There was no television in our house until 1966. Consequently I grew up during the 1950s listening to the radio. Our radios were frequently my grandparents’ cast-offs, apart from the wartime austerity model we owned for a short while. They often had an intricate design around the speaker, and the waveband display included strange and exotic place names such as Athlone, Hilversum, Riga and Zagreb. With their glowing valves, these radios always seemed to take an irritatingly long time to warm up before any sound came out and even then would crackle alarmingly as the volume or waveband was adjusted. The radio came to be my window on the world as well as a supplement to my early education. I listened avidly to the Light Programme with its comedy and wide range of music and while I might not have always completely understood the humour, my imagination painted a picture in my mind of how particular radio artists looked. Every week I eagerly anticipated Hancock’s Half Hour with Bill Kerr addressing Tony Hancock as ‘Tub’ and The Navy Lark’s Jon Pertwee shouting ‘Everybody Down!’ prior to HMS Troutbridge suffering some navigational calamity. While home from school for lunch, I looked forward to the comedian Ken Platt opening his act for Workers’ Playtime in his flat Northern accent with his catchphrase—when it was still de rigueur for comedians to have a catchphrase—‘I won’t take my coat off I’m not stopping!’ I must also have been among the relatively few youngsters who remained devoted to Children’s Hour on the radio as it gradually yielded to both television and the BBC’s cuts and changes of the early 1960s. When alone, I would experiment with tuning the radio and discovered the delights of the Home Service where I listened to the repeats of the week’s comedy programmes I had missed on the Light Programme . The Third Programme too nurtured my interest in serious music and the theatre. On Sundays my parents cooked lunch against a background of the Light Programme’s Two-Way Family Favourites. Later we ate to the accompaniment of the boisterous sounds of a British institution of the 1950s, the Billy Cotton Band Show—Sunday was unthinkable without it—followed by Educating Archie, Ray’s A Laugh or some other Variety Department comedy production. For me these programmes were highly amusing and I never gave a moment’s thought to the organisation behind them or the producers such as Jacques Brown, Charles Maxwell and Roy Speer who were simply names mentioned at the end of each programme. Fifty years later this concerned me much more.
While at the BBC’s Written Archive Centre researching BBC radio comedy in the post -war period, as well as exploring other primary and secondary source material, I became aware that there had been no specific enquiry into the history of the BBC’s Variety Department. Gradually, the Centre’s pink folders revealed long-forgotten personalities and brought to life scenes and situations dating from the earliest years of the BBC. The same names appeared in documents repeatedly as did their sometimes intriguing job title abbreviations. HV and HLE (S) were straightforward; HAR and AHLMP (S) needed a little more thought but HCat, ASESBOB and MOLE(S)—the latter I subsequently interviewed—required considerably more decoding.1 People such as the Misses Absalom and Lipscomb, Gale Pedrick, M.M. Dewar, Pat Dixon, C.F. (‘Mike’) Meehan and Patrick Newman to name but a few, soon began to feel like old friends as they all went about their daily business whether it was informing, requesting, creating, discussing, resolving, placating, complaining, proposing, responding or submitting.
The title of this book is taken partly from the popular but long defunct children’s comic Radio Fun which featured the fictitious adventures of the day’s radio stars in strip cartoon form. The book focuses largely on the history and work of the BBC’s Variety Department from the formation of the BBC in 1922 until 1967. The Department devised, developed and put together radio light entertainment programmes, generally weekly, many of which went on to become firmly embedded in the nation’s cultural psyche. It was a hive of continual human creative interaction which, despite its myriad problems, simply got on with the business of entertaining the nation on a daily basis despite, for example, frequent studio chaos, financial stringency, eccentric characters—often both the producers and the artists—and repeatedly berating memoranda from senior management. It always worked to a very tight schedule.
This book is neither a history of radio artists nor of light entertainment programmes although both feature strongly as they were an integral part of the make-up of the Department. Instead it is a narrative history exploring along chronological lines the workings of, tensions within and the impact of BBC policies on the programme -making department which generated the organisation’s largest audiences. It provides an insight into inter alia key events, personalities, programmes, internal politics and trends in popular entertainment, censorship and anti-American policy as they individually or collectively affected the Department. It examines how the Department’s programmes became markers in the daily and weekly lives of millions of listeners and helped shape the nation’s listening habits when radio was the dominant source of domestic entertainment. The book includes and explores events and topics which, while not directly forming part of the Variety Department’s history, nevertheless intersected with or had an impact on it. Such topics include the BBC’s attitude to jazz and rock and roll, the arrival of television with its impact on radio, the pirate radio stations and the Popular Music and Gramophone Departments, both of whom worked closely with the Variety Department. The book also demonstrates that it was possible for creativity to consistently thrive and develop within the highly bureaucratised environment of the BBC, despite pressures from above to conform to the organisation’s often conservative norms. The Variety Department was a prime example of this phenomenon. On many occasions senior management intervened to ‘rein in’ the Department whether it was in terms of, for example, programme presentation, choice of artist, producer or content. Frequently, after much harrumphing from above, programmes which caused some displeasure to senior management went ahead with only minor changes to appease them, or even none at all.
