Transcript from the GSPS meeting in May 1996, known as An Evening Called Fred.
Part 4 has John P Hamilton recalling his TV days working on A Show Called Fred, then the discussion digresses onto Bernard Braden.
The audience watched part one of A Show Called Fred episode 5 from 1956 on the TV. the last part of it was the Dustbin Dance.
John P Hamilton: The noise on those was entirely my fault. I think I must be the only person in history who has ever balanced two dustbins, live. And it wasn’t easy, I can tell you. I think we put the transmitter off the air a couple of times. Transient peaks, they used to call them.
My lasting impression is what rubbish the shows were. They were crude in the extreme, weren’t they? It was only 1956, but television then had been around then for ten years, post-war. Alright, the equipment was all a bit dodgy, we’d had to rake it in. I’m not making technical excuses, I don’t think I am, but I mean Dickie Lester may have been a brilliant film director later, but he was a terrible television director then, which is evident from what you’ve seen.
Brian Willey: it’s very home movie-ish.
John P Hamilton: Oh, absolutely. But again, Milligan was even more uncontrollable during those than he was in his radio days, I can assure you.
From the audience: The fact that everyone was laughing in the background, it was very unusual for those days. Everything has to be formal. If you’re about ten and you’re listening to that, this is a visual Goon Show really. If you were listening to that, hearing that laughter in the background, you felt that you were gradually coming out of the war, everything’s a bit less formal.
John P Hamilton: The war had been over eleven years by then, we’d made a little progress in broadcasting.
There was one particular horse laugh there that you probably detected at the beginning, which was a guy called Len Swainston, who was the senior floor manager. He did all the Fred shows, unfortunately. He had a really big mouth, he was known as the sergeant major around the place, and he had a very explosive laugh, which was a pity. The rest of the laughs are really from Reg Owen and the band because, after a big ding-dong with me, they insisted I left the band mikes up. We did, what I think I mentioned briefly at the Bournemouth conference, with Breakfast with Braden and Bedtime with Braden, we’d push the orchestra out and there was no audience. The orchestra weren’t allowed to see the run through, they were only brought in for the take and were told to laugh, to just react to what Bernie and the rest of the cast were doing, which they did.
That same principle was forced upon me, as the sound man, in this series. We left the band mikes up, and it was the Reg Owen band who were doing most of the laughing.
The longer sketches, which we haven’t seen on there, are better. The constable sketch where he finishes up marrying Val Dyall, they finish up as constable and wife or whatever. They are quite funny, but they’re still very primitive in their direction. Dick (Lester) tended to lock off a camera. There were limitations, the studio wasn’t much bigger than this room, with the band stuffed in the corner. Hence the moving VP, which was shot through the doors which you saw in that opening bit, where the thing came from the outside. Those were the outside doors of Studio 2 at Wembley. The interior was about twice as long as this room, and not much wider. Not much higher from a lighting point of view. They were old converted studios from the Twentieth Century Fox days, and one of the small ones in the three studio complex.
So it was extremely difficult to get anything out of it, how we ever got the sound out of it I don’t know. I didn’t then and I don’t now. And that was one of the problems. So you didn’t have room to track cameras around and then cross shoot, and all the bells and whistles that you get in television normally. The cameras were thundering great cameras of course, they took up a hell of a lot of room themselves, and the pedestals. So everything was sort of locked off on a single shot, and people came in and did daft things and ran around.
But again, there were terrible problems with the script. The production meetings on those were far worse than anything that ever went on in radio, I can assure you.
John Browell: I’m glad I didn’t go to television…
Brian Willey: It’s funny, John mentioning Breakfast with Braden and the band laughing. I can remember being appointed to it on one occasion, turning up at the studio, Piccadilly 1, the old stage door canteen in Piccadilly, and looking at the accepted layout which had been done before, and saying to the producer ‘I don’t like the look of the layout, three violins and the wind and brass section all behind the same microphone. I’d like to put the violins over here with their own mike, and the rest of the band here’. And we’d do this and rehearse, and the producer’s delighted with the sound, never heard the band sound as good as this. Braden comes in, ‘who did this?’, ‘Brian’, ‘I want it all back as it usually is’. The producer was dumbfounded. I can’t remember who he was. It would have been Roy Spear, wouldn’t it?
John Browell: It wasn’t me.
Brian Willey: It wasn’t you. You’d have supported me. ‘I want it all back’, ‘Why? It sounds marvellous.’, ‘Because three men don’t laugh on their own’. He wanted a collective laugh.
John Browell: I think I first met Bernard Braden on Golden Slipper Club. He’d just arrived from Canada and he was doing a spot on Golden Slipper Club. Just before the show we were out in the lavatory, he was occupying the next bay to me, and he said ‘What are they like, over here?’. Dumbfounded, I said ‘well, I suppose they’re the same as they are in Canada, yes?’ . He did the show and it went quite well. Hhe came round to me and said ‘Your advice was great, thank you’. That’s the only time he ever spoke to me.
John P Hamilton: He was a difficult sod to work with…..
An Evening Called Fred
continue to Part 5 >
The Goon Show Preservation Society 