A History of Television in 100 Programmes

When he tired of that, he went off in the opposite direction with Wham!, introducing ‘The Fat Noise’, a gargantuan house band which produced ‘the fattest, roundest sound that has ever come to television.’ But nothing was working, and Good departed for the USA, to finally hit real paydirt at the ABC network with Shindig! and set The Monkees on their path to self-destruction with the chaotic TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee.

Good returned to the UK sporadically throughout the next few decades, engineering various Oh Boy! revivals to put a spring in the step of middle-aged Teds, but he became increasingly estranged from contemporary pop with every slight return. Finally, in 1992, Jack Good left the music television business he’d been instrumental in creating, in as unexpected a way as he’d entered it – he joined a Carmelite hermitage in Texas.

THE STRANGE WORLD OF GURNEY SLADE (1960) (#ulink_ca1c802d-c4cc-5960-bf49-aadd4d2f01b5)

ITV (ATV)

The sitcom eats itself.

Who and what is Anthony Newley?… This brown-haired, blue-eyed searcher after truth hovers and flits in and around and above the world of show business like a creative helicopter.

Radio Times, 9 November 1961

THOUGH IT STILL HANDLED rock ’n’ roll with all the aplomb of Stan Laurel taming a cobra, television did as much as cinema and radio combined to bring big, brash all-round American entertainment to the chilly front rooms of ration-squeezed Britain. The size, confidence and polish of those variety showcases were swiftly imitated by home-grown entertainers who got their suits reupholstered, their smiles re-pointed and their accents suspended somewhere between New England and the Old Kent Road. The alien sheen of these imitation Yanks – the brittle charm of Brucie, the oily palms of Michael Miles, the messianic humility of Hughie Green – caused amusement and unease among viewers accustomed to the polite cough and the if-you-please of English stage tradition.

Comic and singer Anthony Newley, from out of the Hackney Marshes via the Italia Conti stage school, acknowledged the incongruity of the transatlantic manner. He developed a penchant for running a self-deprecating commentary on his own act. On a UK tour to promote his film Idol on Parade, he stood by the screen as the opening credits rolled, talking them down, one by one. (‘“Directed?” The director couldn’t direct traffic! “Photographed by?” He nipped out to Boots the chemist …’64 (#litres_trial_promo)) Television, the most self-referential medium yet hatched, snapped him up.

Newley’s TV accomplices were writers Sid Green and Dick Hills, who had constructed specials for Sid James, Roy Castle and, disastrously, Eamonn Andrews. Initially billing themselves as the grand ‘SC Green and RM Hills’, they soon relaxed into ‘Sid and Dick’, names more appropriate to their modern, laid-back writing style. ‘They admit cheerfully that they belong with the coffee shop and back-of-the-envelope script writers,’ reported the Mail, ‘rather than the agonised pacers around kidney-shaped desks in grey flanelled rooms.’65 (#litres_trial_promo)

Newley’s attitude to comedy writing was similarly easygoing. ‘How do I define humour?’ he pondered at the behest of the TV Times. ‘I don’t. I wouldn’t dare.’66 (#litres_trial_promo) After two reasonably successful Saturday Spectaculars for Lew Grade’s ATV in early 1960 – one featuring copious amounts of Peter Sellers – Newley, Hills and Green tackled the still maturing world of the sitcom, applying their skills in the same sideways-on manner. Given carte blanche to fill six half-hours how they fancied, they wrote, designed and shot the whole series in seven weeks. Newley was keen to point up the trio’s ground-breaking intent. ‘We hope to achieve humour without setting out to be deliberately funny.’67 (#litres_trial_promo)

An estimated twelve million viewers settled down at 8.35 p.m. on 22 October for the first episode of The Strange World of Gurney Slade. What they saw went roughly like this. We open on the front room of a terraced house, wherein Gurney Slade (Newley) is an unwilling participant in a Grove Family-style domestic soap with the feeblest acting and script known to man, all hurriedly-discharged paragraphs of backstory and leaden lines of chirpy banter. When the cue finally arrives for him to speak (‘Will you have an egg, Albert?’) he silently gets up, puts on his coat, moodily strutting past the floor manager and off the set, leaving the other actors mugging desperately. There’s even a cartoon sound effect as he smashes through the fourth wall.

