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I’ve been in the theatre, in cabaret, in films and television – and this is undoubtedly the toughest job of them all.

RONNIE WALDMAN

‘Light Entertainment.’ What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? or Dark Entertainment?

ERIC MASCHWITZ

‘When we start analysing our good fortune,’ reflected Ernie Wise from the vantage point of the late 1970s, ‘a great deal of it comes from the fact that we came in at the tail-end of the music-hall era, and we were young enough to start again in a new medium, television.’¹ Eric Morecambe agreed: ‘If we hadn’t gone through the transition, we would have ended up as unknowns doing the whole of the North in the clubs.’² Neither man was joking: surviving that transition had been the greatest challenge of their entire career. Morecambe and Wise took a long time to discover how to make the most of television, and television took an even longer time to discover how to make the most of Morecambe and Wise.

Television, in fact, took quite a long time to discover how to make the most of television. The fitful nature of its early evolution (launched in 1936, suspended in 1939, relaunched in 1946) did nothing to help matters, and neither did its exorbitant cost (the price of a post-war ‘budget-model’ set was in the region of £50, while the average weekly industrial wage was just under £7) and its limited reach (full, nationwide coverage would not be achieved for several more years because tight Government control of capital expenditure restricted the construction of new transmitters).³ Even by the early fifties, when the ‘television public’ was estimated to be around 22 per cent of the UK population⁴ and the number of people with television licences was beginning to increase significantly,⁵ the BBC continued to exhibit a certain ambivalence in its attitude to the fledgling medium, slipping its television schedule at the back of the Radio Times as a four-page afterthought. This unhappy situation owed more than a little to the intransigence of Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC between 1944 and 1952. Television, noted Grace Wyndham Goldie (a producer at the time), was Haley’s ‘blind spot. He appeared to distrust and dislike it and his attitudes … seemed to be rooted in a moral disapproval of the medium itself.’⁶

Hours of viewing, like hours of public drinking, were limited in the interests of temperance: transmitters were turned on at three o’clock in the afternoon during weekdays and five o’clock on Sundays; the screen was blank between six and seven o’clock each evening in order to ensure that parents were not distracted from the task of putting their children to bed; and transmission ended at around half past ten on most nights or, on very special occasions, at quarter to eleven. Even in between programmes there were often soothing ‘interludes’ featuring windmills turning, horse ploughs ploughing, waves breaking and potters’ wheels revolving. For long stretches of the day there was nothing on offer other than a blank screen or the sound of something from one of Mozart’s less sensational compositions.

The situation changed dramatically in 1953 with the televised coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Until that moment, remarked Peter Dimmock (the man responsible for producing the historic broadcast), the Establishment, and a fair proportion of the general public, had looked upon television ‘as a bit of a peep-show’.⁷ Then, with a near-flawless production involving the use of 5 cameras inside Westminster Abbey and 21 cameras situated at 5 separate sites outside, the visual power and immediacy of the medium was, at last, underlined. More than 19 million people – 53 per cent of the adult population of Great Britain – saw the television coverage, with 7,800,000 viewing in their own homes, 10,400,000 in the homes of friends and a further 1,500,000 in cinemas, halls and public houses.⁸ It was the first time that a television audience had exceeded a radio audience. The critics reacted positively – the Star declaring that ‘television had cornered the right to put its name first over the BBC door’, and Philip Hope-Wallace announcing, ‘This was television’s Coronation’⁹ – and so, judging from the BBC’s own research, did the public at large – 98 per cent of television viewers (as opposed to 84 per cent of radio listeners) declaring themselves to be ‘completely satisfied’ with the coverage.¹⁰

The BBC now had in Sir Ian Jacob, its Director-General between 1952 and 1959, a man who appreciated both the potential of television to capture the public imagination and also the duty of programme-makers to realise that potential. ‘A public service broadcasting service,’ he wrote, ‘must set as its aim the best available in every field … [This] means that in covering the whole range of broadcasting the opportunity should be given to each individual to choose freely between the best of the one kind of programme with which he is familiar, and the best of another kind which may be less familiar.’¹¹ By the early fifties, a fair proportion of the BBC’s output had begun to live up to that high ideal, with its dramatic productions in particular succeeding in bringing classic literature to an increasingly broad audience (‘We are only a working-class family,’ wrote one group of grateful viewers after seeing a performance of King John. ‘You showed our England to us. Please give us more Shakespeare’¹²). When it came to Variety, however, the results were, to say the least, unsatisfactory.

