Turned Out Nice Again by Louis Barfe

Author:Louis Barfe [Barfe, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848877573
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

The Rolf Harris Show was a fixture in the schedules on Saturday nights – traditionally, variety’s biggest night on screen – from 1967 to 1971. Harris was already well known for hit records like ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Sun Arise’, but other talents were to come to the fore in the series. Morris recalls ‘a lot of sleepless nights thinking “How do I make this?” They said to me this has got to be seven o’clock on Saturday night, our main LE spot, so you’ve got to do a show that is not a children’s show. I already knew he could paint. I didn’t know then that he’d already exhibited at the Royal Academy. I didn’t realize his real talent. And that’s when this idea came up.’ This idea being that Harris would produce a giant painting live on air during each show. Thus it was that a whole generation spent their Saturday teatimes watching an Australian gent humming to himself and daubing a huge canvas with a thick brush, occasionally breaking off to ask the audience ‘Can you see what it is yet?’

Val Doonican’s shows, which were a fixture of the schedules for over twenty years, were far more sedate affairs, Doonican being very much an Irish version of US crooner Perry Como. If Doonican rocked, it was, as one of his album titles reminded us, ‘but gently’. Indeed, Doonican’s longest serving producer, Yvonne Littlewood, had worked on all of Como’s shows for the BBC, whether as production assistant or producer in her own right. Doonican’s early series, however, were produced by John Ammonds in the converted church in Manchester.

Somewhere between Doonican and Dusty in terms of attitude came artists like Shirley Bassey, who made a number of spectaculars for the BBC during the seventies. Stewart Morris produced them and can vouch for the power of the Bassey pipes: ‘For one of her specials, I stood her on the top of Cardiff Castle, singing the Welsh national anthem. I’m in a helicopter with no doors on it, about 50 feet away, filming her and the castle in the background. I’ve got a jet engine behind me, and I could hear her singing.’ Having conquered Cardiff Castle, Morris then sent Bassey out to film a sequence on a North Sea oil rig, and while he could still hear her some distance away, this time, she wasn’t singing:

The helicopter pilot said ‘We should turn back. I can’t land if there’s more than, say, a 10-knot wind, and it’s 15.’ I said ‘You tell her.’ He said ‘I’ll try and land it.’ Anyway, we got on it. I saw this lift, like a bosun’s chair, and I said ‘Shirl, you’ve got to do part of the song in this lift. I’m going to just lift it slightly off the deck and with the angle of the camera, I’ll shoot you against the sea, so that no one will know that you’re still on the deck.’ She wouldn’t have it, but

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