Happy as a Sandbag
by Ken Lee
Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1995
ITMA
Why It’s That Man Again? Because for a show that gave so many catchphrases of its own to the language, it is somehow appropriate that the title of the most popular radio show of the war should itself be taken from a catchphrase: a newspaper headline in fact. In the late 1930s, when the words and actions of one Adolf Hitler were inevitably much in the news, the press, with typical Anglo-Saxon disapproval, would coolly announce “It’s that man again”, and the public would instantly know who they meant.
In the case of the radio ITMA, it was not one man but three. The hugely successful Band Waggon comedy and variety show, starring ‘Big Hearted’ Arthur Askey and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, had just come to an end and had left a huge void not only in the schedules but also in the heart of its listeners. One afternoon in June at the Langham Hotel in Portland Place, three men met to see if they could come up with a replacement. They were the writer Ted Kavanagh, the producer Francis Worsley, and the star Tommy Handley. They decided to stick with the relatively new idea, imported from the USA, of a ‘situation’ comedy, that is, setting up Handley as the presiding force in some ridiculous institution where the stock characters could go through their paces week after week. Kavanagh prided himself on his ability to create a laugh roughly every ten seconds, and aimed to provide a minimum of a hundred for every eighteen and a half minutes of actual dialogue he was allowed (the rest of the half-hour programme had to be filled with music or they couldn’t call it variety).
The first show hit the airwaves on 12 July 1939 from the BBC’s Variety studios in Bristol. It quickly built up a huge following of loyal fans. For the 1939–40 season the cast included the dance band vocalist Sam Costa, character actor Maurice Denham, and Jack Train, a hugely talented and versatile comedy actor of many voices. Fast, funny and exuberant, it was just the tonic the beleaguered British public needed during the early days of the war.
In February 1940 the show was taken off the air and travelled the country’s theatres for seventeen months, but it somehow lost its intimacy and punch in large, ‘live’ venues. By the time it returned in the autumn of 1941 – now being put together from the relative peace of Bangor, North Wales – Kavanagh had come up with a whole new raft of characters and catchphrases, and these too quickly passed into the language. They included Alley Oop the Pedlar (“I go – I come back”), the Diver (“I’m going down now, sir”), Claude and Cecil the polite brokers’ men (“After you, Claude,” “No, after you, Cecil”) the Commercial Traveller (“Good morning, nice day”) and Jack Train’s dipsomaniac Colonel Chinstrap (“I don’t mind if I do”). By 1942 perhaps the most fondly remembered character of all had made her appearance. Mrs Mopp the Corporation Cleaner, played by Dorothy Summers, uttered her first “Can I do you now, sir?”, simultaneously undoing years of Reithian restraint and opening the floodgates to a deluge of cheerful doubles entendres.
By 1944 a staggering forty per cent of the population were tuning in every week. Such popularity derived from two sources – the show’s topicality, mainly due to Tommy Handley’s uncanny ability to ad-lib jokes about that evening’s news, and the fact that, for all its high-flown whimsy, it was firmly rooted in a world the audience could recognise and identify with. By 1949, when Handley died, the world had changed and the show was in decline. But during the war years there had been nothing to touch ITMA for its pace, vitality and breezy optimism.
George Formby
Only in Britain could an entertainer who looked and sounded like George Formby make it to the top. A bemused commentator once described him thus: “With a carp-like face, a mouth outrageously full of teeth, a walk that seems normally to be that of a flustered hen, and a smile of perpetual wonder at the joyous incomprehensibility of the universe and the people in it.”
His father, George Formby Senior, had been one of the most popular comedians of the music hall era, but even that had been a stage name. George Junior, loath to tread too closely on his father’s heels, was all set to be a jockey before increasing bulk ruled that out. Then, in his mid-teens, he met his wife-to-be Beryl Ingham, who was herself at that time touring the halls in a dance act. With Beryl’s encouragement he launched his stage career at the age of 16 using the name George Hoy, his mother’s maiden name. (He would not allow himself to be billed as George Formby until years after his father’s death.)