The BBC’s inaugural Variety Party of 7 June 1946 was merely the first in a long line of embarrassingly ham-fisted attempts at forcing the bright, brash exuberance of the halls to fit the gently flickering intimacy of the small screen. Peter Waring, looking more like a slightly shifty butler than the insouciant comic that he was, set the tone when he stood stock-still in his over-starched white tie and tails and welcomed viewers with the confession: ‘I must say, I feel a trifle self-conscious going into the lens of this thing.’¹³ The problem was that television did not know what to do with Variety. The BBC had been quick enough to devise ways of adapting theatrical plays for the small screen, but it seemed at a loss when confronted with the task of taking a form as bold and as boisterous as music-hall – which thrived on its interaction with a lively audience – and distilling it into a medium intended to be experienced in the privacy of the family living-room. The BBC, without any doubt, meant well, but for a long time its attitude to Variety seemed akin to that of Mr Gladstone’s attitude to fallen women – more a case of pity than passion.

The newspaper critics, though unimpressed by the standard of many of the programmes being transmitted, were at least prepared to persevere with the enterprise. The Observer’s J. P. W. Mallalieu, with his distinctive brand of hopeful ambivalence, urged his fellow viewers not to give up:

We select, and what we select more often than not stimulates rather than depresses. I do not mean that what we select is always good. It is often terrible. But even in what is probably the most terrible BBC effort of all – the portrayal of Variety – when I have seen a performer on my screen I am more interested than I would otherwise have been to see him on the stage, if only to find out whether he is quite as bad as all that.¹⁴

It was a different story in America, where Variety was the least of commercial television’s worries. Unencumbered by any public service ethic, and urged on by sponsors eager for it to embrace all of the most glittering prizes thrown up by the more demotic of pursuits, American television was busy raiding vaudeville, radio and Hollywood in search of available talent. By the early fifties it could boast such hugely popular shows as The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, The Burns and Allen Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Milton Berle Show, Your Show of Shows, Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour and Ed Sullivan’s increasingly influential The Toast of the Town. It was estimated during this period that television stations in New York were devoting as much as 53.3 per cent of their time to light entertainment – in stark contrast to the BBC in London, which was devoting as little as 15.7 per cent to the same kind of material.¹⁵ This yawning disparity was underlined by the BBC’s use of several US imports in its schedules. When, for example, Amos ʼn’ Andy was shown for the first time on the BBC in 1954, the Daily Mirror’s Clifford Davis greeted it with the warmest of praise, pointing out that such a ‘slick, professional effort’ served to make the Corporation’s home-grown comedy shows seem ‘puny by comparison’.¹⁶

It was, in some ways, an unfair comparison to make. For all the brilliance of the very best of American television’s Variety output, it was still the case that the sheer crassness of the rest was closer to the norm, and even if the BBC had somehow found a way to raise the vast sums of money it would have needed to lure stars of comparable stature to its own studios it seems unlikely that many of them would have risen to the bait. Variety agents and managers – echoing their earlier reaction to the advent of radio – eyed television with considerable suspicion, believing initially that it represented little more than a particularly devious way of exhausting an entire career’s worth of material in a single evening, and, as a consequence, hastening the decline of an already precarious business.

Undeterred by such predictable resistance, the BBC struggled on, but for some time yet Variety on television would continue to take the form of televised Variety rather than television Variety. The best examples of this – such as Barney Colehan’s self-consciously antiquated The Good Old Days (which ran from 1953 to 1983), and Bill Cotton Senior’s band shows – had their own unpretentious charm, and the BBC would learn to produce them far more impressively than any of its future competitors ever would, but the worst – such as the half-hearted Café Continental (a cabaret-style show based at the Chiswick Empire) – seemed merely superfluous. It was not obvious, however, how the situation might best be remedied. One problem was that Variety performers tended to fail on television because they would over-project, forgetting the fact that now, instead of reaching out above all the hubbub to the back of the cavernous halls, they were supposed to be reaching directly into someone’s cosy front room. Jimmy Grafton, one of the producers obliged to deal with this issue, recalled a typical example: ‘Ethel Revnell, who was a very strong cockney character comedienne in Variety, was in an early [television show]; we brought her in to play a character in a situation comedy, and she played it like a Variety sketch, expecting she was going to get a laugh when she came on, and grimacing at the audience. She was so much larger than life that we had to scrap the show.’¹⁷

