THE panel game What’s My Line?, based on an American show of the same name, began on BBC television on July 16, 1951. A contestant signed in on a board and performed a brief mime of his or her occupation. The four panellists tried to guess the occupation by asking questions with yes/no answers, such as ‘Do you go to people’s homes?’ and ‘Do you perform a useful service?’ If the answer was ‘No’ to ten questions, the contestant was declared the winner and was rewarded with a certificate. Most of the contestants were members of the public, but there was one weekly celebrity ‘mystery guest’ for whom the panellists were blindfolded.
At its peak the programme achieved Sunday night audiences of 12million. According to the Daily Mail TV critic Peter Black, it was ‘the first smash hit of the dawning television era’.
This is the theme music.
It was written by Woolf Phillips, one of the mid 20th-century big band leaders who also included Ambrose, Geraldo, Harry Roy and Joe Loss. During the war he played trombone with the Royal Army Medical Corps band, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, and by 1945 he was the RAMC’s musical director.
The first chairman of What’s My Line? was Gilbert Harding, a regular panellist on BBC Radio’s Twenty Questions in which a mystery object defined as ‘animal, vegetable or mineral’ had to be identified by means of questions with a yes/no answer. He was notorious for his short fuse and was at one time characterised in the tabloid press as ‘the rudest man in Britain’. You would have thought that he would not be the ideal choice as a game show host, and so it proved. After the first show he was shifted on to the panel and replaced as chairman by the genial Irishman Eamonn Andrews.
The most frequent panellists were Harding, Barbara Kelly, David Nixon and Isobel Barnett. Here they are in a programme from 1957.
With his urbane, gentlemanly air, David Nixon was probably the best-known magician in Britain in the 50s, 60s and 70s. He started learning his craft as a child and joined the Magic Circle in 1938, when he was 19. During the Second World War, being unable to fight because he had suffered pneumonia, he worked with ENSA. Afterwards he joined the Fol de Rols, a touring variety troupe based in Scarborough. In addition to his magic act, Nixon sang, danced and worked front of house. His big break came when he was invited to be a panellist on What’s My Line?, appearing in 150 editions between 1954 and 1963, when the original series ended.
He subsequently had many TV shows. One of his notable tricks, in 1974, was making the singer Lynsey de Paul disappear from a glass casket.
Here is another sequence from around the same time.
In the mid-60s Basil Brush became his sidekick. This is the only tiny clip I can find, but Basil was such a success that he was given his own show.
Nixon, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer in 1978, aged 58.
Barbara Kelly was born in Canada in 1923. At the age of 17 she married Canadian actor Bernard Braden and the couple moved to Britain in 1949. They were regulars on radio both separately and together.
In 1962 ITV launched On the Braden Beat, a consumer affairs programme which also examined political issues, the serious items being interspersed with music and sketches. The show introduced Peter Cook’s character E L Wisty, seen here in a sketch from 1965.
In 1967 Braden moved to the BBC and started another programme with essentially the same format called Braden’s Week. Here are the opening titles.
There were two reporters, newspaper journalist John Pitman and Esther Rantzen, previously a TV researcher. The producer was Desmond Wilcox, who was married with three children. At around the time Braden’s Week started, Rantzen and Wilcox began the affair that led to their 1977 marriage.
Braden’s Week ran for four series, the last episode being broadcast on April 29, 1972.
The reason usually given for the axing of the show was that Braden had appeared in TV ads for Stork margarine, and though he was a freelance the BBC felt that this was incompatible with his position as the host of a programme which might be called on to investigate a commercial company. However as far as I can tell that was not exactly what happened. The Stork ad went out in 1971 and Braden made the fourth series of Braden’s Week after it aired. He then went to his native Canada to make a similar series there. I don’t know whether he expected to resume Braden’s Week, but in his absence a new series, That’s Life, again a mixture of consumer affairs and humour, was commissioned with Esther Rantzen as presenter and Desmond Wilcox, by then head of general features at the BBC, in overall control. Barbara Kelly was convinced to her dying day (in 2007, when she was 83) that Rantzen and Wilcox had stolen the idea from Braden’s Week, and never forgave Rantzen.
In 2001, almost 30 years after the last Braden’s Week, Rantzen published her autobiography, portraying Wilcox’s former wife Patsy as a bitter woman whom he had never loved. When Wilcox’s daughter Cassandra expressed her outrage, Barbara Kelly publicly took her side. As a result, she said, she received a large number of supportive letters from members of the public who recalled Braden’s usurpation by Rantzen. Kelly preserved them in a folder marked ‘Hate Rancid File’. (This article from the Guardian is worth reading for the cremation anecdote.)
