Jazz Riots on a Summer’s Day

It was a warm summer evening in 1960. Lord Montague, he of the Vintage Car Museum fame, was hosting the fifth jazz festival at Beaulieu Palace House in Hampshire. Over three nights jazz enthusiasts could enjoy the sounds of Acker Bilk, Johnny Dankworth, Humphrey Lyttelton, Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and others. A television relay of some of the performances on the Saturday opening night was due to be broadcast by the BBC. Fatefully, just days before the event, Lord Montague had told the press that those who throng to the festival do not cause much damage: “They are extremely well-behaved inside the ground, I find. The grass suffers a little, but it soon recovers. My only reason for doing it is to provide for serious jazz in this country”.     

But on that opening evening on 30 July there were some less than well-behaved elements in the crowd and trouble was brewing. It was, as a Daily Mirror headline would proclaim, a ‘Beatnik Beat-Up’. What happened, according to one press report was that ‘screaming teenagers dragged down scaffolding holding TV cameras, climbed onto the bandstand, littered the estate with broken bottles – and then slept rough in the fields while firemen battled with a blaze in a building housing part of Lord Montague’s Vintage Car Museum’.

Most of the rioting occurred during a live BBC television outside broadcast and, thanks to a home taper, we now have the audio of that incident. The broadcast was scheduled to start at 22.45 and run for just 40 minutes until the late news and weather at 23.25. The recovered recording runs for just over 10 minutes. A few seconds in commentator Derek Jones reminds us that we are listening to the sound of Acker Bilk and the Paramount Jazz Band. At 1 min 35 secs we hear a bang and Derek comments that he can see smoke. At 2.15 the ‘jazz fans’ have climbed onto the lighting tower. At 6.15 by the end of Acker’s second number, Lord Montague has been on stage and talked to Acker about carrying on. At 7.00 Derek informs viewers that the “entire scaffolding holding our lighting equipment has collapsed to the ground” but still the band played on. At 9.00 Acker finally admits “we can’t see, we can’t play...it’s very sad thing, but what can you do.” At 9.30 Derek comes in “Well this is certainly not the way it was intended that this year’s jazz festival at Beaulieu should go. It got completely out of hand. No doubt about that at all.” The recording ends at 10 min 30 secs and it was about a minute later that the broadcast ended, some six minutes earlier than scheduled.

As well as the damage to BBC equipment (plus seven or eight microphones which ‘vanished’) and some musical instruments, the trail of destruction also included fire damage to a 1921 14-seater bus, an old car, two tons of straw, roundabout horses and vehicle parts. Apparently Humphrey Lyttelton’s trumpet was found in the car park and some of George Melly’s clothing halfway up a tree.  In the aftermath of the incident three people were taken to Lymington Hospital and treated for minor injuries. Later in August two men were found guilty of assaulting police officers and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment.

As to what triggered the violence, that remains a mystery.  According to one chap who attended and spoke to BBC reporters at the time it was the trad jazz versus modern jazz argument: “Most of the trouble-makers were traditional jazz fans. I think when the modern jazz was playing they didn’t like it”. The press saw it as indicative of a wider social dilemma and that it was ‘part and parcel of a general trend ...of juvenile delinquency’ and even calling to ‘ban everyone who even looks a little like a supporter of the beatnik cult’. Others suggested that it ‘should not surprise anyone who ..recalls the recent rioting as at jazz festival at Newport, Rhode Island.’ A week later The People was quite clear where the problem lay and that the ‘outbreak of beatnik violence ...must be blamed on the cult of despair preached by four strange men’. Those men were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.          

As for the jazz festival, Lord Montague announced that it would continue as planned but that he wouldn’t host another one. “We cannot possibly have a festival of this form again. I think I owe that to local people and to my staff who are not trained pugilists”. On the second night 30 uniformed police were drafted in, where normally there was just one, and CID officers mingled with the crowd.

Despite the violence, jazz fans were able to descend on Beaulieu the following year (Montagu having changed his mind in January 1961) when there was tighter security, restrictions on ticket sales and a no-alcohol policy. The only problem this time was that trouble-makers rioted in the village instead with reports of brawls between trads and moderns, 100 casualties, smashed beer and wine bottle and three arrests. Lord Montagu was forced to admit that “I can no longer run the risk of further damage to property nor allow Beaulieu residents to suffer from the undesirable crowd the festival attracts to the neighbourhood”. It was to be that last Beaulieu Jazz Festival.   

The recording of the television soundtrack was kindly donated to me by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I extend my thanks. Duncan obtained the tape from Mike Bailey in New Zealand. It had been recorded by his father who had emigrated to the country in the early 60s. 

The Eagle Has Landed

Fifty years ago the world was going space crazy. All eyes were on what was going on 'up there' as three intrepid astronauts blasted off on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Back on earth we just couldn't get enough of all things astronautical. You could send away for a Weetabix Solar System Chart and as a young lad I well remember collecting small plastic models of the command and lunar modules found lurking in the bottom of packets of Corn Flakes. I too had a copy of the Ladybird book of The Rocket from the How it works series. 

Watching on our black and white telly- the pictures from Apollo 11 were in black and white anyway  - coverage of the moon landing itself went through the night of Sunday 20 July into Monday 21 July. I've a vague memory that my parents got me up super early to watch some of the historic event before setting off for school.  

