THE SADDEST SPECTACLE on the contemporary TV scene is the depressing deterioration of American TV. Conditioned by the fear and caution of advertisers, popular programmes are sinking ever deeper into a morass of blancmange entertainment.

With the exception of an occasional current affairs programme, the American networks operate on the principle that it is their function to provide the least offence to the greatest number.

It does not overly concern them that in so doing they are also being extremely offensive to most of the intelligent people in their country.

Nor does it bother them that by being aggressively innocuous they are actively helping to cement into their society all its iniquities and inequalities.

The result of this policy of banalities for the masses is that most discerning, sensitive and intelligent Americans view the medium with contempt. They appear on it sceptically work for it reluctantly and deride it both privately and publicly.

Pressures

One of the most heartening aspects of British TV is that, as yet, the rot that comes from catering to advertising pressures has not bitten very deep into our own programming philosophy.

And, because of a self-imposed limitation on the amount of American material transmitted — usually amounting to about 15 per cent of its total output — British TV has been forced to produce most of its own programmes which, naturally reflect our own customs, habits, values and ideals. The result has been that most people in this country infinitely prefer British programmes to almost anything that comes from America.

American series or variety shows rarely reach the top ten status — not only nationally, but even in the regions. Many weeks go by when not a single American show appears in the top twenty national favourites.

The fact that BBC and the ITV companies still go on buying American material is not because they think the public will prefer them to British shows, but because they usually cost less than producing an original programme over here.

The gap between American popular taste and our own native preferences has been sharply illustrated by the fate of the Smothers Brothers. After only nine programmes they have been dropped by the BBC from their schedules. Two more programmes remain to be shown.

‘Daring’

In America, difficult as it is for anyone over here to understand, the Smothers Brothers are not only the most popular variety show but also have a reputation for producing daring, satirical and controversial TV.

1 have assiduously watched most of their transmitted programmes and I must confess that the mystery of their appeal has consistently escaped me.

In a clean-cut way, I suppose they represent to Middle West moms an ideal of the all-American brothers. Dick, the sharper, more astute one, is amiably patient with the gangling inarticulateness of his brother Tommy, whose lovableness is demonstrated by his awkwardness with both his grammar and his guitar.

The show’s shape is traditional in the mustiest sense of that word. There are guests who are fulsomely introduced and who take part in the inevitable set sketches in which the feeblest of jokes are greeted by almost maniacal laughter from a studio audience.

The level of the jokes and audience appreciation can be gauged by the fact that in a recent skit about the French Revolution the heartiest laugh came when Marie Antoinette, on being told that the people were crying for bread, replied, “Let them eat cake!”

Although eight writers were credited with the script, I did not notice Marie Antoinette’s name among them. Perhaps de Gaulle will take it up. Since we produce a host of variety shows far funnier and wittier than this lame display of simple gush — Morecambe and Wise, Bruce Forsyth, Millicent Martin, Benny Hill, Ken Dodd — it is not surprising that British viewers have been less that enchanted with the Smothers Brothers.

But what amazes me is that in America the Smothers Brothers are hailed as prophets of adventurous and satirical TV. And it is not an idle reputation, since this year alone three advertisers have stopped sponsoring the show because they consider its jokes too blue and its political satire too controversial.

Yet nothing I have seen could, by our standards, be considered remotely objectionable. Compared to our own satire shows or to something like Till Death Us Do Part, the Smothers Brothers are milk-sodden gruel for the toothless.

Sketches

Occasionally there are mild sketches about things like safety in automobiles or treatment of the sick, but nothing more pointed than a gag ever emerges and the atmosphere is always too cosily friendly that an insult could only be interpreted as a compliment.

