A History of Television in 100 Programmes. Phil Norman
concept of ‘Establishment TV’ to young BBC producer Ned Sherrin, who moulded it into a hip end-of-the-week compendium of sketch, song, cartoon and political barb. The studio would be coolly stripped down, showing its busy internal workings and louche audience of wine-bibbing hangers-on. The pace would be relentless, the cast impeccable: improv singer Millicent Martin, Private Eye alumnus Willie Rushton, Joan Littlewood alumnus Roy Kinnear and ‘calypsologist’ Lance Percival among them. The host would be not Bird or Cook, but David Frost.
This decision raised eyebrows, and a few hackles. Regarded, rather snobbishly, in his Cambridge years as a hyper-ambitious hack, Frost had already earned Cook’s disapproval for performing highly derivative ‘homages’ to his material. His greatest television achievement to date was fronting Rediffusion’s dance craze schedule filler Let’s Twist on the Riviera. Sherrin ignored these concerns and launched one of television’s most prodigious careers.
On 24 November, That Was the Week That Was played out in a welter of fluffed cues and missed cameras. The army, the police and composer Norrie Paramor were among the targets. Bernard Levin (‘the most detestable smarty-boots on television’) hosted an adversarial discussion with public relations workers in a debate disarmingly titled ‘Invective’. The stand out sketch, a parody of ITV’s shameless ‘ad-mag’ programme Jim’s Inn, was a refugee from Cook’s Beyond the Fringe days. ‘Anyone who stayed up in the hope of enjoying some ripe topical savagery, continental-style, was doomed to disappointment,’ wrote Peter Green in the Listener. ‘I hope future editions will get some real bite in them, and shed that air of daring cosiness which bedevils British satire at its very roots.’96
Fortunately, TW3 rapidly grew teeth. The third edition achieved Sherrin’s dream of transition from the review pages to the headlines, thanks to comically edited footage of Macmillan talking cobblers and Levin putting the boot into hotel magnate Charles Forte. ‘Private Eye may lash out in all directions and provoke nothing more than a chorus of bland coo-ings,’ observed The Times, ‘but let the BBC do something similar … and they arouse the public to close on a thousand telephone calls and a threat of legal action.’97 Anthony Burgess summed up its winning naivety: ‘Its special virtue is its genuine innocence, a sort of schoolboy surprise that the adult world should behave as it does. A very nice little programme at which only a boor could take offence. Wholesome, high-spirited, unpretentious, humanly unbuttoned, often shrewd, amusing and – above all – totally lacking in malice.’98 Even Peter Green was now sold. ‘[TW3] has acquired that sine qua non of satire, a firm moral stance. “We mustn’t make fun of Mr Macmillan, we mustn’t be rude about British catering” – the terrifying thing is that the views of these witless subtopian boot-lickers command attention. Why, in heaven’s name?’99
Old and young, subtopian and cosmopolitan, reactionary and progressive – all went head to head last thing on a Saturday night, the latter always getting the final word. And what words they were, from a writers’ roster that gathered illustrious names of the past, present and future: Dennis Potter, David Nobbs, Bill Oddie, Kenneth Tynan, John Betjeman, John Cleese, Roald Dahl and many more fed Frost and friends killer lines. For Green, and many others, TW3 became unimpeachable, mainly because ‘it carries a bigger moral punch than all of its critics combined, and the day it is bullied or snivelled out of existence will be a poor one for British television.’100
That day was close at hand. When a second series began in 1963, the blaze of triumphant pre-publicity soon faded into critical murmurings of a loss of purpose. ‘There is less specific emphasis on politics, and a marked swing towards mildly risqué intimate revue.’101 Sketches about open flies, and liberal sprinklings of outré words like ‘bum’ and ‘poo’, had a habit of taking over the more considered (and considerably harder to knock out) political material. This smutty path of least resistance would dog topical comedy shows ever after.
The heavyweight stuff did continue, though, and proved to be the show’s undoing. When Macmillan was replaced by the questionable choice of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, TW3 pounced, dressing Frost in Disraeli gear to deliver a politely damning ‘in character’ summary of Douglas-Home’s unique attributes. What with this, a sketch mocking another Tory hero, Baden-Powell, and the continuing stream of ‘racy’ material, many formerly indulgent champions of the show reached their limits of tolerance, and called for cancellation.
The Director General, Hugh Carleton Greene, felt TW3 was becoming an albatross for the Corporation, monopolising staff time and detracting from his achievements in the more serious departments of drama and current affairs. With a general election looming the following year, he curtailed its run at the end of 1963. Private Eye, the relatively low profile satirical survivor, summed up popular reaction to TW3’s sacrifice by having ‘Greene’ confess: ‘What I really wanted was something reminiscent of Berlin in the 1930s; now that I’ve stopped it, I feel that I have at last recreated that atmosphere.’102
THE SUNDAY-NIGHT PLAY: A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT (1962)
BBC
Drama drops out.
Dear David Mercer, can you please explain why all your plays are about David Mercer?
A student writes to David Mercer, c. 1972
IN CINEMA, THE HIERARCHY was always plain. Stars first, then director, and bringing up the rear, if they’re even mentioned at all, the writer. In the 1960s, television – smaller, more flexible and less glamorous – had a more variable pecking order. Thanks to ever-closer ties with the theatrical revolution, the writer could occasionally, and not always reluctantly, become the star of their own show.
David Mercer was one of many post-war playwrights who had risen from the provincial working class through state and self-education. Born into a Wakefield mining family, he spent four years with the Navy before moving to Paris to work as first a struggling painter, then a struggling novelist. Realising the ‘abstract cul-de-sac’103 he’d backed himself into, he turned to drama, specifically the drama of his own experience. His first play, Where the Difference Begins, was intended for the stage but found a home on the BBC. It dealt with the culture gap between a working class artist and his suspicious kinfolk in an honest and very straightforward way. Mercer would later describe it as ‘one of the dreariest plays ever written by me, or anyone else, for that matter.’104 He seemed to be cultivating an oeuvre every bit as unforgiving as his resting expression of intense concern.
Then, in 1962, the usually methodical Mercer made a breakthrough, written ‘in an absolute kind of trance for three weeks’.105 When director Don Taylor, Mercer’s main early creative collaborator, asked about it, he found his colleague’s usual intense frown replaced by ‘a large, round-faced Yorkshire grin’.106 A Suitable Case for Treatment left the old straight track of social realism and hiked off into the unknown.
Morgan Delt, disillusioned thirtysomething man for whom ‘life became baffling as soon as it became comprehensible’, is in the process of being divorced from his wife Leonie. He sleeps in his car and spends his days railing against society like an Angry Brigade Hamlet, or palling around with Guy the Gorilla at London Zoo. Otherwise he keeps himself occupied by pestering his ex-wife, pinning offensive posters in her flat, shaving a hammer and sickle into her poodle’s back, hanging her stuffed toys on a small portable gallows and blowing up her mother. A few years before the screen would fill with them, Morgan was its first drop-out