A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
the frequent pull-out shots to take in backstage crew and chunky EMI cameras, the floor was visibly covered in studio junk. As with Kovacs’s shows, laughter came from the camera crew rather than an audience. Fred ended with an extended parody of the various po-faced dramas with which it shared the schedules. Soap opera The Grove Family became ‘The Lime Grove Family’: ‘Mum’ cooked roast peacocks’ tongues on baked mangoes in the piano, whereupon ‘son’ hit her with a club, and was reprimanded by ‘dad’, saying, ‘You mustn’t hit your mother like that. You must hit her like this …’ Their version of The Count of Monte Cristo featured the first appearance of the famous coconut-halves-for-horses’-hooves sight gag and ended with the destruction of the already threadbare set, a rousing chorus of ‘Riding Along On the Crest of a Wave’, and Valentine Dyall doing the dishes in the studio’s self-service canteen.
Descriptions like this are hopelessly inadequate. As Bernard Levin put it, ‘if you do not think that is funny it is either because I have failed to convey its essence or because there is something wrong with you.’38 Peter Black agreed: ‘This show has built up in three weeks a following that has gone beyond enthusiasm. It is an addiction.’39 Critical credentials notwithstanding, these men were television comedy’s first fanboys.
When stuff like Fred appeared on the continent, it was Absurdist theatre, afforded its rightful place in the cultural pantheon. Over here it was just British rubbish. Bernard Levin tried to redress matters, asserting that the Fred team ‘have done television a service comparable to that rendered by Gluck to opera, or Newton to mathematics.’40 Philip Purser claimed Fred was ‘roughly equivalent to the revolution in the theatre promoted by Bertolt Brecht; and not entirely dissimilar.’41 It certainly created its own version of Brecht’s Alienation Effect. ‘I had to make a very real effort of will on Wednesday,’ recounted Levin of trying to watch Gun-Law, the bog-standard western which followed Fred, ‘to convince myself that this was not meant to be funny. For a long time I could not stop expecting Mr Spike Milligan to put his mad, bearded head round the corner of the screen with some devastating remark about the shape of Sheriff Dillon’s face.’42
Milligan’s TV year ended with Son of Fred, available for the first time in the north, with cartoons by Bob Godfrey’s Biographic Films, mocked up technical breakdowns and Gilbert Harding’s Uncle Cuthbert playing the contra-bassoon while suspended from wires in a wheelchair. (‘Kind of an aerial fairy,’ he explained.) It also inaugurated the grand tradition of putting jokes in the TV Times listings. (‘Frisby Spoon appears without permission.’) In 1963 a compilation, The Best of Fred, was presented to a public that, claimed ITV, had now ‘caught up’ with Milligan’s anarchic humour, with Milligan and Dyall reminiscing over the show’s distant heyday in between clips. Innovation had become nostalgia.
Lester would go on to give the Beatles silly things to do on film. Milligan inaugurated the Q series in 1969, which took his illogical methods down increasingly strange paths. Meanwhile his former co-Goon Michael Bentine cooked up a more technically elaborate version of the same mayhem for the BBC’s It’s a Square World. But Fred’s place in history would be secured by countless other hands. All around the country, short-trousered future members of Python, The Goodies and other anarcho-comic collectives were watching closely and making mental notes. As Peter Cook would later note, Milligan ‘opened the gate into the field where we now all frolic.’43
ITV (Granada)
The comedy panel show outstays its welcome
A panel of celebrities, of one kind or another, are asked in turn to identify somebody they have met in the past. One of the particular eccentricities of television was shown up in this programme – the choosing of a ‘celebrity’ for the panel with no qualification or aptitude.
Review of Place the Face, Manchester Guardian, 9 July 1957
THE PANEL SHOW WAS a mainstay of television right from the beginning, for reasons both cultural and commercial. The cultural: since the nineteenth century the parlour game, a relaxed after-dinner orgy of banter and one-upmanship, was the icing on the middle class party cake, a civilised letting-down of the hair. The commercial: it’s cheap. It’s wit without a script, drama without a set, sport kept safely indoors. A prestigious panel show will have the country’s greatest two-dozen raconteurs fighting to appear on it. For a less prestigious one, a hundred dim bulbs will tear each other to pieces. Get the initial ingredients right, and it keeps itself afloat with minimal effort – it’s the perpetual motion format.
The cosy, chatty panel game established itself as a national comfort blanket on radio during the war. The BBC Home Service’s Brains Trust, in which clubbable eggheads like Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski debated esoteric enquiries sent in by the public, reached nearly a third of Britons and made highbrows into stars. At the same time, the ease of it all bred suspicion. In 1942, questions were asked in the Commons on whether the Trust participants’ fees of £20 per session ‘for attempting to answer very simple questions’ was public money for old rope.44 It was certainly valuable old rope: in 1954, One Minute Please, predecessor to the long-running Just a Minute, became the first BBC panel format sold to the USA when Dumont bought the TV rights for $104,000.45
On television, two shows dominated. Vocational guessing game What’s My Line? began on CBS in 1950 and hit the BBC the following year, augmenting the elitist ‘wits’ enclave’ with a celebration of honest (but preferably amusingly odd) everyday work. In 1956 Princess Margaret attended an edition, watching from a special ‘royal box’ rigged up in the stalls. Then there was the loftier Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? This was an archaeological quiz that challenged academics to identify cuttlefish beaks and Tibetan prayer wheels, employed a young David Attenborough on its production team and invited viewers ‘to follow the fluctuating course of the contest as the experts grope towards the right solution, and perhaps enjoy a nice cosy feeling of superiority meanwhile.’46
Its star turn was archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, whose powers of observational deduction were second to none, though this wasn’t what made him such a draw. With a florid, expressive face, aided by an atavistic moustache made for twirling, he’d frown intensely at a flint axe or quern – hum, ha, squint, peer – then, in a cartoonish light bulb moment, all but leap in the air as the penny dropped. This showmanship was aided by the custom of lunching the panel, together with chairman Glyn Daniel, at a Kensington restaurant prior to live transmission. Occasionally, the team lunched too well: Daniel on one occasion lost complete track of the scores, decided nobody really cared anyway, and later, staring down the camera lens, used one of the objects – an Aboriginal charm – to put a hex on ‘the viewer who sent me a very silly letter.’47
This element of risk cast a long shadow over the format’s early days. Panel regular Gilbert Harding built a reputation for rudeness that frequently tipped over into outright disdain, such as his notorious claim to a What’s My Line? contestant that ‘I’m tired of looking at you.’ In 1954 the BBC, in a fit of panel game mania, commissioned several shows based on viewers’ ideas. Results included Change Partners, in which the panel had to sort eight married challengers into their constituent couples, working out who was shacking up with whom by asking them to recall marriage proposals, ruffle each others’ hair in an affectionate manner, etc. A year later they apologetically axed all their panel shows, except What’s My Line?