The liberated Gurney wanders the streets aimlessly for the next twenty minutes. He despairs of the state of the medium. (‘“How’d you like your egg done, dear?” The Golden Years of British Entertainment! So much for Shakespeare and Sophocles.’) He reads minds. He chats to animals and the inanimate. He has conversations in invented languages. (‘Flangewick?’ ‘Clittervice!’ ‘Hendalcraw!’ ‘Mandelso!’) He frolics in the park with Una Stubbs and unsuccessfully tries to dump a vacuum cleaner. Finally, wearying of his constant presence on the television screen (‘I’m like a goldfish in a bowl. I’m a poor squirming squingle under a microscope!’) he begs the viewer to switch off the set and put him out of his misery.

The next few episodes were variations on the theme. Episode two in particular was a delightful romantic fantasy set on a disused airfield. Unfortunately it played out in front of an audience a good four million smaller than the opening show. ITV had a flop on their hands. Critics and punters, confused and bothered by this sullying of honest Saturday night fun with existential folderol, jeered as it all came crashing down. As one wag had it, ‘Is your Gurney really necessary?’68 (#litres_trial_promo) Subsequent episodes were relegated to the depths of the night, where they could do less damage.

This turned out to be good timing, as things promptly became even stranger. Filmed well before the ratings nosedive, episode four swapped the bucolic exterior wanderings for the black-walled studio limbo of the avant-garde, presenting the trial of Gurney, before a Lewis Carroll kangaroo court, on the charge of having no sense of humour. (‘I did a television show recently and they didn’t think it was very funny.’)

The fitful attempts of Gurney to win over the hostile opinions of the eternally perplexed Average-Viewer family, a jury of cloth-capped everymen and a dead-eyed manufacturer of countersunk screws, went about as well as the real world defence of the series. ‘We have so much confidence in this progressive type of humour,’ insisted ATV, ‘that we are negotiating with Anthony Newley for another series in the new year. But not,’ they judiciously added, ‘necessarily Gurney Slade.’69 (#litres_trial_promo)

The sixth and final episode was further out still, being a formal deconstruction of the sitcom years before the concept made its academic debut. First a party of bowler-hatted bigwigs are shown the elements of a TV production, from cameras and microphones to The Performer (‘it goes through various motions which are calculated to entertain or amuse the viewers’). Then assorted incidental characters from previous episodes reappear, and round on Gurney for giving them inadequately detailed backgrounds, leaving them in a hazily-defined state of limbo after their moment on screen. Finally Anthony Newley appears as Anthony Newley, Gurney Slade grotesquely turns into a ventriloquist’s doll of himself, and Newley carries him off into the night.

At this point, the television sitcom was all of thirteen years old. When it was three, George Burns had given it the gift of self-consciousness. As it hit its teenage years, Newley granted it self-destruction. At the time it looked like just another odd little failed experiment; unlike A Show Called Fred, Gurney Slade had no Bernard Levin, no intellectual cheerleader, to trumpet its glory from the rooftops. It didn’t entirely lack a legacy, though: young Newley fan David Bowie was transfixed by the programme, and started swanning about the streets of Bromley in a Gurney-esque off-white mackintosh.70 (#litres_trial_promo)

Green and Hills moved into firmer show business territory, helping to resurrect the television fortunes of floundering double act Morecambe and Wise. Newley carried on his own meandering course, majoring in high concept musicals, but returning to television to guest on everything from the Miss World pageant to The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. His later opinion of Gurney Slade was typically equivocal. ‘I think it proved something,’ he concluded, ‘even if I’m not sure what.’71 (#litres_trial_promo)

ARMCHAIR THEATRE: A NIGHT OUT (1960) (#ulink_332f5d3f-fcda-5dcf-b9fc-03d7e3d0e777)

ITV (ABC)

The theatrical revolution reaches the front room.