The going was hard at first. An old pro named Sam Paul took pity on him, taught him a few comedy routines and schooled him in the rudiments of the ukelele. But things didn’t properly pick up for him until 1925, when he again encountered Beryl Ingham. Once married to her, like father like son, his fortunes began to rally. At the London Alhambra he came up with the catchphrase that would be his from that point onwards. “Turned out nice again” was the phrase, and ‘Cleaning Windows’, ‘Mr Wu’ and ‘Leaning on a Lamp-post’ were some of the immortal songs written for him by Gifford and Cliffe and Noel Gay.
In the thirties he broke into films and made over twenty of them, setting the seal on his fame and popularity. By 1938 his contract was said to be worth £100,000, an enormous sum for those days. He also went on to appear in three Royal Variety Shows.
Sadly, again like his father, his career was shortened by ill-health. He was advised to slow down in the early fifties after a heart murmur, but then in 1960 the sudden death of his wife left him bereft. George Formby himself died just a few months later, leaving behind a small Lakeland terrier named Willie Waterbucket.
Max Miller
The Incomparable Max was the comic’s comic, a master of quickfire patter, risqué, charming, simultaneously a ladies’ man and one of the boys, a bit of a lad, the original Cheeky Chappie.
His trademark costume, the loud plus four suit, white hat and fat kipper tie, had been suggested by the impresario Francis Laidler who first saw Max working at the Holborn Empire in 1928. Laidler immediately snapped him up for his revue Tipperary Tim and upgraded the green plus fours he was wearing to a flamboyant suit of gaudy chintz. Max stepped into the role of the Cheeky Chappie as if it too had been tailor-made for him, and from then on he never looked back.
Born Thomas Henry Sargent in 1895, the son of a Bethnal Green busker, Max Miller first discovered his ability to make the troops laugh in India while serving with the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War. He had been apprenticed to a blacksmith and then been a golf caddy at Brighton – now he only wanted to be an entertainer. The desire wasn’t completely unnatural. He had steeped himself in his father’s old material as a youngster and had picked up the art of fast talking from watching auctions in the Caledonia Market. He had taught himself to read music and had a good singing voice which could turn out any number of heart-breaking ballads. Once back in civvy street he got a job touring with Jack Sheppard’s concert party, The Madeira Lawns, where he met a contralto singer names Kitty Marsh who later became his wife and manager.
His first big break came in the show Merrie Arcadians at Bradford. He earned £5 a week. Later at the London Palladium he would make £1000 a week and horde every penny of it, mindful of how fickle the business could be. But before that there were further variety and revue shows with Fred Karno and others, each one adding to his experience and helping him on his way to the top.
Once his image and style had been established, he grew increasingly popular with the masses – if not the Lord Chamberlain. Censorship being what it was, the gags from the ‘Blue Book’ had to be toned down a bit or at least delivered swiftly enough to elude the keen ears of some fictional censor who, according to Max, would constantly be hovering prudishly in the wings. As for the Royal Variety Shows in the fifties of which Max did several, they were notorious for their stuffiness in the presence of the royal family – but Max knew how to get round anyone. ‘White Book’ or ‘Blue Book’, the gags flew thick and fast when Max was on, and the audiences cherished him as one of their own. There’ll never be another.
Robb Wilton
He said “I’ll punch your head.” I said “Whose?” He said “Yours.”
I said “Mine?” He said “Yes.” I said “Oh.”
He said “Want a fight?” I said “Who?” He said “You.”
I said “Me?” He said “Yes.” I said “No.”
So we then got to words…
Robb Wilton, who wrote all his own material, was as big a draw on radio as he had been in the music halls. Yet while the scripts and his delivery of them in a comfortable Liverpool accent were in a league al of their own, you really had to catch him live to see him at his best – worriedly sucking his little finger, or rubbing an anguished hand over his wrinkled little face.
