Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by The Friday Project in 2015

This ebook edition published by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Phil Norman 2015

Cover photograph © Getty Images/Steven Taylor

Design © Kate Gaughran

Phil Norman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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

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Source ISBN: 978-0-00-811332-2

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-759140-4

Version: 2016-10-07

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Tele-Crime (1938–9)

Cookery (1946–51)

Cavalcade of Stars (1949–52)

Crusader Rabbit (1950–1)

The Burns and Allen Show (1950–8)

The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–61)

The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse: Marty (1953)

Small Time (1955–66)

The Phil Silvers Show (1955–9)

A Show Called Fred (1956)

My Wildest Dream (1956–7)

Opportunity Knocks (1956–78)

The Singing Ringing Tree (1957)

Six-Five Special (1957–8)

The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960)

Armchair Theatre: A Night Out (1960)

Hancock: The Bedsitter (1961)

Kingsley Amis Goes Pop (1962)

That Was the Week That Was (1962–3)

The Sunday-Night Play: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962)

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–92)

World in Action (1963–98)

Play School (1964–88)

Crossroads (1964–88)

Le Manège Enchanté (1964–1971) The Magic Roundabout (1965–1977)

World of Sport (1965–85)

Talking to a Stranger (1966)

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–9)

The Prisoner: Fall Out (1968)

If There Weren’t Any Blacks, You’d Have to Invent Them (1968, 1973)

Sesame Street (1969–)

The Owl Service (1969)

Nationwide (1969–83)

The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–7)

Miss World (1970)

Columbo (1971–8/1989–2003)

The Largest Theatre in the World: The Rainbirds (1971)

Duel (1971)

The Special London Bridge Special (1972)

Un, Dos, Tres … (1972–2004)

Inigo Pipkin/Pipkins (1973–81)

The Indoor League (1973–8)

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–4)

Thriller (1973–6)

Tiswas (1974–82)

Don’t Ask Me (1974–8)

Supersonic (1975–7)

The Thrilla in Manila (1974)

The Norman Gunston Show (1975–9)

Play for Today: Double Dare (1976)

Pauline’s Quirkes (1976)

I, Claudius (1976)

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–9)

BBC Nine O’clock News (1976)

Battle of the Network Stars (1976–88)Star Games (1978–80)

Rock Follies (1976–7)

Trans America Ultra Quiz (1977–92)Ultra Quiz (1983–5)

Soap (1977–81)

Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1977)

Leapfrog (1978–9)

The BBC Television Shakespeare (1978–85)

Connections (1978)

Blankety Blank (1979-90)

Life on Earth (1979)

Minder (1979–94)

Now Get Out of That (1981–5)

Artemis 81 (1981)

Hill Street Blues (1981–7)

The Oxford Road Show (1981–5)

Jane (1982–4)

Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)

St Elsewhere (1982–8)

The Tube (1982–7)

M*A*S*H: ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’ (1983)

Saturday Night Affairs (1984)

Threads (1984)

Ever Decreasing Circles (1984–9)

Heimat: Eine Deutsche Chronik (1984)

Moonlighting (1985–9)

Pob’s Programme (1985–7)

The Max Headroom Show (1985–7)

A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–8)

The Comic Strip Presents … Private Enterprise (1986)

Night Network (1987–9)

Mahabharat (1988–90)

Def II (1988–94)

Twin Peaks (1990–1)

Abroad in Britain (1990)

The Real World (1992–)

Come on Down and Out (1993)

Frasier (1993–2004)

Our Friends in the North (1996)

This Morning with Richard Not Judy (1998–9)

The Sopranos (1999–2007)

People Like Us (1999–2001)

Battlestar Galactica (2004–9)

Forbrydelsen (2007–12)

Apple Action News (2009–)

Louie (2010–)

House of Cards (2013–)

Endnotes

About the Author

Also by Phil Norman

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

There is no holding down the modern inventor. He rides the waves of the ether with the conquering skill of a master in a celestial rodeo. Give him a valve and there is no holding him. It is almost certain that within a few years we shall have all our entertainment available within our own four walls. Press but the button and a stereoscopic talking film will happen over the mantelpiece.