I’ve read your bloody play and I haven’t had a wink of sleep for four nights. Well, I suppose we’d better do it.

Peter Willes commissions Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party for Associated-Rediffusion, 195972 (#litres_trial_promo)

LEGEND HAS IT THAT John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger transformed British theatre overnight from a staid world of French window farces and solemn verse epics into a fiercely committed force for social change. It didn’t quite do that, but it did perform one useful service: getting the under-thirties into the stalls. This demographic shift was helped by the transmission of one of the play’s cleaner passages as a BBC television ‘Theatre Flash’, alerting the chattering youth to the presence of something other than genteel matinees for scone-munching Aunt Ednas. A long and fruitful alliance between TV and the modern stage was born.

Another TV beneficiary was The Birthday Party, a drama of nameless persecution in a south coast bed and breakfast, written by jobbing actor Harold Pinter during a 1957 tour of Doctor in the House. Disastrous notices on its London debut threatened it with early closure until the Sunday Times praised it to the skies, but it took a production directed by Joan Kemp-Welch on peak-time ITV for it to reach ten million viewers. Many viewers took against its obscurity (‘We are still wondering what it was all about and why we didn’t switch it off’).73 (#litres_trial_promo) Others had their eyes opened to ‘a Picasso in words’, something new and wonderfully different from the usual tea-table crosstalk. While many found it disturbing, one viewer reported ‘loving every word … of the author’s uproarious nonsense’.74 (#litres_trial_promo) After transmission, the ever-helpful press department of the Tyne-Tees region became so overwhelmed by inquiries it issued a fact-sheet offering a ‘reasonable and interesting interpretation’ of the play. Existential drama had joined the mainstream.

ITV’s main dramatic showcase at the time was Armchair Theatre. Initially a ragbag of classics and light comedies, it was remoulded by incoming Canadian producer Sydney Newman in 1958 to reflect the new theatrical mood of contemporary social engagement. (Newman’s archetypal idea of an armchair play involved a small-time grocer threatened by a new supermarket.)75 (#litres_trial_promo) Many new writing talents would be discovered or nurtured by Newman, and Pinter joined their ranks on 24 April 1960 with his first original television work, A Night Out.

The nocturnal jaunt is made by diffident office worker Albert Stokes (Tom Bell) escaping from the home of his pathetically possessive widowed mother. The works do he attends ends in disaster when he’s mischievously accused of groping a secretary. He flees, ending up in a deeply uncomfortable encounter with a hooker (Pinter’s then wife, Vivien Merchant), who affects a cartoon poshness. (‘You’ve not got any cigarettes on you? I’m very fond of a smoke. After dinner with a glass of wine. Or before dinner … with sherry.’) They almost start to bond over their shared tragic isolation, but when she asks him too many questions, in a manner too like his own mum, Stokes spectacularly falls apart. With nothing in his social armoury between taciturn gaucheness and inarticulate rage, Stokes proves himself completely incapable of starting a life outside the suffocating maternal evenings of gin rummy and shepherd’s pie: not so much Angry Young Man as Awkward Old Boy. Osborne’s threatened men ranted with theatrical garrulousness. More appropriately for the small screen, Pinter’s Stokes agonises in silent close-up.

The mysterious, spectral characters that were Pinter’s trademark were perhaps unsuited to Armchair Theatre’s bread-’n’-scrape naturalism. (Stokes certainly shows none of the buried redeeming features a social realist anti-hero usually possesses.) But his sheepishly combative dialogue fitted perfectly with Newman’s mission statement, sketching a repressed lower-middle-class claustrophobia heightened by director Philip Saville’s endlessly burrowing cameras. For extra realism, the coffee stall where Stokes meets his workmates was John Johnson’s famous all-night concession, normally found outside the Old Vic but shifted to the studio for the occasion.76 (#litres_trial_promo)