The sharpest comment I ever heard about anything remotely resembling a social problem was when someone was asked how people could be discouraged from staying in hospitals. “Bad food, ugly nurses and as a last resort we keep the bed pans in the Frigidaire,” was the answer

If this type of innocuous banter can drive advertisers away from sponsoring programmes — and ultimately extinguish them from the air — then American TV will have imposed upon itself a censorship which in its ultimate effects, will be as damaging to freedom in the United States as controlled TV has already damaged freedom in France, Rhodesia and the Soviet Union.

The post A look at the musty humour of the Smothers Brothers appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Syndicated to newspapers on 9 March 1968

The most immutable, unchangeable, orthodox, settled, transfixed and stubborn form of TV is in the field of light entertainment.

Symbolic of the rooted thinking in the world of variety TV was that revolving stage in the Palladium Show which want on turning with its load of waving chorus girls until even Lew Grade must have grown dizzy at the sight of it.

Such modest deviations in technique that have emerged over the decodes inevitably result in a rash of imitations that never know when to stop.

Perry Como achieved fame in America because of a relaxed throw-away style of delivery and presentation. Since then entertainers in roll-neck sweaters have been relaxing so much their backbones are in danger of becoming vestigial remnants.

The stool

Another modest innovation in the Perry Como Show was the high stool. The result is that the stool has now become the inevitable prop for signalling a friendly informal atmosphere.

When entertainers or singers want to chat cosily to each other or to the audience, they draw up a stool. No one ever sits in a chair and even standing up has become slightly suspect.

It is by such mini advances — hardly the width of the merest G-string — that TV musical shows inch themselves into the future. Compared to the changes that take place in TV drama, comedy shows, current affairs programmes and documentaries, the variety programme is the reluctant dinosaur of the small screen.

Even the annual report of the Independent Television Authority — a document notoriously reticent about casting the slightest shadow of disapproval on anything seen on Channel 9 — has used the words “stale” and “disappointing” about the commercial companies’ output of light entertainment and called for “positive corrective measures.”

But the rot seems to have seeped into the BBC as well. There it may have started with the Val Doonican Show.

Mr. Doonican, a friendly Irishman with a soothing, singing voice, managed to sweep this brand of relaxed amiability into the top ratings.

The show was remarkable only for the intensity of its cosiness. Surrounded by a group of perpetually grinning singers, the highlights of the programme were the choral singing of very old, very familiar, very childish folk songs.

The rest were the usual guests, the usual badinage, the usual toothy greetings. No effort was made to provide anything imaginative in the way of choreography, decor, script or style. Indeed an ideal programme to sleep by.

Since this was apparently what the public wanted, the BBC has repeated the formula in The Rolf Harris Show. Here, if possible, wholesomeness is an even more aggressive quality than it was in the Val Doonican show.

Mr. Harris, bearded and twinkling, has all the by-gosh, gee-whiz charm of a cousin from Australia. He is always overwhelmed by the magnificence of his guests (“They are really international stars … Come on, a tremendous burst of applause for our next guest.”)

His patter is artificially folksy. “I was thinking recently about giraffes,” he tells us, as an excuse for an infantile song about his wish to be able to talk to the animals.

His jokes are simply cringe-making. “Where’s your iambic pentameter?” “I thought you were going to bring it,” is a more-brilliant-than-usual exchange.

Or something like the closing lines of his last show: “My little girl — she’s only four — came back from school with a scruffy little rag doll worth £12 10s … (pause) … Well, it was worth £12 10s. because she swapped her bicycle for it.”

The centre-piece of the programme is Mr. Harris demonstrating his ability to paint with a huge brush on a broad, grey canvas.

Picasso

As he pom-poms, boo-hoops to himself in a humming undertone, the audience settles back as if they were watching nothing less than Picasso at work. What emerges are rather mediocre greeting card scenes whose only distinction is the audacity it takes to demonstrate so tiny a gift so brazenly.

The other staple ingredient of The Rolf Harris Show is a leaping, cavorting group of young men and girts whose idea of a dance routine is to chase each other around the studio or bend forward in a row grinning archly at the camera.

