Family Britain, 1951-1957 (33 page)

Four years later, expectations were more modest for the altogether lower-budget
Chance of a Lifetime
. This was an ‘issue’ film, in which the actor-director and writer Bernard Miles depicted industrial relations in a small tractor-manufacturing firm; against its wishes, Rank was compelled by the Labour government to release the well-meaning drama on its Odeon circuit. When M-O asked people as they came out of London Odeons in June 1950 what they had made of the movie, the working-class response was mixed:

It was too dull. It didn’t have any life in it. It was all talking all the time.
(F20)

I think it was trying to say that the Bolshies are not so bad as some people make out.
(M40)

It was trying to say that the workers and managers should work together harmoniously all the time and not always be going on strike.
(F30)

It was very true to life and it wasn’t far-fetched like some films are today.
(F40)

I liked the other film [
Arson Inc
, an American picture] that was on with it best.
(M35)

I haven’t thought about it, I just sat back and looked at it, that’s all.
(M40)

I usually go anyway once a week and that seemed about the best to go to that week.
(M35)

We generally come each week – we didn’t know what was on – when we saw Basil Rathbone [in fact Radford] we thought it was a funny.
(F40)

I’m not much of a judge myself. I don’t go in for being a critic exactly. But I think that it shows that you just can’t sit back and let things go on, because they just won’t.
(M55)

To tell you the truth, I thought it was a bit drawn-out. I don’t know how to put it – it sort of hung fire somehow.
(M65)

A 50-year-old middle-class woman did not mince her words. ‘It tried to show some of the lower classes,’ she pronounced outside the Wimbledon Odeon, ‘that their conduct today is outrageous – and that that “I’m as good as you” policy is simply outrageous if you haven’t got the sense or education to back it up.’ In the event, Rank’s commercial fears were amply realised. ‘The biggest flop we have ever touched,’ claimed one Scottish exhibitor, thereby endorsing the initial scepticism of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen (an independent member of the Board of Trade committee) that for all its meritorious qualities it ‘lacked the more obvious kind of drawing power’.35

A little realism went a long way, as Sydney Box found. During and immediately after the war, Gainsborough Pictures had produced a series of critically ravaged but highly successful historical costume films – bodice-ripping melodramas aimed unerringly at the working-class female audience. Box took over as Head of Production in 1946 and demanded a greater degree of realism, exemplified by his artistically much more ambitious (and expensive)
The Bad Lord Byron
two years later. But he had fatally misread his market and the film flopped, marking the end of Gainsborough’s glory days. So too at Featherstone in the early to mid-1950s, where Dennis et al discovered that the key ingredients for box-office appeal were action and escapism: ‘The most popular types of film are the coloured “western”, the spectacular adventure story, and the slapstick comedy. Pictures about the 1939–45 war are also popular. Musical romances appeal to the women. All these films resemble one another in their irrelevance to the problems of the day . . .’ It was similar in Liverpool, where years later two working-class women evoked the pull in the 1950s of the American Dream as played out in Hollywood film musicals. ‘They were a life-saver, the musicals,’ recalled one, while the other made an unanswerable defence of their sustaining emotional power: ‘You should have seen the house where we lived in Cunningham Street. This is a palace compared to it. The worst slum I have ever seen in my life. To live like that and then to enter that magical world. Who can despise it? Only them that’s got a lot more can despise it.’

The gulf between ‘good’ taste (which on the part of the established middle class, ie not the lower middle class, often included a strong element of anti-Americanism) and working-class taste was epitomised by what one might call the Shiner paradigm. Ronald Shiner (born 1903) was an actor who, in the words of one obituary, ‘seemed to embody and realise everybody’s notion of the archetypal cockney – inquisitive (a long, apparently probing nose assisted him in this), quick-witted, brilliant improvisation when trouble threatened, and ready to face difficulties with an aggression that was always obviously compounded of equal quantities of bluff, self-reliance, and desperation’. His big breakthrough came on the stage towards the end of the war with
Worm’s Eye View
. This comedy by R. F. Delderfield about the sufferings of aircraftmen billeted in a Lancashire seaside boarding house ran in London for 1,700 performances, and Shiner not only played the lead-swinging Private Sam Porter but was also director. A film version appeared in 1951 and for the most part was either ignored or patronised by the more upmarket critics. ‘In the film,’ thought
The Times
, ‘the simple farce is perhaps even broader, heartier, and more obvious, but it is a fine distinction.’ Commercially, however, it came up trumps, ‘a real money-spinner’ and ‘the turn-up of the century’, according to
Kinematograph Weekly
, which in its review of the year declared that ‘it made many a more costly British film look sickly at the box-office’. Soon afterwards, Shiner starred as Sergeant Bell in the similarly farcical
Reluctant Heroes
, which according to
KW
’s review of 1952 was ‘frightened out of the West End by the critics’ before again proving ‘record-breaking’ and one of the ‘big money-takers’ of the year. That was the peak of Shiner’s career, but later in the fifties there were parts as Alf Tubbe in
Dry Rot
, Marine Ogg in
Girls at Sea
and Gunner Slocum in
Operation Bullshine
.36

