This is my second series of articles about BBC programmes from the 40s and 50s, when the corporation was a much-loved institution broadcasting material the listeners wanted to hear. This time I will be including some early TV shows. You can see earlier episodes in the series here, and the first series is here.
I HAVE never watched a minute of Strictly Come Dancing. I can’t bear the celeb culture of talent-free people being famous for being famous, and I object to the assumption that everyone in the country must love it (the same applies to the juvenile innuendo-laden Bake-Off).
Oh for the days of Come Dancing, the programme that celebrated proper ballroom dancing in an elegant riot of feathers, sequins and puffball gowns.
The forerunner of Come Dancing was BBC Dancing Club, a radio programme intended to lift spirits in wartime. It began broadcasting in the spring of 1941 in front of an audience at the Paris Cinema, Lower Regent Street, London. One of the features was a short dancing lesson, with the steps dictated slowly by bandleader Victor Silvester, followed by a pause so listeners could write down the instructions. According to an anecdote on the BBC website it was discovered that ‘Lord Haw Haw’ (William Joyce) was using these pauses to broadcast German propaganda. The solution was for Silvester to repeat the phrase rather than pause.
I found this 1930 clip of Silvester teaching a ‘simple’ dance step. (It is preceded by a few seconds of something completely different.)
When television was restored after the war, the programme was transferred and became Television Dancing Club. It launchedon January 27, 1948: it must have seemed impossibly glamorous to a battered Britain. It was presented by Victor Silvester and his Ballroom Orchestra. Here is the only clip I can find:
Victor Silvester was born in 1900, the son of a vicar in Wembley. He had piano lessons as a child. In his memoirs he said he enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in 1916, giving his age as 20 when he was actually 16. He described seeing action in the Battle of Arras in the spring of 1917 and being a member of five firing squads executing deserters. However Silvester’s service records released in 2000 showed that his age was discovered after only a week and he was promptly transferred to serve with the First Aid Services of the British Red Cross and St John Ambulance in France from 1916 to 1917. From there, he moved on to the First British Ambulance Unit in Italy. While acting as a stretcher bearer on September 4, 1917, he was wounded in the leg by a shell burst, but refused treatment until others had been attended to. As a result he was awarded the Italian Bronze Medal of Military Valour. In a letter to Silvester’s parents dated September 20, 1917, his Commandant in the First British Ambulance Unit, the historian G M Trevelyan, wrote: ‘He is certainly one who will be deservedly loved wherever he goes in life, and he is besides made of sterling stuff.’
Silvester’s memoirs were published in 1958, by which time he was a major star on British radio and television. How strange that he felt the need to invent a wartime history when the real thing was honourable, to say the least.
After the war he decided against a military career in favour of dancing. He and his partner won the World Ballroom Dancing Championship in 1922. From then on his career was stellar. In 1935 he formed his own band whose first record, You’re Dancing on My Heart, written in 1931 by George W Meyer, was to become his signature tune.
He insisted his recordings conform precisely to the beats per minute recommended by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, a concept termed ‘strict tempo’. He became indelibly associated with the catchphrase ‘slow, slow, quick-quick, slow’, the rhythm of the foxtrot and quickstep, and sold more than 75million records throughout his career. Here is his recording of Deep Purple, set to film of the liner Queen Mary on her maiden voyage to New York in 1937 and as a troop ship in 1940.
He died on holiday in the South of France in 1978, aged 78.
While Television Dancing Club was on BBC television, another show was taking shape under the aegis of impresario Eric Morley.
Morley was born in Holborn in 1918. His father died when he was two and his mother and stepfather died of tuberculosis when he was 11. London County Council sent the orphaned boy to the Royal Naval training ship Exmouth, where he earned a bit of cash by breaking chocolate bars into squares to sell to fellow pupils at a profit. In 1934 he transferred to the Royal Fusiliers as a boy bandsman, playing the French horn. During the war he became a captain in the Royal Army Service Corps, organising entertainment for the troops and fighting at Dunkirk. Demobbed in 1946, he resigned his commission and took charge of publicity at the Mecca Leisure Group. (I can’t imagine anyone starting a company called Mecca nowadays.)
In 1949 Morley came up with the idea of a competition called Come Dancing as a way of getting punters into Mecca’s dance halls. In 1950 the BBC began broadcasting it, alternating it week by week with the existing Television Dancing Club until the latter ended in 1964.
