In later life, Terry Nation was often to tell the tale of his early months in London, the doomed struggle to make it as either a comedian or an actor. ‘I auditioned as a stand-up comic, and I failed time and time again. Somebody told me, “The jokes are very good; it’s you who’s not funny.” That was hurtful, but then I figured I had to make a living.’ So he concentrated on writing, and was still getting nowhere when his fairy godmother appeared in the improbable guise of a Goon, as detailed by the Guardian in a 1966 interview: ‘His first break was an interview with Spike Milligan. He arrived so worn and woebegone that Milligan said, “You look terrible!” wrote out a cheque for £10, and told him to go away and try to write a script for The Goon Show. He did. Some of it, at least, was used on the air, and Milligan took him on as a writer.’
Although there is no evidence of Nation’s work ever being used in a broadcast edition of The Goon Show, much of the rest of this was true, insofar as it went. Harry Greene remembered him turning up backstage at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in January 1955 during a famous production of Richard II with Harry H. Corbett in the title role (Greene was playing Bushey): ‘He told me he was writing comedy scripts and trying to work as an actor and comedian, but wasn’t having much luck.’ But Greene also remembered earlier forays to London, reconnaissance trips that Nation made in 1954, but which didn’t form part of his personal mythology. Also missing from most of Nation’s versions of those early days was the fact that it was the BBC who sent him to see Spike Milligan in the first place.
Milligan and Eric Sykes, both established comedy writers but neither with full-time representation, had decided to form their own agency in the summer of 1954, bringing in the younger team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to create Associated London Scripts (ALS). Sykes and Milligan already shared an office above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, and this was to become the home of ALS, one of the most influential institutions in the cultural life of post-war Britain. ‘The intention was to encourage new writers,’ explained Beryl Vertue, then the secretary at ALS, though later to become a successful television producer in her own right. ‘And this was a bit of a godsend for the BBC, because when they found comedy writers, they’d often say: Why don’t you go down and see those people in Shepherd’s Bush. And so Terry would have arrived as part of that.’
Nation had indeed already been to the BBC, having had a meeting with the script editor and producer Gale Pedrick in March 1955, and it was from there that he was sent to see Milligan at ALS. But an even more significant oversight in Nation’s later accounts was the failure to mention his partner, Dick Barry, who accompanied him to that meeting. The earliest press coverage Nation ever received came in a South Wales Echo article in May 1955, which saluted ‘the tenacity, initiative and guts’ of ‘two young men from Cardiff’, and made it clear that those early months of struggle were not endured alone: ‘Terry Nation was a furniture salesman and Dick Barry an accounts clerk until early this year. They had started to write scripts for their own amusement some months before, but in January they threw up their steady jobs. Off they went to London like Dick Whittington to seek some fortune.’ The two men went together to see Pedrick, and the meeting appears to have been cordial enough, for Nation wrote to thank him for his ‘encouragement and advice’ and promised to ‘submit some [scripts] to you as soon as possible’. In the event, however, they had no further dealings with him, seemingly finding no need once they had been referred to Shepherd’s Bush and found themselves taken under Milligan’s wing.
Their timing was impeccable. They were not the first recruits to the agency, for a handful of others (notably Johnny Speight, later to create Alf Garnett) had already become part of ALS, but these were still early days in a venture that was to transform the role of writers on radio and television. Indeed they were still relatively early days for the concept of comedy scriptwriters at all.
In the days when comedians had been solely concerned with live performance, it had always been assumed by audiences that they wrote their own material. ‘Obviously there had always been many a humorist scripting patter and sketches for comedians,’ remarked Eric Sykes, ‘but the names of these backroom stalwarts were a closely guarded secret. They were in a backroom under a forty-watt bulb.’ As The Times later put it, with a wistful touch of nostalgia: ‘We never heard the names of scriptwriters when Little Tich or Harry Tate were around.’ When comedians did start being broadcast by the radio, they were still able to rely on their existing material, since their appearances were for the most part short, sporadic and unheralded items in the midst of a variety show (often with a voice-over to cover the more visual gags).
It was not until 1938, with the arrival of Band Waggon, starring ‘Big Hearted’ Arthur Askey and Richard Stinker’ Murdoch, that a regular comedy series made its debut on the BBC and things began to change. ‘An idea, novel in every respect to broadcasting in this country was approved by the BBC Programme Board today,’ the Daily Mail informed its readers, and the fact that it had to explain how this was going to work indicated just how new it all was: ‘The programmes will be in serial form to the extent that the same artists and characters will be retained, but each episode will be complete in itself.’ Band Waggon was also one of the first entertainment shows to be broadcast each week at a fixed time on the same day; the idea of regular schedules did not become standard until the paper shortages of the Second World War meant that listeners could not be guaranteed to receive their copy of the listing magazine Radio Times and therefore needed some certainty of what to expect.
