Christmas Minus Fifty: Part Two

 

BBC and ITV square up to win the ratings battle for Christmas Day... fifty years ago.

Last time, we visited the TV schedules from fifty years ago, and found both ITV and BBC in reasonably traditional form. Films, stage spectacles and musical items dominated on both networks, while the only offering that would endure to the modern era was one of the most traditional: a ghost story. Not a single sitcom was in evidence, and soap opera had still to make its undesirable entry to the BBC schedules. On both networks, the big days for populist festive fare were Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Although television was already firmly established in most British homes, it’s interesting to reflect that, for many people, family activities were probably still favoured over the television at the festive season. By 1974, in that year’s edition of The Likely Lads, Bob Ferris reflects that on ‘Christmas night, full of food’, all he wanted to do was to ‘sit down and watch the box’. Times were changing, and Christmas TV would become an increasingly dominant part of the whole festive experience during the 1970s and onwards to the present day.

On BBC1, Christmas Day 1972 got started at 9.30am with an item called This is Christmas Morning, about which the Radio Times compiler waxed lyrical without actually telling us very much. At 10.00 Mr. Benn popped up (he did, after all, live in Festive Road), followed by a news summary. A Christmas Service and Christmas Appeal were followed at 11.30 by A Stocking Full of Stars, a comedy and cartoon compilation for children, co-hosted by avuncular favourites Roy Castle and Michael Aspel, and broadcast from the National Children's Home at Harpenden. Nothing so far in the schedule to offend modern sensibilities… but not so fast, because at 1.30pm came the unaccountably popular Black and White Minstrel Show. Now as then, we’ll skip very quickly on to the next item, Top of the Pops 72, but we can’t linger long here either. By this time established as a Christmas tradition, TOTP would always feature a round-up of the year’s hits during the festive season, most often on Christmas Day afternoon. Unfortunately, one of the two presenters is even more unwelcome in the modern era than the George Mitchell Minstrels…

At 3.00pm came the traditional Christmas broadcast by the Queen, a broadcasting tradition that was then in its fortieth year, having started on radio in 1932 before television took up the baton in 1957. I was never specially interested in the Royal Family or the Queen (other than as a piece of philatelic iconography), but our mum always liked to watch the Queen’s Speech, so I’m sure we left the TV on after Top of the Pops. It was almost certainly turned off or turned over before the next item, Billy Smart’s Christmas Circus. I wouldn’t have been tempted back for the next item either, a televised version of the pantomime Dick Whittington, recorded at the Wimbledon Theatre and starring the unlikely combination of Dick Emery and Peter Noone… to say nothing of Stratford Johns. The news at 5.45 was followed by a new Christmas Day TV tradition in the form of Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game. By this time on Christmas Day, our mum was usually poised to unveil a huge cold collation that would see us through the evening. I well recall filling up plates at the table and taking them into the front room to eat in front of the telly.

If the stars of comedy and variety had been notable by their absence up to now, then the next item on the schedule would make up for it. Christmas Night With the Stars was a well established TV tradition, dating back to 1958, and this year’s instalment, hosted by the Two Ronnies, featured specially recorded festive snippets from current comedies including The Goodies, The Liver Birds and Dad’s Army. It was to be the last such compilation until the tradition was briefly revived in 1994. The big draw of the day was undoubtedly The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show at 8.15.

A big movie was, of course, inevitable, and this year’s offering was neil Simon’s comedy, Barefoot in the Park, in its 1967 adaptation for the screen starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. This ran until 11pm when tradition reared its resistible head with a festive edition of old-time music hall nostalgia in the form of The Good Old Days. Finally, to round off the day’s viewing, Z Cars and Kelloggs Special ‘K’ stalwart John Slater told viewers A Christmas Story (the Radio Times offers no clue as to what it might have been).

Over on BBC2, the Christmas Day schedules found room for  Play School, kicking off broadcasts at 11.00am, before a cartoon film with music, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, The Point. Other items during the day included the documentary film strand Look, Stranger, and a retrospective of the year’s golfing action which had been dominated by names including Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino. The Queen at 3.00 was followed by Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Technicolor production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Going into the evening, we find an edition of Call My Bluff and a wordless film, The Stallion, relating the adventures of an escaped horse on Dartmoor, before the mid-evening schedule settled into full-on BBC2 mode with La Sylphide, a film from French television of a romantic ballet.