Scheduled to run from 6.15 pm to 1.00 am the evening programme on ITV 

On ITV it was ITN that provided the programmes with Alastair Burnett presenting and Science Editor, Peter Fairley (I've still got one of his Peter Fairley's World of Wonders annuals)  and Paul Haney, a former voice of NASA's Mission Control. And because the final approach and moon landing happened on a Sunday evening London Weekend were in charge so we had the added glamour of David Frost and a 'starry' array of show business folk including Lulu, Cliff, Engelbert and Cilla. 

The commercial offering was a decidedly more glitzy affair than the Beeb's offering. Also on hand was Eric Sykes, Roger Bannister, Desmond Morris, Chris Bonnington, Dame Sybil Thorndike and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. There was also David Threlfall, the man who back in 1964 had made a 1000-1 bet at William Hill that there'd be a lunar landing by 1970. During the show he was presented with his £10,000 winnings and promised half to his parents whilst with the remainder he'd take a Caribbean holiday and invest the rest. Tragically he died in a car crash in November 1970.  

The BBC1 evening line-up for Sunday 20 July 1969

Over on the BBC, mainly BBC1 but with some colour simulcasts on BBC2, it was Cliff Michelmore, Patrick Moore and James Burke in the Apollo Space Studio and Michael Charlton at Houston Mission control. No showbiz shenanigans here, though on that Sunday evening you could've watched The Black and White Minstrel Show and over on BBC2 the Show of the Week featured Lulu (again).

As we now know most of the live television coverage was either not kept or just wiped and some of what does remain comes from off-air recordings. However, it's great to hear and see James Burke back again and his radio appearances include tonight's Archive on 4 called James Burke: Our Man on the Moon. Last week James was selecting his favourite music and talking about science and his love of all things Italian to Michael Berkeley in Private Passions.  

What of the radio? Perhaps surprisingly most of the live coverage was on Radios 1 and 2 with only some shared output on Radio 4. That station wasn't yet as news driven as it would become but the Apollo mission was covered on Today, The World at One and Radio Newsreel and some news coverage is in the archive. I'm not aware of any surviving recordings of the Radio 1 and Radio 2 programmes but off-air recordings must surely be in a box in someone's loft.

To give a taste of the what you might have heard here's a rather ropey recording made during the Apollo 12 mission in November that year with Arthur Garratt and science correspondent David Wilson covering the second moon walk during Paul Hollingdale's Breakfast Special.

The Apollo 11 mission Moon Special radio programmes were presented by Arthur Garratt and Colin Riach with Reginald Turnill at Mission Control. Reg became very well-known as the BBC's aerospace correspondent and, on his retirement in 1976, he continued to keep young viewers to Newsround informed. Arthur and Colin would continue to present the radio coverage of the Apollo missions through to Apollo 17 in 1972. Colin went on to produce Tomorrow's World and Young Scientist of the Year. Arthur presented science programmes on BBC tv and radio for about 30 years and he was on hand for the radio broadcasts of the Skylab launch in 1973 and the Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975. 

Unfortunately BBC Genome doesn't show these panels online so here's the detail for
Sunday 20 July 1969

The Radio Times panel for Monday 21 July 1969

For more on the first moon landing listen to the excellent World Service podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon.
See also the BBC Archive page on the moon landings.

Arena Radio Night

Both the novelty value (there was an in-vision edition of In Town Tonight as far back as 1954) and the necessity (stereo broadcasts of Top of the Pops or In Concert) of radio and TV simulcasts has long since passed, occasional 'Red Button' broadcasts of Sounds of the 80s aside.

The BBC2 schedule

The Arena Radio Night of 18 December 1993 was one such simultaneous transmission but one with a subtle difference. BBC2 offered pictures and sound whilst Radio 4 gave us a slightly different but complementary soundtrack. The box in the corner, voiced by Peter Cook, would have conversation with the radio, the voice of Josie Lawrence, but you'd only hear both sides if you had your television and wireless sets lined up together. (Memories of the those Saturday morning stereo test broadcasts using BBC tv and Network Three for those that go back that far).

Radio 4's schedule

From the folk behind the long-running arts programme Arena in purported to show "how the two media have competed over the years, and which medium does what best".  In fact it was a celebration of radio with typically quirky mini-features and narration.

The evening's entertainment was headed by an introduction from David Attenborough. In this sequence I've overlaid the radio soundtrack at various points. You'll immediately recognise the voice of the announcer during the programme as Peter Donaldson.

Throughout the night BBC historian Professor Asa Briggs presented a series of films which, borrowing their title from As You Like It, discussed The Seven Ages of Radio. The technical explanations are from Robert Hawes and the readings by Ian McKellen. (This is the first film, the other six can be found on the Arena Radio Night playlist on YouTube.)

In Heard But Not Seen we are treated to a special Letter from America from Alistair Cooke, introduced by Mark Tully.

The short film The Time Signal was an unusual look at the pips and was presented by Dr Carl Dolmetsch, aka 'Mr Recorder'.

Taking a humorous look at early football commentary was Back to Square One, a film by Steve Bendelack. The cast is Philip Pope, Alistair McGowan, Jon Glover, Andy Parsons, Christopher Driscoll and Marion Sumerfield. There are contributions from Alan Green, Robert Hudson and John Motson.

Television Talk, Radio Rabbit is a feature on the human voice.