The sheer quantity of material required for a weekly show was of a different order to anything anyone had experienced while touring the music hall circuit. Ted Kavanagh, who wrote the wartime hit series ITMA, calculated that ‘every half-hour show contained eighteen and a half minutes of dialogue, in which there were supposed to be one hundred gags or one every eleven seconds’. Such a discipline meant an abandonment of the established practice whereby a comedian could retain the same act for years on end, perhaps for an entire career. Even Tommy Handley, who, as the linchpin of ITMA, was probably the biggest radio star Britain has ever known, came out of this tradition; he played his sketch ‘The Disorderly Room’ around the music halls for twenty years, right up until 1941, when he finally switched his entire attention to broadcasting. Now, it seemed, the voracious demand for new material meant that a policy of hiring writers specifically for radio work would have to be adopted. But there was no rush to publicise this development. Vernon Harris was responsible for much of Band Waggon, but his contribution was unacknowledged: ‘I never got a credit it was the policy of the BBC that they wanted the public to believe that Arthur and Dickie made it up on the spot! It was as ingenuous as that, so they would not give me a credit.’
It was Kavanagh who was most responsible for remedying this lack of public recognition. The unprecedented success of ITMA during the war years eventually pushed his name forward and, when Tommy Handley died suddenly in 1949, thus forcing a premature end to the series, he was big enough that Radio Luxembourg (back on the air after the war) signed him up for The Ted Kavanagh Show, the first time on British radio that a writer had stepped into the spotlight. He had by then formed his own agency to promote the role of writers, and had struck gold when he signed up a new team in the shape of Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who were always keen to pay tribute to their mentor. ‘Pre-Ted Kavanagh and ITMA,’ wrote Muir, ‘scriptwriters simply did not exist in the public mind.’
Muir and Norden were the first to benefit from the new acceptance of celebrity writers. In 1948 their most influential show, Take It From Here, was shown in the Guardian’s radio listings with their names but with no indication at all that it starred Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley. By the early 1950s they were famous enough to be appearing on the panel games that proliferated in the early days of television, shows like What’s Your Story and The Name’s the Same. They became the yardstick of success, so that the South Wales Echo article in 1955 said of Nation and Barry that ‘their ambition is to follow in the steps of Frank Muir and Denis Norden as top script writers for BBC variety shows’.
It was into this new world that Associated London Scripts was launched by Milligan, Sykes, Galton and Simpson. Their timing was fortuitous, for the imminent launch of ITV meant that opportunities were about to increase dramatically. ‘When Ray and I started,’ said Alan Simpson, ‘there were just enough writers to service the BBC. But when ITV started, immediately you had double the requirement, so more writers came in to supply the demand. Which coincided with when the agency started.’ As Sykes put it: ‘With the advent of television comedy, writers were emerging like weeds through a crack in the pavement.’
The material that flowed from the founders of the agency, let alone from their subsequent recruits, represented an impressive diversity, from the anarchic alternative world of Spike Milligan, through the extended comic stories of Eric Sykes, to the pinpoint observations of human nature and behaviour perfected by Galton and Simpson. To some extent, this was the result of their very different lives thus far – their ages at the start of ALS ranged from twenty-four (Galton) to thirty-six (Milligan), and there was a division between those who had served in the war and those who had not – but they also had key characteristics in common.
None, for example, had a university education; unlike the satire boom that was to occupy so many column inches in a few years’ time, the comedy revolutions that came from ALS were not shaped by student revue. It was a trait characteristic of the era, for the leading writers among the Angry Young Men – John Osborne, Colin Wilson, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine – were similarly from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds and had received no formal education after leaving school. Those authors, however, were trying to break into established and reputable fields of work, whereas the members of ALS were embarked on a career path that had yet to be fully explored; they were writing comedy at a time when such a profession was practised by very few people indeed, which forged a certain sense of unity. Perhaps, too, there was the fact that they were all working in a very British tradition, largely unaffected by the American comedians on the American Forces Network. This was particularly true of Milligan, the one of the four for whom Nation had the greatest respect and admiration; his work showed no point of contact with American comedy, and his countervailing Englishness had a strong influence on the young writer.
ALS was described by Alan Simpson as ‘a mutual protection society’. Though this perhaps glossed over the business side of the company – it was still an agency that charged its clients the usual agency commission ‘often per cent’ and rented them office space – there was an enormous benefit to be derived from working in an office adjacent to those occupied by some of the country’s leading writers. ‘If you got stuck with an idea, you could walk down and knock on Eric’s door,’ recalled John Junkin, who joined the agency in 1955. ‘And he’d help. They were all like that. Eric, Galton and Simpson, Spike – they were always very, very helpful, and not in the least bit condescending to the new chaps.’ Beryl Vertue too noted the assistance offered by the founding partners: ‘In an altruistic manner, they were very helpful to the boys and when they had series, they would often encourage them to come and work on them. It was a tremendous opportunity for the new ones.’ The other significant advantage to being on the books of ALS was the access it gave to the BBC, as Junkin explained: ‘This was obviously the great value of the agency: they had the contacts.’
