SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK 'N ROLL
(AND TELEVISION - PART 2)
The 1950s rock and roll explosion was teenage rebellion writ large.
And like any rebellious youngster, time passes and adulthood looms - and what had seemed an energetic and vital recreation no longer holds the attention that it once did. New horizons are in prospect and the enquiring musical mind needs to seek out new sounds and challenges.
In the first part of this quintet of blogs - Sex And Drugs And Rock 'N Roll Part 1 - I covered how television here in the UK eventually embraced this new music. With an increasing public interest in genre music and albums, how would 1960s BBC and ITV respond in their busy schedules? What shows and formats would they provide and how would viewers react to them? I'll try to provide the answers by sorting out the landmark shows from the also-rans and exploring the key trends that emerged.
As before, this is no scholarly, exhaustive trawl through every facet of music on British television, so those expecting intellectual interpretations supported by a myriad of footnotes will be disappointed. But , fear not, it is an action- packed double-album in a smart gate-fold sleeve with colourful lyric sheet, so let's slip disc one out of its inner sleeve, gently place it on the record deck - and cue the music.
FROM OUT OF THE DARKNESS - THERE CAME LIGHT
April 20th 1964 was a big day for the BBC.
After two years of planning, the UK was about to receive its third TV channel - BBC2. Born out of the 1962 Pilkington Report which noted that following the 1955 launch of ITV, the BBC had become more populist in its approach, it recommended that the third channel should be a more upmarket and high-brow affair. Not only that, but coming just a few months after Prime Minister Harold Wilson's famous "white heat of technology speech", BBC2 would make use of the latest broadcast advancement by adopting the UHF format. This enabled the use of 625 lines on the TV screen and made for a higher definition picture as a result. It also meant that viewers would have to buy a new TV aerial capable of receiving UHF broadcasts, a major dampner on the exciting ideas the BBC had for its BBC2 schedule.
It wasn't all plain sailing.
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| Opening Night for BBC2 - with Candle Power |
On launch day at 6.45pm, there was a major fire at Battersea Power Station and large parts of West London, including BBC TV Centre at Shepherds Bush, were plunged into darkness. BBC2 was due to go on air at 7.20pm and although a partial back-up was quickly provided via Alexandra Palace, it was a less than glorious evening for the BBC and their viewers.
Despite the opening night disruption, BBC2 got off to a steady start, but its viewing numbers initially remained low as its potential audience wondered whether or not to buy their new aerials. For those that did, the reward was a pair of new and influential music shows - shows that took advantage of both BBC2's *high-brow* brief and the increasing public demand for more *grown-up* music on TV.
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| Jazz 625 - Titles - April 1964 |
Jazz 625 - neatly using the new UHF system in its title - launched on Day 2 of the new network, 21st April 1964. The show's format mixed in live concerts, jam sessions, interviews and all things of interest to the jazz fan. Presented by Steve Race - and later Humphrey Lyttleton and Peter Clayton - the timing of the show was fortuitous. Until 1964, the Musician's Union, keen to preserve the working interests of their members, had been in dispute with The American Federation Of Musicians which essentially meant that many US artists could not come and play live in the UK. This ended just as BBC2 was preparing for launch - and thus Jazz 625 made great play of the change by bringing stars such as Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson to perform for its viewers.
The show ran through to the summer of 1966 and uniquely for the BBC at the time, most editions were recorded on 35mm film stock and have been kept in the archives. Frequent use has been made of the performances since in all manner of documentaries and packaged repeats. Such was its impact and influence, that in the 1990s, an affectionate parody of the show regularly appeared in the BBC comedy series, The Fast Show.
BBC2 also catered for the pop fan who - perhaps - wanted a wider exposure to the range of artists working in the field. In August 1965, The Beat Room started on BBC2 as a half-hour live show with the chosen acts performing in front of an audience of dancers. The host was offstage and heard but not seen as bands such as The Animals, Moody Blues, John Lee Hooker, The High Numbers and Marvin Gaye appeared on screen. It ran for some seven months and whilst not hugely influential, it was a bold attempt to provide something a little bit different.
The Beat Room was the brainchild of director Barry Langford and he created its BBC2 successor, the awkwardly titled Gadzooks! It's All Happening . It was a half-hour recorded show, broadcast in the early evening and is memorable if only for widening the net a little in terms of the range of artists included. Alongside such as The Moody Blues, there were slots from Graham Bond, David Jones (Mr Bowie to be), Alexis Korner and folk guitarist John Renbourn. Sadly, none of the shows survives and it only ran for six months.
