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
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
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