This was to be of considerable benefit to Terry Nation and Dick Barry. Just two months after that meeting with Gale Pedrick at the BBC, they were commissioned to write a 13-week radio series for Kitty Bluett, an Australian comedienne who was already a familiar voice on the highly popular show Ray’s a Laugh, playing the assertive wife of comedian Ted Ray. On the strength of that performance, which had been running since 1949, the decision was made in 1955 to spin off a new series based on her, to be called All My Eye and Kitty Bluett. Even with a strong supporting cast that included Stanley Baxter, Terry Scott and Patricia Hayes, however, and with musical interludes provided by the cabaret star Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, the show was not a success; it failed to receive a recommission, and Bluett rejoined Ray’s a Laugh for the following series in 1956 after her year’s absence. Nation was later to describe it as ‘a rotten show, a terrible show’. He also admitted that it was a huge step to have taken, from writing the occasional short sketch to being jointly responsible for thirteen half-hour shows, and he talked about coming through a real ordeal by fire, getting something out there every week, getting it prepared, ‘whether it was funny or not’.
Despite the challenges of writing All My Eye, and despite its failure to win the affection of the audience, Nation and Barry hadn’t blotted their copybook entirely with the show’s producer Alastair Scott Johnston, for he was to employ them later in 1955 as contributors to The Frankie Howerd Show. (‘Everybody wrote for Frankie Howerd,’ noted Alan Simpson.) In fact the amenable Johnston was to emerge as one of Nation’s chief supporters at the BBC in the early days, seeing something in the young writer that was worth nurturing. ‘He was supportive of people,’ remembered Beryl Vertue of Johnston. ‘He was very double-barrelled all the way down the line. He always wore a blazer. Very BBC, very nice, not pushy. He was good at his job, but he was not what you would imagine a typical producer to be.’ Ray Galton had similarly fond memories, though shaded with a significant qualification: ‘He was a lovely man, a man you could trust, a man you’d go into the jungle with. But not a man you’d want to produce your programmes.’ Others evidently came to the same conclusion, for although Johnston went on the BBC course to become a television producer, he never did make that leap, as so many of his colleagues did; instead he had to content himself with bringing to the radio its longest-running comedy series, The Navy Lark, which debuted in 1959 and lasted for over eighteen years, helping to establish the reputation of its stars Leslie Phillips and Jon Pertwee.
The partnership of Nation and Barry was not destined to last long. They were, by all accounts, an oddly assorted team. Ray Galton remembered them arriving at ALS ‘all hairy tweeds and walking sticks’, but the image appears to have been determined more by Nation than by Barry. ‘Terry tried to be extremely well dressed,’ recalled Alan Simpson, and the same memory struck Beryl Vertue: ‘He was always well dressed, liked nice things.’ A slightly more sardonic take was offered by Ray Galton: ‘He came down here with a cane. He was looking like an upper-class guy with a stately home somewhere, and he was acting a part of being amongst the peasants. He did try to look like a country gentleman. We all used to take the piss out of him.’ Though, as Simpson pointed out: ‘He must have got away with it with people who didn’t know him.’ Dick Barry, on the other hand, was remembered primarily for being self-effacing, in stark contrast to his more extrovert colleague. ‘He was a nice bloke, you knew straight away he was a nice guy,’ commented Galton, while Vertue added: ‘He was a very quiet person in the place, very quietly spoken.’ Simpson concluded: ‘Dick was much more diffident. He was very quiet. They were as different as chalk and cheese, apart from their accent.’
Perhaps the differences proved too much, or perhaps it was the need to break from their background and reinvent themselves, but by the end of 1955 the partnership had split. Barry teamed up instead with Johnny Speight, and made immediate progress. Over the next eighteen months or so, they wrote BBC television shows for both Frankie Howerd and Norman Evans, as well as providing the independent channel with That’s Life, Says Max Wall and The Dickie Valentine Show, in which Britain’s first true pop star was joined somewhat incongruously by Peter Sellers. Their biggest hit was the ATV variety show Get Happy, which made a household name of the comedian Arthur Haynes, though when he got his own long-running series, The Arthur Haynes Show, it was written by Speight alone, fast emerging as the most plausible rival in ALS to the four founding fathers. Soon afterwards, Barry was to emigrate to Australia, where he continued to find work writing for television.
Meanwhile Nation, rather than striking out on his own, had formed a new partnership. (‘None of them were fully fledged writers, so they gravitated towards each other,’ noted Beryl Vertue.) This time it was with two of the newer arrivals at ALS: John Junkin and Dave Freeman. Of the trio, Freeman was significantly the senior. Born in London in 1922, he worked as an electrician before enlisting in the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm on the outbreak of war. On being demobbed, he had joined the Metropolitan Police, spending some time in the Special Branch, before becoming a security officer at the American Officers’ Club in Regent’s Park. Throughout this period, he had harboured ambitions of writing, submitting stories to Lilliput magazine as early as 1941, while still serving in the Pacific. But it was at the Officers’ Club that he found his true calling, involving himself in the booking of entertainment acts and striking up friendships with new comedians, most significantly with Benny Hill. By 1953 he was selling gags to Frank Muir, who provided him with the encouragement to continue, and in September 1955, having contributed material to Hill’s television series and to the Terry Scott and Bill Maynard vehicle Great Scott – It’s Maynard, he abandoned his existing career path and joined ALS as a full-time writer. ‘He was quite gentle,’ recalled Ray Galton, ‘a tall fellow, big bloke.’
