In All Directions

 

Ad-libbed or improvised comedy was unheard of in post-war comedy shows. Scripts had to be written and typed-up in advance of broadcast with producers ensuring that they didn’t breach any of the rules in the BBC’s variety programme policy guide, the so-called ‘Green Book’. Even music shows were not immune. Presenters of Housewives’ Choice had to turn-up to the studio extra early to rehearse the running order. Guests on Desert Island Discs would have a preliminary chat with Roy Plomley who would then type up a script for them to use in the recording. But there was one comedy series that tried to be different and was wholly improvised, albeit recorded and edited ready for broadcast, and that was In All Directions.   

In All Directions was broadcast between 1952 and 1955 and although there were just nineteen episodes it still stands out as a remarkable comedy success. All the voices, and some of the sound effects, were provided by Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones. The outline for each episode was conjured up by those master script-writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who at the time were otherwise engaged in scripting Take It From Here. Denis Norden tells the story as to how the series came about and how it was put together:   

For us, In All Directions represented two quite separate but equally satisfying achievements. First, the preliminary lunch at the Caprice where Pat Dixon, the producer, Frank and I met Peter Ustinov to try and persuade him into taking on a radio series. It went on till half past four and racked up the largest expenses bill thus far (1952) for the BBC Light Entertainment Department.

Its second departure from the norm, one that worried the executive high-ups no end, was that it was the first ever BBC comedy series to be broadcast without a script.

During the exploratory lunch, we found that Ustinov could improvise such extravagant and wondrously complex conceits on a minimum of prompting, we were all for putting this rare gift at the programme’s centre. Pat, always the most radical of the Department’s producers – across the wall behind his desk he had nailed the rebel flag of the US Civil War – saw virtue in this and promised to shield us from the inevitable wrath the execution of this format would provoke.

The series, which took its title from a favourite Stephen Leacock line, ‘He jumped on his horse and galloped off madly in all directions’, purported to be an ongoing car journey undertaken by Ustinov and Peter Jones – every bit as equal as an improviser – in search of a mythical Copthorne Avenue, with the two of them supplying the voices of all the characters they meet on the way, as well as providing most of the sound effects. Ustinov was particularly hot on car noises and creaky doors opening.

The two Peters would come into our office at the beginning of each week and ad-lib various responses to the characters and situations we suggested they might encounter en route. (‘Why don’t we pull up and ask that debby-looking girl selling flags where we are?’; ‘Look, outside that Boy’s Club there’s a poster announcing that Field Marshall Montgomery will be opening their new table tennis room.’)

We would record all their improvisations on such themes with a primitive tape machine Pat scrounged for us. Then, after they had left, listen to the various segments, choose the most apt, then rearrange them into some kind of coherent running order. This we would issue in note form to the two Peters, who would turn up on the day of transmission and recreate them, still sans any kind of script.

My one regret about In All Directions is that, somewhere down the years, the recorded bits of Ustinov and Jones we had not selected for the programme went missing. I’m quite sure that, even today, their wit and agility of comic invention would still be something to savour.   

What was also different about In All Directions was that there wasn’t a studio audience, obviously the method of constructing the programme precluded that. It wasn’t totally unheard of for comedy shows to be without an audience, the more cerebral offerings on the Third Programme – including Third Division (1949) also written by Muir and Norden and produced by Pat Dixon - for instance or Just Fancy and Breakfast with Braden were all studio-based. 

The first series of six programmes of In All Directions aired on the BBC Home Service in September and October 1952. They had actually been recorded in July so we must assume that Denis meant that the Peters would recreate the scenes on the day of recording, not transmission. 

The BBC only retained two episodes of the show. This is the first of them, the third show from series number one, as broadcast on the Friday evening of 3 October 1952. Musical links and interludes are provided by the Aeolian Players and singing is Rose Hill who, some three decades later would be known for playing Madame Fanny Le Fan, the bed-ridden mother in ‘Allo ‘Allo. The announcer is none other than Wallace Greenslade.