Memories of Sunday lunchtime meals and radio shows were evoked in the piece Sunday Dinner. In this upload I merged the BBC2 and Radio 4 sound.

One of the undoubted highlights of Radio Night was the reading of the Shipping Forecast on both TV and radio, the one and only time this has happened. Doing the honours was continuity announcer Laurie MacMillan. This remains the most viewed upload on my YouTube channel..     

I'll post more clips as and when I get the opportunity and also overcome some copyright restrictions.

Seeing by Wireless

"A mighty maze of mystic rays is all about us in the blue." So sang Adele Dixon in the opening programme of the new BBC Television Service, launching exactly 80 years ago today.

The opening night was the culmination of years of experiment, test transmissions, disputes about the preferred system and, ultimately, good old British compromise. This was an early example of a format war - a precursor to the VHS versus Betamax argument four decades later.

The pre-history of television can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century with a number of discoveries and inventions: the electro-chemical effects of light, the photo-sensitive properties of selenium, scanning discs and cathode ray tubes. 

It was left to others to realise how these discoveries could lead to a television system: Boris Rising in Russia and A.A. Campbell-Swinton in England, but the technical limitations of the time meant they never progressed. Campbell-Swinton announced that his idea "could not be got to work without a great deal of experiment, and probably much modification."

On the scene comes Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird  - the archetypal 'mad scientist' who also invents the glass safety razor and thermal undersocks - who starts to grapple with the mechanics of what he called a 'televisor'. In June 1923 he inserts a notice in The Times : "Seeing by Wireless - Inventor of apparatus wishes to hear from someone who will assist (not financially) in making working model." His first model was a Heath Robinson affair built from an old tea chest to form the base for a motor which rotated a circular cardboard disc cut out from an old hat box. A darning needle served as a spindle and biscuit box housed the projection lamp. The lenses he bought from a bicycle shop at a cost of fourpence.

Over the next six years Baird continued to experiment and modify his television equipment and gave numerous public demonstrations However, he was met with naysayers and sceptics including the Post Office and the BBC. A BBC memo of 1928 concluded that "the Baird apparatus not only does not deserve a public trail, but also has reached the limit of its development owing to the basic technical limitations of the method employed."

The BBC relented and gave into political pressure in 1929 and offered Baird's company out of hours transmission time when 2LO wasn't on air with 30-line experimental broadcasts starting on 30 September. Those first tentative steps were seen, Baird estimated, by no more than thirty 'lookers-in' - a set was owned by Baird himself, one each at the BBC and the Post Office, about half a dozen sets in the country and probably about twenty or so on apparatus built by clever amateurs. Technically the first broadcasts were primitive, no more than a waving silhouette and, due to only one transmitter being available, no synchronised sound.

Synchronised sound and vision was eventually achieved on 31 March 1930. The Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, had a set installed at number 10 The performers included Gracie Fields and playwright R.C. Sherriff who announced, with a degree of prescience, that "I am afraid if this invention becomes too perfect, it will cause most people to spend their evenings at home instead of visiting the theatre."

As the technology improved - early highlights included drama and coverage of the 1931 Derby - the BBC began to work more closely with Baird's company, installing television equipment in a studio at the new Broadcasting House. Interestingly the agreement included the clause that "we should be free to give transmissions by other Television methods, whether the Baird transmissions were continued or not." 

Meanwhile coming up on the rails was EMI with their swanky new Emitron cameras based on the new 'iconoscope' technology developed by Russian engineer V.K. Zworykin. EMI had first demonstrated their high-definition television to the BBC in late 1932 where it impressed them with its superior picture quality with three times as many lines per picture and twice as many pictures per second.  

Two competitive demonstrations were arranged in April 1933 with both the representatives of the Post Office and the Corporation agreeing that the EMI equipment was far in advance of Baird's. But the Postmaster-General demurred fearing a political backlash for any blame attached to "the inevitable bankruptcy of the Baird company". The issue wasn't really the provision of the television service but the considerable advantage it would give in the manufacture and sale of receivers.

Baird continued to provide test transmissions for the BBC whilst EMI was spending thousands developing its technology. Eventually, in the spring of 1934, someone concluded that the best way to decide which system to go with, and also to discuss how such a service would be funded, should be by a Public Committee. The House of Commons was told that committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Selsdon, was "to consider the development of television and to advise the Postmaster-General on the relative merits of the several systems and on the conditions under which any public service of television should be provided".

The Selsdon Committee's recommendations (reporting in January 1935) solved little. There was to be no increase in the licence fee nor an additional TV licence. There was to be a new public service from London. A Television Advisory Committee was to be established. No agreement had been reached with the manufacturers regarding their patents so there was to be further testing with Baird and Marconi-EMI (EMI had joined with Marconi in March 1934) under "strictly comparable conditions" with their systems used "alternately".

The BBC announced plans to base its television transmitting station at Alexandra Palace.  In the meantime the Baird 30-line tests ceased in September 1935 at the end of the previously agreed test period and there was a lull before the new service started.  

In November 1935 the BBC's newly appointed Director of Television, Gerald Cock, reported on the plans for the new service as featured in this edition of Popular Wireless magazine:

Ahead of the go-live date test broadcasts were arranged from Ally Pally to the Radiolympia Exhibition in August 1936. Cecil Madden was charged with planning the programmes and announcers Leslie Mitchell, Jasmine Blight and Elizabeth Cowell were on hand to guide viewers through what was on offer, a mixture of live performances and films such as the Queen Mary docking in Southampton and an Arsenal versus Everton football match.