It was not just cinema that was poised for a great fall, but also live Variety. Yet at the time, like cinema, it still seemed a sure-fire formula, nicely evoked by a local paper’s favourable review in September 1953 of the ‘Celebration Rag’ show twice nightly at the Coventry Hippodrome. Top of the bill was Donald Peers ‘singing the songs the radio audiences enjoy and managing to carry off the most banal rhyme with a kind of infectious enthusiasm’; other acts included the Tanner Sisters (‘zip through their numbers’), Georges and Lennette (‘perform nonchalantly on a high wire’), and Sonny Burke and Jimmy Clitheroe (‘an original conjuring act that throws fresh light on the ever-ready volunteer from the audience’), the midget not yet radio’s ‘The Clitheroe Kid’. Best of all, there was Jimmy James, with his ‘sly way with comedy’, for instance ‘as the drunk with wife trouble, the chap-who-knows-his-way-about, the man who can tell you esoteric things about the fish and chip business’, so that ‘towards the end of the evening’ he had ‘only to lift a massive eyebrow and we laughed’.

Variety sometimes took place in the fewish surviving Victorian music halls, such as the Queen’s in Poplar High Street or the Metropolitan in Edgware Road (where the young, not-yet-screaming David Sutch watched two-hour, twelve-act shows ‘ranging from singers and comics to fire-eaters, magicians and trick cyclists’) or the Queen’s behind Glasgow Cross, ‘small and profoundly proletarian’, in one observer’s words. More often, though, it took its turn in theatres such as the Bristol Empire, the Brighton Hippodrome or the dreaded – by southern comedians – Glasgow Empire. The joy, perhaps as much in memory as at the time, was in the variousness: the magician Ali Bongo (‘The Shriek of Araby’), the illusionist Cingallee, the pigeon act Hamilton Conrad, the animal and bird impersonator Percy (‘I Travel the Road’) Edwards, the drag act Ford and Sheen, the mind-reader The Amazing Fogel, the lady whistler Eva Kane, the male impersonator Hetty King, the foot juggler Levanda, the comedy acrobats Manley and Austin, the rope-spinner and raconteur Tex McLeod, the yodelling accordionist Billy Moore, the human spider Valantyne Napier, the mental telepathists The Piddingtons, the novelty xylophonist Reggie Redcliffe, the speciality dancer Bunty St Clare, the pianist Semprini, the aereliste Olga Varona, and many, many others – inhabitants of a lost world.37

What conclusively destroyed that world was of course television, but it was not just television. It was also the coming to the halls – for good short-term commercial reasons in terms of male bums on seats, but with ultimately disastrous consequences in terms of family entertainment – of nudity, something inconceivable as yet on television. It was admittedly nudity of a very specific, controlled sort: the Lord Chamberlain’s rules insisted on the girl or girls staying completely motionless, prompting the well-known revue number, ‘It’s all right to be nude, but if it moves, it’s rude’. Variety’s early nudes included Phyllis Dixey (the ‘Peek-a-Boo Girl’), ‘Jane’ (based on the
Daily Mirror
cartoon and usually accompanied by her little dachshund, Fritzi) and Blondie (‘Godiva’) Haigh. A key figure in the rise of the touring revue with a Nude Show at its heart was Paul Raymond, the future ‘King of Soho’. Topless girls posing in saucy tableaux were his speciality, and by the early 1950s his show had, an obituary recounted, ‘evolved into the
Festival of Nudes
(a cheeky wink at the Festival of Britain) and then
Moving Nudes
, where naked lovelies were perched high in the air on precarious wooden platforms’. The poor man’s Raymond was Terry Cantor, whose touring revue (
All Shapes and Surprises
, playing at the Palace Theatre, Preston) was profiled by Trevor Philpott in early 1954. ‘Is it what the customers want?’ he asked rhetorically after describing how the chorus girls took off their dressing gowns to present what had been announced as ‘a tableau in stark reality entitled “The Kill”’. ‘The box office says so,’ was his answer. ‘The show was losing steadily until the nudes were brought in, three years ago. Pantomimes and “family-shows” are having leaner times, year by year; but “Jane,” doing a strip-tease, filled this same theatre in November.’ Philpott reflected that it was ‘a sad thing to think on’, but the last word went to Cantor: ‘My show’s got to suit my audiences. We give the public what they ask for.’38

