The dialogue was less snappy and the characters less smart as network bosses sought to woo Middle America. The Phil Silvers Show merely opened with a cartoon; shows like Gilligan’s Island and Mr Ed (the latter backed by George Burns) were cartoons themselves, often not particularly good ones. Add a plethora of Hollywood-produced ‘adult’ western shows and the cosy croon of Perry Como to the evening schedules, and the televisual tide was decisively turning from Hiken’s satirical high water mark. Those critical jeers began to look less precious and more prophetic with each new season. Bilko could outsmart anyone, but he couldn’t cope with being out-dumbed.

A SHOW CALLED FRED (1956) (#ulink_894ffcb7-34f6-5ba3-9fbe-1e4309964d64)

ITV (Associated-Rediffusion)

Television comedy explodes.

TV isn’t like films, radio or the stage. It has bits of all three in it, of course. But it is something demanding a new approach.

Terry-Thomas, Answers, 6 October 1951

COMIC GENIUS HAS THE habit of springing up in several places at once. About the time Ernie Kovacs was conducting his early Pennsylvanian experiments, Terry-Thomas, the gentleman’s gentleman comic, was regaling BBC audiences with How Do You View? Written by Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell, this loose assemblage of sketches and monologues pioneered countless bits of televisual business: the deadpan nonsense interview (conducted by linkmen Leslie Mitchell and Brian Johnston); mock home movies; the constantly-interrupted speech; and the random foray off the set and around the cameras, booths and assorted detritus of the studio, just for the hell of it. Its success in those sparse early days was considerable, although critics were snooty. ‘I should not care to say,’ ventured a confused C. A. Lejeune, ‘whether the presentation is more formless or the material more inept.’35 (#litres_trial_promo)

While ‘T-T’ was in his pomp on TV, the BBC Home Service was plagued by an infestation of nits. The Goon Show didn’t so much break the rules of radio comedy as blithely caper on to the air in complete ignorance that any existed in the first place. With its cast of vocal grotesques and relaxed approach to the laws of cause and effect, it became an unhinged institution to a nation still recovering from the similarly lunatic privations of war. Two Goons – writer Spike Milligan and voice-of-them-all Peter Sellers – joined forces with young American director Richard Lester to translate their formula to independent television, in the form of The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d.

The fusty periodical of the title, inspired by the florid world of Daily Express humorist Beachcomber, provided an extremely tenuous jumping-off point for a bewildering array of skits, with Sellers playing Edwardian schoolmasters and gentleman boxers, ‘Footo, the Wonderboot explorer’ and even much-loved Goon character Bluebottle. Blackout gags included an expectant audience sat before a curtain, which was raised to reveal another audience, facing them. Singers like Patti Lewis got a custard pie in the face. This time, the critics had caught up with the viewers: even the Daily Mail dug this ‘bubble of nonsense which stayed miles above the surface of reality.’36 (#litres_trial_promo)

A few months later the same gang made A Show Called Fred, which scrapped the magazine trappings and intensified the lunacy. As the DailyMail noted, The Idiot Weekly ‘made a few grudging concessions to the audience, in as much as it was possible to follow the jokes by the ordinary, accepted sense of humour. Fred makes no concessions at all.’37 (#litres_trial_promo)

A typical edition of Fred began with Spike, dressed in rags, mooching around the Associated-Rediffusion studio corridors: a parody of the Rank Films gong (which Terry-Thomas also lampooned) and credits for ‘the well-known Thespian actors’ Kenneth Connor and Valentine Dyall (usually clad in bow tie, dinner jacket and no shirt). There would be mock interviews with insane individuals, often called Hugh Jampton, commercials for ‘Muc, the wonder deterrent’, and viewer query slot ‘Idiots’ Postbag’, presented in front of a projected backdrop of open sea, or a burning building. (‘Dear sir, do you know what horse won the Derby in 1936?’ ‘Yes, Mr Smith, I do.’)

Even by the primitive standards of the day, the thing was heroically shoddy. Backdrops wobbled and frayed at the edges, costumes were either half-complete or non-existent, and in the frequent pull-out shots to take in backstage crew and chunky EMI cameras, the floor was visibly covered in studio junk. As with Kovacs’s shows, laughter came from the camera crew rather than an audience. Fred ended with an extended parody of the various po-faced dramas with which it shared the schedules. Soap opera The Grove Family became ‘The Lime Grove Family’: ‘Mum’ cooked roast peacocks’ tongues on baked mangoes in the piano, whereupon ‘son’ hit her with a club, and was reprimanded by ‘dad’, saying, ‘You mustn’t hit your mother like that. You must hit her like this …’ Their version of The Count of Monte Cristo featured the first appearance of the famous coconut-halves-for-horses’-hooves sight gag and ended with the destruction of the already threadbare set, a rousing chorus of ‘Riding Along On the Crest of a Wave’, and Valentine Dyall doing the dishes in the studio’s self-service canteen.

Descriptions like this are hopelessly inadequate. As Bernard Levin put it, ‘if you do not think that is funny it is either because I have failed to convey its essence or because there is something wrong with you.’38 (#litres_trial_promo) Peter Black agreed: ‘This show has built up in three weeks a following that has gone beyond enthusiasm. It is an addiction.’39 (#litres_trial_promo) Critical credentials notwithstanding, these men were television comedy’s first fanboys.

When stuff like Fred appeared on the continent, it was Absurdist theatre, afforded its rightful place in the cultural pantheon. Over here it was just British rubbish. Bernard Levin tried to redress matters, asserting that the Fred team ‘have done television a service comparable to that rendered by Gluck to opera, or Newton to mathematics.’40 (#litres_trial_promo) Philip Purser claimed Fred was ‘roughly equivalent to the revolution in the theatre promoted by Bertolt Brecht; and not entirely dissimilar.’41 (#litres_trial_promo) It certainly created its own version of Brecht’s Alienation Effect. ‘I had to make a very real effort of will on Wednesday,’ recounted Levin of trying to watch Gun-Law, the bog-standard western which followed Fred, ‘to convince myself that this was not meant to be funny. For a long time I could not stop expecting Mr Spike Milligan to put his mad, bearded head round the corner of the screen with some devastating remark about the shape of Sheriff Dillon’s face.’42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Milligan’s TV year ended with Son of Fred, available for the first time in the north, with cartoons by Bob Godfrey’s Biographic Films, mocked up technical breakdowns and Gilbert Harding’s Uncle Cuthbert playing the contra-bassoon while suspended from wires in a wheelchair. (‘Kind of an aerial fairy,’ he explained.) It also inaugurated the grand tradition of putting jokes in the TV Times listings. (‘Frisby Spoon appears without permission.’) In 1963 a compilation, The Best of Fred, was presented to a public that, claimed ITV, had now ‘caught up’ with Milligan’s anarchic humour, with Milligan and Dyall reminiscing over the show’s distant heyday in between clips. Innovation had become nostalgia.

Lester would go on to give the Beatles silly things to do on film. Milligan inaugurated the Q series in 1969, which took his illogical methods down increasingly strange paths. Meanwhile his former co-Goon Michael Bentine cooked up a more technically elaborate version of the same mayhem for the BBC’s It’s a Square World. But Fred’s place in history would be secured by countless other hands. All around the country, short-trousered future members of Python, The Goodies and other anarcho-comic collectives were watching closely and making mental notes. As Peter Cook would later note, Milligan ‘opened the gate into the field where we now all frolic.’43 (#litres_trial_promo)

MY WILDEST DREAM (1956–7) (#ulink_e176627b-e050-5f16-a689-490e76b43c96)