During the interregnum between Radiolympia and the official launch some programmes went out to whoever happened to be watching. 8 October 1936, for instance, saw the first edition of Picture Page hosted by Canadian actress Joan Miller shown sitting at a switchboard supposedly plugging in the 'lookers' as they were still called. Picture Page would be TV's first popular hit running until 1939 and then again between 1946 and 1952.  

The new television service went on air at 3 pm on Monday 2 November 1936 with speeches on both systems (Baird first then Marconi-EMI) from the Postmaster-General, the Chairman of the BBC and Lord Selsdon. The chair of the Baird television Company, Sir Harry Greer and Marconi-EMI's chairman Alfred Clark were each televised by their own system. BBC Chairman R.C. Norman was spot on when he said: "We believe that these proceedings will be remembered in the future as an historic occasion, not less momentous and not less rich in promise than the day, almost fourteen years ago, when the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then, transmitted its first programme from Marconi House".

After an interval and a newsreel the day continued with variety with Adele Dixon and Buck and Bubbles and the newly formed BBC Television Orchestra. Adele Dixon was to feature later, when the evening broadcasts started, in the pre-filmed Television Comes to London complete with that oft-repeated clip of her carefully enunciating the lyrics "by the magic rays to light, that bring television to you." After Picture Page and another showing of a Movietone newsreel the historic day was over.

The launch of the television service 80 years ago is to be recreated tonight on BBC Four in Television's Opening Night: How The Box Was Born. "To find out just what went on, this 21st century team will attempt to piece back together and recreate every aspect of the show from scratch, from the variety acts to the cameras, using the original technology and filming techniques to capture the excitement of the day".

As to who won the battle of the formats, well that decision was made as early as December 1936 when Gerald Cock concluded that the BBC should make exclusive use of the Marconi-EMI system. The so-called 'London television standards' were set as 405-line pictures with 50 frames per second, making Baird's 240-line picture with 25 frames per second redundant. The official announcement was held off until February 1937 as the Post Office was still fearful of the monopoly that Marconi-EMI would enjoy unless adequate guarantees were forthcoming.

Recalling the life and work of John Logie Baird is this 1997 documentary Seeing by Wireless - the Life of John Logie Baird. Narrated by Joan Bakewell it features contributions from his son and daughter Malcolm Baird and Diana Richardson. We also hear first-hand from some of the engineers that worked with Baird: Ray Herbert , Philip Hobson and Paul Revely.

This programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on Sunday 21 October 1997. 

You can read more about Baird and the early days of television on the Baird Television website
The BBC have just launched some additional pages about the Birth of TV on their History of the BBC webpages

Radio Lives - Cliff Michelmore

Throughout the 1960s he was the unflappable safe pair of hands, equally adept at anchoring election coverage, moon landings, current affairs and global broadcasts. At the start of the decade he was the avuncular host who came into people's homes every evening on Tonight ("the next Tonight will be tomorrow night, until then good night") and ended it advising on the latest package deals in sunny Spain on Holiday 69.

Arthur Clifford Michelmore was born in Cowes on the Isle of Wight on 11 December 1919. On leaving school he trained as an RAF engineer in Loughborough. During the war he became a squadron leader and afterwards in 1947 began broadcasting as a sports commentator with the British Forces Network, then based in Hamburg. A year later he became the BFN's Head of Outside Broadcasts and Variety and a year later the Deputy Station Director. As I related in my post on Family Favourites, Cliff was called in to present the German end of the programme at short notice where he was partnered in London by Jean Metcalfe. By 1950 they had married and would become broadcasting's golden couple. Such was the media interest in Cliff and Jean that when their son Guy was born in 1957 Rory McEwen composed this topical calypso for Tonight:

Cliff Michelmore's in a lather

He's suddenly found out he's a father.

A brand new Michelmore's on tonight,

Shoving his father out of the light

He weighs 6 pounds

A bouncing lad,

Which is 16 stone lighter than his dad.

The Daily Herald reported that Woman's Hour had rung Cliff to say: "It's no good, old man. Woman all over the country are badgering us to broadcast a few burps from your offspring. Can we send a microphone along?" Poor Jean found her stay in hospital shattered by photographer's bulbs flashing and the reporter from Woman's Hour immortalising baby Guy's first gurglings on tape.

When Cliff left the BFN and returned to the UK it was as a freelance working for the BBC. On the television service he was both  behind the camera producing shows such as the children's magazine All Your Own, presented by Huw Wheldon, Playbox and Johnny Morris's The Horse Chestnut Man as well in front of them on the children's shows Telescope,  Westward Ho! and Junior Sportsview. For BBC radio he was introducing music shows such as Top Score  and Housewives' Choice as well as providing sports commentaries. Indeed looking through the BBC Genome website throughout most of the 1950s and 1960s there's hardly a week where Cliff's name doesn't appear on either TV or radio either presenting, commentating or producing.

