by Alwyn Turner
Nation and Junkin’s BBC contracts were not renewed when they lapsed at the end of May 1959, and – although they contributed some material for a new young comic, Harry Worth – there had been a sense during that twelve-month period that there was a shortage of projects for the two writers to work on; among other attempts, Beryl Vertue tried to get them a job on the Terry-Thomas radio series London Lights, but made no progress.
In fact there was to be just one more radio show to come from Nation and Junkin. The 1961 series It’s a Fair Cop starred Eric Sykes as a police constable at the rural Blossom Hill station, with Hattie Jacques playing his sister – the same combination that had just completed the fourth series of the highly acclaimed television sitcom Sykes and a .. . They were joined by Deryck Guyler as the sergeant and by Dick Emery as an habitual prisoner who, like Harry Grout in the 1970s series Porridge, has made himself fully at home. ‘He has been in and out for a long time,’ noted the Radio Times’s preview of the show, ‘and so has learnt to make himself comfortable with the armchair and television set provided by his solicitous gaolers.’ The same article did the series no favours by claiming that it would appeal to fans of Dixon of Dock Green: ‘It may be pure coincidence, but the setting for Eric’s radio series bears a striking resemblance to Dock Green.’
Yet again, Paul Ferris was less than enthusiastic: ‘There is funny Ealing-film-type music going oompah-oompah, and the script says things like “You’re late.” – “That’s no reason for putting my sausages in the cornflakes.” In desperation the writers use an astonishing number of tiny scenes, each barely supported by the basic competence of actors, ‘certainly not by the jokes.’ He was a little harsh in not recognising the acting talent of Jacques at least, who provided a splendidly inhospitable landlady: ‘I want you to treat it like it was your own ’ome. No cooking in the room, no pets, no musical instruments, no visitors after six in the evening.’ She exits with a parting shot at her new guests: ‘I’ll leave you to settle in. If there’s anything you want – get it yourself!’
The fact that Nation and Junkin were producing material for Sykes, who was not only a founder of ALS but one of the very best writers in the business, was clearly occasioned by him being overstretched with his commitments to the television series. ‘Because of the voracious appetite of radio and television,’ he later noted, ‘once accepted as a reliable writer you were forever swimming, with no time to tread water.’ The invitation to work for him was nonetheless to be seen as a compliment, and Junkin’s memory of the series was a positive one: ‘It did okay. It got a nice, warm reaction and pretty decent ratings, and I think we would probably have done more than one series had Eric’s TV series not been such a big hit so quickly.’
By this stage, the pair had effectively turned their backs on radio and – a little way behind Nation’s former co-writers, Dick Barry and Dave Freeman – were focused now on television work, where the prospects were greater and the money was better. The shift in power in the broadcast media was already clear, but in case anyone was in any doubt about who now called the shots, there had been a symbolic changing of the guard in February 1957 when the Radio Times was redesigned so that instead of the radio schedule preceding that of the television, the order was reversed. Four years later a further, more subtle change made the same point. The magazine had previously run from Sunday to Monday, giving primacy to the Sabbath, the observance of which had been so important to John Reith; now it capitulated to television’s love of the weekend, and started its listings on Saturday. The effect of the rise of television on the other dominant form in popular culture was still more devastating. In 1950 there were 1,400 million cinema admissions in Britain; ten years later that total had collapsed to just 500 million. During the same period, the number of television licences increased by ten million, while those for radio (the radio licence was not abandoned until 1970) fell dramatically. Television, clearly, was the medium of the future.