Arguably the best item on offer across all three channels this Christmas was another ghost story, albeit one dressed up in modern garb. Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape would go on to acquire legendary status, and provided a notable TV role for Michael Bryant who had just guest starred in a memorable episode of Colditz (see my earlier blog for more detail). Athough to modern viewers the story is marred by mysogyny and stereotypical characterisations, the core idea of traumatic happenings being somehow ‘recorded’ in their immediate environment still has resonance today and is often revisited by similarly paranormal productions.

The schedule was rounded off by a repeat of yesterday’s America, and a special edition of The Dick Cavett Show featuring legendary song-and-dance man Fred Astaire.

Meanwhile, over on the commercial channel, Christmas Day had got started with a concert of carols from the Royal Festival Hall, followed by a festive edition of the long forgotten cut-out cartoon series The Enchanted House. At 9.30, viewers were treated to the sight of ‘Leslie Crowther in a children’s ward’ (as referenced in the 1974 Christmas edition of The Likely Lads). ‘A Merry Morning’ was something of an ITV tradition, and this year’s programme came from the King Edward VII Orthopadeic Hospital, Sheffield, where ukulele man Alan Randall added to the festive fun. A Christmas edition of film magazine Clapperboard was followed by a Christmas Morning Service, taking programmes up to twelve noon, when the 1939 cartoon film Gulliver’s Travels was given an airing.

There was to be no escape from circuses, with ITV offering The Big Top at 1.15, with Billy Smart’s big rivals, Chipperfields, providing the acts under the ringmastership of David ‘Diddy’ Hamilton. A wildlife film, The Flight of the Snow Geese, straddled the hour from 2.00pm till 3.00pm when the Queen’s Speech also appeared. Afternoon entertainment was provided by the Morecambe and Wise 1966 cinema vehicle That Riviera Touch, which I remember being promoted quite heavily (ITV would finally bring the duo up to date when they decamped to Thames later in the decade). We certainly watched this before bailing out at 4.50 when Opportunity Knocks presented a 45-minute Christmas special. Hughie Green on top of turkey and christmas pudding was really too much to stomach.

Things took a turn for the better after the ITN News at 5.35, with ITV presenting its own comedic line up, with the All-Star Comedy Carnival. Scheduled deliberately to clash with the BBC alternative, viewers could watch one or the other, or perhaps shuttle between the two (this was, of course, before the days of the remote control). At 7.30 came the one and only soap opera in the Christmas schedules, in the form of Coronation Street, of which the TVTimes listing says: ‘at last the 1940’s (sic) show’. I’ve no idea what that might have been, but it sounds a far cry from the life-and-death-drama and shout-fests that the soaps currently insist on dishing up on Christmas Day. A festive Comedians followed at 8.00 before the evening’s big film, 1966’s Khartoum starring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. The ITN News cut into it at 10.15, while the evening was rounded off with The Love Goddesses, a film documentary about some of the iconic females of cinema.

It’s interesting to reflect that, of all the festive offerings on television this year, very few have endured into the modern era. The most often repeated (albeit mostly in truncated or clip form) must be The Morecambe and Wise Show, whilst the two comedy carnivals have, miraculously survived. The BBC edition was rebroadcast in recent years, whilst ITV’s is available on DVD. Other years are much less well represented in the archive. The compilations were never repeated, and seem to have been considered as disposable items, good for one year only, perhaps explaining how so many of them came to be junked. Back in 1972, full-length festive episodes of contemporary comedy series were much harder to find, and it’s notable to see no such examples on repeat as would increasingly become the case in later years. One should also reflect that, despite the preponderance of colour movies in the schedules, many (including ourselves) were still viewing in monochrome. The cost of a colour set in 1972 was £225, equivalent to over £3,000 today, and such expensive luxuries were well outside the budget of many families.

Those old schedules also tell us that Christmas television was a long way from being set in stone, and both networks were still very much feeling their way into the future, propping up their festive line-ups with reliable entertainment staples like films, circuses and variety. I would argue, though, that despite the huge array of channels available to modern viewers, there is less choice and diversity of content, and far too many formats and programmes look to have come to stay, seemingly forever. Could the BBC conceive of Christmas today without the obligatory staples of Strictly Come Dancing, EastEnders, Call the Midwife, Michael McIntyre et al? I doubt it. Programmes like these have become the schedulers’ crutch and will likely endure for however long ‘real time’ broadcast television has left to live. Personally, I’ll give it less than ten years. Who knows what we’ll be watching by then… or even how.