Cliff's break into mainstream TV came about following the arrival of ITV in 1955. The BBC decided to schedule a 20 minute Newsreel, news summary and weather forecast from 7 pm. leaving a 10-minute gap before the evening's entertainment kicked off at 7.30 pm. Producer Donald Baverstock jumped at the chance to fill the void and thus Highlight was born. Billed as "people, events, comments of today" in effect the formula was three short interviews, carefully balanced: "a hard interview at the start, a human interest story in the middle, and a pretty girl at the end". Woman's lib had not reached Lime Grove in the mid-50s.

Initially the presentation duties alternated between Macdonald Hastings and Geoffrey Johnson Smith. When Mac gave it up Cliff was drawn in, apparently following an introduction to Donald Baverstock in one of the pubs near the Lime Grove studios.

Cliff was worth his salt and readily adapted to this live evening broadcast. On one occasion, not long after he joined Highlight, the contents of an edition were the financial journalist Edward Westrop talking about the state of the economy, an interview over the circuit to Cardiff with  Welsh author Gwyn Thomas about a new production of Under Milk Wood and rounding off with a talk to a young Scot who'd just won the World Ham Slicing Championship. The journalist's train broke down at Notting Hill Gate so he was a no-show, the line between Lime Grove and Cardiff went down and so Cliff was left with having to fill the time discussing the finer points of ham slicing. His only consolation was that he went home with copious amounts of ham! 

Working on Highlight Cliff also learnt a valuable lesson that stood him in good stead for the remainder of his career. It came about when he was lined-up to interview Krishna Menon, a Minister in the Indian Government, who was in London to have talks with Harold MacMillan and had also caused ructions at the UN over their stance on Formosa (as Taiwan was then known). Each of Cliff's question was met with somewhat enigmatic rebuke "That question is not cast in the mould of my thinking." Years later Cliff would reflect: "You cannot go into any interview over prepared. Under prepared yes, but never over prepared".

By 1956 Cliff was not only working on Highlight but was still covering sporting matters on Today's Sport and Sports Round-Up was well as covering current affairs on Panorama. It was also about this time he acquired a new nickname. The story goes that he'd missed his train from Victoria Station and had retired to the Golden Arrow bar for a quick drink. He felt a tug at the bottom of his jacket, gazing up at him was a small girl. "Excuse me", she said. "Are you Clifflemore?" Answering yes she ran off and returned a minute later. "Clifflemore, this is my brother." He was carrying a bag of sweets and said, "Have a phweet, Clifflemore."

At the end of the year the Postmaster General, Lord de la Warr, extended the hours available to television (following pressure from the commercial channels rather than the Corporation) by opening up the closed hour between 6 and 7pm, the so-called Toddlers Truce. Donald Baverstock proposed that the Highlight team, with Cliff as presenter, bridge the gap with a nightly show called Man Alive. By February 1957 that title had been dropped in favour of Tonight. The programme was to be "very informal and relaxed in manner, the tempo brisk and competent." Crucially the use of filmed reports was to be an important element, a decision which led to the launching of the TV careers of Alan Whicker, Trevor Philpott and Fyffe Robertson. All this was promised on a very low budget of between £200 and £300 per day. Plus, as Lime Gove was unable to accommodate the expanded show, a temporary home was found in the old Marconi Studios in St Mary Abbott's Place in Kensington - a studio that had recently been vacated by ATV.     

Cliff introduced the first edition of Tonight on Monday 18 February 1957. It had a specially composed sig tune, Tonight and Very Night, written by Felix de Wolfe. The packed running order included the draw for the FA Cup, a press review by John Metcalf, Cy Grant with a topical calypso penned by Bernard Levin of all people, actor Derek Bond telling the story of 'Bulbous Betty' the statue of Aphrodite that was offending people in Richmond Park, Derek Hart interviewing the great Ed Murrow and (intriguingly) Jonathan Miller giving his impressions of shops in Charing Cross Road.

Appearing for the best part of an hour each night Cliff would become a household name, a kind of TV everyman. The Evening Standard likened him to being "the John Bull of the Small Screen" It went on to say "this avuncular pink-faced middle-brow with middle-class accent, occasional squeak in the voice and mid-as-cocoa manner has a very warm place in the hearts of millions of Britons". Behind the scenes he was well-liked by colleagues but apparently "he was not easy to get on with; he could be prickly and he did have bursts of temper, but these never lasted long."

Tonight ended its run in June 1965 but Cliff was soon back as main presenter of BBC1's new current affairs programme, Twenty-Four Hours, broadcast on weeknights at 10.30 pm - so in some ways a forerunner to Newsnight. He was cutting back on  his radio work, reports for the West region and football commentaries for the Light Programme, but was still much in evidence on the telly: "One way or another I got caught up in the Cuban missile crisis, General Elections, Olympic Games, early space shots, Royal Investitures, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Concorde's maiden flights, the Apollo Moon programme."

Cliff was chosen to anchor the programme with the biggest worldwide audience (at the time), the Our World satellite link-up of 25 June 1967 that pulled in at least 400 million viewers, some estimates say 700 million.  

In July 1968 Cliff left Twenty-Four Hours (the programme continued with Kenneth Allsop and Michael Barrett and later David Dimbleby by which time its title had slimmed down to 24 Hours). Ostensibly he left to "settle for a more predictable lifestyle" which would allow more time with the family. In fact he was also planning to move into industry and set up a corporate video programme production, as a subsidiary of EMI, with Gordon Reece. However, a return to TV was not far away.   