The rapid decline of Variety later in the 1950s would be no laughing matter for its front-rank comedians, not necessarily equipped to make the transition to the small screen. Each had his (occasionally her) own following and distinctive style. Max Miller, no longer quite the dominant force he had been before and during the war, was still the original cheeky chappie, the ‘eternal commercial traveller’, in Roy Hudd’s words, whose art was that of ‘suggestion, innuendo, the unspoken’ and who seldom ventured north of Birmingham; the double act of Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss (the latter as the snappily dressed, brilliantined know-all mercilessly tormenting his gormless partner) was the bridge between Flanagan and Allen before the war and Morecambe and Wise from the 1960s; Tommy Trinder specialised in the brash, abrasive, cockney putdown; Nat Jackley’s greatest asset was his rubberneck; Dave Morris played long seasons in Blackpool depicting in drag a domineering local landlady; Freddie Frinton’s calling card was his ‘Dinner For One, Please, James’ sketch, with Frinton as the bumbling manservant to an autocratic old lady; Doris Droy, famous for her impersonation of a drunken office cleaner, was the loud-voiced doyenne of the Queen’s in Glasgow; Eddie Gray (‘Monsewer’), one of the Crazy Gang, had on his own a line in the burlesque that anticipated Tommy Cooper. Some generalisations are possible. Variety humour combined identity-reinforcing macro-conservatism with a streak of anti-puritanical micro-subversiveness; was strongly working-class in both manner and appeal; and ultimately, for good or ill, was profoundly escapist. M-O in 1950 found that music-hall humour was not only little different in subject matter from ten years earlier – with most jokes still being about sex, ill-health (often accidents) and domestic affairs (including mothers-in-law), and very few topical and/or political ones – but that the jokes themselves were almost word-for-word and largely unchanged.39 It was, in short, a humour that still spoke to its audience.

The wireless version, more or less following strict BBC guidelines, was a somewhat tamer affair, but presumably not wholly different. Catchphrases proliferated in radio comedy, including ‘I thought, “Right monkey!” ’ for Salford’s Al Read, less escapist than most and hailed by the
Daily Mirror
in 1951 (the year of his first series) as ‘the pieman who has become the white hope of Northern comedy’. It was a justified hope, as Read over the years rolled out in his show a succession of recognisable characters from everyday working-class life, such as (to quote Hudd) ‘the wife in the kitchen, the “know-all” decorator/football fan/car park attendant, and the embarrassing small son’. Or, in the apt words of Alan Bennett, an early fan: ‘Radio was at the kitchen sink long before Arnold Wesker.’ Read’s counterpart from the north-east was Bobby Thompson, who following his successful stints in
Wot Cheor Geordie!
, had from 1953 his own series,
Bob’s Your Uncle!
, transmitted on the North of England Home Service and subtitled ‘A running commentary on the wife and hard times of a plain working man, with music and songs for the silver lining’. A sketch from an early show, called ‘Buying a New Suit’, began with Thompson’s recreation of a husband-and-wife meeting of minds:

I gets me cap on for the club – then it starts!

‘Just look at the mess ye are! That suit’s an absolute disgrace! All the money ye keep out of your pay ye’d think ye’d get yourself a new ’un.’

‘Why,’ I says, ‘don’t take on pet. It’s all right to go to the club in.’

‘The club? That’s where ye got all them stains, spillin’ that muck ye drink.’

‘Thaa’s wrong there, Phyllis,’ I says. ‘Beer’s awer dear to spill.’ I says, ‘Lend’s a quid to go to the club, an’ when I come back thaa can guess how much change I has!’ Why, she blows up then . . .