Indeed, the whole show smacks of well-intentioned amateurism. Since Mr. Harris cannot sing, dance, draw or tell jokes very well, it is only natural that he should be surrounded by an atmosphere revelling in its own mediocrity. It is all bland and harmless in much the same way as having a bath in semolina pudding.

A step-up in imagination — but not much — is Once More With Felix on BBC-2. Miss Julie Felix, her aquiline face framed in a cascade of black hair, has presumably been given this show because she is sincere with a guitar.

More often than not her repertoire consists of protest songs that for me seem to have exactly the same melody.

Her pretty face takes on an aura of social significance as she rhythmically tries to break our hearts about the Mexican deportees who are chased “like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves” and die in the following sequence: in the hills, in the mountains and in the plains.

Stamina

It’s never easy to whip oneself up into a proper mood of indignation about such folksy injustice when the guests on the programme tend to be lighthearted puppeteers or raconteurs seemingly indifferent to “trying for the sun” or “not having a name when you reach the aeroplane.”

There is a spasmodic attempt to use bits of film to illustrate some of the songs — almost always showing Miss Felix either running or walking along beeches or hot southern streets — but aside from establishing Miss Felix’s stamina, they add little to the general quality of the entertainment.

Piccadilly Palace, on Channel 9, starred Millicent Martin and Bruce Forsyth and if it offered up nothing new, it at least looked as if more effort and money had gone into it than the Rolf Harris and Julie Felix shows put together.

Gloss

The script had some good situation sketches and some of Millicent Martin’s dancing numbers were very effective. It was basically the same tired stuff, but a gloss of professionalism made it more palatable.

On the Continent, this type of light entertainment has acquired a brightness and vivacity and flair that no one over here seems capable of matching.

Film is imaginatively used to extend the barriers of the studio. Dance numbers are organised to please the eye and take advantage of all the electronic aids that are now available to directors.

Although British TV leads the world in most fields, it has consistently trudged along in the rear as far as musical variety is concerned. It may well be that the British public is content with nothing better than soporific comforters to while away the hours until the grave, but that is no reason why TV executives should be content to give them nothing better.

The post Take a high stool, then add a roll neck – and you’ve got a show! appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

ONE OF THE CONSISTENT minor mysteries of TV is its inability to use and exploit intelligent women on the screen. The concept of a female brain seems to be anathema to the box.

Fictional characters like Elsie Tanner or Emma Peel can acquire such a grip on TV audiences that they will wear black for their funerals and send them embroidered tea towels on their weddings.

Light entertainment artists like Dusty Springfield or Millicent Martin are embraced by TV with almost embarrassing haste and given the supreme accolade of named shows like Dusty or Mainly Millicent.

But it is difficult to envisage a programme called Just Dee or The Brophy Report with Dee Wells or Brigid Brophy as the centrifugal force holding together the other elements of a TV show.

It is true that in panel fames a bright woman like Lady Barnet or Olive Stephens will be accepted as long as she is doing something harmless like pitting her wits against men.

Desultory

But if she has a point-of-view, a personal philosophy, an attitude of mind which she would like to express as pungently and as forcefully as, say, Alan Whicker or David Frost or Robin Day, her days on the small screen are destined to be ruthlessly short.

Since it is an accepted fact that most TV audiences are women and that the woman’s finger dominates the TV switch, it is, indeed, odd that not a single intelligent woman has had anything but a desultory and brief flutter of prominence on TV since it began.

Baffled by this curious phenomenon, I sought some guidance from two of the most attractive and bright women that have appeared on British TV for years, Joan Bakewell and Eleanor Brown.

Joan Bakewell can be seen almost nightly on BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up tactfully and pertly interviewing an astonishing range of people over an astonishing range of subjects. She never seems at a loss for a question, never seems baffled for a reply.