The ‘star’ characters of In All Directions would be, to quote Ustinov, “two deplorable spivs, Morrie and Dudley Grosvenor ...who have never reached a point of criminal proficiency where their activities would cause Scotland Yard to lose a wink of sleep.” They were already part of Ustinov and Jones’s repertoire before the series, dropping into impromptu routines at showbiz parties. In his autobiography Peter Ustinov explained further:

Peter and I invented a couple of characters out of the folklore of London, Morris and Dudley Grosvenor, low characters with high ambitions, as their name suggests. They spoke in the lisping accent of London's East End, and had endless wife trouble with their platinum-haired companions, as they did with the wretched character called simple  'The Boy' who was sent out on dangerous and sometimes criminal errands, in which he consistently failed. These programmes were improvised within a certain framework, and often they reached satisfactory heights of comic melancholy. Foolishly asking 'How's Zelda?' on one occasion, I received the following exercise in gloom from Peter Jones.

'Zelda? I'll tell you this much, Mowwie, if every evening after work you are hit on the head with a beer bottle with monotonous wegularity mawwiage soon loses its magic.'

So successful was the first run that it was swiftly repeated on the Home Service in January and February 1953 and again on the Light Programme in July and August. A Christmas special, broadcast on 24 December was quickly commissioned.

A second series of six episodes followed in May and June of 1953. Ustinov told the Radio Times that ‘Dudley Grosvenor and his brother Maurice will continue to crop up throughout the programmes. The only difference is that we’ve given up looking for Copthorne Avenue. Instead we shall be searching for such things as Britain’s Heritage and True Love: we think this idea will give us more scope.’

To give a flavour as to what the programme offered here’s a review from the Yorkshire Evening Post from 28 July 1953:

The sketches of In All Directions written and acted by Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones, revealed a barbed and brilliant wit.

There was the amiable and oh so amenable Yorkshireman who, with unsolicited patience, put up with the irascibilities of the Italian cafe proprietor in Soho in the vain hope of being served with food of some sort; and the air charter firm whose crew parachuted to safety, leaving the lone passenger to his fate.

But the shaft that really hit the bull’s eye was the peep behind the scenes of television’s In the News, the MP contestants simulating a towering rage with each other in front of the mike as a signal from the producer and pretending that the party bickering was unscripted whereas it had been carefully gone over beforehand. Afterwards the ‘enemies’ went off to dine together, the producer’s congratulations on the (spurious) quarrel ringing in their ears.

The inebriated, but extremely polite, gentleman in the bus shelter and the historian on the street corner were refreshingly funny caricature.   

It would be nearly two years until the third and final series came to fruition, this time they were in search of ‘a guide, philosopher and friend’, i.e. the producer Pat Dixon. This is the third episode from Friday 11 February 1955. There are a number of sketches spoofing BBC radio programmes including Animal, Vegetable and Mineral and World Theatre meets Mrs Dale’s Diary.

In the week after the first episode of the third series BBC television made an outside broadcast from Ustinov’s Chelsea home prosaically titled Peter Ustinov at Home. It was contrived that Peter Jones would happen to be in the study with his friend and they would perform an impromptu sketch along the lines of In All Directions. It was great publicity for the radio show.    

It is interesting to see how Ustinov is viewed as the senior partner in the show. The BBC classed it as a ‘personality-type show’ with Ustinov as the ‘personality’ and up until the third series all the fees were paid to his agent, much to Peter Jones’s chagrin. Barry Took recounts the time Peter Jones spoke as at a Press Association dinner and told a long anecdote about a dream he’d had at the end of which he was supposedly dead and hovering  over central London when he sees a newspaper placard that reads: Peter Ustinov Bereaved.

