by Alwyn Turner
Meanwhile Nation, rather than striking out on his own, had formed a new partnership. (‘None of them were fully fledged writers, so they gravitated towards each other,’ noted Beryl Vertue.) This time it was with two of the newer arrivals at ALS: John Junkin and Dave Freeman. Of the trio, Freeman was significantly the senior. Born in London in 1922, he worked as an electrician before enlisting in the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm on the outbreak of war. On being demobbed, he had joined the Metropolitan Police, spending some time in the Special Branch, before becoming a security officer at the American Officers’ Club in Regent’s Park. Throughout this period, he had harboured ambitions of writing, submitting stories to Lilliput magazine as early as 1941, while still serving in the Pacific. But it was at the Officers’ Club that he found his true calling, involving himself in the booking of entertainment acts and striking up friendships with new comedians, most significantly with Benny Hill. By 1953 he was selling gags to Frank Muir, who provided him with the encouragement to continue, and in September 1955, having contributed material to Hill’s television series and to the Terry Scott and Bill Maynard vehicle Great Scott – It’s Maynard, he abandoned his existing career path and joined ALS as a full-time writer. ‘He was quite gentle,’ recalled Ray Galton, ‘a tall fellow, big bloke.’
So too was Junkin, who like Nation and Freeman was well over six foot tall. Born in 1930, the son of a London policeman, Junkin had spent three years as a teacher in an East End primary school, though his career in education ended with an incident when he saw a boy in the back row chewing gum. Calling the child to the front, he issued the familiar instruction, ‘In the bin!’, and was horrified at the extent of his own power when the boy misunderstood and climbed into the bin, looking humiliated, resentful and hurt. Concluding that he ‘was not cut out for the teaching profession’, Junkin took up dead-end jobs to allow him time to try writing. Following the same path claimed by Nation, he wrote a script for The Goon Show and submitted it to Spike Milligan. Milligan’s response was sufficiently favourable – ‘I think you can write and I think you should’ – that Junkin too ended up on the agency’s books.
In January 1956 the new team of Nation, Junkin and Freeman had a meeting with Alastair Scott Johnston at the BBC to pitch an idea for a radio comedy they had devised, to be titled The Fixers. The stories would centre on a trio of characters: Colonel Harry Lashington, his cockney manservant Herbert Cooper (or perhaps Collins, the proposal gives both names) and a fiercely patriotic Welshman named David Owen Glendower, who ‘is intensely proud of his family tree, which he can trace back as far as his parents’. Together, they seek to right wrongs, motivated by ‘a strong sense of moral justice’, though ‘unfortunately they have more enthusiasm than good judgement’ and are liable to ‘insist on helping their fellow men whether their help is wanted or not’. The suggested storylines included the rebuilding of a house for an old lady who can’t get her landlord to do any repairs (though they get the wrong house), and the rescuing of a Victorian music hall comedian who was lost in the Amazonian jungle in 1901 (and doesn’t want rescuing); they return him to civilisation, ‘well, not quite civilisation, but show business’.
The fact that each of the three central characters sounds as if he could be played by one of the writers might suggest that they were keen to be behind the microphones themselves, but Nation’s covering letter to Johnston made clear that this was not the case, as well as outlining the ‘cinematic technique’ they wanted to use: ‘We feel that it is essential that a show of this sort should be performed without an audience. The construction of the show will depend not upon gags but situations. Using actors rather than comedians, we feel it would be dangerous to hope to influence the audience who are notoriously “idea killers”. We hope to experiment to some degree with recorded background music, and with your assistance, microphone techniques which emphasise voice.’ And they provided a wish-list for the cast they would have liked to see, all the names being up-and-coming actors with some experience behind them: Dennis Price as Lashington, Bill Owen or Dick Emery as Herbert, and – a star of Welsh Rarebit – Anthony Oliver as Glendower, with either Kenneth Kendall or Robin Boyle as the announcer.