The performers who survived the transition were those who had been both willing and able to adapt. Terry-Thomas, for example, was handed his own comedy series, How Do You View?, in 1951, and others, such as Frankie Howerd, Max Wall, Arthur Askey, Jimmy Edwards and Bob Monkhouse started to appear on a regular basis soon after. Terry-Thomas commanded £100 for each fortnightly show – and by 1953 this had risen to 140 guineas¹⁸ – but most of those who were signed up at this time were placed on salaries that, compared both to radio and the most prestigious Variety circuits, were relatively modest. Ronnie Waldman – the BBC’s Head of Television Light Entertainment – certainly did believe in the viability of television Variety, but he was subject to the same degree of financial limitations as his opposite number in radio, even though his expenses, of necessity, were far greater (as average programme costs for television in 1954 were £892 per hour¹⁹). As a consequence, promising radio stars, such as Bernard Braden, or up-and-coming screen stars, such as Norman Wisdom, tended to be too expensive to hire more than occasionally. ‘Personality programmes’, such as the very popular What’s My Line?, proved to be far easier and cheaper to broadcast than Variety, as they had no need of well-written scripts or elaborate stage sets, and they also created their own television-bred celebrities, such as the notoriously brusque Gilbert Harding.

Waldman, however, was a determined man. Writing in the Radio Times shortly after assuming control of his department in 1951, he declared that he and his team of producers were committed to the creation of ‘something that had never existed before the invention of television – something that we call Television Light Entertainment … Our aim’, he continued, ‘is now to try and bring the entertainment profession as a whole to believe, with us, that television does not mean the mere photographing of something that could be entertaining in a theatre or a cinema. Television demands a very high standard of performance and an immense degree of polish from its artists. Inexperience and lack of “authority” ... are things with which the television camera has no mercy. Only the best is good enough for television.’²⁰ His department, he insisted, was going to be dedicated to the ideal of making ‘as many people as possible as happy as possible’.²¹ Eager to find new and exciting ideas with which he might invigorate his department, he set off on a fact-finding tour of the United States of America – ‘to see how the other chap does it’²² – taking in 114 different television programmes during a tour that took in New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, Arizona and Nevada. What impressed him most was not the commercial aspect of American television, but rather its lack of embarrassment about the idea of popular television. On his return to Britain, Waldman was in a bullish mood: his ambition, he announced, was ‘to give viewers what they want – but better than they expect it’.²³ By the beginning of 1954, he took great pleasure in drawing his colleagues’ attention to the fact that the Light Entertainment department was now producing around 400 shows per year – ‘a vastly greater output than that of any theatrical or film organisation’.²⁴ This was in spite of the fact that its full-time staff numbered no more than thirty seriously over-worked people. In the future, he concluded, there would be no excuse for a lack of variety in television Variety.

Morecambe and Wise were regarded within the BBC at this time as two of Waldman’s protégés, but the irony was that their television career – like their radio career – began only after years of unanswered letters, abortive engagements and innumerable false dawns. They had actually been trying to appear on television since 1948 – the year in which Ernie Wise first resolved to subject the BBC’s television producers and bookings managers to the same kind of remorseless letter-writing campaign that he had already begun to inflict on their radio counterparts.²⁵ On 21 April of that year, in fact, they were invited to an audition at Star Sound Studios near Baker Street in London; the report card has been preserved in the BBC’s archives²⁶:

MORECAMBE & WISE (Comedy duo)

DESCRIPTION	2 young men in ‘Healthy Hank’ & ‘Lingering Death’ make-up.
DATE OF AUDITION	21 April, 1948.
PERFORMANCE	Cross talk, Inkspots impe[rsonation], Vocal finish with ‘dance’ movements.
TIME	8 mins.
EXPERIENCE	Equity. Panto. B[roa]dcast.
REMARKS	Parts of this act might be suitable. Suggestive material & dancing together should be omitted.
[SCORE]	8.

Although this was judged to have been good enough to warrant a further invitation for a test ‘under normal Television studio conditions, at Alexandra Palace, as soon as possible’,²⁷ nothing came of it as far as actual television appearances were concerned. They did manage a brief appearance on Youth Parade in the autumn of 1951,²⁸ but it was not until Stars at Blackpool, in 1953, and their subsequent encounter with Waldman himself, that their luck really changed for the better.

