Variety, Pop and Populism

Boris Johnson meeting Archie Rice - illustration by Bob Dickinson, 2022

 I grew up with parents who became adults during the Second World War. They never glorified anything about the conflict they were caught up in. For them, it had clearly been no picnic, and they knew they were lucky to have survived. But British popular culture viewed things differently. And in some surprising ways, the television and radio that kept us amused when I was growing up has had a large part to play in the rise of the political populism we’re now enduring.

As a kid in the 1960s, the originality of British pop music was hard to ignore. Even our war-weary Mum and Dad liked the Beatles – a band that came from a regional port city, making the band aware of imported black American records that never got played on British radio. And the Beatles wouldn’t have been as tight a band if they hadn’t worked the tough clubs of Hamburg as well as Liverpool.

“Programmes like ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium featured comedians, dancers, circus acts, ventriloquists, puppets, and artists who just whistled.”

But while the Beatles looked outwards, much of the British entertainment world looked backwards. The way in which pop was broadcast was carefully controlled. Pop music had to fit into a familiar template in order to be included in radio and TV schedules. This template had been shaped by the tradition of Variety entertainment.

Variety was a format that stretched back to the music halls of the nineteenth century, when popular song, comedy and dance were first organised into a booking and promotional system capable of attracting mass audiences drawn from the industrial working class and lower middle class. Nearly all the TV and radio shows that first featured the Beatles resembled these traditional Variety shows. Programmes like ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium featured comedians, dancers, circus acts, ventriloquists, puppets, and artists who just whistled. On tour, many of the venues the new pop groups played were surviving Variety theatres, and similar end-of-the-pier establishments. UK pop, including the work of the Beatles, was also creatively steeped in the variety tradition. Bands like the Kinks and the Small Faces paid tribute to it musically and visually. And it’s difficult to imagine Sergeant Pepper forming a Lonely Hearts’ Club Band without music halls, benefits for Mr Kite, and Victorian memorabilia.

Variety also provided the template that shaped many of the other TV and radio programmes we grew up within the 1960s. Entertainment departments at the BBC and ITV were seemingly run by executives who believed that this was the only way to please and placate the masses. Popular shows like Opportunity Knocks or Have A Go, which were both originally devised for radio, nonetheless had their origins on the Variety and music hall stage, where their presenters, Hughie Green and Wilfred Pickles, respectively, learned their craft when young. Both those presenters were also acutely aware of Britain’s regional differences, as were the music halls of the previous century, where comedians especially made mirth and mockery of stereotypical Scots, Irish, cockneys, and northerners. TV and radio comedy kept such stereotypes alive, even after the Suez Crisis of 1956, when John Osborne’s play The Entertainer was first staged, with its central character, the bitter and twisted comedian Archie Rice, satirising the teetering decline of imperialist Britain.  Even more amazing was the BBC’s reluctance to give up on the Variety tradition’s most offensive trait, that of “blacking-up”. The Black and White Minstrel Show was a regular and popular feature of BBC TV schedules until 1978, when the first angry surge of punk rock was already a thing of the past.

But even as late as the 1970s and early 80s, it is also important to remember that many of Variety’s original workforce were still alive, including, of course, a large number of the lesser-known ones, who were not necessarily stars. In my 20s, as the post-punk beneficiary of work funded by the Manpower Services Commission, I tracked down and tape-recorded interviews with elderly working-class people who’d earned a living in Variety theatre at the beginning of the 20th century. I learned a lot from them. I learned, for instance, about audience behaviour (and I wrote about it in the journal, Oral History). I also discovered that under Variety’s surface of stereotypes and racist imagery, there lay deeper, darker secrets.

“In my 20s, I tracked down and tape-recorded interviews with elderly working-class people who’d earned a living in Variety theatre at the beginning of the 20th century. I discovered that under Variety’s surface of stereotypes and racist imagery, there lay deeper, darker secrets. ”

I remember an old lady called Anne Liddy, for instance, who started out as a child clog dancer in pubs around Manchester before becoming a member of the Tiller Girls dance troupe and performing in Paris in the early 1900s. She still wept angrily about one manager who she knew was sexually abusing some of the younger girls she worked with, whom Anne had tried to protect. The “me too” generation goes back a long way: another interviewee told me that to submit to the advances of a manager in order to get work was known as obtaining work “via Richard”.

And there were other perils. In the Staffordshire Potteries, I met Frank Marsden, a retired dentist who’d survived the trenches of the Great War. He retained fond childhood memories of going backstage at the Hanley Grand Theatre of Varieties to meet many of the big names, like Harry Lauder, Little Tich, and even the great Russian bass singer, Feodor Chaliapin. But those good times ended suddenly, when Frank’s father, the leader of theatre’s band, died young of a lung infection, as a result of having to sit for hours on end in a draughty, unheated orchestra pit.

Like the pop and rock industry that stemmed from it, music hall and Variety were exploitative and at times brutal. Yet it was easy to get nostalgic about it all, and, like Brexiteers do now, when describing British history, recall a false impression of how funny, charming, patriotic and inspiring it all was, as the BBC TV series The Good Old Days did, for many years.

So, perhaps it’s not so surprising to remember too that British showbiz, with its Variety upbringing, was also capable of direct intervention, attempting to influence the surrounding political and economic climate. After Harold Wilson’s Labour government devalued sterling in 1967, an I’m Backing Britain campaign, supported by the establishment and royalty, led to a burst of populist patriotism. And an I’m Backing Britain record was released, sung by the veteran comic Bruce Forsyth, host of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The campaign and the record both endorsed the idea of ordinary folk working extra hours without pay, to help the British economy. Understandably, the TUC raised concerns. Meanwhile, reviewers correctly identified Brucie’s record as pure propaganda. And like the campaign, the record flopped.

But by the 1970s, when the economy was in an even more difficult state, Hughie Green used his biggest show, Opportunity Knocks, to comment regularly on the state of the nation, against the instructions of the show’s producers, Thames TV. At end of 1974’s series, he appealed, live, to his audience to “Wake up!” to what was going wrong with the nation. And in 1977, he released a single, Stand Up and Be Counted, which he performed on the show, with a choir. It featured an opening monologue that referred to Britain’s apparent lone stance in both world wars, namechecking Churchill, and specifically mentioning the Blitz year, 1940. Amongst other goals, Green looked forward to “freedom from strikes”. Green’s career may have ended as a result of his blatant act of political interference. But his sentiments chimed in with many of those expressed by Margaret Thatcher, elected soon afterwards.

It may also be that Hughie Green’s ranting, as well as Granada TV’s mid-1970s series the Comedians, both led Trevor Griffiths to write his still-disturbing play, Comedians, first staged in 1975. Set in Manchester, it describes how a group of hopeless trainee comics forget everything they have been taught when faced with a live audience, and aim as low and as crude as possible in order to get a laugh. But in today’s Britain, haunted by the nationalist words of comedians like Nigel Farage, Priti Patel, and Boris Johnson, it’s Hughie Green’s backwards-looking sentiments that seem ahead of their time. The whole sorry tale reveals how today’s nationalism is just as corny, sentimental, racist and phoney as Variety and music hall were at their worst.