The first breakthrough for Nation and Junkin – excluding their contributions to The Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d – came in December 1957 with the one-off show Friday the 13th, starring Ted Ray, with whom they had just worked on Variety Playhouse. When he returned with his regular television series, The Ted Ray Show, the following year, they were retained as writers, and were primarily responsible for seven hour-long editions, though three sketches were contributed separately by Dave Freeman. Another involved in the series was a BBC staffer named David Whitaker; then a light entertainment script editor, he would later emerge as a significant figure in Nation’s story. As well as script editing, Whitaker contributed lyrics to some of the songs used in the show. Audience research carried out by the BBC on 22 November 1958 indicated that the series was proving popular. The reaction index gave it a score of 74, some way above the average of 67 that was expected of a Saturday night light entertainment show, and the report noted: ‘The script, too, was commended as being witty and topical.’
The series was produced by George Inns, who was also responsible for a couple of one-off programmes by the Scottish comedian Jimmy Logan, then the biggest live draw in Glasgow. When the comic was given his own twelve-part series by the BBC in 1959, Inns brought in Nation and Junkin to write the shows, since Logan had already exhausted his existing stock of material. As with Calling the Stars, however, a change in producer was to cause problems. Inns became fully occupied with The Black and White Minstrel Show, which he had brought to the screen and which had become an unlikely success story (Stan Stennett was one of the resident comedians), and he passed over production duties on Logan’s series to Bryan Sears, the man behind Morecambe and Wise’s notoriously disastrous show Running Wild five years earlier.
The Jimmy Logan Show was to fare little better, at least if its star was to be believed. Logan was deeply unhappy with the change in personnel, and came to see the producer as an enemy and saboteur: ‘He didn’t like me, so he had decided to do his best to make my show as bad as possible.’ Nor was he overly impressed with the material he was offered. ‘They made me sick because every single one was terrible, and obviously terrible,’ he commented of the first batch of scripts. ‘A good comedian can make good comedy out of a bad situation, but these scripts were way beyond salvage.’ For the last four editions, new writers were brought in, though with the benefit of hindsight, Logan’s biggest regret over the whole affair was that he didn’t walk out halfway through filming the series, as his misery deepened. The consequence was, he claimed, ‘that it took me at least two years to reestablish my credibility outside Scotland.’ Nonetheless, he returned to BBC television in October 1961 with a one-off 45-minute special. Although there was a new producer, the script was again by Nation and Junkin.
These ventures into television had been a moderate success and had provided an income, but they had hardly set the country alight. Nor had they provided much creative satisfaction for their writers. As an alternative, in the summer of 1960, Nation, Junkin and Johnny Speight approached the BBC with a new proposal for a series to be titled Comedy Playhouse, an anthology strand which would feature one-off sitcoms from a variety of writers and starring actors rather than comedians. The suggestion did eventually materialise, some eighteen months later, but in a modified form that dispensed with the multiple authors —instead the sixteen episodes that comprised the first two seasons of Comedy Playhouse were all written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (and included ‘The Offer’, which became Steptoe and Son). Like The Fixers, it was an idea ahead of its time, and clearly one that the BBC felt couldn’t be entrusted to unknown writers.
Meanwhile, in the absence of more substantial sustenance, Nation’s partnership with John Junkin was withering away. Junkin had already made some appearances as an actor at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the autumn of 1960 he opened there in a new play, Sparrers Can’t Sing, opposite Barbara Windsor; he was still in the production when it transferred to the West End. There were a couple of collaborations with Nation yet to come (It’s a Fair Cop, the special
of The Jimmy Logan Show), but from now on Junkin was to see his career as being centred on performance and acting as much as it was on writing. He became a regular fixture on British television over the next forty years, playing in both comedy and drama and appearing as himself on game shows.