Robb Wilton – real name Smith – hailed from Everton and began his stage career at the old Theatre Royal in Garston. He met his wife Florence Palmer on tour in 1903 and their marriage lasted happily until her death some fifty-three years later. “Without her I would never have made it to the top,” he said. They were acting in melodramas at the time, but when audience tastes began to change, it was Florence who encouraged Robb to try his luck in music hall. She gave him his first ideas, suggested characters, and appeared in sketches with him as required.
In his early days he was billed as ‘The Confidential Comedian’ which hints at his later stage persona, but so low down the playbill did he appear that “I shared a line with the bioscope”. Then while performing at the Leeds City Varieties (which later became famous as the venue for TV’s The Good Old Days) he was seen by Tom Sherwood, owner of the Opera House and the Empire chain of theatres in Wakefield. Recognising quality when he saw it, Sherwood arranged for Robb to headline a tour of twenty halls throughout the North East. The tour began at Stockton Hippodrome and before it was over the comic had landed his first London bookings.
His bungling authority figures were endearingly fallible in a peculiarly English way. His famous Fireman sketch (“Can you keep it going will we get there?”) was a staple of his act for many years, in an age when the same material could often last a comic his lifetime. During the war his Magistrate and Home Guard characterisations did much to boost morale, while in addition his distinctive monologues in verse with the sketchiest of piano accompaniments became his much-copied but never-equalled trademark.
After sixty years in the business Robb Wilton died, just before he could retire, in 1957.
Coward at War
The declaration of war on 3 September 1939 found Noël Coward hard at work rehearsing two new plays. This Happy Breed and Present Laughter. He immediately disbanded the company and looked about for something useful he could do to help win the war. Dismissing as impractical Winston Churchill’s advice to “get into a warship and sing to them with the guns firing”, he worked briefly in Paris at the Bureau of Propaganda, then went to the United States as a kind of roving ambassador to assess American attitudes to the war. This was followed, in February 1941, by a tour of Australasia comprising broadcasts and concerts which raised almost £12,000 for war charities and the Red Cross.
But it was the Italian film producer Filippo Del Giudice who helped Noël provide his best and most appropriate contribution to the war effort. In Which We Serve (1942) had to be put together slowly with the help of the Admiralty, the Ministry of Information, and several Sea Lords who were called on to supply genuine ships’ companies as extras. Authenticity was to be the keynote. For that reason it was based in large part on the life story of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s ship the Kelly. Mountbatten himself had already suggested Noël do “a Cavalcade about the Navy”, while Noël had always had a keen affection for the service. He had visited Mountbatten’s destroyer several times and got to know both officers and crew very well. But despite Mountbatten’s stern (or disingenuous?) warnings that he would only cooperate so long as the ship in the film could not be traced back to him, the similarities between the fictional Torrin and the actual Kelly are unmistakable.
Although In Which We Serve was Coward’s first film – he not only produced it, he wrote the screenplay and the music, played the leading role and even co-directed with a young David Lean – it was one of the most successful British films of the decade and won a special Oscar “for outstanding production achievement”.
It was also Celia Johnson’s film debut. Although she had worked with the author on stage, she later recalled that she would never have been cast if she hadn’t rather cheekily pushed herself forward. “The film people didn’t want me at all. They said ‘Oh no. Good actress, I daresay, but not photogenic.’” Noël Coward was having none of it. “You’re supposed to be cameramen,” he told them, “photograph her!”. David Lean’s verdict on her performance was that she was “simply wonderful”, and she went on to star in two further Coward/Lean productions – This Happy Breed and, most memorable of all, the classic Brief Encounter.
Rattigan, the well-made playwright
Terence Rattigan was the master of the ‘well-made play’, a term first coined pejoratively during the fifties when a whole generation of so-called angry young men decided that theatre should become more politically motivated. Nevertheless, despite changing tastes, Rattigan remained one of the best playwrights of his day.