Of course, by this time Ustinov had already been acting on stage, in film and making radio appearances for just over a decade and had appeared in his first Hollywood film, Quo Vadis, a year before the first series of In All Directions. And if being a castaway on Desert Island Discs is an indication of stardom, Peter Ustinov had already appeared on it in 1951 and would feature twice more in 1956 and 1977. Peter Jones was a guest in 1962. 

The end of the third series of In All Directions wasn’t quite the end of the Ustinov-Jones partnership, nor the last we’d see or hear of Dudley and Maurice Grosvenor. On Boxing Day 1955 the two Peters were All at Sea, an hour long special on the Light Programme. They got together again for the 10^th anniversary of the Third Programme for In Third Gear (29 September 1956) which offered ‘much the same formula as In All Directions but set within the Third Programme orbit’. (An off-air recording is on YouTube).

In April 1959 Peter Jones was playing Dudley Grosvenor once more in the series We’re in Business with the Radio Times telling us that this was ‘a reference to the fact that Dudley is taking a new partner – Harry Worth. ‘With my brains and your private income ‘Arry, we’ll do alright,’ says Dudley’. Guest appearances were made by the likes of Dick Emery, June Whitfield, Nicholas Parsons, Harry Locke ad Frank Thornton. A second series followed in 1960 this time with Barry Took and Marty Feldman (their first joint writing venture) on board to help Peter Jones write the scripts. Dudley and Harry’s business headquarters moved from Syd’s Cafe to a boarding house run by Miss Jubilee Boot, played by Irene Handl. Dick Emery Graham Stark and Hugh Paddick were also in the cast.

The Grosvenor characters provided the influence for ‘The Winsome Welshmen’, two used- car salesman by the name of Dudley and Dunstan Dorchester in the 1960 film School for Scoundrels. Played by Peter Jones and Dennis Price they manage to flog Ian Carmichael a 1924 4-litre Swiftmobile – “make the cheque out to bearer if you don’t mind. And please don’t cross it sir, it confuses our books”. The on-screen writing credits are for Patricia Moyes, who was Ustinov’s personal assistant at the time, and producer Hal E. Chester but it was actually by Ustinov himself and Frank Tarloff, an American writer who was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings, that adapted the Stephen Potter books.

In All Directions and the Grosvenors were back in 1966 when BBC2 featured them as part of the Show of the Week strand. Frank Muir takes up the story:

I went over to Paris where Peter Ustinov was editing a film, and persuaded him to do an In All Directions for television with Peter Jones. There was no scenery or costumes. In one sketch Ustinov played a fat American speed cop. He asked the props department for an armchair fitted with good castors, and in the sketch it became his motorbike. He propelled it about the stage with his legs making motorbike and siren noises, and then went into a marvellous accent, brow-beating the unfortunate Peter Jones, an English tourist he had caught speeding.

The programme was broadcast in April 1966 and repeated over on BBC1 on Christmas Day. It was the last hurrah for In All Directions.   

“Dudley. Run for it!”

Series information

Series 1: 26.9.52 to 31.10.52 6 episodes on the Home Service repeated HS Jan-Feb 1953  and on the Light Programme July-Aug 1953

Christmas Special: 24.12.52 (HS) rpt 25.12.52

Series 2: 12.5.53 to 16.6.63 6 episodes (HS) repeated LP Aug-Sept 1953

Series 3: 28.1.55 to 4.3.55 6 episodes (HS) repeated HS May-June 1955

Peter Ustinov at Home 3.2.55 BBCtv

All at Sea 26.12.55 Light Programme

In Third Gear 29.5.56 Third Programme

We’re in Business series 1: 3.4.59 to 26.5.59 13 episodes (HS) – the final episode was retained by Sound Archives

We’re in Business series 2: 19.2.60 to 13 May 1960 (HS) – Transcription Services selected 7 episodes for release

Show of the Week presenting In All Directions 26.4.66 BBC2 repeated BBC1 24.12.66

Quotes from Clips from a Life by Denis Norden, A Kentish Lad by Frank Muir, Dear Me by Peter Ustinov and Laughter in the Air by Barry Took,