Whilst BBC2 was exploring the further reaches of the pop and rock universe, what was its elder brother, BBC1 up to? Given that it had a brief to cater for a wider section of the viewing public, it pressed on with Juke Box Jury and Top of The Pops, but it did experiment with a magazine-format music and youth show aimed at the under-21s. Called A Whole Scene Going On, it was launched in January 1966 and was hosted by Barry Fantoni (an artist, jazz musician and, for many years, a stalwart contributor to Private Eye) and actress Wendy Varnals. Of the 24 shows broadcast, only 4 seem to have survived - including one featuring such content as a live performance of The Spencer Davis Group and clips from the movie Dalek Inavsion Of Earth: 2150. Hardly cutting-edge, but none-the-less, interesting fayre.
As for ITV, it was steady as you go with their popular shows, Ready Steady Go! and Thank Your Lucky Stars. But, if TV was playing it safe, the music world in 1966 was on the cusp of revolution. The Beatles set the cat amongst the pigeons with the release of Revolver in August, an album that sign-posted a new direction of travel for the moptops. Bob Dylan had already released two classic electric albums in 1965 (Bringing it All Back Home; Highway '61 Revisited) and 1966 saw his stunning release, Blonde On Blonde. In San Francisco, The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were exploring new avenues, often substance-assisted - and here in the UK, British TV barely recognised the "new tomorrow" and BBC radio (for there was no commercial radio) ignored it.
Change was in the wind.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED - IN COLOUR
One of the benefits that BBC2 had by being broadcast on UHF was that it could accommodate the introduction of colour TV. The USA had pioneered colour shows some years before and even in the UK, several programmes (The Avengers, Thunderbirds) were made in colour for the US market. But it was the BBC who would be the first in Europe to launch a colour broadcast service. This was on BBC2 in 1967, just in time for Wimbledon - and from our point of view, co-iniciding with The Summer Of Love. The existing UHF aerial could cope with it, but televisions could not as once again, the viewing public had to decide whether to upgrade - this time to a large and expensive colour set. It was some while before the sufficiency of colour broadcasts met with the increasing propensity of the public to take the plunge, but the BBC did their bit to wave the flag. BBC producer Aubrey Singer had been working for almost a year on a major project to demonstrate the internationalism of television. He came up with the idea of Our World, a two and half our special to be broadcast via satellite around the world. It would take contributions from nineteen nations to show and promote internationalism and, although broadcast via the auspices of the European Broadcast Union, it remained a BBC project.
Our interest is the closing sequence where a range of artists such as The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Graham Nash joined with the Beatles in a live perfomance of a song the fab four had written specially for the occasion. The song - of course - was All You Need Is Love and it is believed to have reached an audience of 400 million viewers. The only thing that was missing was the fact that it was broadcast in black and white - but times would change, and very quickly.
It was The Beatles again that provided the catalyst - and this time, they had been working on a colour broadcast project of their own - The Magical Mystery Tour. It might have seemed a good idea at the time, the band playing themselves on board a touring coach alongside a host of odd and interesting characters all keen to find out where the Mystery Tour would end up. The plot was thin and the humour of the situation didn't always come across, but there were several fine songs to break up the production including the iconic sequence of the band playing I Am the Walrus whilst wearing animal masks. It was broadcast on BBC1 on Boxing Day, 1967. Thus far, The Beatles could do little wrong in the eyes of the British public having released Sgt Pepper to immense praise and success earlier that year. That combined with their abandonment of live gigs back in 1966 gave the show an added piquance, but whether it was an over-reached ambition or the desire of the Christmas TV audience to have non-challenging viewing, it was met with bemusement from fans and indifference from the critics.
One other interesting and influential programme hit the screens for the first time in that December as well. It was a bridge towards such shows as The Goodies, The Two Ronnies and Monty Python's Flying Circus - and it was aimed firmly at children. It was Do not Adjust Your Set, a comedy sketch show produced by Rediffusion (later Thames) featuring Terry Jones, Michael Palin, David Jason, Denise Coffey and Eric Idle. From our viewpoint, the excitement lies in the weekly slot occupied by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a platform for their anarchic musical pieces and today, a valuable archive for music clips. It only ran for two seasons of 13 shows (ending in 1969), but there's no doubt that when comparing the musical TV take on the world of the late 60s, it was probably more percipient than the fab four touring the land in a colourful coach.
