A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
banter. When the cue finally arrives for him to speak (‘Will you have an egg, Albert?’) he silently gets up, puts on his coat, moodily strutting past the floor manager and off the set, leaving the other actors mugging desperately. There’s even a cartoon sound effect as he smashes through the fourth wall.
The liberated Gurney wanders the streets aimlessly for the next twenty minutes. He despairs of the state of the medium. (‘“How’d you like your egg done, dear?” The Golden Years of British Entertainment! So much for Shakespeare and Sophocles.’) He reads minds. He chats to animals and the inanimate. He has conversations in invented languages. (‘Flangewick?’ ‘Clittervice!’ ‘Hendalcraw!’ ‘Mandelso!’) He frolics in the park with Una Stubbs and unsuccessfully tries to dump a vacuum cleaner. Finally, wearying of his constant presence on the television screen (‘I’m like a goldfish in a bowl. I’m a poor squirming squingle under a microscope!’) he begs the viewer to switch off the set and put him out of his misery.
The next few episodes were variations on the theme. Episode two in particular was a delightful romantic fantasy set on a disused airfield. Unfortunately it played out in front of an audience a good four million smaller than the opening show. ITV had a flop on their hands. Critics and punters, confused and bothered by this sullying of honest Saturday night fun with existential folderol, jeered as it all came crashing down. As one wag had it, ‘Is your Gurney really necessary?’68 Subsequent episodes were relegated to the depths of the night, where they could do less damage.
This turned out to be good timing, as things promptly became even stranger. Filmed well before the ratings nosedive, episode four swapped the bucolic exterior wanderings for the black-walled studio limbo of the avant-garde, presenting the trial of Gurney, before a Lewis Carroll kangaroo court, on the charge of having no sense of humour. (‘I did a television show recently and they didn’t think it was very funny.’)
The fitful attempts of Gurney to win over the hostile opinions of the eternally perplexed Average-Viewer family, a jury of cloth-capped everymen and a dead-eyed manufacturer of countersunk screws, went about as well as the real world defence of the series. ‘We have so much confidence in this progressive type of humour,’ insisted ATV, ‘that we are negotiating with Anthony Newley for another series in the new year. But not,’ they judiciously added, ‘necessarily Gurney Slade.’69
The sixth and final episode was further out still, being a formal deconstruction of the sitcom years before the concept made its academic debut. First a party of bowler-hatted bigwigs are shown the elements of a TV production, from cameras and microphones to The Performer (‘it goes through various motions which are calculated to entertain or amuse the viewers’). Then assorted incidental characters from previous episodes reappear, and round on Gurney for giving them inadequately detailed backgrounds, leaving them in a hazily-defined state of limbo after their moment on screen. Finally Anthony Newley appears as Anthony Newley, Gurney Slade grotesquely turns into a ventriloquist’s doll of himself, and Newley carries him off into the night.
At this point, the television sitcom was all of thirteen years old. When it was three, George Burns had given it the gift of self-consciousness. As it hit its teenage years, Newley granted it self-destruction. At the time it looked like just another odd little failed experiment; unlike A Show Called Fred, Gurney Slade had no Bernard Levin, no intellectual cheerleader, to trumpet its glory from the rooftops. It didn’t entirely lack a legacy, though: young Newley fan David Bowie was transfixed by the programme, and started swanning about the streets of Bromley in a Gurney-esque off-white mackintosh.70
Green and Hills moved into firmer show business territory, helping to resurrect the television fortunes of floundering double act Morecambe and Wise. Newley carried on his own meandering course, majoring in high concept musicals, but returning to television to guest on everything from the Miss World pageant to The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. His later opinion of Gurney Slade was typically equivocal. ‘I think it proved something,’ he concluded, ‘even if I’m not sure what.’71
ARMCHAIR THEATRE: A NIGHT OUT (1960)
ITV (ABC)
The theatrical revolution reaches the front room.
I’ve read your bloody play and I haven’t had a wink of sleep for four nights. Well, I suppose we’d better do it.
Peter Willes commissions Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party for Associated-Rediffusion, 195972
LEGEND HAS IT THAT John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger transformed British theatre overnight from a staid world of French window farces and solemn verse epics into a fiercely committed force for social change. It didn’t quite do that, but it did perform one useful service: getting the under-thirties into the stalls. This demographic shift was helped by the transmission of one of the play’s cleaner passages as a BBC television ‘Theatre Flash’, alerting the chattering youth to the presence of something other than genteel matinees for scone-munching Aunt Ednas. A long and fruitful alliance between TV and the modern stage was born.
Another TV beneficiary was The Birthday Party, a drama of nameless persecution in a south coast bed and breakfast, written by jobbing actor Harold Pinter during a 1957 tour of Doctor in the House. Disastrous notices on its London debut threatened it with early closure until the Sunday Times praised it to the skies, but it took a production directed by Joan Kemp-Welch on peak-time ITV for it to reach ten million viewers. Many viewers took against its obscurity (‘We are still wondering what it was all about and why we didn’t switch it off’).73 Others had their eyes opened to ‘a Picasso in words’, something new and wonderfully different from the usual tea-table crosstalk. While many found it disturbing, one viewer reported ‘loving every word … of the author’s uproarious nonsense’.74 After transmission, the ever-helpful press department of the Tyne-Tees region became so overwhelmed by inquiries it issued a fact-sheet offering a ‘reasonable and interesting interpretation’ of the play. Existential drama had joined the mainstream.
ITV’s main dramatic showcase at the time was Armchair Theatre. Initially a ragbag of classics and light comedies, it was remoulded by incoming Canadian producer Sydney Newman in 1958 to reflect the new theatrical mood of contemporary social engagement. (Newman’s archetypal idea of an armchair play involved a small-time grocer threatened by a new supermarket.)75 Many new writing talents would be discovered or nurtured by Newman, and Pinter joined their ranks on 24 April 1960 with his first original television work, A Night Out.
The nocturnal jaunt is made by diffident office worker Albert Stokes (Tom Bell) escaping from the home of his pathetically possessive widowed mother. The works do he attends ends in disaster when he’s mischievously accused of groping a secretary. He flees, ending up in a deeply uncomfortable encounter with a hooker (Pinter’s then wife, Vivien Merchant), who affects a cartoon poshness. (‘You’ve not got any cigarettes on you? I’m very fond of a smoke. After dinner with a glass of wine. Or before dinner … with sherry.’) They almost start to bond over their shared tragic isolation, but when she asks him too many questions, in a manner too like his own mum, Stokes spectacularly falls apart. With nothing in his social armoury between taciturn gaucheness and inarticulate rage, Stokes proves himself completely incapable of starting a life outside the suffocating maternal evenings of gin rummy and shepherd’s pie: not so much Angry Young Man as Awkward Old Boy. Osborne’s threatened men ranted with theatrical garrulousness. More appropriately for the small screen, Pinter’s Stokes agonises in silent close-up.
The mysterious, spectral characters that were Pinter’s trademark were perhaps unsuited to Armchair Theatre’s