The edition of the Radio Times that ushered in 1969 was packed with the usual holiday ads: JetSet holidays offering 15 days in Majorca for £35.10.0, Hoverlloyd with Ramsgate to Calais in 40 minutes for £10 plus a new weekly column from travel writer John Carter. Meanwhile the centre colour pages showed the Michelmore family on holiday, in Scotland and on the Isle of Wight, though they had plans to visit Canada. All this was to promote the new BBC1 series Holiday 69, designed to "take the worry out of your holiday planning". The first edition covered the increasingly popular package holidays, week two looked at holiday camps. For the next seventeen years Cliff was the trusted programme host, offering viewers a mix of exotic, and not so exotic, travelogues plus a dose of consumer advice. Here, in 1994, he returned to the programme when it celebrated its 25th anniversary. The presenter at the time was Jill Dando.

After Twenty-Four Hours Cliff didn't leave current affairs entirely. In 1980 and 1981 he was one of the presenters of Southern TV's regional news show Day by Day. It wasn't an entirely happy period as the commute to the studio's in Southampton proved exhausting.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Cliff returned to radio. In 1982 and 1983 he sat in for both Jimmy Young and Ed Stewart on their Radio 2 shows. The latter now included a Family Favourites feature so it was full circle. There was Waterlines (1984-92), a sort of aquatic Going Places, on Radio 4 (later transferring to Radio 5) and Coastline (1991-92) also on Radio 4. He took over as chair from David Hamilton of Radio 2's nostalgia based quiz Some of These Days (1986-91). His last regular series was again mining a nostalgia seam in A Year to Remember.

Since Jean Metcalfe's death in 2000, Cliff's media appearances were infrequent. He was last seen on TV on BBC Parliament's 2007 theme night The Pound in Your Pocket and in 2009 he was reading listener's news on iPM.

In 1984 Cliff suffered a suspected heart attack which caused him to take stock of his life. In the joint autobiography Two-Way Story he imagined what his obituaries might read like: "They might say I had been extremely fortunate to have achieved a measure of success in broadcasting in spite of lacking the intellectual powers and education of some of my contemporaries and the physical attributes of others. Hopefully they would add that I was greatly blessed by the love of a wife and family who, with good humour and tolerance, overlooked, and even ignored, the deficiencies in my character."

Cliff Michelmore 1919-2016

"The next Tonight will be tomorrow night, until then good night."

Quotes taken from:

Two-Way Story by Cliff Michelmore and Jean Metcalfe (Futura, 1986)

Tonight: A Short History by Deirdre Macdonald (BFI Dossier 15, 1982)

I Predict a Riot

In the first part of Trumpton Riots Brian Cant remembered the worlds of Noggin the Nog, Jones the Steam and the Soup Dragon. Due to popular demand, well two requests, here’s the rest of this five-part series first heard on BBC Radio 4 at Christmas 1993.

In Today is Saturday Caron Keating recalls the chaos that was Saturday morning TV on TISWAS.  There are reminiscences from Chris Tarrant, Lenny Henry, Sally James and Bob Carolgees. The identity of the Phantom Flan Flinger is not revealed  but there is a chance to sing-a-long with The Bucket of Water Song and a unique rendition of Bright Eyes.
 

Through the Arched Window revisits Play School. Maggie Philbin hears from former presenters Brian Cant, Johnny Ball, Julie Stevens, Chloe Ashcroft and Fred Harris. We find out about the theft of Big Ted, why there was a reserve Hamble and why we rarely went through the arched window.
 

Programme four asks Val or Sue, John or Tommy? as Sally James she goes back to the days of Blue Peter and Magpie.  There are contributions from Peter Purves, John Noakes, Biddy Baxter, Tommy Boyd, Mick Robertson and Susan Stranks. The history of Magpie is somewhat misrepresented, totally overlooking the first presenters Tony Bastable and Pete Brady and there’s no mention of Douglas Rae who joined in August 1971.
 

In the final programme Fred Harris visits the world of Pugwash, Windy and Barney McGrew. Fred talks to voice of Bill and Ben and Pugwash Peter Hawkins, Mr Benn creator David McKee, animator of Captain Pugwash John Ryan, Michael Cole who came up with Fingerbobs and creator of Trumpton and Camberwick Green Gordon Murray.  Hear about the real Festing Road, why Rick Jones was Yoffy and the sad fate of the Trumpton puppets.
 

By Arrangement With Maurice Winnick

As a sidebar to the Gilbert Harding post I noticed that the Radio Times billings for What’s My Line and Twenty Questions would always include the credit: “by arrangement with Maurice Winnick”. But who was Maurice Winnick?

During the 1930s Winnick was a saxophonist and violinist who had formed his own band and began broadcasting with his Piccadilly Hotel Band, modelling his sound on that of Guy Lombardo. Playing with his later Dorchester Hotel Band was Ted Heath and both Don Lusher, Robert Farnon and Norrie Paramor were, at one time or another, employed by Winnick. Featured vocalists included Al Bowlly, Sam Costa, Harry Bentley, Judy Shirley, Vera Lynn, Hughie Diamond and Ronnie Odell. The Maurice Winnick Orchestra continued to broadcast regularly on the Light Programme until 1950.