The romantic, patriotic drama Flare Path was the first play to use the RAF as a background. Initially it met with resistance from theatre managements who couldn’t see why people would stir out of their homes to see the kind of dramas on stage that they were having to live through at home. But finally, with the support of Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont and HM Tennant, the play was first produced in July 1942, opening at the Apollo Theatre, London the following month. It ran for over 700 performances, by far the most successful play Rattigan had yet written, and set him firmly on the course he was to follow for the rest of his professional life.
The son of a diplomat, Terence Rattigan was educated at Harrow then read history at Oxford. But he had already started writing whilst at school. In his youth a pacifist, he joined the RAF at the suggestion of psychiatrist Dr Keith Newman who thought active service might help him overcome a bout of writer’s block. Pilot Officer Rattigan was first an air gunner and wireless operator with Coastal Command, hunting submarines in the Atlantic from a Sunderland flying boat, and later became a flight lieutenant and gunnery officer with 422 Squadron.
He wrote the first act of Flare Path while grounded by bad weather at Calshot on the Solent. He took the unfinished manuscript with him on a flight to Freetown, West Africa, and wrote the second act at Gibraltar where his plane had put in for repairs after being attacked over the Bay of Biscay. The replacement plane itself ran into trouble when an engine failed and everything non-essential to the flight had to be jettisoned. Rattigan tossed out the hard covers of the exercise book in which he was writing the play, but retained the unfinished script itself. The text was finally completed in the Gambia “with monkeys clambering about and everybody drinking gins and tonics”.
In March 1943, while Flare Path was still running successfully in the West End, Rattigan was seconded to the RAF film unit where he reworked some of it for The Way to the Stars, a wartime flag-waver starring John Mills, Michael Redgrave and Trevor Howard. From that point on, Rattigan wrote almost as many film scripts as stage plays, including the adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, David Lean’s The Sound Barrier and Anthony Asquith’s The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Among his thirty or so plays, many of which were filmed, are such popular classics as French Without Tears, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Ross.
Jane
On 5 December 1932, a new star appeared on the horizon and a legend was born. It was the first episode of Jane’s Journal in the Daily Mirror. Billed as the ‘Diary of a Bright Young Thing’, it was teasingly flirtatious from the outset. The content of those early strips was fairly trivial stuff – what dress was Jane going to wear for her date? – invariably little more than a pretext to show her in her lingerie.
It wasn’t until the war that Jane really came into her own. From the outset she was drawn by Norman Pett who changed her style to suit the times. The huge expansion of the armed forces at the outbreak of war meant a greater demand for diversions from the more serious business at hand, and Jane was required to become more and more risqué. Never was the term ‘cartoon strip’ more appropriate.
There was a naïve toughness about Jane as she desperately tried to keep her clothes on in each episode against mounting odds; but ever a lady, she always managed to salvage some dignity in the end. Even the Americans found this beguiling British mixture of innocence and aplomb very sexy and envied our troops their fictional pin-up. At the height of Jane’s fame in 1943, the US Army newspaper Round-Up wrote: “Well, sirs, you can go home now…Jane peeled a week ago. The British 36th Division immediately gained six miles and the British attacked Arakan. Maybe we Americans should have a Jane too.” (Milton Caniff stepped up, creating a mysterious and sexy vision called Miss Lace who first appeared in the weekly comic strip Male Call, then vanished again at war’s end as mysteriously as she had arrived, her work completed.)
On VE Day, Jane managed to lose all her clothes again – to souvenir-hunting troops – but managed to find a handy Union Jack to hide behind.
The Jane strip continued in the Daily Mirror until 1959 when she sailed into the sunset with her beloved Georgy, fully clothed. In 1961, the Mirror attempted to revive the idea with Jane – Daughter of Jane as a swinging sixties girl, but it lasted only a few months. In the early 1980s, the BBC ran a series of short films in strip cartoon format with Glynis Barber (of Dempsey and Makepeace fame) portraying Jane against backgrounds from the original cartoons. Later in the eighties a film was made called Jane and the Lost City, which sank without trace.
