Armed with a special pass from his commanding officer, nineteen-year-old David Tringham was shown through the gates at Ealing Studios and directed to the offices of Hal Mason. David was unsure what lay in store for him but felt suitably confident, dressed as he was in a smart dark-blue double-breasted suit.
After a short wait he was ushered into an unimposing office and asked to sit down. To his left was Mason’s assistant, Baynham Honri, a small academic-looking man with plain glasses who had been in vaudeville before entering films. In contrast Mason, who sat on the other side of a predictably large desk, was very dapper as David recalls, ‘with clean features, hair sleeked back from a bullet-like forehead’. He was wearing a sympathetic, almost resigned, expression. There was hardly any small talk at all besides the obligatory good morning. Mason came straight out with it. ‘If I were you, I’d steer clear of the film business. There’s no future in it. Find something else to do.’
This wasn’t exactly the advice David was hoping to hear. Almost at the end of his National Service, he was keen for a career in the film industry and his father, an advertising executive, had managed to wangle an interview for him at the studio thanks to one of his secretaries having previously worked there for Balcon. Now here he was being told in no uncertain fashion not to come into the business at all.
‘But I don’t want to do anything else,’ David heard himself say. ‘I want to make films.’
‘Make films?’ said Mason. ‘We all start off like that.’ There was polite laughter. ‘Which part of the industry are you interested in?’
‘I don’t know, really, I suppose I want to be the person who decides what happens, what’s got to be done.’
‘You want to be a director,’ said Mason.
‘Yes,’ replied David. ‘I suppose that’s what it is.’
‘The best way to be a director is through the cutting rooms,’ said Mason. ‘Be an editor. All our directors come from the cutting rooms, don’t they, Bay?’
Honri nodded in agreement. ‘Almost without exception,’ he said.
‘So that’s what you should do,’ said Mason. ‘How does that sound?’
‘Sounds marvellous,’ said David, not believing his luck.
‘By the way, what film directors do you admire?’
‘Jean Cocteau, René Clair and John Ford.’
‘Interesting,’ noted Mason. ‘What about our films? What do you think of them?’
‘I liked The Man in the White Suit, and Whisky Galore was good.’
‘Another of Sandy’s fans. They all go for him,’ said Honri.
‘Anyway,’ said Mason, ending the meeting. ‘If you don’t change your mind about coming into the business, and I suggest you do, give us a call when you come out of National Service and there’ll be a job waiting for you.’
David said his thank-yous and was led out into the corridor by Honri, who asked if he fancied popping onto one of the stages before leaving to see how it was all done. ‘They’re shooting a picture called The Ladykillers. Being directed by Sandy Mackendrick. When you go on, keep to the back, don’t make any noise and let yourself out when you’ve had enough.’
‘Thanks, thank you very much. For everything.’
Honri pointed David in the right direction and, before turning to leave, said with a wry smile, ‘The film business isn’t so bad.’
The stage was a blur of activity and it took David several minutes to acclimatise himself. Much of the activity seemed directed towards a brightly lit area that contained the set of an attic room, where a bunch of oddball-looking actors, some dressed in flashy suits and holding musical instruments, were in discussion with an elderly lady. As David edged closer to hear what everyone was saying, there was a loud cry of, ‘I think we’re about ready.’ The old lady exited the room and the other actors composed themselves. What David had been watching was a rehearsal. He was fascinated. As the camera pulled back, wardrobe and make-up people swarmed in for last-minute adjustments. A bell sounded and the red light went on. ‘Turnover,’ went a voice. Then, ‘Action!’
It was at this point that David recognised a couple of the actors, Alec Guinness, despite the horrific set of dentures, and Peter Sellers. They were all pretending to play their instruments as the old lady knocked and walked into the room with a tray of tea. ‘Cut.’ The voice belonged to Mackendrick. ‘Once more. I think we can do a better one.’
Everyone got on with their individual jobs as Mackendrick readied for another take. Just then David was approached by one of the crew. ‘This’ll be a good one, this will,’ the man said. ‘Sandy’s the best, knows what he’s doing.’
‘Does he?’”
‘You bet he does. Not like some of the others.’
Proudly David told the man that he fully intended to be working at the studio soon.
‘Will you now,’ said the man, not very impressed. ‘Remember me, then. Name’s Harry Phipps. Props. They always ask for me. I can get anything you want.’
David hung around for a while longer; nobody else bothered to come over and talk to him. ‘But it was fascinating to watch the filming continue. So little seemed to get done, yet I could see progress being made from one shot to another. There was so much about which I knew so little, that I couldn’t wait to get started and familiarise myself with it.’