‘Seen and Heard’, Manchester Guardian, 1 April 1930

IT HAD AN AURA about it, a presence. By today’s standards it was tiny, but it dominated the room in a way its technically superior descendants never quite manage. It catered directly for two of the senses, but in operation it affected them all. The flicker and the glare of the bulbous, grey-green screen. The hum and whine of the tube heating up. The crackle of static when it turned off, the tang of burnt dust in the air when it was repaired. For decades the television set was the most advanced piece of technology to be found in any house. How it worked was a mystery, but it was literally part of the furniture.

It was also an instant portal to a cavalcade of smart, witty house guests with inexhaustible supplies of information, anecdotes, opinions and vibrant sweaters. Miraculous and commonplace at the same time, television occupied a unique position in the national imagination. Detractors claimed it hijacked the national imagination – formerly a cultural Arcadia of chamber music and well-made plays – for its own base ends, but at its best it brought classes and cultures into each other’s homes without prejudice. By the late 1960s even the press admitted that TV, coming from nowhere, was beating them at their own game and several new ones of its own invention.

The birth of television in the mid-1920s garnered more fuss than a royal baby. The race to perfect a workable system was matched by the rush to predict imminent social catastrophe. Newspapers, radio, theatre and even the motor car (why drive somewhere you can see at the flick of a switch?) were pronounced doomed many times. Rumour and misconception abounded. Professor A. M. Low worried about the effect on international relations if Americans could use the new device to view their British neighbours engaged in ‘frightful’ activities, such as drinking cocktails.1 Meanwhile, R. H. Hill of Oxford University demanded, ‘How could one have a bath in comfort if all the neighbours could look in?’2 Noted physicist Sir Oliver Lodge fretted that broadcasting’s electromagnetic waves might make planes fall out of the sky, though he didn’t expect TV to become a working reality ‘for a good many years yet, perhaps not for a century’.3

More usefully, Lodge worried about content, noting that the majority of messages sent by another recent scientific triumph – the transatlantic telegraph cable – were ‘rubbishy’. ‘It is no use enlarging our powers of communication,’ he warned, ‘if we have nothing worthwhile to say.’4 The insubstantial nature of the early demonstrations didn’t help – even John Logie Baird provoked a wave of cheap laughs when he based his first telerecording demo around a cabbage.

Initially the preserve of the rich, the take up of TV spread after the Second World War as prices dropped and services improved. Older media, who had originally described it as an elitist fad for well-to-do stay-at-homes, now tried to dismiss it as a pernicious influence on those less stable, less educated than themselves. A snobbish line in the fifties had it that people were raising H-shaped aerials over their houses to make up for all the ‘H’s dropped inside them.

It may have projected a serene, slightly aloof air on screen, but behind the cameras post-war television was paddling like mad, inventing a new medium on the hoof, often with whatever came to hand. Studios looked less like the glistening caverns of today and more like the shop floor of an engineering works under the stewardship of a hyperactive ten-year-old. A profession was being steadily built through years of committed bodging.

America initially lagged behind Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan in television take up, but soon made up for lost time. NBC’s first electronic transmission in 1936, featuring comedian Ed Wynn, ignited an industrial boom that in little over a decade would result in four national television networks broadcasting to over four million set-equipped homes. The US network system, commercially funded and powered by the twin big tickets of sports and vaudeville, was voracious and unstoppable. By the late 1940s its diverse schedule offered programmes that were sombre (Court of Current Issues, People’s Platform), sophisticated (Café de Paris, Champaign and Orchids) and silly (Buzzy Wuzzy, Campus Hoopla).