Though it wasn’t Pinter’s greatest work, A Night Out was a solid hit, reaching 6.38 million. Three days after it aired, Pinter joined the theatrical aristocracy as The Caretaker opened to prodigious acclaim, but he calculated that the play would have to run at the Duchess Theatre until 1990 to get the exposure A Night Out caught in one go.77 (#litres_trial_promo) As well as plays, Pinter’s subsequent TV work spanned everything from The Dick Emery Show to Pinter People, a collection of sketches animated by Sesame Street alumnus Gerald Potterton. This was for the psychedelic series NBC Experiment in Television, which gave US network time over to the imaginations of everyone from Tom Stoppard to Jim Henson.

By the end of 1960 the all-purpose avant-garde TV play had become such a part of the broadcasting landscape it was ripe for parody. The writer hero of Joan Morgan’s Square Dance toiled away at a modishly obscure drama called Ending’s No End, featuring a Greek chorus of Teddy boys and the cast turning radioactive in the final act.78 (#litres_trial_promo) The joke relied on every viewer having at one time switched off something by Pinter or his contemporaries in confusion and disgust. What it ignored was the significant portion who kept watching.

HANCOCK: THE BEDSITTER (1961) (#ulink_b934eeb7-60b0-5d62-846b-50001556efa2)

BBC

One man, one room, twenty-five minutes – comedy stripped bare.

COMEDY HAS TWO POLES: far-out fantasy and close-up reality. Both have their problems and rewards, but only one almost guarantees critical esteem by its mere presence. Possibly because of its superficial kinship with drama, the realistic sitcom is often regarded as the superior comic format. No-one became more thoroughly wrapped up in this dogma than Tony Hancock.

On the radio, Hancock’s Half-Hour distinguished itself by playing to Hancock’s strengths as a reactive, deadpan performer, as opposed to the standard issue, wisecracking clown. Writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson gradually moulded the programme to fit Hancock’s sullen, defeated spirit, relying less on cohort Sid James’s zany schemes and more on the mundane frustrations of real life. The less Hancock did, the funnier he got. The radio show’s zenith was the episode Sunday Afternoon at Home: the dreariness of a wet, post-war Sabbath distilled into a litany of bored sighs, circular conversations and desperate inanities. The farce of a life going off the rails was replaced by the tragicomedy of a life waiting to start.

Hancock’s television life was equally motionless. Ray Galton admitted the only concession they made to the visual was that ‘instead of saying “pick up that bucket”, we’d say “pick that up”.’79 (#litres_trial_promo) What was new was Hancock’s face. Framed by a heavy Astrakhan collared coat and homburg hat, by turns boyishly jovial and froggishly depressed, its athletic malleability perfectly augmented Hancock’s innate sense of comic timing. For once the weather-beaten putty features of Sid James were not the centre of attention.

For his seventh (and final) BBC television series, Hancock rationalised even further, dropping Sid and moving from East Cheam to an Earl’s Court bedsitter. The new series, titled simply Hancock, was presented as a break with the old style. ‘Ah yes, it’s goodbye to all that black homburg and Astrakhan collar rubbish,’ he confided to the Radio Times. ‘Knowledge and self advancement are the things.’80 (#litres_trial_promo) The new Hancock was introduced with the creative bar set higher than ever.

The two-hander, an entire episode featuring just two characters confined to one set, is often seen as the hallmark of sophisticated character comedy, a rite of passage for ‘quality’ sitcoms. This tradition began on ITV in October 1960. Bootsie and Snudge: A Day Off by Marty Feldman and Barry Took saw the eponymous gentleman’s club lackeys aimlessly passing the time on, again, a Sunday afternoon. (That pious ennui remains Christianity’s lasting contribution to comedy.) Despite constantly making plans, they never left their shared dormitory, encountering no-one else save a rogue pigeon. Seven months later, The Bedsitter also centred on entertainment endlessly deferred, going one better, and one fewer.