Had Ronnie Waldman been a less understanding patron, Morecambe and Wise could easily have found themselves ostracised before their television career had really begun. While Waldman, from a discreet distance, was monitoring their development and making tentative plans to sign them up for a series of their own, Frank Pope, their agent, and George Campey, a journalist friend from the London Evening Standard, were allowing themselves to get carried away by their various efforts at publicising the act. Things came to a head when, due to some kind of failure of communication between Pope and Campey, an aggressively pro-Morecambe and Wise article by Campey²⁹ (which practically ordered Waldman to sign them up immediately, and even suggested what their salary should be) appeared several days after Waldman had assured them that he was very close to confirming the series for the 1954 spring schedules. Pope, fearing the worst, wrote to Waldman on 9 November 1953³⁰ – the same day as the appearance of the offending article – explaining that it had all been a most unfortunate mistake and apologising profusely for any embarrassment that might have been caused. Waldman, however, was more amused than angered by the unsolicited advice, and he continued as before with his plans for the series.

Morecambe and Wise had regarded Waldman’s initial offer to them as representing ‘a delirious moment’,³¹ and they had been young enough and ambitious enough to refuse to be unnerved by the various warnings they received from older performers once the news began to circulate. Ernie Wise recalled:

You will hear old pros tell you that the twenties were the heyday of music-hall, or Variety, as it became known, and that by 1939 it was already dying, that the cinema was killing it. Yet, when we started in 1939, Variety was booming. We believe that if anything killed Variety it was the war when a lot of brilliant acts disappeared and the Palladium embarked on a policy of using only American tops of the bill … [O]n top of that TV was in the ascendancy despite the pundits who scoffed at the new medium. ‘TV will never kill Variety,’ we heard so many say. ‘Who’ll bother to watch a screen when you can see acts live in the theatre?’³²

The answer, Morecambe and Wise believed, was ‘an increasingly significant number’, and they were determined to make the most of the opportunity they had been handed to be in at the start of an exciting new era. They certainly felt as though they were malleable enough to adapt: they had done so once before, for radio, and saw no reason why they could not now do so again. They appreciated the fact that there was much that needed changing. Morecambe acknowledged that the act they ‘had in music-hall had 15 to 20 minutes of material in it’, which could have been used continuously for years on the circuit (because ‘if a boy saw you doing a sketch when he was 15 he’d usually have completely forgotten it by the time he was 19’³³). They needed a new one – several new ones, in fact – to satisfy the voracious appetite of television. Between them, they soon came up with a number of ideas – some drawn from personal experience, some from writer friends, and some from the trusted old joke books they carried everywhere with them – and so, when Bryan Sears, their new producer/director,³⁴ arranged to visit them in Sheffield, where they were playing, to commence preliminary discussions, they looked forward to the meeting with more than a little confidence. It proved, however, to have been confidence misplaced.

Ronnie Waldman may well have been in charge of the BBC’s Light Entertainment division, and he may well have believed fervently in breaking down the old cultural barriers that divided the North from the South, but not all of the producers underneath him were inclined to act entirely in accordance with his admirable ideals. Bryan Sears, for one, did not share his superior’s optimism as far as Morecambe and Wise’s future on television was concerned. The first thing that he did after having listened politely to all of their ideas was to tell them that none of them would work ‘down South’. They should be aware, he informed them, that they had a serious problem, and the problem was that they came from the ‘wrong’ part of the country. Both Morecambe and Wise sat open-mouthed as Sears explained that they were unfortunate to be ‘“Northern” comics, [and] that a barrier of prejudice existed separating the North from the South and from Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well’.³⁵ This must have sounded somewhat surprising to performers who only recently had played to large and very appreciative audiences in various parts of London, and whose London-based agent was at that very moment busy responding to numerous requests for return engagements in such places as Bedford, Brighton, Oxford and Norwich. It would have seemed equally fanciful to those in the radio division of the BBCs Variety department who were more eager than ever to offer Morecambe and Wise further opportunities to appear on shows that were broadcast nationally. This, however, was television, and Sears was a television producer, and a good one at that, so they assumed that he must know what was best for them now.

Although one can question his reasoning, one can hardly doubt that Bryan Sears was committed to doing what he felt was most likely to make Morecambe and Wise’s first television series a success. His primary goal, of course, was to produce a good show – rather than to ensure that Morecambe and Wise became stars – but it seemed logical to presume that by doing the former he would probably also be doing the latter. He informed them that they would require a great deal of help if they were to overcome all of the obstacles that were facing them, and that they would therefore need to be ready to make a number of compromises in order to benefit from the support that he and the rest of his production team were willing to offer. Morecambe and Wise agreed, although privately they were now considerably more apprehensive than before.