This last category caused unease back in Britain, where ITV’s arrival in the mid-1950s threatened the state-run BBC order. The US broadcasts of Elizabeth II’s coronation had included grinning appearances by NBC’s mascot, chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs, and there were concerns about a similar crassness creeping in to British broadcasting. The Tories championed ITV, Labour vilified it, while Liberal councillor Paul Rose reminded both sides that ‘there is always freedom of the knob.’5

Technological advance was an enduring obsession, if not always taking place as quickly as predicted: a committee set up in 1943 to prepare for British television’s post-war return anticipated the swift invention not only of colour, but 1000-line high definition and 3D.6 A quarter of a century later, round the clock coverage of the Apollo missions fused the Television Age with the Space Age for as long as the latter held out, and made a star of James Burke, who went on to present the most lavish science programmes ever made, travelling further on a BBC expense account than Armstrong ever managed in a Saturn V. On a smaller scale, potting shed innovation was everywhere, from the BBC’s home computer sideline to abortive plans in the late 1960s for contestants on The Golden Shot to operate the game show’s famous crossbow from their own front rooms, via a Golden Joystick in a James Bond-style Golden Suitcase, specially delivered in a Golden Car. The technology, the producers made clear, boasted Golden safety features as ‘we don’t want any nut shooting Bob Monkhouse.’7

Around this time came the first symptoms of two ailments that would dog the medium for evermore. The first was the transformation of the social embarrassment surrounding television among the middle classes into an ironic ‘guilty pleasure’. As John Osborne confessed to Kenneth Tynan in 1968, ‘When TV is dreadful, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. After you’ve seen The Golden Shot a couple of times, it acquires a special horror of its own.’8 The second, closely related to the first, was nostalgia. In the dying days of 1969, ITV screened A Child of the Sixties, taking the temperature of the decade with a rummage in the archive. This sort of thing was nothing new in itself, but for the first time whimsical talking heads were added, including ‘the impressions they made on a receptive young mind’ – an Oxford undergraduate named Gyles Brandreth. The bar for retro-punditry was set from that moment.

The study of television doesn’t have to be so apologetic. Television may not be high art, but many artists have worked in it, regardless of its condemnation as unclean by the world’s cultural custodians. Samuel Beckett wrote for it. Kingsley Amis presented a pop music show on it. Carol Ann Duffy laboured in it writing cockney gags for Joe Brown’s snakes and ladders game show Square One on her way to becoming Poet Laureate.

As a vivid source of graphic reportage, television transformed our relationship with the world at large. When the Vietnam War stopped being a few fuzzy black and white images accompanied by sober paragraphs of text and became an avalanche of explicit, full-colour moving horrors, western populations seriously reconsidered the wisdom of military adventures. Dramatists, meanwhile, found a unique new medium that was more intimate than cinema, more precise than the theatre and which could pluck the hearts of millions. Worries about the creation of a world of antisocial couch ornaments were outweighed by a sense of barriers and borders vaulted by satellite, a shift in the way we looked at the world that wouldn’t happen again until the advent of the Internet.

If that arrival meant the writing was on the wall for television’s place in the media vanguard, for most it was hard to read. Prestel, the British Post Office’s pioneering online data service, was struggling by 1982. Punters predicted that staring at a load of text was so passé in the age of the image it would never catch on. ‘Prestel and The Two Ronnies … have no more in common than the Financial Times and Hammond Innes,’ reasoned Hamish McRae. ‘It would further follow that it is pointless to give people who want to watch The Two Ronnies a Prestel set that tells them the time of the trains to Newcastle.’9 Such faultless logic buoyed TV’s unassailable self-image until it was far too late, at which point panic set in.

Factual programmes in particular are acutely conscious of the Internet looking over their shoulders. Current affairs channels pride themselves as vital parts of the democratic machine, but TV could never make on-screen democracy work. In May 1982, World in Action tried to atone for the scarcity of news coming out of the Falklands Conflict with a high-tech viewer vote. This consisted of 75 homes being equipped to give instant reaction to the big questions of warfare. The set-up worked fine, but a naively honest on-screen tally of the total votes showed less than half the audience, specially wired in at great fuss, were actually bothering. Viewer participation remains largely a token gesture – and, thanks to premium rate phone lines, often the token that pays for the programme.

Before the Internet took its place as the number one scourge of decent society, television’s constant stream bred disdain. A novel takes its place in the literary canon. A film lines up in the cinematic pantheon. Television programmes just float there, then vanish. While films relate to other films at a distance, via elegant homage or the critic’s comparative whim, a TV show arrives surrounded by other shows before and after, on other channels, from other seasons. It’s an adaptation of this Danish show, a reboot of that long-forgotten space opera, or a strange amalgam of those two 1970s programmes presented by that newsreader who’s suddenly all over the place after she showed how game she was, doing that soap opera parody on a charity special. Never mind placing a programme in context, it’s an afternoon’s work just to pull the thing out of the undergrowth.