Next time, we’ll move onto 1972’s Boxing Day highlights.

Christmas Minus Fifty

 

A look back at the pop cultural highlights of Christmas 1972

As we clock up yet another Christmas, it’s interesting to reflect on how many of the old chestnuts still roasting on the open fire of popular culture weren’t around this time half a century ago. Oft-repeated Christmas episodes of The Likely Lads, Porridge, The Good Life, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em and even Steptoe and Son had not yet been produced. On the radio, Christmas music lay as thinly on the ground as powdered snow: no Slade, Wizzard, Wham, Band Aid, Jona Lewie, Macca, Greg Lake, Pretenders: absolutely nothing existed from what has since become the default pop soundtrack to Christmas. So what, then, were we watching, and listening to on that long ago Christmas of 1972?

Let’s start with Christmas Eve, on BBC1, where broadcasting did not begin until 10am. Programmes kicked off in traditional festive flavour with a Christmas Eve mass from, of all places, Kings’ Heath, Birmingham. This was followed by a cartoon rendition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (illustrated, according to the Radio Times, ‘in the style of the original … by “Phiz”’. So far, so festive. 

Next up was a travelogue to Jerusalem (try finding anything like that in this year’s schedule), followed by a concert by the Vienna Boys’ Choir. So far, the day’s television could easily have hailed from several decades earlier, as did the next offering, Robert Youngson’s silent movie compilation, The Golden Age of Comedy. Unfortunately, my 1972 diary had fizzled out during the summer holidays, so I have no record of whether we sat down to watch this, but I suspect we probably did. We may have left the set on for Mary, Mungo and Midge: at eleven years old, I was rather too old for such nursery fare, but I adored Johnny Pearson’s theme music. At the time, I imagined it to have been written specially for the series: only much later did I discover that all the music cues were selections from the KPM library.

We certainly didn’t stay around for the next offering, Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. The BBC always tended to include Disney items in their Christmas schedules, but they bored me rigid. I can well remember a subsequent year’s Christmas Eve television including Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase, which was promoted so heavily you’d have thought it was a Hollywood blockbuster. As if this wasn’t enough, there was still more Disney to come at 5.20, in the form of Disney Time. I found this kind of clip compilation somewhat more digestible, but history has not dealt kindly with its antipodean presenter. Between these two festive wedges of Disney was sandwiched another travelogue item, Around the World in Eighty Minutes, described in the Radio Times as ‘a Guided Tour of our Spectacular Planet with Joyce Grenfell, Kenneth Allsop, David Attenborough and Tony Soper’. 

The news at five past six was followed by a twenty-minute film about children with muscular dystrophy. Again, it’s hard to imagine anything like this featuring on prime time Christmas BBC1 these days, where the likes of EastEnders and the merit-free Mrs. Brown hold sway. A respectful mood was maintained across the next two items, namely ‘the story of Jesus told in pictures’ and the obligatory Carols with Kings’ College Choir (almost the only item on offer that can be found in this year’s schedules).

Having done its festive public service duty, the BBC then kicked back and devoted the bulk of the evening’s viewing to a broadcast of the 1961 movie West Side Story, almost certainly its first outing on British television. The main news summary at 9.50pm was followed by an Omnibus profile of Judy Garland before what was for me the highlight of the evening, A Ghost Story for Christmas. Lawrence Gordon Clarke’s film of A Warning to the Curious was only the second in what would become a recurring strand of festive adapatations derived mostly from the works of M.R. James. I definitely stayed up to watch this, having seen the very atmospheric promotional trailer for it which had been aired several times in the run up to broadcast. This demonic offering was offset by the Midnight Eucharist, followed by closedown.

So much for Christmas Eve on BBC1. But what did the other two channels have to offer as alternatives? On BBC2, programmes didn’t start until 4.30pm, with an hour long film, Money at Work: The Poverty of Nations, examining how British aid money was being spent in under-developed countries. Other items during the evening included a festive quiz, Christmas! What’s It All About?, an episode from Alastair Cooke’s ongoing series America, the panel show Face the Music, a play, a Spike Milligan offering, and best of all by a very long way, Alan Bennett’s film A Day Out. This elegaic offering focused on a cycling club outing on a summer Sunday before the First World War, and featured fine performances from a cast of established and up-and-coming character actors. A very young Anthony Andrews appeared briefly, in a cast that included James Cossins, Brian Glover, Fred Feast and Philip Locke.