Meanwhile Nation too was becoming disillusioned with the way his career was failing to make significant advances. On a personal level, he was now happily married to Kathleen Grant, more commonly known as Kate, a classical pianist and the daughter of a Yorkshire miner, whom he had wed in March 1958; their marriage was to last for the remainder of his life. But professionally there was no comparable progress. As the new decade dawned, he could reasonably claim to have paid his dues since coming to London, with over a hundred episodes of radio series and more than a dozen television shows to his name (albeit in partnership with others). And yet he had failed to find an individual voice of his own or a stable vehicle for his talent. The positions of Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson at the top of the ALS tree might have seemed too remote to challenge, but others who had joined the agency around the same time as him were making much greater strides: Johnny Speight with The Arthur Haynes Show, Eric Merriman and Barry Took with the hit radio series Beyond Our Ken, which would later evolve into Round the Horne, and Dave Freeman with television series for Benny Hill and Charlie Drake. Meanwhile Maurice Wiltshire, Lew Schwarz and (until his untimely death in 1959) Larry Stephens were all busily supplying scripts for The Army Game, the most popular comedy on ITV.
The failed proposal for The Fixers had suggested that Nation was keen to create an original and distinctive show. Instead he was writing for Ted Ray, a man who shared his fondness for Jack Benny and American patter, and who was an engaging and amiable comedian, but one who had no great need for material that would set him apart from his rivals. Ray was essentially a teller of gags, and there was nothing much to separate his jokes from those of other comedians. The BBC contract had not been renewed, and Nation’s partners had moved on to other projects. Things weren’t going the way he had hoped.
‘I was getting into a very depressed state with the feeling that comedy wasn’t going the right way – not progressing,’ he remembered some years later. ‘I felt I’d like to go into drama, and after a heart-searching evening with my wife, I decided to write a television play. I’d finished it in two weeks – a comedy set in Wales called Uncle Selwyn.’
Chapter Three
The Lads Themselves
While Terry Nation and John Junkin had been toiling in what was still essentially the variety tradition of light entertainment, there had been a substantial shift in the relative status of the founding members of Associated London Scripts. At the time that Nation joined the agency, there was no doubt that Spike Milligan was the biggest name, writing and starring in Britain’s most celebrated comedy, The Goon Show. But as the decade wore on, Milligan became increasingly frustrated with the format and with the limitations imposed on him by the BBC: ‘I’m the most progressive comedy writer in the country,’ he told the press in 1958, ‘but they don’t want ideas.’ And, he added, ‘I resent being called a Goon.’ Rumours of the demise of The Goon Show were already circulating and, although they were a little premature, the programme did finally end in January 1960, with the tenth, rather perfunctory, series. Milligan had until now failed to hit upon a format that would allow him to translate his surreal fantasies into visual expression – despite the brief flourishes of The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d and its television sequels, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred – and it was unclear where his future path lay.
In the same period, however, the stock of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had enjoyed a spectacular rise, thanks to their work with Tony Hancock, a comedian who came with a reputation for being extremely demanding of his writers. Back in 1952, when he was still trying to make his mark, Hancock was co-hosting the radio series Calling All Forces when he decided that the script, by Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin, was below par. Monkhouse remembered him breaking up the read-through as he stormed out shouting: ‘This is shit! And it’s written on shit paper so I’ll take it away and have a shit and wipe my arse with it!’ Shortly afterwards, Monkhouse and Goodwin were replaced by Galton and Simpson, beginning an association with Hancock that would transform the careers of all three men, and in the process change the face of British comedy.
The show they created, Hancock’s Half Hour, ran on radio from 1954 to 1959, and on television from 1956 to 1960. On both media it was, after a slow start, a huge hit and it elevated Hancock to the position of Britain’s most successful comedian. As the show evolved, the attention to detail became ever more profound, and the portrayal of the central character acquired depths that broke new ground for broadcast comedy; the constrained, claustrophobic setting of 23 Railway Cuttings, with its taut relationship between the intellectual and social aspirations of Hancock and the know-your-place attitude of Sid James, set the standard for future British sitcoms. Long before George Costanza tried to pitch the idea of ‘a show about nothing’ to television executives in the 1990s series Seinfeld, Hancock, Galton and Simpson had already mastered the concept on radio with the tedium of ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’, and on television with ‘The Bedsitter’, the latter comprising a full twenty-five minutes of Hancock alone in a single room, trying and failing to keep himself amused. That show came from the final BBC series in 1961, simply titled Hancock, which dispensed with Sid James and achieved still greater heights of critical and popular success.