So too was Junkin, who like Nation and Freeman was well over six foot tall. Born in 1930, the son of a London policeman, Junkin had spent three years as a teacher in an East End primary school, though his career in education ended with an incident when he saw a boy in the back row chewing gum. Calling the child to the front, he issued the familiar instruction, ‘In the bin!’, and was horrified at the extent of his own power when the boy misunderstood and climbed into the bin, looking humiliated, resentful and hurt. Concluding that he ‘was not cut out for the teaching profession’, Junkin took up dead-end jobs to allow him time to try writing. Following the same path claimed by Nation, he wrote a script for The Goon Show and submitted it to Spike Milligan. Milligan’s response was sufficiently favourable – ‘I think you can write and I think you should’ – that Junkin too ended up on the agency’s books.
In January 1956 the new team of Nation, Junkin and Freeman had a meeting with Alastair Scott Johnston at the BBC to pitch an idea for a radio comedy they had devised, to be titled The Fixers. The stories would centre on a trio of characters: Colonel Harry Lashington, his cockney manservant Herbert Cooper (or perhaps Collins, the proposal gives both names) and a fiercely patriotic Welshman named David Owen Glendower, who ‘is intensely proud of his family tree, which he can trace back as far as his parents’. Together, they seek to right wrongs, motivated by ‘a strong sense of moral justice’, though ‘unfortunately they have more enthusiasm than good judgement’ and are liable to ‘insist on helping their fellow men whether their help is wanted or not’. The suggested storylines included the rebuilding of a house for an old lady who can’t get her landlord to do any repairs (though they get the wrong house), and the rescuing of a Victorian music hall comedian who was lost in the Amazonian jungle in 1901 (and doesn’t want rescuing); they return him to civilisation, ‘well, not quite civilisation, but show business’.
The fact that each of the three central characters sounds as if he could be played by one of the writers might suggest that they were keen to be behind the microphones themselves, but Nation’s covering letter to Johnston made clear that this was not the case, as well as outlining the ‘cinematic technique’ they wanted to use: ‘We feel that it is essential that a show of this sort should be performed without an audience. The construction of the show will depend not upon gags but situations. Using actors rather than comedians, we feel it would be dangerous to hope to influence the audience who are notoriously “idea killers”. We hope to experiment to some degree with recorded background music, and with your assistance, microphone techniques which emphasise voice.’ And they provided a wish-list for the cast they would have liked to see, all the names being up-and-coming actors with some experience behind them: Dennis Price as Lashington, Bill Owen or Dick Emery as Herbert, and – a star of Welsh Rarebit – Anthony Oliver as Glendower, with either Kenneth Kendall or Robin Boyle as the announcer.
It was an intriguing proposal, and some way ahead of its time. Though writers were beginning to acquire star status, comedy shows were still at this stage built around comedians. It was to be six years before the practice of using actors in sitcoms became fashionable, with the television series The Rag Trade (written by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe) and with Galton and Simpson’s pilot for what turned out to be Steptoe and Son. For three virtually unknown writers to be making such a suggestion revealed considerable self-assurance. So too did the idea of doing away with a studio audience altogether; there had been a few radio comedy series without an audience, such as the Marx Brothers-inspired Danger – Men At Work, first broadcast in 1939, but they were very much the exception rather than the rule. In an attempt to head off any doubts arising from these innovations, Nation was quick to add that ‘we have devised this as a low budget show, which we trust will be a point in its favour’. Even so, the confidence was impressive, and perhaps reflected the support they found at ALS, as well as a sense that anything was possible. These were young men, seeking to make their mark on the world with the encouragement of older-brother figures. ‘We were beginning to sense our own importance,’ noted John Antrobus, another of the ALS new boys. ‘We were going to kick the rest of the Fifties up the arse and start a New Decade.’ As Beryl Vertue pointed out: ‘They were unafraid because they didn’t know what to be afraid of.’
If in retrospect the basic set-up of The Fixers sounds like an early try-out for the 1970s television comedy The Goodies, the initial concern at the time was that it smacked rather too much of The Goon Show. Nation, however, reassured Johnston that Spike Milligan had seen the revised synopsis and ‘sees no similarity to his show at all’. Suitably impressed, Johnston passed the proposal on up the BBC hierarchy, explaining that it came from Terry Nation, one of the Frankie Howerd writers, plus two new assistants, Dave Freeman, ‘who has some experience of TV writing, and John Junken [sic], who is more or less new,’ and suggesting that ‘the idea is worthy of serious consideration’.