As he’d been requested to do, David contacted Ealing after his demobilisation and was once again back in Mason’s office, only to be told there was no job for him in the cutting rooms. No job at all, in fact, save for something in the upstairs office working with a gentleman by the name of Rudkin, who kept accounts of everything in the studio – charts, progress reports and the like. Mason asked for Rudkin to come down and in walked a rather gruff fellow who had the habit of barking in place of normal speech.
‘OK young man, you’ll do. Right. Start tomorrow.’
‘Well, the thing is,’ David said apologetically, ‘I was going to go to Paris.’
‘If you don’t want the job …’
‘I do. I do. It’s just I’ve been two years in the army and I was hoping to have a short break before I started here.’
‘If you don’t start tomorrow, no job.’
David asked couldn’t he at least start the day after tomorrow and it was agreed. He was paid £5 a week, the bare minimum, and his first duties were to deliver call sheets and other menial tasks. After just a few weeks his break arrived when he was asked to be third assistant for Basil Dearden on a comedy starring a very young Benny Hill called Who Done It? (1956). ‘A piece of rubbish, really,’ David admits. He also discovered rather quickly that third assistant did most of the jobs everyone else on the unit didn’t want to do. In the film there was a chase around Notting Hill Gate, which required a bloodhound to stop at a road junction in order for Benny Hill to run past it. Animal training in British films was in its infancy, no one quite knew how to get this animal to do their bidding. Tom Pevsner, the assistant director, told David to run the dog round the block to get it out of breath. ‘What a stupid thing to say,’ argues David.
It’s a bloodhound, that’s what they do, they run forever. I went chasing round with this thing and it didn’t work. Nobody knew what they were doing. So one minute I was in charge of a barrack room of the most difficult soldiers in the army, the 39th Heavy Regiment, which was all the rejects and the troublemakers, and the next I was running this bloody dog around, trying to get it out of breath.
The hope with Who Done It? was that Ealing would create another comedy star in Benny Hill, a successor to the likes of Tommy Trinder, Will Hay and Stanley Holloway. His hit TV show had caught Balcon’s eye, and Tibby Clarke had accompanied the comedian on a recent music hall tour of the country in a bid to capture his personality to fashion a script that involved Hill donning numerous disguises as a private detective investigating a plot to assassinate British scientists. It was a tough schedule for the star as he was appearing at the time in a twice-nightly revue in London’s West End. That meant waking up at six in the morning to get to the studio for make-up at seven-thirty, where he’d invariably slump down in the chair and fall asleep. After a busy day’s filming, a car would race him to the theatre for the first of his evening performances. It was hectic, and often Dearden would turn round to direct Hill only to see him fast asleep right on the set.
During filming there was the inevitable fracas with the unions. Relations with union officials had the tendency to sometimes descend to the levels of total farce and such was the case here. One sequence in Who Done It? was to take place at Earls Court Exhibition Centre during one of their large-scale exhibitions, and the film-makers had made a deal with the venue’s management to buy up a lot of old stands and ship them down to Ealing. ‘The construction folk at the studio got very uppity about this,’ recalls Rex Hipple. ‘Because they wanted to make them, and the director said, “What for? They’re already at Earls Court, all we have to do is bring them in.”
Michael Balcon got wind of this, that there was trouble brewing, and so he said, “OK then, I’ll shut Ealing for good.” I remember at the end of that week all the secretaries were given their notice; he was going to close it up. And one couldn’t blame him, the unions were just being bloody-minded.’ What the unions probably didn’t know was that the studios were already under the threat of closure, but Balcon’s stance ended up working. ‘I mean, Ealing was the goose that laid the golden egg for a lot of us,’ says Rex. ‘We were all on decent wages. But I was quite proud of Balcon. I thought he did the right thing, he couldn’t be held to ransom by the construction folk who just wanted to make all the sets that were virtually just sitting outside the gate waiting to be brought in from Earls Court.’
Another duty on the film for David was getting Basil Dearden his lunch. ‘Go to the canteen, dear boy,’ he’d say (‘It was so patronising,’ admits David), ‘and get me a Wiltshire bacon sandwich with the rind cut off, best Wiltshire, and no crusts. And a coffee.’ So off would go a mightily irritated David to fetch this, thinking – am I a waiter or something? And then he’d never eat the damn thing. ‘So you were following him around like it was the bloody Dorchester or something. But that’s the kind of thing you did; that was what the third assistant did. But there was a way of doing it, a thank-you, for instance.’
One night, going home, David met Dearden on the train. ‘How are you getting on, dear boy?’ he asked.
‘OK,’ said David. ‘But I’m not mad about the coffee and sandwich service.’