It was an intriguing proposal, and some way ahead of its time. Though writers were beginning to acquire star status, comedy shows were still at this stage built around comedians. It was to be six years before the practice of using actors in sitcoms became fashionable, with the television series The Rag Trade (written by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe) and with Galton and Simpson’s pilot for what turned out to be Steptoe and Son. For three virtually unknown writers to be making such a suggestion revealed considerable self-assurance. So too did the idea of doing away with a studio audience altogether; there had been a few radio comedy series without an audience, such as the Marx Brothers-inspired Danger – Men At Work, first broadcast in 1939, but they were very much the exception rather than the rule. In an attempt to head off any doubts arising from these innovations, Nation was quick to add that ‘we have devised this as a low budget show, which we trust will be a point in its favour’. Even so, the confidence was impressive, and perhaps reflected the support they found at ALS, as well as a sense that anything was possible. These were young men, seeking to make their mark on the world with the encouragement of older-brother figures. ‘We were beginning to sense our own importance,’ noted John Antrobus, another of the ALS new boys. ‘We were going to kick the rest of the Fifties up the arse and start a New Decade.’ As Beryl Vertue pointed out: ‘They were unafraid because they didn’t know what to be afraid of.’
If in retrospect the basic set-up of The Fixers sounds like an early try-out for the 1970s television comedy The Goodies, the initial concern at the time was that it smacked rather too much of The Goon Show. Nation, however, reassured Johnston that Spike Milligan had seen the revised synopsis and ‘sees no similarity to his show at all’. Suitably impressed, Johnston passed the proposal on up the BBC hierarchy, explaining that it came from Terry Nation, one of the Frankie Howerd writers, plus two new assistants, Dave Freeman, ‘who has some experience of TV writing, and John Junken [sic], who is more or less new,’ and suggesting that ‘the idea is worthy of serious consideration’.
How much consideration it actually received is unknown, but the proposal was rejected, and The Fixers never came into being. In its place the three writers were put on a completely different project, though in the meantime they had received their first commission in a more direct manner: in February 1956 ALS engaged them ‘to script material for two shows for the Peter Sellers series Idiot Weekly’ at a fee of £150 per script ‘to cover all interests’. (The commissioning letter carefully pointed out that the writers were still liable for the ten per cent agency fees from this sum.) The sketch show involved was more properly titled The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d and ran in the London region for just five episodes in the spring of 1956. Made by Associated-Rediffusion, which held the ITV weekday franchise for London at the time, it was directed by Richard Lester, starred Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes as well as Sellers, and was the first time that the Goons’ humour was explored on screen. The writing was credited simply to Spike Milligan and Associated London Scripts, giving no indication of who was responsible for what, but the fact that Nation, Junkin and Freeman were invited to contribute at all was an indication of their acceptance within ALS. Junkin even appeared in one episode, deputising for an ill Sykes.
The BBC offer that emerged from the failure of The Fixers was to write a new series titled Floggit’s, starring Elsie and Doris Waters in their long-running Cockney characters of Gert and Daisy. The Waters sisters (their brother was Jack Warner, best known as the police officer George Dixon in the television series Dixon of Dock Green) had been working as a double-act since the 1920s, and for twenty-five years they had been big stars, appearing regularly in films, on records and on stage, but particularly on the radio: they were regulars on Workers’ Playtime and headlined series including Gert and Daisy’s Wedding Party and Pe
tticoat Lane. The sisters had even received OBEs in 1946 in recognition of their contributions to the war effort. Much of their work has survived better than that of their contemporaries, for their rapid crosstalk sketches were mostly written by themselves, as were their songs, and their focus on finding humour in the everyday lives of women, together with the quiet, detailed observation of their character studies, was among the most advanced comedy to be heard.
By the mid 1950s there was a feeling that the homeliness of the act was perhaps turning into blandness, but there was life left in Gert and Daisy yet, and it was proposed that taking them away from their familiar setting in Knockhall Street, London, might help find new comedic possibilities. Nation, Junkin and Freeman were asked in May 1956 to produce a trial script, and when that proved satisfactory, a further fifteen episodes were commissioned. Committed to four months’ employment, the trio rented an office in the ramshackle Shepherd’s Bush home of ALS and set to work. ‘They cleared the potato sacks out of the spare room and put in a table and three chairs, and Terry, David and I moved in there,’ remembered Junkin.