Haughty

Eleanor Bron, who has a serene, almost haughty, beauty, was one of the consistent delights of the BBC satire shows, TW3 and Not So Much A Programme, with her devastating impressions of Tory wives, American culture seekers and Hampstead intellectuals. Films now occupy most of her time.

Their faces, pretty as they are, have not yet acquired that sort of familiarity which make them instantly recognisable in a crowd.

“I’m not pestered much for autographs,” said Joan Bakewell. “Nor do I get many dirty letters or rude phone calls. Strangers tend to think they know me when they see me on the street or a bus, but that’s all.”

Nor is Eleanor Bron’s experience much different. “I get the odd pornographic letter but only a few. I’m ex-directory so there are no rude telephone calls. There is an arrested expression on people’s faces when they see me on the street that I find amusing. A lot of people tell me that I look like Eleanor Bron.

“If people do recognise me, they tend to laugh. I hope with me and not at me. Socially, it’s an advantage in starting up a conversation. They don’t ask you what you do. When they do talk to me it’s usually to ask what David Frost is really like.”

Searching for a reason for the lack of interest in women on TV, both agreed that it had little to do with the view that women are more difficult to handle in this kind of job.

“It’s certainly not true that women are more temperamental and cannot stand up to the nervous strain of television,” said Miss Bakewell. “I believe women are much tougher and can survive the pressures better than men. Most women run two lives and cope with it. Men don’t.”

Miss Bron agreed that women with families do present more problems on a job than men, but this was not an exclusive TV concern.

“Men tend to think women are more fragile and likely to crash in a crisis. But a woman in tears is no different than a man who gets drunk in a crisis. In my experience, men on TV are more often in a worse shape than women.”

Why then this reluctance to allow women a serious place on the TV screen? Eleanor Bron, discussing interviewers, came close to a pertinent answer.

“There is something not neutral about a woman,” she said. “Men in their presence tend to be either chivalrous or flirtatious.

“This tends to elicit a phoney response from men. Viewers accept a man’s interviewing as a more natural condition.

“There is also a kind of forthrightness and aggressiveness needed for good TV which is not particularly feminine. Women to be attractive have to be conciliatory, but this is not the best way to elicit responses on TV. She can’t use the true arts of a woman for getting responses which is to be gentle, sympathetic and understanding.

Gentle

“If the programme is about politics then the interviewer must be tougher. And if a woman gets tough, an audience feels threatened and put upon. It’s not natural for her to be doing it”

Joan Bakewell thought that this argument applied that were controversial in theme.

“I don’t think I would be given an interview job that demanded a muscular, tough, relentless attitude on the part of the interviewer. It’s more difficult for a woman to be rude on TV. But I don’t think interviews have to be aggressive to be successful.

“I don’t want to be a cipher on the box. I hope people will think I have attitudes. But women are emotive objects and if she feels something she tends to express it very intensely. This might annoy men who hate losing an argument to a woman on TV.

“It looks like an act of sexual aggression if a woman tries to win an argument and that’s why it would be difficult to have a female Robin Day on the screen.”

Having said this, she paused for reflection. “Of course,” she said, after a moment’s silence, “I must admit that I also mind losing arguments.”

The post The real trouble about women on TV is that they make men nervous appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE DRIFT of Ned Sherrin to the cinema will mean the loss to the BBC of one of the greatest talent-spotters in the business.

As producer of TW3, Not So Much and BBC3, he dumped a cornucopia of fresh faces on to the small screen and, more significantly, invested most of them with an aura of talent.

David Frost, Lance Percival, Roy Hudd, Millicent Martin, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Campbell, Harvey Orkin, John Bird, Eleanor Bron are only some or those who owe their TV reputations to the chances given them by Sherrin.

But it cannot yet be said that many of them on their own have soared into the more rarified atmosphere of personal stardom.

Millicent Martin’s breezy, chirpy personality came across successfully in her song and dance series, Mainly Millicent. But both Roy Kinnear and Roy Hudd have still been unable to find the producers and script-writers capable of exploiting the promise they first showed. Their efforts have ranged from the routine to the dismal.