If, for many fans, the radio shows remain the pinnacle of Hancock’s career, there is no doubt that the television version made the more influential contribution to the evolution of comedy. The novelty of the format was such that the term ‘situation comedy’ itself was a recent coinage (its common abbreviation to ‘sitcom’ was a 1970s development), and there were many who didn’t entirely approve of this new concept, among them a correspondent of The Times: ‘comedians, inclined by stage experience to pack everything they have into a ten-minute act, are driven by television into situation comedy, so that a single idea, which might have burnt out in one incandescent flash, can smoulder on for several weeks.’ Hancock’s Half Hour was the most prominent exception, the show that proved the potential of television as a vehicle for comedy to break finally with the music hall tradition. For now at least, it seemed as though the future lay in the character-based style of Galton and Simpson.
Something of the sort seems to have been in Terry Nation’s mind, for when he submitted his play Uncle Selwyn to the BBC in 1960, it was as a possible pilot for a six-part series, based around a group of recurrent characters in a very definite historical setting.
The timing was right, for the corporation was, for the first time, in need of new scripts. Television drama on the BBC was, in its early days, firmly rooted in the stage, so that, for example, regulations insisted on a break of five minutes between the acts of a broadcast play, mimicking the conventions of the theatre. These gaps were filled with the much-loved ‘interlude’ films: restful shots of a windmill, a kitten playing with a ball or, most famously, a potter’s wheel. The material was similarly dependent on remaking the classics and, particularly, on bringing in existing theatrical productions; new work tended to mean plays that had only recently debuted in the West End. The same policy had applied for three decades on radio, but while the arrangement worked for both sides – the box-office success of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was the result of an extract being broadcast to five million viewers – it was now starting to look a little unadventurous in contrast with ITV’s Armchair Theatre, busily blazing a trail for new commissions. In response the corporation was changing its emphasis and in 1959, for the first time, more than half its drama output was written specifically for television.
But even in this propitious climate, Uncle Selwyn failed to make the right impression; it was rejected by both the light entertainment department in 1960 and, the following year, by the script department. Meanwhile the
head of programmes in Wales concluded that it was ‘too crudely farcical and derivative’. In slightly modified form, however, the piece did eventually appear in the Play of the Week strand on ITV in February 1964, coincidentally just after the first Daleks serial had finally made Nation’s name.
Set in the aftermath of the First World War, the play told the story of the eponymous Selwyn’s return from a German prisoner-of-war camp to his home village of Pontynarvon in the Rhondda Valley, where he discovers that he’s inherited his father’s oil-lamp shop. (His father, we learn, has been killed by a runaway beer barrel – it rolled into his shop, he drank the contents and died in a drunken stupor.) Unfortunately he also discovers that, in his absence, ‘the colliery owners put the electric in all the houses’, and that the demand for oil lamps is now virtually non-existent. In an attempt to make some money, he rents out his back room to a group of old men who, he learns by accident, are actually a secret society of anarchists plotting a bomb attack on London. Seeing his chance, he joins the group and steals their bomb so that he can blow up the local power station, in order to revitalise the market for oil lamps.
The cast included Mervyn Jones, John Glyn-Jones and Talfryn Thomas, while Selwyn himself was played by Tony Tanner, a stage actor who had taken over the starring role in Anthony Newley’s West End musical Stop the World–I Want to Get Off on Newley’s departure for the Broadway production, but who thus far had little television experience. His performance was praised by the critics and, according to the preview publicity, he relished the part: ‘At first Selwyn seems to be all sweetness and naivety with a determination to please. But when it comes to it and Selwyn conceives his devious plan, far from being conscience-stricken, he carries it through without a qualm. In fact, with a good deal of enthusiasm.’ His real feelings were considerably less positive: ‘The play sucked, I almost fell asleep in rehearsal and the director was no fucking good.’
