Denis Norden believes his career with Alright on the Night came from a cup of tea in the ITV canteen discussing a mishap on the BBC
For a television series whose success depended on things going wrong, It’ll Be Alright On The Night had a remarkably trouble-free birth.
Over a cup of tea in the London Weekend Television canteen, producer Paul Smith and I were chatting about the famous Blue Peter episode featuring Valerie Singleton and the incontinent baby elephant, when one of us — and, for the life of me, I can’t recall which — mused: ‘Wonder if it would be possible to string together a whole programme of out-takes?’
(Strictly speaking, that one wasn’t an ‘out-take’ because it had been transmitted, which made it what we later called a ‘blooper’.)
After mulling it over for all of five minutes, we phoned upstairs to Michael Grade, then Head of Entertainment, and asked if we could meet to talk about a programme idea.
‘Come up now,’ Michael said.
He received us, red-braced and shirt-sleeved, waved us into chairs and said: ‘Tell me about it.’ I can recall the next two lines of dialogue verbatim.
‘What do you think about an entire programme of out-takes?’
‘How soon can you let me have it?’
We left his office with a recording date and a budget. Michael had even suggested a title which, Paul and I agreed on the way down, wasn’t that hot, but seeing he had been so accommodating, it might be best to go with it. We went with it for 29 years.
To select the hundred-plus clips that went into each episode I looked at every one of the thousand-or-so our researchers dug out of edit-suite dustbins round the world.
Some of their treasure trove presented a considerable challenge. You don’t know what wandering attention is until you’re obliged to sit through a two-hour reel of minor mishaps from a daily Korean soap opera, all of them verbal. On the whole, though, the experience was agreeable.
It was not unpleasing to watch so many highly respected film and TV personages in their moments of alarm and unease. While other programmes set out to portray the ups and downs of showbusiness, we can safely claim that in 29 years we did not portray one up.
Over a cup of tea in the London Weekend Television canteen, producer Paul Smith and I were chatting about the famous Blue Peter episode featuring Valerie Singleton and the incontinent baby elephant, when one of us — and, for the life of me, I can’t recall which — mused: ‘Wonder if it would be possible to string together a whole programme of out-takes?’
The shows consisted largely of what I once saw a management training manual describe as ‘unplanned deviations from criteria-based standards of competence’.
I’ve certainly experienced many of those in my own long career and I present them in the following ruminative rummage through moments that have amused or impressed me over the years. But enough of the Opening Titles. Cue the Clips!
On the only occasion I flew Concorde, I was very flattered when the captain invited me on to the flight deck. After exhibiting various complicated instruments and dials, he said: ‘It’s difficult for most people to grasp the concept of really high speed, so we lay on a simple demonstration. In the time it takes me to say your name, we will have travelled a mile. Ready?’
‘Ready,’ I said.
On the only occasion I flew Concorde, I was very flattered when the captain invited me on to the flight deck
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Stand by ... Frank Muir.’
I first met Frank, and his famous pink bow-ties, early in 1947. Like me, he was ex-RAF and had spent the latter part of his service career writing shows to entertain the troops and we were both hired to work on the radio comedy series Take It From Here.
So began a 17-year writing partnership which took on some affinities associated with long-married couples. These included a form of non-verbal communication that enabled us to exchange complex messages without a word being spoken. You have no idea how many pungent remarks I was glanced.
Frank and I began working together long before the advent of the word processor. The most advanced item of technological gadgetry writers had at their disposal was the recently introduced ballpoint pen. And even that was regarded with distrust by a generation brought up to revere expensive fountain pens.
As we were both hopeless at typing, the first draft of a Take It From Here script was painstakingly written out in longhand, a task that always fell to me because my crabbed and angular scrawl was that much faster.
We would sit facing each other across our wide office desk, batting the lines to and fro while, at intervals, Brenda, our secretary, would poke her head round the door to ask: ‘Anything yet?’
As soon as there were a couple of pages ready for her to collect, she would take them back to her own office and convert my scribbles, blotches and marginal jottings into pages of neat, double-spaced print.
This instilled one valuable discipline. When setting off on a false trail could lead to excesses of retyping and rejigging, you mulled an idea over in a lot more detail before committing yourself to it.
It was, I suppose, akin to television watching in the days before the invention of the remote control. You tended to give the programme a bit more of a chance before hauling yourself up and walking across to change the channel.
A line Frank would use to outrageous effect was reserved for the stuffiest of broadcasting’s social occasions: a chairman’s dinner, or the presentation of a special award. Meeting one of the lady executives dressed in unaccustomed finery, he would take her hand and compliment her on how exquisite her dress looked. Then, leaning forward and dropping his voice to the most confiding of tones: ‘Why pay more?’
When Frank and I arrived Down Under to write a series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, a journalist at a press conference asked: ‘How can two people write a comedy script together?’ One of us — I forget which — answered: ‘We use a very large pencil’ and the other mimed the two-handed wielding of an oversize writing instrument.
From the very first It’ll Be Alright On The Night, we paid a fee to every performer seen in an out-take
A week or so later, we were shown a cutting from a New South Wales magazine in which that information appeared under the heading ‘Fifteen Fascinating Facts About Muir and Norden’.