Morley went on to create the Miss World beauty contest. The first was in 1951 to coincide with the Festival of Britain. Here is a report in both English and French. I was astonished to see how brief the bikinis were, daring even by today’s standards.
The swimwear was more demure for the 1952 event, held at the Lyceum Ballroom in London. (Apparently the audience sat on the floor.)
By 1953 they had obtained some chairs.
The 1970 Miss World, compered by Bob Hope at the Royal Albert Hall, was controversial for two reasons. It coincided with the rise of Women’s Lib, and apartheid-era South Africa sent two contestants: a white contestant represented ‘South Africa’ while a black contestant competed under the title ‘Africa South’. On the evening of the contest, a bomb exploded under a BBC outside broadcast van (there were no injuries) and noisy demonstrators were held behind barricades.
Here is the opening act, the Lionel Blair Dancers.
Michael Aspel introduces the judges.
Suddenly protesters shouting ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry’ attack the stage with flour bombs, ink and leaflets. (This sequence jumps ahead a bit by showing the crowning of the winner.)
After the event gets back on track Bob Hope offers his considered opinion that ‘Anybody who wants to interrupt something as beautiful as this must be on some kind of dope.’
In the final sequence the 1969 winner, Austria’s Eva Rueber-Staier (often considered the loveliest of them all – my parents met her at a party and Dad was smitten) performs a dance routine before the announcement of the first black winner, Jennifer Hosten from Grenada. (I love the way the lower-placed contestants always pretended to be thrilled not to have won.)
That was not the end of controversy surrounding the contest as it turned out that four of the nine judges had given first-place votes to Miss Sweden, while Miss Grenada received only two firsts, yet the Swedish entrant finished fourth. One of the judges was Grenada’s Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy. Eric Morley tried to pacify protesters by describing the complex voting system, but many remained convinced that the contest had been rigged.
In 1960 Morley married Julia Pritchard, a former model he had met at Mecca’s Leeds dance hall and who, at the age of 86, continues to run the Miss World empire. In 1961 he introduced commercial bingo to Britain. I couldn’t find a contemporary clip but here is one from 1985, and I doubt if it had changed much.
Under his leadership Mecca grew from a small catering and dancing firm into one of the UK’s leading entertainment companies. It employed 15,000 people and covered dance halls, catering, bingo, gambling, ice-skating rinks, bowling alleys, discos and restaurants.
Described by the Guardian as ‘a voluble, self-made Cockney with an ability to put people’s backs up without consciously trying’, Morley fell out with Grand Metropolitan, which had taken over Mecca, in 1978 and left with a £200,000 payoff (well over a million now). He stood as Conservative candidate for Dulwich in 1974, although Labour’s Sam Silkin saw him off with a majority of 7,500 as he did again in 1979, albeit with a majority down to 122.
Morley raised millions for children’s charities and died in 2000 at the age of 82.
Back to Come Dancing: The format was a weekly competition between two regions. I can’t find any early episodes but here are a few clips from that era.
This is a clip from Come Dancing: I am not sure of the year, but the narrator informs us: ‘Joyce made her own dress – crystal chiffon in sunblush.’ Those were the days.
At its peak, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the programme attracted audiences of ten million. The last regular series was aired in 1995 with a 50th anniversary special in 1998. By this time many of the costumes had become revealing,
though there was still room for the old-time styles.
Over the years the presenters included Sylvia Peters, Peter West, Pete Murray, Michael Aspel, Keith Fordyce, David Jacobs, Judith Chalmers, Peter Marshall, Peter Haigh, Brian Johnston, McDonald Hobley, Terry Wogan, Isla St Clair, Peter Dimmock, Angela Rippon and
Rosemarie Ford.
Here, in a rare programme available on BBC iPlayer, Terry Wogan hosts the 1978 final. That shirt!
Footnote: For many viewers the highlight of the programme was the formation dancing segment. The top teams were trained by Frank and Peggy Spencer at their Royston Ballroom in Penge, south-east London. When I was at Beckenham Grammar School in the 1960s, sixth-formers had dancing lessons at the Royston with boys from the counterpart school, Beckenham and Penge Grammar. I asked some old school friends about this, and the consensus was that it was part of the curriculum, not optional. One afternoon a week (for a term, I think) a group of us would troop over to Penge and try to master the art. Unfortunately I have two left feet so never grasped a single step. I remember being partnered quite often with a boy known as Ace Worrall from his initials ACE – I think he was Andrew. Anyway we made a pact that if we were both still unmarried at 40 we would marry each other. I hope he isn’t still waiting.