Jane had passed her peak of fame. She is very much a creature of her time – along with images of Betty Grable, Rita Heyworth and the Vargas Girl pin-ups – from a more innocent and, some would say, more interesting era. Jane looks a little coy by today’s standards. But in the imaginations of the homesick troops in World War II, she was probably a lot more real.
Whale Meat Again
Nutritionists are still arguing as to whether Britain’s diet during the war years was more or less healthy than it is today. True, there were fewer processed foods around, but also there was less fruit and fewer fresh vegetables. Oddly enough, people probably ate better during the war than they had during the years of the Depression because rationing was based on a system scientifically worked out to meet individuals’ requirements.
Rationing was introduced from early 1940 onwards, but at a progressive rate so as not to demoralise the country overnight with the harsh measures it involved. Each person was issued with a weekly ration book containing coupons which could be exchanged for goods in the shops. Then again, sometimes they couldn’t. Most housewives during the war came to know the bitter disappointment of reaching the front of the queue after an hour standing in the rain only to find the butcher had given away his last sausage just a couple of minutes before.
To those of us with a full belly today, the quantities allowed each individual seem terribly meagre. For example, although meat played a smaller part in the national diet then than it tends to now, 1s 2d (in today’s money about 6p) would buy you little more than a couple of chops – and that was a week’s ration. Other things were even harder to come by. Fresh vegetables were at a premium in the winter, so the population was encouraged to Dig for Victory in their own allotments (not forgetting the carrots for the night fighters!). There was no citrus fruit to be had at all until concentrated orange juice began arriving from America. The lack of bananas could be overcome by cooking and mashing parsnips which were then sweetened with sugar and a few drops of banana essence – but the result really fooled nobody. Nor did the powdered egg (one packet per person per month, equivalent to a dozen eggs) which housewives found were good for little more than soufflés and Yorkshire puddings.
The Ministry of Food was in charge of distribution, and also gave out information on how to make the best of the scant goods available. Home economists were sent into the community to offer advice and they set up shop in workers’ canteens, department stores, market squares: anywhere, in fact, where crowds would gather. As the war ground on and further foodstuffs, no less than other essential goods like clothes, petrol, coal and wood became harder to come by, many found themselves wondering whether all this hardship was worth it. But in the long run the Dunkirk Spirit prevailed, and resolve strengthened to determination as the tide of war began to turn in the Allies’ favour.
The Britain that finally emerged from the conflict was leaner, fitter and harder than it had ever been before. Austerity, like every other scourge of the war years, had been just another enemy to be faced down and defeated.
PS
My time at Proscenium coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and around that time several shows were put on to commemorate our victory. While they might have been a tad more jingoistic than current tastes would prefer (though surely the survivors had a right to salute their forebears and celebrate their deliverance?), they were founded mainly on the solid themes of nostalgia and gratitude for the Greatest Generation which had lived through those dark days and emerged bloodied but unbowed the other side.
The British character, which we fondly like to think was what saw us through the worst, was best reflected in the lives of the comedians who, as surely as the arms manufacturers themselves, did very well out of the war thank you very much and laid the foundations for the comedy stylings of the next decade and a half. While comedy itself would continue to evolve – through the satire boom of the sixties, the rise of the stand-up in the seventies, the emergence of alternative comedy in the eighties – it was generally the white, middle-aged, ordinary-looking joes who kept our parents and grandparents laughing, the average man in the street types who knew exactly who they were talking to because they came from the same stock themselves. (I’ve always thought the funniest thing about this was that while the greatest stars in America at the time were super-hunks like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, and sinuous lovelies like Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth, the top box office draws in Britain were dodgy window cleaner-type George Formby and the fragrant foghorn herself Gracie Fields. Doubtless I’m a jumped-up whippersnapper who should show more respect to the bravery and fortitude of my parents. On the other hand, if these were the kinds of performers who were keeping them entertained through some of the most fraught and terrifying times of their lives, then more power to their respective elbows.)
(See also Keep Calm and Carry On Laughing for more profiles and sketches.)