Small wonder that early critics, fearful of getting their hands dirty with this suspicious new medium, contented themselves with a few tentative pokes and prods at TV as a whole – muttering darkly about ‘admass’ and ‘diachronic flow’, and treating it with the loftiness of the anthropologist. For these early critics, TV could best be understood as the by-product of some industrial process or quaintly exotic lower culture: it was an experimental new plastic from the labs of ICI, or the campfire story of a backward tribe. Aside from the odd accidentally interesting curio, artistic judgement was hardly appropriate. The Guardian’s TV editor Peter Fiddick noted that TV’s lowly status could lead, at worst, to ‘know-nothings writing for care-nothings about stuff that [is] worth nothing.’10 That was in 1982. Things have got worse since.

So here’s an attempt to revisit and revive the history of the idiot’s lantern. A hundred programmes have been gathered to chart eighty-odd years of televisual evolution. It is, admittedly, a predominantly Anglophone, western collection. Though the Global Village has lately begun to live up to its name, TV around the world has overwhelmingly followed blueprints drawn up by British and American hands.

A crudely calibrated Hundred Greatest, a solemn Hall of Fame, would give only a fraction of the picture. This book aims to celebrate and mimic the serendipitous joy of that scheduling jumble which, in the days of restricted channel numbers, threw up dizzy juxtapositions daily: an earnest play might be followed by a big broad variety spectacular; a horror anthology that drove children behind furniture followed a sketch show that chewed the carpet. This riotous mix, now slowly disappearing as themed channels and on-demand services take over, may have downgraded TV’s importance in the eyes of aesthetes, but gave it a community feel other media lacked. No-one ever turned up at a cinema half an hour early for a screening of Three Colours: Red and got thirty minutes of Slam Dunk Ernest for their trouble.

This isn’t a book about how much ‘better’ television once was, but how much stranger it used to be – much braver, more foolhardy, unselfconscious and creatively energetic before commerce knocked those fascinating corners off its character. At its best and at its worst, television is brutally honest and charmingly deceitful, sentimentally partisan and coldly dispassionate, obscenely lavish and ludicrously cheap. Its screen bulges with obsessive perfectionists and clueless amateurs, sociopathic monsters and all-round good eggs. It can’t be contained by a neat little narrative. It’s chaos all the way down.

No countdown of the top hundred shows can do television full justice. But maybe a more varied hundred can make a better stab at exploring it: a rough guide antidote to the standard lists of well-worn greats. What follows is one such alternative trek. Overlooked gems and justly wiped follies, overcooked spectaculars and underfunded experiments are as much a part of TV history as the national treasures and stone cold classics. They can tell us just as much, and sometimes more, about the nature of television, those who crafted it and those who lapped it up. Here, then, are tales of the days when television was at the most exciting, creative stage of any medium: a cottage industry with the world at its feet.

TELE-CRIME (1938–9)
BBC
The original TV drama series.

When the BBC asks a question, it isn’t just a question, it’s a ‘viewer participation programme’.

Grace Wyndham Goldie, Listener, 2 March 1939

IN BBC TELEVISION’S BRIEF life before the war, drama meant the theatre: simple studio productions of acknowledged classics or extracts from a show currently running in the West End. These unofficial trailers were either recreated in the studio (with as much of the theatre’s scenery as could be blagged) or occasionally and chaotically broadcast live from their home turf. Champions of theatre broadcasts claimed the presence of an audience added atmosphere and upped the actors’ game – the fact that the cameras often ended up chasing them about the stage, like a football match filmed by a bunch of drunken fans, was a small price to pay.