Toothless

For the past few weeks two more graduates of the satire school have been seen in their own programmes the Frost Report and The Lance Percival Show – and instead of the expected cynical bite all we have so far experienced is an ingratiating, toothless mumble.

Since David Frost has been almost as intensely publicised as Woburn Abbey and since he was TV satire’s first front-man and in that sense the Louis XIII to Sherrin’s Cardinal Richelieu, he has been uniquely identified with the irreverence, scepticism and daring of TW3 and Not So Much.

Technically Frost now displays before the cameras the assurance, authority and command of a brilliant toast-master. Gripping us with a fierce glare that might do justice to a show called The Son of Ancient Mariner, he barks out his aphorisms and comments as if he was trying to hypnotise the autocue machine.

Just when we are about to quail before this baleful stare, he comes to his punch-line which is accompanied by his face snapping into a frozen grin which., in turn, is our signal to laugh.

Old jokes

In the last three editions of The Frost Report, it has been, more often than not, only this facial seismograph that has given us any true indication that a joke has been told.

Each show has tackled such general themes as Authority, Holidays or Sin and instead of giving us any fresh comic insight or amusing observation about our attitudes to these topics, Frost, with the help of about 15 writers, has been content to string together a number of old jokes and quick revue blackouts which intellectually might have been the basis for a film called Carry On Satire.

Some of the contrived excuses used to introduce familiar gags would make a compere on the Palladium Show weep with envy. Thus following up an item on Guernsey, Frost told us that a mermaid has just been caught off the island. Its statistics were 36-22-and 7s 6d a pound.

Nor has David Frost any particular reticence about repeating himself – surely the worst offence any
comedian can commit. He told us, for instance, about a holiday advertisement for “sunny Vietnam.”

“Come to Saigon.” it urged. “You will find no fighting in the city – only in the outskirts.” It sounded funnier when I first heard him tell it on Not So Much.

The programme on Sin – aha, this will be something, we thought – not only concentrated on Sex to the exclusion of almost every other vice, but treated it so hygienically and respectfully that it might have been the week’s Good Cause.

Occasionally, of course, some items do succeed – the law of averages sees to that – but unless future Frost Reports sharpen up their bite and their purpose, the scourging menace that once terrified politicians, vicars and Mrs. Mary Whitehead will end up with an endearing spot on The Black and White Minstrel Show.

– Milton Shulman

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THE BBC is undoubtedly the most prolific comedy factory in the world. It churns out with awesome regularity everything from a seaside-pier giggle to a sophisticated, way-out leer.

Compared with it, commercial TV is about as funny as a crematorium. For some reason, Channel Nine has never taken humour very seriously.

ITV has relied for its laughs largely on imported American shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or The Lucy Show. It has cultivated comedians like Morecambe and Wise, Arthur Haynes, Alfred Marks and Bruce Forsyth, but this is a tiny achievement when one realises what the BBC has done for British humour.

On any representative week there is likely to be at least three times as much home-produced comedy on the BBC as on the alternative channel.

Benny Hill, Eric Sykes, Charlie Drake, Sheila Hancock, Thora Hird, Lance Percival, Roy Kinnear, Eleanor Bron, Dudley Moore, Harry Worth, Harry Corbett, Wilfred Brambell, Roy Hudd, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Hugh Griffiths, Millicent Martin, Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd, Ted Ray – are only a fraction of the names who owe their TV reputations and best opportunities to the BBC.

Art form

And at the BBC, comic script writing has been recognised as the minor art-form that it is and with Frank Muir now in the higher echelons of the Light Entertainment side of the Corporation, this respect and nurturing of comic writers is likely to be even more enthusiastic.

All that having been said, it seems incredible to me that the BBC should have wantonly abandoned their reputation for reasonable judgment in the comedy field by putting on a show like And So To Ted to replace one of the slots left vacant by Not So Much.