How much consideration it actually received is unknown, but the proposal was rejected, and The Fixers never came into being. In its place the three writers were put on a completely different project, though in the meantime they had received their first commission in a more direct manner: in February 1956 ALS engaged them ‘to script material for two shows for the Peter Sellers series Idiot Weekly’ at a fee of £150 per script ‘to cover all interests’. (The commissioning letter carefully pointed out that the writers were still liable for the ten per cent agency fees from this sum.) The sketch show involved was more properly titled The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d and ran in the London region for just five episodes in the spring of 1956. Made by Associated-Rediffusion, which held the ITV weekday franchise for London at the time, it was directed by Richard Lester, starred Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes as well as Sellers, and was the first time that the Goons’ humour was explored on screen. The writing was credited simply to Spike Milligan and Associated London Scripts, giving no indication of who was responsible for what, but the fact that Nation, Junkin and Freeman were invited to contribute at all was an indication of their acceptance within ALS. Junkin even appeared in one episode, deputising for an ill Sykes.
The BBC offer that emerged from the failure of The Fixers was to write a new series titled Floggit’s, starring Elsie and Doris Waters in their long-running Cockney characters of Gert and Daisy. The Waters sisters (their brother was Jack Warner, best known as the police officer George Dixon in the television series Dixon of Dock Green) had been working as a double-act since the 1920s, and for twenty-five years they had been big stars, appearing regularly in films, on records and on stage, but particularly on the radio: they were regulars on Workers’ Playtime and headlined series including Gert and Daisy’s Wedding Party and Petticoat Lane. The sisters had even received OBEs in 1946 in recognition of their contributions to the war effort. Much of their work has survived better than that of their contemporaries, for their rapid crosstalk sketches were mostly written by themselves, as were their songs, and their focus on finding humour in the everyday lives of women, together with the quiet, detailed observation of their character studies, was among the most advanced comedy to be heard.
By the mid 1950s there was a feeling that the homeliness of the act was perhaps turning into blandness, but there was life left in Gert and Daisy yet, and it was proposed that taking them away from their familiar setting in Knockhall Street, London, might help find new comedic possibilities. Nation, Junkin and Freeman were asked in May 1956 to produce a trial script, and when that proved satisfactory, a further fifteen episodes were commissioned. Committed to four months’ employment, the trio rented an office in the ramshackle Shepherd’s Bush home of ALS and set to work. ‘They cleared the potato sacks out of the spare room and put in a table and three chairs, and Terry, David and I moved in there,’ remembered Junkin.
They were now firmly part of the ALS world, a convivial society in which the pressures of meeting deadlines didn’t interfere with having fun. ‘You’d go to lunch when you wanted, you’d go home when you wanted. You knew what you had to do, but how you did it was up to you,’ said Junkin. ‘There were days when some of us never got much work done before lunchtime,’ remembered another writer, Brad Ashton. ‘So in Terry Nation’s office – which was quite a long office with a long strip of green carpet down the middle – we might play golf for about an hour or so, then we’d go into Lew Schwartz’s office – he had a big dartboard on his wall – where we’d play darts for another hour, and then we’d go to lunch.’ Lunch itself could stretch out until, fuelled by cigarettes and alcohol, the writers would resume a work programme that might last well into the evening; Milligan in particular was known to work so late that he ended up sleeping in his office.
Floggit’s, the series created by Nation, Junkin and Freeman during those late nights and between those long lunches, was based on the premise of Gert and Daisy inheriting from their Uncle Alf a general store – after which the show was named – set in the fictional village of Russet Green. There was, however, a snake in this rural paradise: ‘We expected life to be a bed of roses, and what turns up but deadly nightshade in person, Old Mother Butler.’ The gossipy, small-minded Ma Butler, played then as now by Iris Vandeleur, had been a regular antagonist of the pair and she was to remain their chief foe in the village, the butt of many of Daisy’s jokes. (Gert would have joined in but she was always a little slower on the uptake.) Beyond her, the series was crammed full of incidental characters played by an impressive cast that included Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Connor, Ron Moody, Anthony Newley and Ronnie Barker, the latter appearing for the first time as Ronnie, rather than Ronald.
Best of all was Joan Sims, fresh from her role as a nurse nicknamed Rigor Mortis in the 1954 Dirk Bogarde film Doctor in the House. In Floggit’s she played a variety of parts from Ma Butler’s sidekick, Emma Smeed, through to a sickly sweet little girl – in the same lineage as Monica in Educating Archie and Jennifer in Ray’s a Laugh – who lisped her way through soppy stories about her life (‘I’ve been down in the meadows talking to the squirrels and bunny rabbits’), but still managed to con Gert and Daisy out of money at every opportunity. Somewhere in between was an outrageously flirtatious barmaid, Greta, whose banter hinted at an impressive level of sexual promiscuity, and who got many of the best lines. ‘What do men talk about when they’re together?’ she asks a regular customer. When he replies, ‘I don’t know, the same as women, I suppose,’ she is deeply shocked: ‘Well, you should be ashamed of yourselves!’