Christmas on ITV was, inevitably, a much more populist affair: one has only to glance at the cover of the double issue of TVTimes to get a flavour of what was in store. Christmas Eve started traditionally enough, with a Service of Lessons and Carols at 9.30am, followed incongruously by a repeat of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. I was never one to miss an episode, so I can say with certainty that I saw this. I’m not sure if we hung around for the festive edition of pop show Lift Off that followed at 11.00, but if we did, then the next offering was a definite cue to switch off the set: Stars at Christmas With Songs at Christmas featured an eclectic line-up of mostly venerable performers including Frank Ifield, The Beverley Sisters, Bob Monkhouse, and someone called Leila Khalil Utshant (who was neither a terrorist nor a song by the Teardrop Explodes). The archives were raided for the next item on the bill, the 1952 feature film Ivanhoe, which in spite of its age, boasted a production in Technicolor. 

Christmas Eve being a Sunday, ITV’s generic football offering, Star Soccer, filled its customary slot at 2.15, ahead of a song and dance revue, Christmas Company, with a bill that managed to find room for the Mike Sammes Singers, Jack Parnell and his Orchestra (ubiquitous TV performers of the era), and current pop chart one-hit wonders, Lieutenant Pigeon, whose hit 'Mouldy Old Dough' had been roosting at number one during October and November. Sunday also meant The Golden Shot, which by this point in its run was being compered by comedian Norman Vaughan, whose inept handling of contestants has to be seen to be believed. This was followed by Sleeping Beauty On Ice (whose TVTimes listing mysteriously includes Police 5 presenter Shaw Taylor!). Further spectacle followed with a staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I’ve always hated musicals, especially those with Biblical storylines, so I think it’s safe to say that we were either tuned to BBC1 or, more likely, visiting relatives, since I distinctly remember seeing part of the evening’s big feature film, Gigi (1958), on our aunt and uncle’s colour television. Elsewhere in the schedule, ITV’s evening line-up found room for a children’s carol competition (hosted by Alan Partridge inspiration Fred Dineage), a musical special presided over by comic entertainer and pianist Victor Borge, and an Aquarius looking at the Christmas story. In common with BBC1, ITV also featured a midnight mass as an end to the day’s programmes.

What’s remarkable about the line-up on both channels is the lack of festive specials from the big comedy and entertainment names of the era, which both channels were keeping in reserve until the following day. And contrasting today’s schedules, where brand-new drama and comedy tend to dominate prime time on Christmas Eve, both ITV and BBC1 took the ‘easy’ option of filling their mid evening schedules with feature films. Of the two networks, it’s BBC’s offerings that have fared best down the years, with A Warning to the Curious having been broadcast in relatively recent years, as well as featuring on a DVD collection; Alan Bennett’s A Day Out would also enjoy several repeat broadcasts and is still available to view as part of a DVD collection. Of ITV’s schedule, pretty well the only items one could select to watch today are Captain Scarlet, Ivanhoe and Gigi.

Next time, we’ll consider what Christmas Day had to offer.

Tweedledum at Fifty

 

It was Colditz's best episode: could it be the best episode of any series?

In all the pantheon of television, spanning over eight decades, can there possibly be a ‘best ever episode of everything?’ If there is, then it must be a matter of personal choice and, inevitably, selection. No one can have seen every episode of every series ever produced. For me, though, there has long since been a clear candidate, an outstanding example of hour-long drama that beats pretty well anything else I can put up against it. It’s an episode of the BBC’s Colditz, and it turns fifty this week. After half a century, it is still staggeringly impressive.

Tweedledum was episode ten in an initial series of fifteen, and was first broadcast at 9.25pm on Thursday, 21 December 1972. It tells the story of an RAF officer’s attempt to escape from the infamous POW camp by achieving repatriation. In order to do so, he decides to feign insanity. John Brason’s script was based on genuine (and successful) attempts to do the same thing by actual POWs in the real Oflag IVC, better known as Colditz. The story relates how Wing Commander George Marsh (Michael Bryant) uses his student experience working in an asylum as the raw material for an audacious and dangerous escape attempt. With only the British medic (Geoffrey Palmer) and a select few fellow inmates in on the secret, Marsh duly sets out to present himself as a paranoid schizophrenic, knowing that once he embarks on his deception, he will have to live the role twenty four hours a day, convincing not only his German captors, but his fellow prisoners.