Working on The Seven Faces Of Jim, the 1961 series which introduced Ronnie Barker to TV, Frank and I found that we shared Ronnie’s fondness for end-of-the-pier jokes, agreeing that the best of them began, ‘A man went into a chemist’s shop...’ (Favoured example: ‘A man went into a chemist’s shop and asked for a bar of soap. “Want it scented?” asked the chemist. “No, thanks, I’ll take it with me.”’)
Ronnie also introduced us to his all-time favourite: ‘I have 200 more bones in my body than you have.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I had a kipper for breakfast.’
‘Two words you can’t go wrong with,’ Eric Morecambe once told me, ‘are kippers and Cockfosters.’
From the very first It’ll Be Alright On The Night, we paid a fee to every performer seen in an out-take. Outside of running a railway or managing a pension fund, it is hard to think of another activity where those who make a mistake can get paid extra for it. I once likened it to owning a farm where you earn more from the manure than from the cattle.
It was suggested to me that the reason why the blunders we showed on It’ll Be Alright On The Night were so well received was because the English nourish a deep fondness for well-intentioned failure. After all, the one historical date no Englishman ever forgets is 1066 — when King Harold neglected to get out of the way of an arrow.
Similarly, what does England’s best-known poem celebrate? That well-loved military disaster, the Charge of the Light Brigade. And this is without even mentioning the Eurovision Song Contest.
As a regular guest on Channel 4’s Countdown, I was required to give a short monologue during each show and I was casting about for ideas when I noticed an item in the local paper advertising ‘Chest Freezers’. I began idly wondering why anyone would freeze their chest, then realised that I constantly assigned literal meanings to phrases other people accepted at face value.
As a regular guest on Channel 4’s Countdown, I was required to give a short monologue during each show and I was casting about for ideas when I noticed an item in the local paper advertising ‘Chest Freezers’
I remembered the question that had come to mind on first encountering a bottle of ‘Coconut Shampoo’ was, ‘What sort of person shampoos a coconut?’ (Ditto for ‘Lemon Rinse’, ‘Turtle Wax’, and ‘Executive Shredder’.)
Out of this came the notion of ‘Literalism’, a medical condition which I defined as ‘the congenital inability to interpret words or phrases other than in their literal sense’. After concocting a few of these on the first batch of programmes, I began receiving an unexpected number of letters from viewers confessing their own encounters with Literalism.
There was the lady from the Home Counties, for instance, who admitted the befuddlement she felt on first sighting a road sign reading ‘Heavy Plant Crossing’, envisaging a massive African violet making its way across the A4.
Such notifications as ‘Gigantic Wedding Dress Sale’ or ‘Floral Arrangements to Match Your Interior’ also brought Literalists up short. If you bear that in mind, I need only quote you the first sentence of the second letter, which came from a Literalism-afflicted pensioner in Bournemouth. ‘On the fire extinguisher they installed in the hall of my flat last week, it said: “Turn upside down before using.”’
One day, while lunching at the Soho restaurant Isow’s, which was popular with celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye, I was told by a waiter that an elegant blonde lady sitting by the window had asked if I could sign a menu card for her.
Endeavouring to give the impression that this sort of thing happened all the time, I obliged, only to see her take the card from the waiter, inspect the signature and then tear it into four pieces which she dropped on the table.
As soon as she was gone, I called the waiter back and asked: ‘What was all that about?’
‘She thought you were Arthur Miller,’ he replied. The odd thing was, I felt even more flattered.
- Adapted from Clips From A Life by Denis Norden, published by HarperPerennial at £10.99 © Denis Norden 2008. To order a copy, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.
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News Pictures The memoirs of the late DENIS NORDEN reveal his own life was as funny as his show
You don’t have to pack away your bikini just because you’re the wrong side of 20. These body-beautiful stars reveal their secrets to staying in shape and prove you can smoulder in a two-piece, whatever your age. Read on and be bikini inspired!
TEENS
Hayden Panettiere
Size: 8
Age: 18
Height: 5ft 1in
Weight: 8st
To achieve her kick-ass figure, Hayden – who plays cheerleader Claire Bennet in Heroes – follows the ‘quartering’ rule. She eats only a quarter of the food on her plate, then waits 20 minutes before deciding whether she needs to eat again.
Hayden says: “I don’t have a model’s body, but I’m not one of those crazy girls who thinks that they’re fat. I’m OK with what I have.”
Nicollette says: “I don’t like diets – I see it, I eat it! I believe in eating healthily with lots of protein, vegetables and carbs to give you energy.”
kim cattrall
Size: 10-12
Age: 52
Height: 5ft 8in
Weight: 9st 4lb
SATC star Kim swears by gym sessions with Russian kettle bells (traditional cast-iron weights) and the South Beach Diet to give her the body she wants. To avoid overeating, Kim has a radical diet trick – squirting lemon juice on her leftovers – so she won’t carry on picking.
Kim says: “I am no super-thin Hollywood actress. I am built for men who like women to look like women.”
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