Like Hancock’s Half Hour, now the most popular comedy on air, Floggit’s was a continuous thirty-minute programme without benefit of musical interludes (previously the bane of radio comedy shows), and was broadly a situation comedy, though there were some breaks from the storyline: Greta, for example, never meets Gert and Daisy, and plays no part in the plots, her contributions being simply stand-alone sketches. The stories themselves were vanishingly simple – a tree outside the shop becomes unstable and needs to be chopped down, they take in a stray dog who they nickname ’Orrible (played by Peter Hawkins) – but there was a gentleness and charm to the proceedings which has lasted well, even if it was considerably more mainstream than the material that Nation, Junkin and Freeman had wanted to write for The Fixers. And there were some good jokes, often referencing contemporary popular culture (the sisters have a couple of chickens named Marilyn and Sabrina, with the latter jealous of the former), while Daisy is always capable of coming up with epigrams that are slightly more acerbic than they appear at first sight: ‘Bonfire night’s no good without fireworks,’ she observes. ‘It’s like television without Richard Dimbleby.’ There was also – surely one of Nation’s contributions – the story of a Welsh perfumer trying to sell a new range of scents, including Evening in Caerphilly, Moon over Tonypandy and Ashes of Anthracite.
The series was produced initially by Alastair Scott Johnston and then by Bill Gates, and although it didn’t win any critical plaudits (‘All they have to say is “Nice cupper tea,” or “On your way, Stirling Moss” to a bus driver, and the audience roars like a giant being tickled,’ wrote Paul Ferris disparagingly in the Observer), it proved a popular success. The first run was followed by a Christmas special and, in 1957, by a second series of eighteen shows, for which Ronnie Barker and Anthony Newley were dropped from the cast, allegedly because the stars felt they were getting too many laughs.
In between those two series, Dave Freeman had found more lucrative work. The first series of The Benny Hill Show on BBC television in 1955 had been a major hit – Hill was named Personality of the Year in the National Television Awards – and for the second series of six hour-long shows, starting in January 1957, he called in Freeman to act as his official co-writer, a partnership that was to last into the 1960s and produce some of the most inventive visual gags of the early television era. Freeman did return to the fold for the second series of Floggit’s, but thereafter his path diverged from that of Nation and Junkin, and he went on to specialise in writing television shows for comedians including Sid James, Jimmy Edwards, Charlie Drake and Arthur Askey, as well as scripting Carry On Behind, one of the later entries in the long-running film series.
In Freeman’s absence, Nation and Junkin formed a more stable pairing, though their first step together was more of a stumble. In 1956 Alastair Scott Johnston had produced a Sunday night variety show titled Calling the Stars, and when new writers were required for the second series, he had recommended Nation and Junkin. By the time the first scripts were submitted, however, a new producer had taken over. John Simmonds (later to produce Round the Horne) was far from impressed by the material he received in January 1957, and rejected it as being simply unfunny. He also implied that he felt a little cheated by the absence of Freeman, who he had expected to be part of the team. At this point Spike Milligan, whose deep distrust of the BBC was by now approaching paranoia, involved himself in the issue, and it took Beryl Vertue’s conciliatory intervention to find a way forward. Nation and Junkin were given twenty-four hours to produce a rewrite of the first episode, with a guarantee from ALS that Milligan, Galton and Simpson would all look at the script before it was resubmitted. This having been done, the writers withdrew from the show at their own request, and Ronald Wolfe was appointed in their place.
But Milligan couldn’t quite let the matter drop, writing to Simmonds after the broadcast: ‘I should like you to know that the material which Peter Sellers did so uproariously well on your Calling the Stars programme, was written by the writers (John Junkin and Terry Nation) who were elbowed out of your programme as not quite up to it. Somebody’s wrong.’ Simmonds’s response was a masterly piece of barbed criticism: ‘May I say how wonderful I think Peter Sellers is, to be able to get a laugh by making a funny noise, having only said “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen”. I am sure you understand what this remark means.’
This hiccup did nothing to dissuade Alastair Scott Johnston from promoting his protégés, and later in 1957 he commissioned Nation and Junkin to write the new series of the popular Variety Playhouse, providing continuity material for the show’s host, the comedian Ted Ray, as well as a weekly sketch. And despite Ray’s reputation as an easy-going, family-orientated comedian, there was a slightly darker side to some of the material than might have been expected, a hint of bleakness behind the gags. ‘Then came the great day,’ reminisced Ray in a routine about his wartime exploits. ‘They were going to drop me into France. We waited by the plane. It was a beautiful British summer’s night – you could hear the owls coughing with bronchitis.’