Television - as is often the case - rarely sets the agenda, but is pretty good at following it once it's been established. Whilst the music world was turned upside down in 1967, it wasn't really until 1968 that the BBC hit its stride with bringing that revolution into our homes. March saw the launch on BBC2 of an early forerunner of what was to become the Old Grey Whistle Test slot, a show with the *catchy* title of Colour Me Pop. Aimed at pushing the availability of colour TV as much as presenting a host of pop and rock acts, it had been created out of Late Night Line-Up, a fondly remembered "open-ended" daily arts show. It only ran for half an hour, but managed to persuade a highly eclectic range of bands and artists to take part. In most shows, the whole programme was given over to one or two acts at most which served to provide a wider exploration of their music. Colour Me Pop ran for two seasons and in its 53 shows, it had sessions from The Hollies, The Kinks, Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, Giles Giles and Fripp, The Nice, Ten Years After and many others. This was such a striking comparison with the bill of fayre being served up over at Top Of The Pops on BBC1, but that show too was about to hit its stride and attain a popularity that lasted through to the mid 1970s.
Over on the commercial network, one-time pirate DJ and now BBC Radio 1 breakfast host Tony Blackburn was given a weekly show on Saturday evenings from February 1968 onwards. Called Time For Blackburn, it was an odd production, being created by the regional contractor Southern TV and not a show that was able to hold down a national broadcast slot. (In the 1960s, although ITV acted as an umbrella organisation, each regional station could determine their own scheduling of shows). It was interesting, though for two reasons - it was directed by Mike Mansfield (who we shall return to in the 1970s) and it aimed to include rock music as well as the expected pop hits of the day. It ran for a year and is one of several regionally produced ITV shows that added their bit to the television musical mix.
BBC1 had another bash at a magazine format show aimed (as it said at the time) at "the young and young at heart". This was How It Is, a forty minute show broadcast from July to December 1968 and produced by Tony Palmer who, later on, became a noted film director and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. Its music content varied quite a bit, but space was always at a premium as other segments fought for their time as well.
So, as 1968 came to a close, let's take stock of where we are.
On BBC1, Top Of The Pops was going strong and Juke Box Jury had come to an end. ITV's Ready Steady Go! had gone as had Thank Your Lucky Stars. BBC2 was pressing ahead with Colour Me Pop and various other specials.
The musical revolution had certainly brought change - and the increasing use of colour. But there was no doubt that in the round, the TV treatment of music programming still heavily relied on variety shows with a *safe* pop act rather than a good range of genre music shows and shows aimed at the album buying audience. Both main networks ran light entertainment series hosted by pop artists attempting to diversify and prolong their careers: ATV had been running a series of shows with Cliff Richard - later to transfer to the BBC in 1970 - and the BBC themselves had done their bit with several seasons of music and comedy shows hosted by Lulu. Cilla Black too had been launched in January as a TV entertainer by the BBC's Head Of Light Entertainment, Bill Cotton. Of the three, she went on to a lengthy televison career and it is for this which she's probably better known today, rather than her 1960s pop recordings.
But, how - and when - would this change? Would there ever be a time when *serious* rock and pop would have its own, prominent slots on TV? There's nothing wrong with populist programming - just as long as there's appropriate attention being given to the wilder stretches of the musical world too.
I'll explore this in the next blog as we take a look at the 1970s and 1980s This was an era of explosive change that started with paucity - and ended with profusion.
Was it what we wanted?
Join me next time.
Alan Dorey
20th January 2014.
The Beat Room was the brainchild of director Barry Langford and he created its BBC2 successor, the awkwardly titled Gadzooks! It's All Happening . It was a half-hour recorded show, broadcast in the early evening and is memorable if only for widening the net a little in terms of the range of artists included. Alongside such as The Moody Blues, there were slots from Graham Bond, David Jones (Mr Bowie to be), Alexis Korner and folk guitarist John Renbourn. Sadly, none of the shows survives and it only ran for six months.