They were now firmly part of the ALS world, a convivial society in which the pressures of meeting deadlines didn’t interfere with having fun. ‘You’d go to lunch when you wanted, you’d go home when you wanted. You knew what you had to do, but how you did it was up to you,’ said Junkin. ‘There were days when some of us never got much work done before lunchtime,’ remembered another writer, Brad Ashton. ‘So in Terry Nation’s office – which was quite a long office with a long strip of green carpet down the middle – we might play golf for about an hour or so, then we’d go into Lew Schwartz’s office – he had a big dartboard on his wall – where we’d play darts for another hour, and then we’d go to lunch.’ Lunch itself could stretch out until, fuelled by cigarettes and alcohol, the writers would resume a work programme that might last well into the evening; Milligan in particular was known to work so late that he ended up sleeping in his office.
Floggit’s, the series created by Nation, Junkin and Freeman during those late nights and between those long lunches, was based on the premise of Gert and Daisy inheriting from their Uncle Alf a general store – after which the show was named – set in the fictional village of Russet Green. There was, however, a snake in this rural paradise: ‘We expected life to be a bed of roses, and what turns up but deadly nightshade in person, Old Mother Butler.’ The gossipy, small-minded Ma Butler, played then as now by Iris Vandeleur, had been a regular antagonist of the pair and she was to remain their chief foe in the village, the butt of many of Daisy’s jokes. (Gert would have joined in but she was always a little slower on the uptake.) Beyond her, the series was crammed full of incidental characters played by an impressive cast that included Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Connor, Ron Moody, Anthony Newley and Ronnie Barker, the latter appearing for the first time as Ronnie, rather than Ronald.
Best of all was Joan Sims, fresh from her role as a nurse nicknamed Rigor Mortis in the 1954 Dirk Bogarde film Doctor in the House. In Floggit’s she played a variety of parts from Ma Butler’s sidekick, Emma Smeed, through to a sickly sweet little girl – in the same lineage as Monica in Educating Archie and Jennifer in Ray’s a Laugh – who lisped her way through soppy stories about her life (‘I’ve been down in the meadows talking to the squirrels and bunny rabbits’), but still managed to con Gert and Daisy out of money at every opportunity. Somewhere in between was an outrageously flirtatious barmaid, Greta, whose banter hinted at an impressive level of sexual promiscuity, and who got many of the best lines. ‘What do men talk about when they’re together?’ she asks a regular customer. When he replies, ‘I don’t know, the same as women, I suppose,’ she is deeply shocked: ‘Well, you should be ashamed of yourselves!’
Like Hancock’s Half Hour, now the most popular comedy on air, Floggit’s was a continuous thirty-minute programme without benefit of musical interludes (previously the bane of radio comedy shows), and was broadly a situation comedy, though there were some breaks from the storyline: Greta, for example, never meets Gert and Daisy, and plays no part in the plots, her contributions being simply stand-alone sketches. The stories themselves were vanishingly simple – a tree outside the shop becomes unstable and needs to be chopped down, they take in a stray dog who they nickname ’Orrible (played by Peter Hawkins) – but there was a gentleness and charm to the proceedings which has lasted well, even if it was considerably more mainstream than the material that Nation, Junkin and Freeman had wanted to write for The Fixers. And there were some good jokes, often referencing contemporary popular culture (the sisters have a couple of chickens named Marilyn and Sabrina, with the latter jealous of the former), while Daisy is always capable of coming up with epigrams that are slightly more acerbic than they appear at first sight: ‘Bonfire night’s no good without fireworks,’ she observes. ‘It’s like television without Richard Dimbleby.’ There was also – surely one of Nation’s contributions – the story of a Welsh perfumer trying to sell a new range of scents, including Evening in Caerphilly, Moon over Tonypandy and Ashes of Anthracite.