As a further sign of his confidence, Johnston recommended that the two writers should, on the basis of their work thus far, be given a long-term contract by the BBC. It took nine months for the suggestion to be fully considered, but in June 1958 they were signed up to a year’s contract, with an option to renew, guaranteeing them a minimum payment of 2,000 guineas, their actual fee being calculated at 85 guineas for each half-hour show. (This put them marginally above the average annual salary of nonmanual male workers.) In the meantime, Nation and Junkin had scripted a new series of Fine Goings On, the show that had given Frankie Howerd his first headlining role when broadcast back in 1951. Then it had been written by Eric Sykes, Howerd’s first and finest collaborator, but the 1958 series was less impressive (a typical gag ran: ‘We can’t go to the Costa Brava.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because of the costa living!’) and certainly less well received, with the Observer’s Paul Ferris – the only radio critic on a national newspaper who paid any attention to such shows – again unimpressed by the writing: ‘His script would disgrace a small pier on a wet Monday.’
Nation and Junkin’s BBC contracts were not renewed when they lapsed at the end of May 1959, and – although they contributed some material for a new young comic, Harry Worth – there had been a sense during that twelve-month period that there was a shortage of projects for the two writers to work on; among other attempts, Beryl Vertue tried to get them a job on the Terry-Thomas radio series London Lights, but made no progress.
In fact there was to be just one more radio show to come from Nation and Junkin. The 1961 series It’s a Fair Cop starred Eric Sykes as a police constable at the rural Blossom Hill station, with Hattie Jacques playing his sister – the same combination that had just completed the fourth series of the highly acclaimed television sitcom Sykes and a .. . They were joined by Deryck Guyler as the sergeant and by Dick Emery as an habitual prisoner who, like Harry Grout in the 1970s series Porridge, has made himself fully at home. ‘He has been in and out for a long time,’ noted the Radio Times’s preview of the show, ‘and so has learnt to make himself comfortable with the armchair and television set provided by his solicitous gaolers.’ The same article did the series no favours by claiming that it would appeal to fans of Dixon of Dock Green: ‘It may be pure coincidence, but the setting for Eric’s radio series bears a striking resemblance to Dock Green.’
Yet again, Paul Ferris was less than enthusiastic: ‘There is funny Ealing-film-type music going oompah-oompah, and the script says things like “You’re late.” – “That’s no reason for putting my sausages in the cornflakes.” In desperation the writers use an astonishing number of tiny scenes, each barely supported by the basic competence of actors, ‘certainly not by the jokes.’ He was a little harsh in not recognising the acting talent of Jacques at least, who provided a splendidly inhospitable landlady: ‘I want you to treat it like it was your own ’ome. No cooking in the room, no pets, no musical instruments, no visitors after six in the evening.’ She exits with a parting shot at her new guests: ‘I’ll leave you to settle in. If there’s anything you want – get it yourself!’
The fact that Nation and Junkin were producing material for Sykes, who was not only a founder of ALS but one of the very best writers in the business, was clearly occasioned by him being overstretched with his commitments to the television series. ‘Because of the voracious appetite of radio and television,’ he later noted, ‘once accepted as a reliable writer you were forever swimming, with no time to tread water.’ The invitation to work for him was nonetheless to be seen as a compliment, and Junkin’s memory of the series was a positive one: ‘It did okay. It got a nice, warm reaction and pretty decent ratings, and I think we would probably have done more than one series had Eric’s TV series not been such a big hit so quickly.’
By this stage, the pair had effectively turned their backs on radio and – a little way behind Nation’s former co-writers, Dick Barry and Dave Freeman – were focused now on television work, where the prospects were greater and the money was better. The shift in power in the broadcast media was already clear, but in case anyone was in any doubt about who now called the shots, there had been a symbolic changing of the guard in February 1957 when the Radio Times was redesigned so that instead of the radio schedule preceding that of the television, the order was reversed. Four years later a further, more subtle change made the same point. The magazine had previously run from Sunday to Monday, giving primacy to the Sabbath, the observance of which had been so important to John Reith; now it capitulated to television’s love of the weekend, and started its listings on Saturday. The effect of the rise of television on the other dominant form in popular culture was still more devastating. In 1950 there were 1,400 million cinema admissions in Britain; ten years later that total had collapsed to just 500 million. During the same period, the number of television licences increased by ten million, while those for radio (the radio licence was not abandoned until 1970) fell dramatically. Television, clearly, was the medium of the future.
The first breakthrough for Nation and Junkin – excluding their contributions to The Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d – came in December 1957 with the one-off show Friday the 13th, starring Ted Ray, with whom they had just worked on Variety Playhouse. When he returned with his regular television series, The Ted Ray Show, the following year, they were retained as writers, and were primarily responsible for seven hour-long editions, though three sketches were contributed separately by Dave Freeman. Another involved in the series was a BBC staffer named David Whitaker; then a light entertainment script editor, he would later emerge as a significant figure in Nation’s story. As well as script editing, Whitaker contributed lyrics to some of the songs used in the show. Audience research carried out by the BBC on 22 November 1958 indicated that the series was proving popular. The reaction index gave it a score of 74, some way above the average of 67 that was expected of a Saturday night light entertainment show, and the report noted: ‘The script, too, was commended as being witty and topical.’
