Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas by Graham McCann

Author:Graham McCann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845137564
Publisher: Aurum Press Ltd

Mills, however, was far from satisfied with this apology, and serious discussions about whether or not to sue the star went on internally for more than a month before the decision was made to draw a line under the entire unhappy episode.103

Why had it all gone so horribly wrong? One factor might have been that Terry-Thomas only had memories of working regularly in television during the era of How Do You View?, when, as a pioneering programme-maker himself, he had often known as much as – and in some cases more than – many of his colleagues and superiors about the right way to bring a comedy project to the screen; perhaps overlooking how much better, more professional and (one would have thought most obviously) more experienced most television production teams had become during his prolonged absence, he could easily have returned to the TV environment with the same combative ‘I’m right – you’re wrong’ attitude that had helped him protect and improve his own shows back in the 1950s. Then again, he might just have come back and found that so much had changed about the medium he once had mastered that he suddenly felt a little like a dinosaur, out of date and disorientated; perhaps he even lost his nerve. Another possibility, of course, is that word had just reached him of a better-paid project, in a better climate, elsewhere (the movie How to Murder Your Wife, which was filmed towards the end of the following year, could have been the one), and he had not wanted to risk being tied up in England with a subsequent full-length series. Whatever the true reason for the sharp exit, however, it was clear that he had handled the matter embarrassingly badly, and knew that he had let down an old and very influential friend in Michael Mills, as well as alienating several other powerful people behind the scenes.

Terry-Thomas was somewhat surprised and relieved, therefore, when four years later, in the summer of 1967, he found himself being welcomed back by the BBC – and Michael Mills – to appear in another edition of Comedy Playhouse. This time, however, he was genuinely keen on the project – a story called ‘The Old Campaigner’ that had been crafted with him expressly in mind by the very experienced screen-writer Michael Pertwee – and was convinced that it possessed the requisite ‘legs’ to run on into a series. Cast as the ‘old campaigner’ himself, James Franklin-Jones – a globetrotting salesman (known as ‘FJ’ to his colleagues) who jets around the world on behalf of Balsom Plastics while continuing his incorrigible quest for ‘crumpet’ – he was on his best behaviour throughout: braving without complaint a set of rehearsals that were held in an over-heated church hall at St Mary Abbotts in Kensington; regularly taking his fellow cast members (who included Derek Fowlds as FJ’s young and naïve assistant, Clancy) for drinks at a few of his favourite old London watering-holes; and breezing through the recording session using every discreet little scene-stealing trick in the book.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.