The series was produced initially by Alastair Scott Johnston and then by Bill Gates, and although it didn’t win any critical plaudits (‘All they have to say is “Nice cupper tea,” or “On your way, Stirling Moss” to a bus driver, and the audience roars like a giant being tickled,’ wrote Paul Ferris disparagingly in the Observer), it proved a popular success. The first run was followed by a Christmas special and, in 1957, by a second series of eighteen shows, for which Ronnie Barker and Anthony Newley were dropped from the cast, allegedly because the stars felt they were getting too many laughs.
In between those two series, Dave Freeman had found more lucrative work. The first series of The Benny Hill Show on BBC television in 1955 had been a major hit – Hill was named Personality of the Year in the National Television Awards – and for the second series of six hour-long shows, starting in January 1957, he called in Freeman to act as his official co-writer, a partnership that was to last into the 1960s and produce some of the most inventive visual gags of the early television era. Freeman did return to the fold for the second series of Floggit’s, but thereafter his path diverged from that of Nation and Junkin, and he went on to specialise in writing television shows for comedians including Sid James, Jimmy Edwards, Charlie Drake and Arthur Askey, as well as scripting Carry On Behind, one of the later entries in the long-running film series.
In Freeman’s absence, Nation and Junkin formed a more stable pairing, though their first step together was more of a stumble. In 1956 Alastair Scott Johnston had produced a Sunday night variety show titled Calling the Stars, and when new writers were required for the second series, he had recommended Nation and Junkin. By the time the first scripts were submitted, however, a new producer had taken over. John Simmonds (later to produce Round the Horne) was far from impressed by the material he received in January 1957, and rejected it as being simply unfunny. He also implied that he felt a little cheated by the absence of Freeman, who he had expected to be part of the team. At this point Spike Milligan, whose deep distrust of the BBC was by now approaching paranoia, involved himself in the issue, and it took Beryl Vertue’s conciliatory intervention to find a way forward. Nation and Junkin were given twenty-four hours to produce a rewrite of the first episode, with a guarantee from ALS that Milligan, Galton and Simpson would all look at the script before it was resubmitted. This having been done, the writers withdrew from the show at their own request, and Ronald Wolfe was appointed in their place.
But Milligan couldn’t quite let the matter drop, writing to Simmonds after the broadcast: ‘I should like you to know that the material which Peter Sellers did so uproariously well on your Calling the Stars programme, was written by the writers (John Junkin and Terry Nation) who were elbowed out of your programme as not quite up to it. Somebody’s wrong.’ Simmonds’s response was a masterly piece of barbed criticism: ‘May I say how wonderful I think Peter Sellers is, to be able to get a laugh by mak
ing a funny noise, having only said “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen”. I am sure you understand what this remark means.’
This hiccup did nothing to dissuade Alastair Scott Johnston from promoting his protégés, and later in 1957 he commissioned Nation and Junkin to write the new series of the popular Variety Playhouse, providing continuity material for the show’s host, the comedian Ted Ray, as well as a weekly sketch. And despite Ray’s reputation as an easy-going, family-orientated comedian, there was a slightly darker side to some of the material than might have been expected, a hint of bleakness behind the gags. ‘Then came the great day,’ reminisced Ray in a routine about his wartime exploits. ‘They were going to drop me into France. We waited by the plane. It was a beautiful British summer’s night – you could hear the owls coughing with bronchitis.’
As a further sign of his confidence, Johnston recommended that the two writers should, on the basis of their work thus far, be given a long-term contract by the BBC. It took nine months for the suggestion to be fully considered, but in June 1958 they were signed up to a year’s contract, with an option to renew, guaranteeing them a minimum payment of 2,000 guineas, their actual fee being calculated at 85 guineas for each half-hour show. (This put them marginally above the average annual salary of nonmanual male workers.) In the meantime, Nation and Junkin had scripted a new series of Fine Goings On, the show that had given Frankie Howerd his first headlining role when broadcast back in 1951. Then it had been written by Eric Sykes, Howerd’s first and finest collaborator, but the 1958 series was less impressive (a typical gag ran: ‘We can’t go to the Costa Brava.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because of the costa living!’) and certainly less well received, with the Observer’s Paul Ferris – the only radio critic on a national newspaper who paid any attention to such shows – again unimpressed by the writing: ‘His script would disgrace a small pier on a wet Monday.’
