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Double Bill (Text Only). Bill Cotton
Читать онлайн.Название Double Bill (Text Only)
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008219420
Автор произведения Bill Cotton
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
During one performance, Jack Warner was on stage doing an impression of Maurice Chevalier, which had a certain poignancy because France had just fallen. The band played the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, quietly in the background while in ringing Shakespearean tones Jack Warner declaimed that France would rise from the ashes again. At this point Tommy’s voice rang out from the makeshift dressing-room, ‘A drop of hot water in No.9 please’ – a well-known catch phrase in public bathhouses at the time. Jack was beside himself with fury, Tommy assumed an air of innocence and couldn’t understand what the fuss was about, and my father as usual tried to be the peace-maker. Then a stray German bomb dropped near the theatre, which besides playing havoc with bookings put these silly artistic tantrums in perspective.
Dad may not have achieved his dearest wish and flown in combat, but he and the band were subject to the dangers of travelling around Britain during the war, playing as they did in towns and cities that got a pasting from the German air force. In Plymouth, both the theatre where they were appearing and the hotel where they were staying went up in flames. The band got out just in time and spent the night on the moors overlooking the city. Dad was having supper at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool when it was hit by a bomb. He escaped injury and for the rest of the night travelled backwards and forwards on the Mersey ferry, on the principle that it was harder to hit a moving target.
During the blitz, a bomb dropped in the garden of our Willesden house and blew the front off, so we had to move out. We stayed at Farnham Common for a while with a good friend of my father’s, Jimmy Philips, who was a music publisher. We eventually found a house nearby and we’d frequent the local pub, the Dog and Pot. It was there that my father and Jimmy first heard a German song which was a favourite of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the desert. The Eighth Army lads had adopted and adapted it, adding some pretty ribald words. Both Jimmy and my father were struck by the tune and got a song writer called Tommy Connor to put some lyrics to it. It was called ‘Lili Marlene’ and became immortal.
At about this time Leslie Grade, who had become my father’s agent, went into the RAF. His brother Lew took over the agency and with his other brother, Bernard Delfont, created one of the greatest show-business dynasties of the century. The Grade organisation represented Dad until he died. There were plenty of heated discussions between client and agent over the years. Leslie used to tell the story of my dad pitching up in his office and demanding more work in London. When he was told that there weren’t any more theatres left, that they were either booked up or bombed out, Dad hit the roof and shouted that he’d had enough, their partnership was forthwith dissolved. As Dad stormed out of the door Leslie shouted, ‘You’ll be back!’ – and sure enough, he was. He’d left his hat behind.
In spite of having in Leslie Grade one of the best agents in the business, my father’s career took a dip in the immediate postwar period and he seriously considered giving up the entertainment business and buying a garage. The problem was that the Billy Cotton Band seemed to have been around for ever; there was a dated feel to their music compared with that of orchestras such as the Ted Heath Band and the Squadronaires who had first formed ad hoc as groups of musicians serving together in the forces, then decided to stick together when they were demobbed. To the millions who had served in the forces these were the exciting and evocative sounds of the hectic war years, whereas Dad’s band, having been playing since the twenties, seemed to belong to a sedate era that had vanished for ever.
I remember going with him to the Streatham Empire where he was playing to a half-empty theatre and worrying whether his share of the box-office takings would pay the musicians’ wages. The truth was that live variety was dying – though ironically television was responsible for its resurrection and my father, having suffered through its declining years, was one of the chief beneficiaries when a bright new age dawned.
To add to the family’s problems, my brother while in the RAF had been posted to Burma where he contracted first malaria and then TB. After a long convalescence at the famous Baragwanath Hospital in South Africa, Ted came home, was demobbed and got a job in the film industry. Then TB broke out in his other lung, at which point my father flew him out to Switzerland, which as a result of its crystal-clear and unpolluted mountain air had become a leading centre for the treatment of the disease. Following intensive care, Ted went back to work again, but the family always had some anxiety about his health – as it turned out, with good reason.
In desperate need of work, Dad went to the BBC to see an Australian called Jim Davidson who was at that time Assistant Head of Light Entertainment. Jim proposed some radio work on different days of each week. This was no good to Dad because he played all round the country, often in towns a long distance from the nearest radio studio. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford to abandon live variety and keep the band in existence just for one broadcast a week. Jim Davidson thought for a moment and then said, ‘How about a show on Sunday mornings?’ This was a startling proposal. The BBC was still shrouded in Reithian gloom on Sundays, the founder of the BBC having decreed that no programmes should be broadcast which might distract churchgoing listeners from holy things. And the Billy Cotton Band with its raucous leader hardly qualified as a suitable religious offering. But Jim Davidson decided to take the risk and booked the band to do half a dozen shows at ten-thirty on Sunday mornings.
The show was an immediate success, though the strain on Dad and the band was immense. After a hard week on the road, they often had to travel through the night to get to the BBC studio by seven o’clock on Sunday morning for rehearsals. My father was to claim later that his famous catch phrase ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ was born when he arrived at the studio one Sunday morning to find the members of the band nodding with weariness in their chairs. ‘Oi, come on,’ he roared. ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ Noting its tonic effect on everyone in the studio, the producer suggested that that’s how the show should begin. Far from being outraged by The Billy Cotton Band Show, the representatives of the churches on the BBC’s religious advisory committee felt that the programme sent people off to church in an upbeat, cheerful mood. There was, though, the odd Puritan who believed that broadcast dance music on the Sabbath was the work of the devil. One Lancashire vicar was reported in the press as telling his congregation, ‘The choice is yours, Billy Cotton or the Almighty!’ Dad was flattered by the comparison. The Church’s only concern was the programme’s timing, which clashed with most church services which began somewhere between ten and eleven. The BBC then proposed that the programme should be moved to one-thirty, Sunday lunchtime, when families traditionally all gathered round their tables in convivial mood. It was this decision which transformed my father from being a fading band-leader into a national institution. Whole generations grew up and grew old associating the sound of The Billy Cotton Band Show with the smell of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
One unexpected side-effect of the radio show’s success was that Dad’s theatre bookings perked up again. Leslie Grade booked the band for a four-week tour with Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea. The show was called Tess and Bill, and ran for more than two years. Both Dad and Tessie were larger than life personalities – hugely so in Tessie’s case – and they got on well together. They toured all round the country to packed theatres and were at one about everything but money. Tessie had a much shrewder appreciation of Dad’s radio popularity than he had himself, and decided she’d take a percentage of the box office, whereas he preferred a fixed fee. Tessie’s instinct paid off and the tour made her very rich, until she made a fatal miscalculation. They had worked all the London suburban theatres, from Edgware to Hackney and New Cross to Lewisham, then Tessie proposed a final visit to the Victoria Palace – a West End theatre with an enormous coach trade. Dad felt that Londoners who’d paid four and sixpence to see them in the suburbs wouldn’t shell out twelve and sixpence for a repeat performance at the Victoria Palace, and he was right. Tessie lost a lot of money and Tess and Bill eventually split up.
Dad was soon drawing big crowds on the strength of the huge popularity his radio show had given him. Initially he had no interest in television,