It would be charitable to think that this throw-back to the dreariest kind of radio humour of the early thirties had been deliberately slotted as an act of malevolent revenge on all those viewers who had been clamouring for the removal of Not So Much.

Unfortunately, it looks far more like a grovelling surrender to the lowest taste denominator and a sickening reminder of how easy it is for any adult advance in TV programming to be shunted into a limbo of vestigial relics.

Except for an amiable face and an ability to reel off old jokes without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, Ted Rogers is my concept of a non-comedian.

Anxiety

His nervous grin and zig-zagging eyes convey anxiety. His timing is halting. His mastery of mimicry is minimal. And he displays a profound inability to distinguish a funny line from an abysmal one.

The script writers – Dick Vosburgh, Ken Hoare and Mike Sharland – seem to have gone on an exhumation hunt to find gags for their first two shows. If they dig up any more fossilised jokes they might be had up for grave-robbing.

“Here is the news in brief,” smirks an announcer wearing no trousers. For a topical joke there is “Which was the funniest of the Marx Brothers – Harpo, Groucho, Chico or Profumo?”

Since it has now run for two weeks in succession there is the item dealing with the Professor (funny, presumably, because he has a guttural accent) providing questions to answers.

“Now, Professor, what question follows the answer V-Neck”? What do me and my girl friend do when we are out together?” [sic on quotemarks -Ed] (berserk laughter from laugh machine). “Everest”? “What do I do when I feel tired?” (maniacal hysterics from laugh machine).

The second programme was an advance on the first simply because someone had throttled the laugh machine. Now there was a studio audience that seemed to contain one or two hyenas ready with an apoplectic response to the slightest tickle.

The nearest the programme got to sex was when a gardener said: “I got so confused I put Sweet William in the same bed as Iris,” and it took almost four minutes to re-enact that tired chestnut of the man who is awakened by his butler to take a sleeping pill.

Row

Surely in view of the row that followed Not So Much‘s disappearance, one would have thought that both Huw Wheldon and Michael Peacock, as top BBC administrators, would have been acutely sensitive about the type of show they were replacing it with.

It does not say much for their sense of public relations – or, indeed, their feeling about what is or is not proper late-night viewing – that …And So To Ted is now with us.

What a relief, by contrast, to watch a real funny man at work.

The Benny Hill Show had some inspired clowning on its return a fortnight ago. The item about the fastest film director in the world was a hilarious hodgepodge of every technical mistake ever committed on the screen. And a family having breakfast in the rhythms dominated by the radio music was amusing stuff.

I thought the second show last Saturday less inventive and the skit about the weakling who takes body-building lessons to become the toughest man on the beach went on much too long and was decidedly forced.

But in his saga about how Little Bo Peep might have been treated by Z-Cars, Tonight and Bonanza, Benny Hill’s face, with its look of a naughty melon, showed once again its delicious and formidable gift for mimicry. I suspect that a second mind to help him with his script-writing might get rid of some of the more obvious errors in judgment.

The post Hail the B.B.C. – It’s the most prolific comedy factory in the world appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

That’s why I am treating Sidney Charles Green and Richard Michael Hills with a mixture of respect and suspicion.

For here they are, waiting to greet me at the Elstree Studios, dressed perfectly conventionally. Except for their magnificent black busby hats, which they arc wearing as if it is a perfectly natural mode of head-gear for top comedy scriptwriters.

“We’re letting our heads grow accustomed to their presence,” said Sid, most solemnly.

“And getting used to drinking in low-beamed bars,” says Dick, with terrible aplomb.

The busbies are stage props, but Sid and Dick simply can’t resist having a giggle with them. That’s their business, after all: they are among television’s most consistently successful comedy script-writers. Stars like Morecambe and Wise, Bruce Forsyth and Norman Vaughan look to them for laughs.