‘I would do it myself,’ said Dearden. ‘But I can’t leave the camera.’
It made sense and did alleviate the resentment slightly. In fact, David got to quite like Dearden. When Ealing Studios closed down, just three months after David arrived, Dearden was the only one who helped him get another job. Out of work and desperate, David telephoned Dearden out of the blue. ‘You probably don’t remember me.’
‘Of course I remember you, dear boy.’ David asked if the director knew of any films starting up. Expecting to be told to bugger off, Dearden instead said there was one just about to get under way. ‘Ring these people, it’s called The Green Man. Just tell them I told you to ring.’
David arrived at the production office the very next day and was warmly received. ‘You’ve been highly recommended by Basil,’ said the producer. ‘So we’d like you to do the film.’ Just like that. It was a terrific break and David went on to become one of the top assistant directors in the business, working on numerous films including Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Highlander (1986).
In style and execution, The Green Man was almost a typical Ealing-style film, and starred one of the studio’s past collaborators, Alastair Sim. David caught a lift back into London once in Sim’s private limo.
I thought, this is my opportunity, I must ask him something serious about his craft. So I plucked up the courage and said, ‘Mr Sim,’ because it was always Mr in those days, no familiarity. I said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ He said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘What is your attitude to acting?’ After the briefest of pauses he replied, ‘I don’t have one.’ And that was that, end of conversation.
Dearden was one of the very few Ealing directors to carve out anything like a successful career after the demise of the studio, with The League of Gentlemen (1960), Victim (1961) and Khartoum (1966) among his most famous works. David recalls that on Who Done It? Dearden used to act out all the parts before a take and was sometimes much better than the actors.
‘I used to laugh like mad at the back. He’d go, ‘This is the way I’d like you to play it …’ He had a slightly avuncular way of speaking. And he couldn’t say his Rs properly.’
Tragically, in 1971, after directing the Roger Moore drama The Man Who Haunted Himself, Dearden was killed in a car accident. ‘No one quite knew what happened,’ David claims. Was it an accident, was it intentional, or had he been drinking? ‘He crashed the car straight into the barrier between the slip road and the motorway.’ He was decapitated at the wheel.
David left Ealing soon after Who Done It?, not having enjoyed the experience of working there at all.
It wasn’t fun, they weren’t fun people, they were too pompous and insecure. They couldn’t fool around and have a bit of fun because Michael Balcon might say you’ve got to take this seriously. Well, you take it seriously but there has to be a safety valve, and there wasn’t at Ealing, they were just so uptight and not very nurturing. And it should be fun, making films is doing something creative, but they weren’t into any of that, they played it safe.
Someone else who had grown disenchanted with Ealing and soon left was Christopher Barry. The Feminine Touch (1956), which followed a group of student nurses as they enter the National Health Service, was the last Ealing film he worked on. The reason he decided to go was simple: ‘I was no longer being used as a first assistant and was being used mainly as a researcher for the upcoming film about Dunkirk over at the Imperial War Museum and newspaper archives, and saw my future as bleak.’ Still, Christopher never regretted his time at Ealing; indeed saw his eight years working at the studio as a grand start to his career, first in the script unit and then in production. ‘All this set me up well to get the job I eventually got at the BBC. There was also the opportunities Ealing gave me to observe different directors at work and absorb much of the know-how needed anywhere in the film and TV industry.’
Once again it was Basil Dearden who helped out. Dearden must have recognised Christopher’s plight at Ealing and told him about an ad he’d seen for production assistants in BBC TV Drama, and suggested it might be just the thing and that he should apply quickly. And so it proved. With his experience at Ealing, Christopher quickly climbed the ladder to become a fully fledged director on such series as Z Cars, The Onedin Line, Poldark and All Creatures Great and Small. But it was his sixteen-year association with Dr Who that is perhaps his greatest television legacy. It began in 1963 when Christopher was entrusted to direct the show’s second-ever adventure, which introduced the now legendary Daleks. Christopher worked on a further three stories featuring the original doctor, William Hartnell, before returning in 1966 to handle the tricky job of introducing a new actor in the lead role, Patrick Troughton, thus cementing the long-term success of the series. With the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, Christopher directed two episodes, ‘The Mutants’ and ‘The Daemons’, considered by many to be among the series’ finest. In 1974, Christopher once more found himself introducing a new Doctor to the public when he was asked to helm Tom Baker’s first adventure. As Christopher told me, ‘If I didn’t quite make my ambition to be a film director I achieved enough to assure me a happy and creative career.’ Christopher passed away in February 2014, just a few short weeks after we had corresponded for this book.