The premise was simple: Hancock, gay bachelor in bedsit-land, idles his way through a wet afternoon (weekday unspecified), tries and fails to improve himself, accidentally secures then loses a hot date, and generally mucks about. Keeping a solo Hancock funny for 25 minutes was a tall order (aside from fleeting glimpses of Michael Aspel on Tone’s dodgy telly, no-one else appears), but the mature Hancock persona was more than rich enough to fill the space – Galton and Simpson’s first draft ran twenty minutes too long.81 (#litres_trial_promo)

The logistics of filming one man alone were intricately worked out by director Duncan Wood and designer Malcolm Goulding, ensuring the cameras could follow Hancock wherever he wandered.82 (#litres_trial_promo) Hancock himself became increasingly keen to exert his influence on the show beyond performance, and persuaded a grudging Wood to let him direct a handful of shots per show himself.83 (#litres_trial_promo) Rehearsals were rigorous, and by the time of recording Hancock was on rare word-perfect form. From Noel Coward impersonations to an elaborate TV reception ballet, he barely put a foot wrong.

At times in his frivolous soliloquy Hancock almost – but not quite – catches the camera’s eye. There must have been a temptation to break the fourth wall in this episode, but the dedication to realism stopped it going down the Burns and Allen route (an episode of which followed Hancock at 9.25 p.m.). The early TV Half-Hours were awash with self-reference. In the very first, a couple watching Hancock’s television debut annoy him so much with their snide comments he leaves the studio and enters their front room, smashing up their set, and finding himself doing the rest of the show live from a hospital bed. It wasn’t a classic, and such gags were soon dumped.

A few episodes after The Bedsitter, a serious car accident started Hancock’s well-documented decline. Galton and Simpson went on to take the two-hander to ever greater heights with Steptoe and Son, and the minimalist format remained a sitcom goal, attained by shows as diverse as Porridge and Benson. The solo feat has never been equalled, not even by the lad himself – ATV’s lacklustre 1963 Hancock series tried to ape the formula in The Early Call, in which Hancock booked a wake-up call and fretted about it for the entire night. But the star was in the descendent and the script was second rate – in place of Tone’s epic struggle with Bertrand Russell’s Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, we got some uninspired business with a chest expander. The closest contender is perhaps a 1973 episode of All In the Family, Norman Lear’s reupholstering of Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part, which locked central character Archie Bunker in the cellar for a night of drunken self-loathing, with only token appearances by other characters.

The cult of the one- and two-hander holds more weight with writers than audiences, but its role in sitcom craft is considerable. The cult of realism is more problematic. Hancock’s obsessive pursuit of it began with him shedding the unnecessary (trad jokes, wacky situations) and ended with him dropping the necessary (Galton, Simpson). He was not the last performer to lose his comic perspective chasing after a phantom seriousness – conversely, lesser talents have used ostentatious naturalism to bolster feeble scripts. A reviewer in 1960 observed, ‘Mr Hancock teeters on the verge of tragedy: it is only his fine sense of the ridiculous that holds him … on the narrow path of sanity.’84 (#litres_trial_promo) In the quest for realism, that sense can be fatally neglected.

KINGSLEY AMIS GOES POP (1962) (#ulink_874bec9f-55e8-52f3-a4bf-4c8e477e103c)

ITV (Associated-Rediffusion)

TV’s introduces pop to high culture.

I’m looking forward to doing this programme enormously. I’m going to have fun even if nobody else does.

Kingsley Amis, TV Times,14 October 1962

BY THE 1960S, TV had accepted the necessity of covering pop music, but remained confused as to exactly how to do it. Clueless but game, they tried everything. Ken Dodd flaunted his hip Liverpool connections in Doddy’s Music Box, promising a ‘psychediddylic’ experience for all. BBC2 floated the unforgettably named Gadzooks! It’s All Happening!, which became Gadzooks! It’s the In Crowd! before sanity prevailed, and the title was rationalised to just plain Gadzooks! Producers were not so much going to the hop as caught on it.