On Friday, they start a new series themselves, as performers. Those Two Fellers, it’s called. Anonymous sounding, you might think. But Sid and Dick are a fairly anonymous pair; you could mistake them for anyone’s next door neighbour.

Both live in Kent, in classy commuter country. Both are family men, and “fortyish”. They play rugby at weekends for exercise and the “social gathering” afterwards. They drive their children to school and their respective wives mad by dropping cigarette ash over their respective carpets!

Perfectly normal types: Sid is the crinkly-haired one, sometimes wears glasses, and prefers casual clothes. Dick is more thick-set; the more extrovert; likes a natty line in suiting.

And it’s virtually impossible to put your finger on their highly-tuned sense of humour. Enough to say it doesn’t slosh you in the eye like a custard-pie. It sort of creeps up behind you and taps you on the shoulder 10 minutes after they’ve changed the subject.

Their philosophy of humour is that anything, anything is funny if you look at it long enough, think about it hard enough.

Even me! And they don’t even have to look or think hard about me. “You’re tall,” says Sid, immediately. “Always good for a whole routine of tall man’s gags… you know, trouble washing hands in trains, doing up shoe laces.”

“And you’ve got long, thin, hairless legs,” remarks Dick, surfacing from my sock-line. “All you need is a short, fat, hairy partner and you’re in business, boy.”

Which is a thought that needs some swallowing, so we move into the Elstree Studio bar, where we are greeted warmly by Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise, and Millicent Martin, who are working on a show with Sid and Dick today.

Sid and Dick are obviously putting their humour philosophy to the test. They’re staring at a glass. So are Eric, Ernie and Millie. Remember, if you look at anything long enough, etc.

“It’s empty,” says Sid.

“And to make it funny, Dave,” says Dick, “fill it!”

They all stop staring at the glass. And stare at me. All absolutely deadpan… you see what I mean about tricky situations? It must be my round.

“If you fill it three times, it gets to be hilarious,” adds Sid, helpfully. Yes, but what about the show? How come two script writers pop up every now and again in their own series?

“Mainly because it gives us a pretty good showcase as writers,” replies Sid. “We’re not realty performers — although we’ve never lost a schoolboyish delight in acting the fool.”

“And this series will give people a chance to learn our surnames,” adds Dick. “Until now, we’ve simply been known as Those Two Fellers. Or Sid and Dick. Or them two. Now people will know our surnames.”

“I’m Sid Richard,” says Sid, deadpan.

“I’m Dick Sidney,” says Dick, equally deadpan.

And this is the way they work. Set up a serious situation. Work in a gag. Blow up the balloons, then burst them.

In the series, Green and Hills (notice I’ve got the surnames in!) will write for many top comedians, who will appear as their guests — Morecambe and Wise, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse, Arthur Askey, Bruce Forsyth, Ted Ray.

Before they write anything, they study each comedy talent under a microscope: style, facial expression, timing, the lot They can imitate most comedy acts; Sid can do Eric Morecambe to a T. They act out ideas. This is partly how they have become involved as performers.

“We even studied ourselves for this series,” says Sid.

“Discovered we’re probably the best-paid writers in the business,” adds Dick.

“And the worst-paid performers,” says Sid.

It takes quite something to make Sid and Dick break down and laugh out loud. They did when they saw Rachelle, a ravishing, 27-year-old, 6ft. tall red-head, who sings off-key… and deadpan, of course. She will appear in the series.

Having studied each other under their comedy microscope, they have decided Hills is the performer and Green is not. So Dick gets the funny lines, although it’s debatable whether they will stick to any formula.

Sid says his wife will complain right through the six shows that he ought to be home doing the garden at this time of year. Dick says she’s right!

Me? I’m still trying to work out why Sidney Charles Green and Richard Michael Hills have worn busbies throughout this assignment. After all, there isn’t one low beam in this bar.

Still, maybe the joke will creep up on me.

The post Lanning at Large meets Those Two Fellers (Sid Green and Dick Hills) appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.