Visuals took a back seat at first. Early TV equipment produced low-definition pictures in murky black and grimy white. Faces had to be held in tight close-up to enable recognition, and wide shots couldn’t be that wide due to the Beeb’s tiny Lime Grove studios. Sets and lighting just about did the job, and nothing more. Directors couldn’t cut between cameras – a change of shot had to be done by mixing, which could take several seconds. With all these restrictions, wrote the critic Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘the television screen is much less a stage … than a checking-board helping us listen to good talk.’11

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

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

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

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

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

COOKERY (1946–51)
BBC
The first celebrity chef.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAVALCADE OF STARS (1949–52)
DuMont (Drugstore Television)
Vaudeville begets the sitcom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRUSADER RABBIT (1950–1)
NBC (Television Arts Productions)
TV’s first bespoke cartoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BURNS AND ALLEN SHOW (1950–8)
CBS
Still in its infancy, the sitcom goes postmodern.

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

George Burns

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

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

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

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

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

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

In October 1956, Burns gained a TV set which enabled him to watch the show – the one which, to him, was real life (the Burns and Allen played by Burns and Allen in The Burns and Allen Show were the stars of a show of their own, the content of which remained a mystery). He could sow mischief, retire to the set, and watch trouble unfold at his leisure. When he tired of that, he could switch channels and spy on Jack Benny. Burns’s fluctuating relationship to audience and plot (of which, he said, there was more than in a variety show, but less than in a wrestling match) was a deconstructionist triumph.

Ken Dodd questioned Freud’s theories of comedy, noting the great psychoanalyst ‘never had to play second house at the Glasgow Empire’. Burns and Allen, graduates of vaudeville, would have agreed. The self-awareness that high art lauds as sophisticated was part of the DNA of popular entertainment from the year dot – that is, about a day after George Burns was born.

THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW (1952–61)
DuMont/NBC/ABC
TV’s visual gag pioneer.

MOST MODERN COMEDIANS APPEAR on TV. Very few use it. In Britain there have been Spike Milligan, the Pythons, Kenny Everett and Chris Morris. America boasted George Burns, the Laugh-In crowd, David Letterman and Garry Shandling. But most of all it had the quintessential TV comedian: the cigar-sucking, second generation Hungarian Ernie Kovacs.

Like many TV comics, Kovacs began as a nonconformist local radio DJ, before becoming a continuity announcer on Pennsylvania’s regional NBC affiliate station. His first on-screen stint came in 1950 as eleventh hour stand-in on cookery show Deadline for Dinner, where a talent for off-the-cuff wisecracks impressed management enough to give him the blank canvas of a ninety-minute morning programme. In 1950, the 7.30-to-9.00 a.m. weekday slot was uncharted terrain, so Kovacs had free rein to improvise as he wished. He goofed around to music, toyed with random props and chatted calmly to the viewers, seemingly unaware of a live panther squatting on his back. At a time when comedy was ruled by repetition and ritual, Kovacs insisted on constant innovation.

The Ernie Kovacs Show proper first appeared on the DuMont network, in front of an audience of ‘twenty-three passing strangers’. Kovacs preferred to work without a full studio audience for one very good reason – he was determined to use the medium in every way possible, so a lot of his gags only worked on the screen. Atmosphere came from the camera crew, who could laugh (and heckle) as heartily as anyone.

He exploited the basic video effects of the day – wipes, superimpositions and picture flips – to make characters fly off screen, expose the contents of his head or superimpose it onto a small dog. He would walk off the edge of the set and give viewers an impromptu guided tour of the studio paraphernalia. With his technicians he made an inverting lens from mirrors and soup cans, built a cheap upside-down set and walked on the ceiling. Or he simply stuck a child’s kaleidoscope in front of the camera, accompanied by some music. In an unexplored medium he broke ground with every step – usually accompanied by a discordant sound effect. His work is most often compared to Kenny Everett’s, but he pre-empted others. His interest in the personalities of puppet animals is reminiscent of early Vic Reeves (sample stage direction: ‘Trevor the stuffed deer is vacuumed – laughs.’23)

After the DuMont network collapsed, Kovacs returned to NBC to occupy a variety of slots, culminating in his first prime-time gig, an 8 p.m. Monday night spectacular from a real theatre, with a real audience. The show also came with a real budget that Kovacs didn’t hesitate to spend with alarming profligacy: huge song-and-dance numbers were choreographed, incorporating giant flights of collapsible stairs; Boris Karloff was paid top dollar to recite the alphabet. The transition from backroom ‘improv’ to gargantuan showcase came surprisingly easily to him.