After the war Winnick eventually disbanded his own orchestra and became an impresario and a leading packager of programmes for radio and television, buying the UK rights for US produced series. The phrase “by arrangement with Maurice Winnick” was heard on BBC radio programmes such as Ignorance is Bliss (first aired in 1946), based on the US series It Pays to be Ignorant, Twenty Questions (1947) and The Name’s the Same (1953), also based on an American original format. For BBC television there was What’s My Line (1951) - a radio version was also produced, for Radio Luxembourg, between 1952 and 1955.     

In 1954 Winnick was part of the Kemsley-Winnick consortium bidding for the newly advertised commercial television contract for weekends in the Midlands and the North; an alliance with Sunday Times owner Lord Kemsley and Isaac Wolfson of Great Universal Stores, with John McMillan, formerly Chief Assistant on the Light Programme, as General Manager. Winnick’s involvement came about from an introduction by Kemsley’s stepdaughter Ghislaine Alexander, who had been a panellist on What’s My Line.

The individuals concerned in the bid didn’t get on with each other and eventually Wolfson left and then Kemsley pulled the plug by withdrawing his financial support. The ITA went on to award the licence to the Associated British Picture Corporation (broadcasting as ABC Television).  However, Winnick did make it to commercial television in a way, as he produced at least two of their many early game shows: Two for the Money (1956-7) and I've Got a Secret (1956) with regular panellists Jon Pertwee, Catherine Boyle, Dick Bentley and Zoe Gail, both series based on US formats.  

Maurice Winnick died, after a long illness, in 1962 aged 60.

The Rudest Man in Britain

This is the man who signed off from one radio show with: “I'm fed up with this idiotic game; as for the score, if you've been listening you won't need it; if you haven't, you won't want it. I'm going home."  And of one contestant on TV responded with “I’m tired of looking at you.” Yet he was one of the biggest personalities of 1950s Britain, and undoubtedly the first big star of the post-war television service. 

‘Irascible’ is the oft-used description for Gilbert Harding’s character.  A former colleague, Leonard Miall, went on to say he was “arrogant and rude. He bullied people shamelessly. As like as not he would be the worse for alcohol, and he was prone to lose his temper. Yet he had great personal charm and a very well-stocked mind”.  Despite his fame, and it was widespread, much like Kenneth Williams and the Carry On films a decade later, he seemingly despised the medium he appeared on, yet thrived on it too.

John Snagge, for many years the ‘Voice of the BBC’, took the view that Gilbert was “a Regency period character, throughout, and his rudeness was studied: not merely vulgar abuse. At one time he was talking to my father, and a man came up and patted him on the shoulder. Gilbert turned, and didn’t say anything like ‘Go away, I’m busy’ or ‘Why the hell d’you interrupt?’ He just looked at the man and said ‘What emporium of so-called education does that tie come from?’”

Harding joined the BBC in the early days of the war. Aged 32 he’d already had a number of teaching jobs in England, France and Canada, a brief spell as a policeman, been a stringer for The Times whilst on a teaching assignment in Cyprus and was studying for his final law examinations when war broke out.

Now with the newly formed BBC Monitoring Service - Harding spoke French, German, Greek and Turkish -he was based at Broadcasting House on the team compiling the Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts. When the team was evacuated out to Woods Norton, near Evesham, Harding worked on the Cabinet Report analysis for the War Cabinet and would sometimes be telephoned directly by Churchill who once asked for “that man with the succinct mind.”

In 1942 Harding moved to the Outside Broadcasts Department, where he shared an office with Raymond Glendenning. Here he made The Microphone Wants to Know, a series of radio features about wartime life on the home front broadcast on the Home Service, plus Meet John Londoner, with “on-the-street” interviews and Behind the Battlefront, both of which were syndicated to North American stations.

Within a couple of years Harding applied for a new post in Toronto as the Assistant to the BBC’s Canadian Representative. Here he would choose suitable Canadians for Commonwealth radio hook-ups and did PR work for the Corporation, for which he was perhaps not the ideal choice – “this Englishman who thinks that because half the world is painted red, he owns it”.

Back in the UK by 1947 he went freelance and soon slotted into roles that would define his career, as chairman or panellist on quizzes and game shows. There was the successor to Transatlantic Quiz, in which Alistair Cooke in New York and Lionel Hale in London had posed the questions. For lack of dollars the BBC abandoned the programme and devised Round Britain Quiz (first broadcast 2 November 1947), still with Lionel Hale in London but with Gilbert taking on the role of peripatetic quizmaster in the regions.  In 1948 he chaired the revived Brains Trust and a couple of years later took over from Stewart MacPherson as chair on what was to be another long-running show, Twenty Questions.

Both radio and television were stuffed full of panel games at this time and in 1950 Gilbert joined We Beg to Differ. This set women against men in a “lively discussion on subjects upon which the sexes may disagree”. The chairman was Roy ‘Desert Island Discs’ Plomley and regular panellists included the husband and wife acting team of Kay Hammond and John Clements followed a year later by another married couple, Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly. 

But it was the early TV success of What’s My Line that made Gilbert a household name, the Sunday evening broadcasts drawing in millions of viewers. Whilst those at home could play along with the panel and guess the mystery occupation it was Harding that became the main draw. Miall recalls: “They were waiting to see how soon Gilbert Harding’s temper would explode, as it nearly always did, especially if a person he was interrogating employed a coy circumlocution or misused the English language. He was a verbal sadist. He used to refer to himself as a ‘tele-phony’”,  

He secured support at the highest level of the Corporation. On one occasion the D-G Sir Ian Jacob batted back a complaint as follows:

"Mr Harding is somewhat of an eccentric and there are times when his attitude and bearing go beyond what is proper even in a light entertainment programme; but his characteristics are well-known, and on balance it seems to me better to have someone who, though he may occasionally annoy and irritate, can also stimulate, rather than fall back on a flat level of boring propriety".