Whilst BBC2 was exploring the further reaches of the pop and rock universe, what was its elder brother, BBC1 up to? Given that it had a brief to cater for a wider section of the viewing public, it pressed on with Juke Box Jury and Top of The Pops, but it did experiment with a magazine-format music and youth show aimed at the under-21s. Called A Whole Scene Going On, it was launched in January 1966 and was hosted by Barry Fantoni (an artist, jazz musician and, for many years, a stalwart contributor to Private Eye) and actress Wendy Varnals. Of the 24 shows broadcast, only 4 seem to have survived - including one featuring such content as a live performance of The Spencer Davis Group and clips from the movie Dalek Inavsion Of Earth: 2150. Hardly cutting-edge, but none-the-less, interesting fayre.
 |
| Second big-screen outing for Dr Who and the Daleks, 1966 |
Change was in the wind.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED - IN COLOUR
One of the benefits that BBC2 had by being broadcast on UHF was that it could accommodate the introduction of colour TV. The USA had pioneered colour shows some years before and even in the UK, several programmes (The Avengers, Thunderbirds) were made in colour for the US market. But it was the BBC who would be the first in Europe to launch a colour broadcast service. This was on BBC2 in 1967, just in time for Wimbledon - and from our point of view, co-iniciding with The Summer Of Love. The existing UHF aerial could cope with it, but televisions could not as once again, the viewing public had to decide whether to upgrade - this time to a large and expensive colour set. It was some while before the sufficiency of colour broadcasts met with the increasing propensity of the public to take the plunge, but the BBC did their bit to wave the flag. BBC producer Aubrey Singer had been working for almost a year on a major project to demonstrate the internationalism of television. He came up with the idea of Our World, a two and half our special to be broadcast via satellite around the world. It would take contributions from nineteen nations to show and promote internationalism and, although broadcast via the auspices of the European Broadcast Union, it remained a BBC project.
 |
| The Beatles at Abbey Road Studios for their Our World sequence |
Our interest is the closing sequence where a range of artists such as The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Graham Nash joined with the Beatles in a live perfomance of a song the fab four had written specially for the occasion. The song - of course - was All You Need Is Love and it is believed to have reached an audience of 400 million viewers. The only thing that was missing was the fact that it was broadcast in black and white - but times would change, and very quickly.
It was The Beatles again that provided the catalyst - and this time, they had been working on a colour broadcast project of their own - The Magical Mystery Tour. It might have seemed a good idea at the time, the band playing themselves on board a touring coach alongside a host of odd and interesting characters all keen to find out where the Mystery Tour would end up. The plot was thin and the humour of the situation didn't always come across, but there were several fine songs to break up the production including the iconic sequence of the band playing I Am the Walrus whilst wearing animal masks. It was broadcast on BBC1 on Boxing Day, 1967. Thus far, The Beatles could do little wrong in the eyes of the British public having released Sgt Pepper to immense praise and success earlier that year. That combined with their abandonment of live gigs back in 1966 gave the show an added piquance, but whether it was an over-reached ambition or the desire of the Christmas TV audience to have non-challenging viewing, it was met with bemusement from fans and indifference from the critics.
 |
| The Beatles - Have they been watching The Magical Mystery Tour? |
One other interesting and influential programme hit the screens for the first time in that December as well. It was a bridge towards such shows as The Goodies, The Two Ronnies and Monty Python's Flying Circus - and it was aimed firmly at children. It was Do not Adjust Your Set, a comedy sketch show produced by Rediffusion (later Thames) featuring Terry Jones, Michael Palin, David Jason, Denise Coffey and Eric Idle. From our viewpoint, the excitement lies in the weekly slot occupied by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a platform for their anarchic musical pieces and today, a valuable archive for music clips. It only ran for two seasons of 13 shows (ending in 1969), but there's no doubt that when comparing the musical TV take on the world of the late 60s, it was probably more percipient than the fab four touring the land in a colourful coach.
 |
| The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band |
 |
| Tony Blackburn |
BBC1 had another bash at a magazine format show aimed (as it said at the time) at "the young and young at heart". This was How It Is, a forty minute show broadcast from July to December 1968 and produced by Tony Palmer who, later on, became a noted film director and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. Its music content varied quite a bit, but space was always at a premium as other segments fought for their time as well.
So, as 1968 came to a close, let's take stock of where we are.
On BBC1, Top Of The Pops was going strong and Juke Box Jury had come to an end. ITV's Ready Steady Go! had gone as had Thank Your Lucky Stars. BBC2 was pressing ahead with Colour Me Pop and various other specials.
But, how - and when - would this change? Would there ever be a time when *serious* rock and pop would have its own, prominent slots on TV? There's nothing wrong with populist programming - just as long as there's appropriate attention being given to the wilder stretches of the musical world too.
I'll explore this in the next blog as we take a look at the 1970s and 1980s This was an era of explosive change that started with paucity - and ended with profusion.
Was it what we wanted?
Join me next time.
Alan Dorey
20th January 2014.
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