Suspecting that Marsh may be faking, Security Officer Ullman (Hans Meyer) details one of his men with personal experience of insanity to keep close watch on Marsh as his mental state unravels.

The episode also finds room to depict another genuine escape attempt, by a French officer who audaciously ‘leap-frogged’ over the wire in the exercise compound, scoring a ‘home run’ (a feat achieved in real life by Captain Pierre Mairesse-Lebrun). But it’s Marsh’s feigned insanity that is the heart of the story, and Bryant’s BAFTA-nominated performance in the role that make this such an outstanding episode. Tweedledum is arguably the finest piece of acting Bryant ever gave on screen; he ends up convincing not only the Germans and his fellow officers, but the audience. I’d stick my neck out and say that if there has ever been a better piece of acting anywhere in the history of television, then I’ve yet to see it.

As the German officer detailed to keep watch on Marsh, Bernard Kay is almost equally impressive: his character, Hartwig, has a brother in an asylum, and at first he is convinced Marsh is faking. His conversion from scepticism to total empathy provides a moving contrast to Bryant’s study in psychosis. Kay, whose own father died in an asylum, must have felt a special resonance with the storyline.

Despite having only a handful of lines of dialogue, Bryant walks away with the show, stealing it wholesale from the series’ nominal stars Robert Wagner and David McCallum. As McCallum’s character Simon observes, Marsh saves ‘the best for last’: for when he is finally accepted for repatriation, he stages an emotional last stand, refusing to leave the castle which he now insists is his home. This is perhaps the strongest scene in the entire 50 minutes.

A recurring musical motif crops up throughout the episode, as Marsh persistently plays a 78rpm record of JS Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, an elaborate, intricate piece of harpsichord virtuosity that memorably symbolises his inner turmoil. It also serves to illustrate the manic, obsessive quality of Marsh’s ‘illness’ as he repeatedly plays the record over and over, to the annoyance of his fellow inmates.

I came a few weeks late to the Colditz series – having been recommended to it by a school friend with an abiding interest in World War II – and Tweedledum was amongst the first episodes I saw on that original broadcast. It was also one of just six episodes from Colditz’ first series to be given a repeat broadcast, six months later. Curiously, whilst the entire second series was repeated in 1975, it was not until the 1990s that the first series would be repeated in full, on UK Gold. In 2010, the series finally made it onto DVD. During that first run, Colditz quickly became a must-see, and I even went so far as to read Pat Reid’s original books, republished to tie in with the broadcasts. They were, in fact, the first ‘grown up’ paperbacks I ever owned.

Tweedledum would eventually come to stand apart from the rest of Colditz: in 1981, it was chosen for a one-off repeat broadcast in a midweek slot that was given over to random repeats of unrelated hour long dramas (other examples included Softly Softly: Task Force and The Man from UNCLE), and it came up for an unprecedented fourth broadcast during a retrospective season of archive television in 1986. I’d managed to record the 1981 screening, and for many years, Tweedledum was the only example of Colditz I had available to watch. Accordingly, I have probably now seen it more than ten times, yet for all those repeats, it never loses its power.

Michael Bryant would become a favourite actor of mine, albeit a face rarely seen on the small screen, and perhaps more at home in the theatre. He can be glimpsed in the latter context in an uncredited appearance in the film The Deadly Affair, a 1967 adaptation of John Le Carre’s Call For the Dead. But after Tweedledum, my personal favourite Bryant performance was in the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas of 1974, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, which cast him as a curious academic delving unwisely into the tale of a reputed alchemist. Just this year, viewers had a rare chance to see Bryant starring in the BBC adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, a series that had been unbroadcast since the mid-70s. In the central role of troubled existentialist lecturer Mathieu, Bryant is coolly impressive; but Wing Commander Marsh remains a career best performance, for me at any rate.

I wonder how much of today’s desperate-to-impress, big budget series will similarly stand the test of time? There aren’t many other episodes of television that I’ve lived with for half a century, and none in all that time that has had the lasting impact of this single example. On that basis, I rest my case. For me, there is no better episode of a television series, and there probably never will be.