The series was produced by George Inns, who was also responsible for a couple of one-off programmes by the Scottish comedian Jimmy Logan, then the biggest live draw in Glasgow. When the comic was given his own twelve-part series by the BBC in 1959, Inns brought in Nation and Junkin to write the shows, since Logan had already exhausted his existing stock of material. As with Calling the Stars, however, a change in producer was to cause problems. Inns became fully occupied with The Black and White Minstrel Show, which he had brought to the screen and which had become an unlikely success story (Stan Stennett was one of the resident comedians), and he passed over production duties on Logan’s series to Bryan Sears, the man behind Morecambe and Wise’s notoriously disastrous show Running Wild five years earlier.
The Jimmy Logan Show was to fare little better, at least if its star was to be believed. Logan was deeply unhappy with the change in personnel, and came to see the producer as an enemy and saboteur: ‘He didn’t like me, so he had decided to do his best to make my show as bad as possible.’ Nor was he overly impressed with the material he was offered. ‘They made me sick because every single one was terrible, and obviously terrible,’ he commented of the first batch of scripts. ‘A good comedian can make good comedy out of a bad situation, but these scripts were way beyond salvage.’ For the last four editions, new writers were brought in, though with the benefit of hindsight, Logan’s biggest regret over the whole affair was that he didn’t walk out halfway through filming the series, as his misery deepened. The consequence was, he claimed, ‘that it took me at least two years to reestablish my credibility outside Scotland.’ Nonetheless, he returned to BBC television in October 1961 with a one-off 45-minute special. Although there was a new producer, the script was again by Nation and Junkin.
These ventures into television had been a moderate success and had provided an income, but they had hardly set the country alight. Nor had they provided much creative satisfaction for their writers. As an alternative, in the summer of 1960, Nation, Junkin and Johnny Speight approached the BBC with a new proposal for a series to be titled Comedy Playhouse, an anthology strand which would feature one-off sitcoms from a variety of writers and starring actors rather than comedians. The suggestion did eventually materialise, some eighteen months later, but in a modified form that dispensed with the multiple authors —instead the sixteen episodes that comprised the first two seasons of Comedy Playhouse were all written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (and included ‘The Offer’, which became Steptoe and Son). Like The Fixers, it was an idea ahead of its time, and clearly one that the BBC felt couldn’t be entrusted to unknown writers.
Meanwhile, in the absence of more substantial sustenance, Nation’s partnership with John Junkin was withering away. Junkin had already made some appearances as an actor at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the autumn of 1960 he opened there in a new play, Sparrers Can’t Sing, opposite Barbara Windsor; he was still in the production when it transferred to the West End. There were a couple of collaborations with Nation yet to come (It’s a Fair Cop, the special of The Jimmy Logan Show), but from now on Junkin was to see his career as being centred on performance and acting as much as it was on writing. He became a regular fixture on British television over the next forty years, playing in both comedy and drama and appearing as himself on game shows.
Meanwhile Nation too was becoming disillusioned with the way his career was failing to make significant advances. On a personal level, he was now happily married to Kathleen Grant, more commonly known as Kate, a classical pianist and the daughter of a Yorkshire miner, whom he had wed in March 1958; their marriage was to last for the remainder of his life. But professionally there was no comparable progress. As the new decade dawned, he could reasonably claim to have paid his dues since coming to London, with over a hundred episodes of radio series and more than a dozen television shows to his name (albeit in partnership with others). And yet he had failed to find an individual voice of his own or a stable vehicle for his talent. The positions of Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson at the top of the ALS tree might have seemed too remote to challenge, but others who had joined the agency around the same time as him were making much greater strides: Johnny Speight with The Arthur Haynes Show, Eric Merriman and Barry Took with the hit radio series Beyond Our Ken, which would later evolve into Round the Horne, and Dave Freeman with television series for Benny Hill and Charlie Drake. Meanwhile Maurice Wiltshire, Lew Schwarz and (until his untimely death in 1959) Larry Stephens were all busily supplying scripts for The Army Game, the most popular comedy on ITV.
The failed proposal for The Fixers had suggested that Nation was keen to create an original and distinctive show. Instead he was writing for Ted Ray, a man who shared his fondness for Jack Benny and American patter, and who was an engaging and amiable comedian, but one who had no great need for material that would set him apart from his rivals. Ray was essentially a teller of gags, and there was nothing much to separate his jokes from those of other comedians. The BBC contract had not been renewed, and Nation’s partners had moved on to other projects. Things weren’t going the way he had hoped.
‘I was getting into a very depressed state with the feeling that comedy wasn’t going the right way – not progressing,’ he remembered some years later. ‘I felt I’d like to go into drama, and after a heart-searching evening with my wife, I decided to write a television play. I’d finished it in two weeks – a comedy set in Wales called Uncle Selwyn.’