The third member of the regular What’s My Line? panel was Isobel Barnett, always referred to as ‘Lady Isobel Barnett’ though since her title came via her husband she was technically Lady Barnett.
She was born Isobel Marshall in 1918 in Aberdeen. Her father was a neurologist and she was privately educated. She studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and qualified as a doctor in 1940. She worked as a GP in Leicester during World War II where she married solicitor and company director Geoffrey Barnett, who became Lord Mayor of Leicester in 1952. His wife was hosting a local ceremony when a BBC executive noticed her aptitude for making her guests feel at ease and decided she would be perfect for television. The following year her husband was knighted for public services, making her Lady Barnett. Her arrival on What’s My Line? in 1953 made her a star. She appeared in 327 episodes, including the new colour series of What’s My Line? in 1973-4. Here is an episode from January 1974 with fellow panellists William Franklyn, Nanette Newman and Kenneth Williams.
Her last TV appearance was in 1978 when This Is Your Life surprised Barbara Kelly. (I can’t find the programme on YouTube but there is an article about it here, with Lady Barnett in the eighth picture from the left at the foot of the main item.)
In 1980, when she was 62, she appeared in court accused of stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream worth 87p (£3.28 now) from a village shop near her home in Cossington, Leicestershire. She pleaded not guilty but was convicted and fined £75 plus £200 court costs (a total of £1,190 today) with the alternative of 14 days in jail. Four days later, on October 20, she was found dead in the bath at her home. A coroner ruled that she had killed herself with an overdose of painkillers. However last year writer Paul Stenning cast serious doubt on this verdict. He suspects that she was murdered, and from his evidence I think he is right, and I can guess who did it. I do urge you to read this fascinating article.
Gilbert Harding was born in 1907 in Hereford where his parents were the ‘master’ and ‘matron’ of the city’s workhouse. His father died in 1911 at the age of 30 following an appendicitis operation, and when Gilbert was nine he was sent to board at the Royal Orphanage of Wolverhampton (now called the Royal School, Wolverhampton), set up by a Victorian philanthropist, John Lees, to educate children who had lost one or both parents.
In 1950 Harding contributed to A History of The Royal Wolverhampton School 1850-1950 which was privately published to celebrate the school’s centenary. Copies were given to the governors, staff, local and visiting VIPs, the Home Office and the Royal Family. After a passing mention in a comment on an earlier article in this series, I was contacted by a reader who sent me copies of the four pages that Harding wrote. I think TCW can reasonably claim a world exclusive!
Harding won a scholarship from the ‘Ophney’, as the school was known by its pupils, to Cambridge where he studied French and German for ‘three glorious years’ (1925-28). At university he became a devout Anglo-Catholic and for a time trained for the Anglican priesthood, but abandoned the idea and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1929. He had a wide variety of jobs including as a teacher of English in Canada and France, a policeman in Bradford and the Times correspondent in Cyprus. He studied for the bar but never took his final examination. In 1936 he began his long-term career with the BBC.
He made many programmes which were well received but it was What’s My Line? that turned him into a household name. He was voted Personality of the Year in the National Radio Awards of 1953-4. A waxwork of him in Madame Tussauds was labelled ‘The Most Famous Man in Britain’.
His irascibility was his trademark and he became caught in the trap that he had to be rude to be in continued employment. Viewers watched What’s My Line? hoping for a repeat of the outburst when he told a contestant: ‘I’m tired of looking at you.’
He took on several film roles, including one as himself in the early Cliff Richard vehicle Expresso Bongo.
Again he found that directors wanted only his bad-tempered persona and he continued to parody himself. He felt a deep sense of loathing that his fame should derive from such a trivial source, and once observed his status was akin to that of a weary circus lion in need of protection from his public.
Harding was a homosexual at a time when such activity was illegal. In 1960 he was interviewed by John Freeman on the programme Face to Face and wept when talking about his late mother. He admitted that his bad manners and temper were ‘indefensible’. He said: ‘[I’m] profoundly lonely . . . I would very much like to be dead.’ The programme was broadcast on September 18, 1960. Less than two months later, on November 16, Harding had a fatal heart attack on the steps of Broadcasting House. He was 53 years old.
As you might expect, the Face to Face interview is not available to view on the BBC website.
This picture was taken shortly before his death.
The original series of What’s My Line? ran until 1963, when its popularity was fading. It was revived in colour on BBC from 1973 to 1974, hosted by David Jacobs. In 1984 it switched to ITV, with Eamonn Andrews returning as host until his death in 1987. It continued until 1990 with successive hosts Penelope Keith and Angela Rippon. Two ITV stations, HTV and Meridian, resurrected it for the last time in 1994 with host Emma Forbes before it finally died in 1996.