His fame during the decade led to his face being plastered on many an advert to endorse a range of products, “from Kraft Salad Cream to Basildon Bond writing paper”.  Apparently he became so associated with Macleans Double-Action Indigestion Tablets that customers would pop into Boots and ask for “those Gilbert Harding Tablets”.

Harding appeared in a number of films, often playing himself, such as the Ealing’s anti-TV satire Meet Mr Lucifer. Other radio work included record request shows Housewives’ Choice and Purely for Pleasure, a series of interviews imaginatively titled The Harding Interviews and guest appearances on three editions of Educating Archie, all on the Light Programme. His other TV work included the Huw Wheldon-produced Harding Finds Out, an unsuccessful series in which he dealt with complaints submitted by viewers, I Know What I Like and Who Said That? 

Most of Harding’s work has not survived; indeed most of it was live anyway, so if he is remembered at all it is through the close-up lens of his Face to Face interview with John Freeman in 1960. Famously Harding was reduced to tears, though the reasons surrounding this incident are often mis-reported.  Freeman had intended to hint at Harding’s homosexuality. He knew that Harding had not served in the armed forces during the war and knowing that overtly homosexual men were not normally called-up, Freeman took an indirect approach by asking if he’d ever seen anyone die. Unfortunately Freeman had overlooked that Gilbert’s mother had died the week before, much to his evident distress on camera. 

Just a little under two months after the Face to Face programme Harding was leaving Broadcasting House after recording two editions of Round Britain Quiz when he dropped dead from a heart attack. Oddly even his dying moments are variously reported; The Times stating that that “only his chauffeur was with him” but elsewhere it is said he was waiting for a taxi or that he collapsed into the arms of BBC producer and old friend from Cambridge, Christopher Saltmarshe.  No matter what the circumstances of his death the memory of Gilbert Harding, much like the hundreds of programmes he appeared on, just drifted off into the ether. His face and his voice are so evocative of the decade that it is perhaps timely that he died before the Sixties started to swing, what would he have made of it one wonders?

This weekend BBC Radio 4 Extra remembers the life and career of Gilbert Harding when Simon Fanshawe presents The Rudest Man in Britain. There are excerpts from Round Britain Quiz, What’s My Line and Brains Trust, a complete edition of Twenty Questions, the Face to Face interview and Stephen Wyatt’s 2005 Afternoon Theatre play Dr Brighton and Mr Harding.

Gilbert Charles Harding 1907-1960

References:

Inside the BBC by Leonard Miall (1994)
Those Vintage Years of Radio by John Snagge & Michael Barsley (1972)
Armchair Nation by Joe Moran (2013)

It Was Number One, It Was Top of the Pops

Fifty years ago today viewers to BBC TV saw the first edition of Top of the Pops. You’ll see or hear nothing on the usually anniversary-conscious  Beeb to commemorate this;  the brand has become more than a little tarnished in the last couple of years. Selected repeats start up again on BBC Four, we’re into 1979 now, but the regular series was killed off in 2006, though it limps on with the Christmas/New Year specials.

Back in May 1983 Top of the Pops celebrated its 1000th edition and BBC Radio 1 joined in with a simultaneous broadcast and a history of the show introduced by Richard Skinner.

Firstly here’s what went out on Radio 1 only for the 10 minutes before TOTP and then half an hour afterwards.

And here’s that night’s edition of the show complete with an introductory chat between Richard Skinner and David Jacobs that also aired on BBC1.

Both recordings are exactly as I committed them to tape that day and include the voices of presenters who are now ‘persona non grata’. I have made no further digital edits.

Update (December 2023): The studio set Christmas specials ended in 2021. BBC Four repeats continue and we're now up to 1995.   

Rock On Tommy

On BBC Four tonight there’s a showing of the rock opera Tommy. 

As usual the authors of the weekly Creamguide, from those lovely people at TV Cream, have long memories and recalled that “when this film was first shown on the telly in the eighties it was the subject of a simulcast on Radio 1”.

Spot on! It was shown on BBC2 and heard on Radio 1 (straight after Peter Clayton’s Sounds of Jazz) on Sunday 29 August 1982 as part of Rock Week. In those pre-stereo TV days there were plenty of opportunities to experiment with simultaneous broadcasts and that year the little SB logo appeared in the listings for some of the Proms concerts and Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

In the kind of season that BBC2 sadly no longer does Rock Week also offered us GI Blues, Jimi Hendrix, That’ll Be The Day, Maze, Joan Armatrading, Squeeze, The Jam, The Last Waltz, The Doors, BA Robertson’s Jock and Roll, Stardust, The Police and Yellow Submarine. There was also a three-hour Bank Holiday Rock special fronted by David Hepworth and Mark Ellen. 

It was a packed week on the telly as we also got the start of the Beeb’s 60 Years celebrations with plenty for nostalgia lovers with repeats of Dixon of Dock Green, Maigret, Stocker’s Copper, The World of Wooster and that creeky old film Death at Broadcasting House.