Don't Drink the Water

If you’ve watched or listened to our latest podcast on the sitcom Don’t Drink the Water, then you’ll have heard me go on at some length about the early days of London Weekend Television (LWT), and on future podcasts we’ll no doubt get on to most of the other historic ITV regional companies as well. Westward and Southern will get their respective days in the sun, and the grubby tale of the death of Thames will be retold. Although the old ITV regional set up is a mystery to anyone under 30, it’s impossible to talk about the history of UK broadcasting without acknowledging that each of the companies had a distinct identity and that was reflected in the programmes they made. The good news is that the literature about these companies is extensive, most of it is accessible on the second-hand market, and usually can be bought for peanuts.

The ”official” history of ITV is the multi-volume, magisterial Independent Television in Britain, written initially by Bernard Sendall, then later Jeremy Potter, and finally Paul Bonner and Lesley Aston. It’s great but I wouldn’t start with it, and instead I’d recommend memoirs or biographies of the key players, and any company histories if they happen to exist. In the case of LWT, there are some cracking books available, and it was a real pleasure to read them again while watching the excruciating first series of Don’t Drink the Water. I’d like to share a few nuggets from each of them.

David Docherty’s Running the Show is the story of LWT’s first 21 years. It chronicles the fraught genesis of the company in a clear and impartial way, but also vividly describes the personalities involved, including David Frost, Brian Tesler, Cyril Bennett, and John Birt. No management battle goes uncovered, and Docherty is never far from an update on LWT shares or the latest bonuses. You could argue the book gets a bit overwhelmed by detail at times, but some of the most fascinating bits are in the footnotes and shed a lot of light on how things work in the TV industry. For example, at one point it’s mentioned that “Birt was willing to hold over the transmission of a drama called Mitch, starring John Thaw, until the next financial year.” The footnote to this innocuous sentence reveals “By not transmitting Mitch, LWT did not enter it as expenditure and, consequently, it did not affect the company’s profits…it made sense not to transmit the most expensive type of programme – drama.” This continued to be common ITV practice for a number of years. Another footnote states “John Thaw was very upset.” In fact, he was so angry about Mitch being delayed that he refused to work for LWT again. Docherty’s book gets you from a footnote about accounting to the human story of an actor being badly treated. There’s a lot of similarly excellent stuff throughout Running the Show.

There’s a great deal more than LWT in Barry Took’s memoir A Point of View including his writing career on Take it from Here and Round the Horne as well a spell in the USA advising on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in. But the section on his time as Head of Comedy at LWT is really acute particularly when he analyses the history of the company “the real underlying problem with LWT in its early years was the uneasy mix of people from the old Associated Rediffusion and the influx of BBC people.” He’s very funny about Simon Dee’s disastrous LWT chat show (Took calls him “a minor irritation”) but the most eye-opening passage concerns his one encounter with Rupert Murdoch at which the latter accused Took of incompetence for not making even more episodes of On the Buses. Murdoch eventually “had to accept the reality of the situation.” The mind boggles.

Brian Tesler’s personal history of British television The Best of Times is a terrific book by one of the great figures in broadcasting. Tesler started at the BBC in the early 1950s, before moving on to ATV, ABC, Thames and finally LWT. It’s well worth seeking out. As Tesler was one of the protagonists at LWT, it’s obviously a partial account, but it tallies very closely to Docherty’s book, and Tesler’s affectionate portrayals of the big personalities involved like Rupert Murdoch and the extraordinary John Freeman are full of insight. Unfortunately, the book is quite pricey nowadays, but if you’re into this kind of thing then go ahead and treat yourself.

Finally, with Frank Muir’s autobiography A Kentish Lad you can just wallow in a very funny book that can usually be picked up for three quid. Muir is so likeable that you don’t really need to care about the history of radio and television in order to enjoy the stream of brilliantly told anecdotes. I particularly enjoyed the section covering the time when Muir and his co-writer Denis Norden were comedy consultants at the BBC, and worked with Head of Light Entertainment Eric Maschwitz, who amongst other things wrote the lyrics to A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and These Foolish Things. Muir was enamoured of Maschwitz and relishes telling stories about him: “Eric…invented nicknames for many of us…[his].. name for Denis and me was ‘Los Layabouts’, Dennis Main Wilson was ‘Dr Sinister’ and Graham Muir…a smooth, grey-haired producer of middle-class sitcoms was ‘our resident gynaecologist’.”

But A Kentish Lad is more than just fun. Muir’s covers the absurdities and agonies of his year or so with LWT with a light touch, but he also provides some crucial details for enquiring minds. For years I’d wondered why the earliest LWT sitcoms – most prominently Please Sir!’s first series - featured 45-minute episodes. There seemed to be no logic to it, and the practice was obviously abandoned quickly because On the Buses, made only a couple of months later, has the standard 25-minute episodes. Well thanks to Muir I now know the reason and it certainly wasn’t rational. “Tom Margerison, a senior management figure, though exactly what he managed I never knew…seemed to be principally concerned with convincing me to make all sitcoms last forty-five minutes.” So, there we have it, a manager who had previously been a science journalist with no experience whatsoever in television arbitrarily decided to dictate the length of sitcom episodes. It’s the kind of baffling detail that epitomises LWT at the time. There’s loads more good stuff in all of these books, and I recommend adding them to your TV library.

Errata. I made a couple of slips in the podcast. When I mentioned that in the early years of LWT Humphrey Barclay was the Head of Comedy, I meant to say that Humphrey Burton was Head of Arts. In fact, Barclay did eventually become Head of Comedy but quite a few years later. Also, at the end of the podcast my phrasing gave the impression that Brian Tesler is still alive, but sadly he died last year.

Next Time: The Adventures of Fred Silverman

Sources in chronological order: 

Barry Took, A Point of View, Duckworth, 1990 

David Docherty, Running the Show, Boxtree,1990 

Frank Muir, A Kentish Lad, Bantam Press, 1997 

Brian Tesler, The Best of Times, Kaleidoscope Publishing, 2016 

Thanks to Simon Coward, Adam McLean, and Andrew Pixley for indulging me in conversations about Don’t Drink the Water and the early days of LWT.