The BBC as a company and later public corporation always provided entertainment in its schedules. Variety was one of the main sources of early programme content. Variety, or vaudeville in America , was a form of public entertainment in a theatre setting comprising a series of separate acts or ‘turns’. It evolved from its predecessor, the music hall, which dated from mid-Victorian Britain and provided entertainment, largely comic and chorus songs, to an audience seated at tables and chairs with food and drink being served throughout the performance. From the late nineteenth century, purpose-built variety theatres began to appear in cities and towns of any size. They were highly decorative both inside and out, had a proscenium arch, plush interiors and fixed seating, but without meals being served in the auditorium. Their arrival, together with changes in the law, marked the decline of the music hall from 1914 onwards. A variety show would include a selection of performers such as acrobats, animal acts, comedians, dancers, instrumentalists, jugglers, magicians, mime artists, singers and ‘speciality’ acts such as mind readers or whistlers. The programme would typically be played twice nightly and often run for a week, after which the acts would disperse to other venues across the country. Variety entertainment reached its zenith during the inter-war years, but its demise began with the arrival of its most serious rival, the talking cinema. With the expansion of the television audience, the variety theatre, as a type of public entertainment, was practically extinct by 1960.2
In the BBC’s early years, this established cultural form provided a source of material for popular entertainment programmes with their typical spread of talent. While there were practical reasons why the mime artist and juggler, which relied on visual impact, were excluded, there were examples of tap dancers being accommodated. Indeed, Music Hall and Palace of Varieties, which aimed to capture variety’s atmosphere, were among the Department’s most popular programmes for many years. When the BBC’s Variety Department was created in June 1933, its title reflected the diverse range of public entertainment genres then currently popular including revue, concert party and light opera, none of which would have been out of place in variety theatres. The Department came about through opposition, competition, criticism and need. Opposition came from the entertainment industry which regarded radio with deep suspicion as a means of depleting its audiences rather than as an opportunity to popularise its artists. Competition emanated from European continental radio stations who threatened the BBC’s monopoly and audience. Press criticism highlighted the BBC’s shortcomings in providing popular entertainment, while the need to increase variety programme output resulted from the formation of the BBC Empire Service in 1932. The BBC assumed that the majority of listeners would choose a diet of mainly popular entertainment. However, John Reith, the BBC’s first General Manager and later Managing Director, felt that if the radio audience were continually fed entertainment, they would soon grow tired of it. He considered that the medium should be used for the greater good by bringing into every home, irrespective of class or means, the best that had ever been thought or said in the world. He therefore set out to give the radio audience what he considered they needed rather than what they thought they wanted and to provide listeners with the full range of output on one radio network in order to surprise them with topics they never knew they would find engaging.
The establishment of the Variety Department not only marked the beginning of the process to professionalise the BBC’s approach to the production of light entertainment programmes, but also gave clear evidence of the Corporation’s commitment to the provision of popular entertainment for the nation. The BBC now began to create something distinct—its own form of popular culture. One of the first steps was to initiate the process of reducing its dependence on the entertainment industry by developing its own ‘radiogenic’ stars—artists who had the unique ability to entertain and communicate with an unseen audience. Once the Department was operating, producers began to think more critically about how light entertainment on radio could be original, effective and better suited to the medium as they set about creating the first generation of programmes for the listener. These early attempts brought about innovative programmes such as Café Colette which, although broadcast from a London radio studio, transported listeners to Paris for a programme of live continental dance music. They also included In Town Tonight , the earliest chat show; Monday Night at Seven, which comprised four separate items; and Band Waggon , an early part-comedy programme in magazine format. It was during this period that the Variety Department established itself within the BBC and in the mind of the listeners and helped to make radio the leading provider of domestic entertainment in inter-war Britain. It was one of the first programme-making departments to embrace Listener Research as a valuable tool in determining audience size and preferences to inform programme-making . Successive Directors of Variety drew all this activity together. Each was a powerful and influential high-profile figure who, behind the scenes, grappled with the problems of having to find new artists , develop new programme ideas, source scripted material, answer the radio critics, work to tight schedules and justify the Department’s actions to senior management.
The war severely tested the Variety Department and it was arguably its finest hour. It successfully carried the crucial dual responsibilities of morale-boosting by entertaining the nation at home and forces overseas and helping to ensure industrial output and productivity were consistently high. This was achieved under extremely difficult conditions while having to contend with the effects of two evacuations—with their accompanying transport and communication problems—shortages of talented staff brought about by war service and the need to consistently devise programmes to keep people cheerful. The BBC’s strict pre-war broadcasting standards were maintained. This involved the imposition of tough policies on programme censorship and an uneasy co-existence with American light entertainment with its potential to affect British culture. Wartime brought about important and irreversible changes to broadcasting. Significant breaks with Reithian philosophy came with the establishment of an additional single radio network, the Forces Programme, designed for a specific audience and purely for popular output. This led to the contraction of the BBC’s restrictive Sunday broadcasting policy.
Variety emerged from the war in a state of low morale having burnt itself out creatively over the previous six years. A new Director heralded a period of renewal in which the Department discovered and established new artists and writers. The process was in full flower by the early 1950s when the radio comedy series proper—particularly the situation comedy format—had become well established. However, just when radio was demonstrating exactly what it could do, the scene was set for a decline in listening from the mid-1950s due to the rapid emergence of television as the dominant domestic entertainment medium. By 1967 the process was complete. All radio programme-making departments were a...