One sketch from these shows was far ahead of its time. To the thunderous accompaniment of drum rolls and the clatter of teleprinters, Kovacs appeared as a self-important newsreader, employing primitive in-camera effects to lampoon the already excessive presentation of TV news decades before the likes of Chris Morris. One sketch, ‘News Analyst’, is uncannily modern in its approach:

KOVACS: Good morning. This is Leroy L. Bascombe McFinister …

[Picture is wiped inward, leaving tiny vertical slit in middle through which we glimpse Ernie.]

KOVACS:… with the news.

[Wipe widens to full set.]

KOVACS: Behind the news.

[Picture tilts right.]

KOVACS: News flashes and news highlights.

[Tilts upside down.]

KOVACS: Events of the day and events of the night.

[Picture spins 360 degrees to left.]

KOVACS: Brought to you …

[Picture spins to right, ends upside down.]

KOVACS:… as they happen …

[Picture spins upright.]

KOVACS:… when they happen.

[Tilts to right, then back.]

KOVACS: News!

[Tilts to left, then back.]

KOVACS: From all over!

[Shot of spinning world globe – hand reaches in and stops globe.] 24

(This complex, frenetic high-tech skit was, astoundingly, performed live.) The final NBC Kovacs show climaxed with a dance number that had close to 100 people and animals on stage, ending with the destruction of the set as the credits rolled, while perspiring executives picked up the tab.

Kovacs simultaneously subbed for Steve Allen, hosting the Monday and Tuesday editions of Tonight. His effects-heavy fantasies didn’t sit well in a show built around talk and the expense of the more elaborate gags made his tenure brief. But it did incubate two of his most famous routines: Eugene, a featherweight tenderfoot whose every action caused loud, incongruous sound effects; and the tilted room, a set built on a slant which a prism lens restored to the vertical, rendering everything from olives to milk prone to hare off in bizarre directions as the hapless Eugene looked askance.

In January 1957 Kovacs was parachuted into a prime-time slot following a much-publicised Jerry Lewis special. Spotting a potential big break, he put everything into devising a speech-free showcase of his very best material. The ‘No Dialogue’ show was meticulously executed, including a perfected and expanded tilted room sketch. This was crafted comedy in the fullest sense, and won plaudits galore. Another equally precise special, Kovacs on Music, featured the comedy debut of André Previn. Kovacs had finally made the big time, but his pinnacle was precarious. The early experimental spirit of US TV was being rapidly eroded as big money entered the equation, and ratings became the only thing that mattered.

Kovacs was obliged to switch again, to ABC, for a series of specials and a quiz show, Take a Good Look. The quiz show featured his most expensive gag of all – as a used car salesman slaps a car on the bonnet, it falls through a hole in the ground, creating a bill of thousands of dollars for a thirty-second quickie. The specials were recorded with a dedicated crew in marathon all-weekend studio lock-ins. Alongside familiar routines, he created elaborate and rather elegant musical ballets of office equipment and other inanimate objects. His disdain for network top brass made itself felt in satirically amended end credits.(‘Associate Producer (That’s like STEALING money!)’)

These shows won Kovacs his only Emmy, for ‘outstanding achievement in electronic camerawork’. He died in a car accident shortly after recording the eighth, which was shown in tribute a fortnight later. Like the experimenters who followed him, Kovacs remained on the fringes of television, distrustful of its grandees and eager to undermine and mock them at every opportunity, finding door after door slammed in his face as a result. As a career model for fame-hungry comics, he was as lousy as they came. As a master craftsman, he was among the greatest.

THE PHILCO-GOODYEAR TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE: MARTY (1953)
NBC (Showcase)
TV drama mines the mundane.

I am just now becoming aware of this marvellous world of the ordinary. This is an age of savage introspection, and television is the dramatic medium through which to expose our new insights into ourselves.

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

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 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

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 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

SMALL TIME (1955–66)
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

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 Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company 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)
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

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

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 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 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.

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