COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Bill Cotton 2000

The right of Bill Cotton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781841153285

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219420

Version: 2016-09-20

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife, Kate, for things too

numerous to mention, but above all for her love.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

On a crisp spring afternoon in 1969 I sat in St Margaret’s, Westminster, which is next door to the Abbey. It was my father’s funeral and, because he had been what one newspaper obituary called ‘one of the greatest entertainers of modern times’, the church was packed. My father was as usual playing to a full house, but this was the very last time he would do so. Celebrities like the great band-leader Henry Hall rubbed shoulders with hundreds of ordinary folk for whom Billy Cotton and his band had become over the years a valued part of their lives, on radio, television and in the theatre.

St Margaret’s is one of the most fashionable and beautiful churches in the land; MPs in particular cherish the privilege of being married or having their children baptised there. But it was the location for my father’s funeral not because he was famous or important but because he was born in the parish. When I went along to ask the rector if the service could take place there, he seemed dubious: Lent was a busy time; there were lots of services planned; the choir would be at full stretch; and so on. Beneath his expressions of regret, though, I detected just a tinge of scepticism at my claim that Dad had grown up in the parish and sung in St Margaret’s choir. Then a verger appeared and the rector explained to him what I was doing there and the difficulty of fitting in the funeral. ‘That’s a pity,’ said the verger. ‘He really loved this place. I often chatted with him when he slipped in to listen to the choir.’ That settled it. It was agreed that Dad should be laid to rest in his own parish church.

In fact, Dad had been born at what is now an exclusive address, No. 1 Smith Square, adjacent to the Conservative Party central offices. In 1899 it was a two up, two down terrace house (rent: seven and sixpence a week) and Dad shared a bedroom with three brothers while six sisters squashed into an attic room. Westminster was then a self-contained village within London. Like the other kids in the area, my father played in the streets around the Parliament buildings, hitched lifts on the cow-catchers of trams and swam in the Thames off Lambeth Bridge when the police weren’t looking. (If they were looking, Dad would often end up running home, naked and dripping wet, his boots tied by their laces round his neck.)

Dad’s father was a ganger in charge of a section of the Metropolitan Water Board, and looked splendid in a top hat with a badge on it. He was a huge man who could with one hand pick up his wife, Sukey, who was only four feet tall, and tuck her under his arm. He was once invited onto the stage of the Aquarium in Tothill Street to try his luck against George Hackenschmidt, the Russian world-champion wrestler. In a flash he was on his back, but went away with the ten shillings promised to anyone brave enough to go into the ring against the world’s strongest man.

I still use my grandfather’s malacca walking-stick which has a gold band around the top inscribed, ‘To Joseph Cotton: from X Division, Metropolitan Police in appreciation of help with violent prisoners. May 1925.’ He must have been sixty-five years of age when he came to the rescue of a couple of police constables trying to arrest a gang of thugs. So he knew how to take care of himself.

Grandad was mad on clocks. However complicated they were, he could take them to pieces and put them together again. He had three or four clocks in every room of the house – cuckoo clocks, chiming clocks, water clocks. It was bedlam to walk through the house on the hour or half-hour.

In the deep silence before the funeral service began, I gazed around the church to keep my mind occupied and my eyes off Dad’s coffin. As a choir boy, under the eagle eye of St Margaret’s legendary organist and choirmaster, Dr Goss-Custard, Dad had sat in one of those stalls practising every weekday at noon between morning and afternoon school-lessons. Apparently he had a beautiful voice, and besides enjoying the singing earned a few precious shillings for special services such as weddings and funerals. And so began a life dedicated to music. To the end of his life he could sing arias such as ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ from Messiah, though since that was composed for a soprano voice it sounded strange in his husky bass-tones. According to my grandmother he was a typical choirboy: cherubic in surplice and ruff collar but a tough, vigorous lad elsewhere, especially on the football field. His school played all their matches on Clapham Common, and they’d have to march the three miles there and back carrying the goalposts.

Tattered regimental banners, worn with age and damaged in battle, hung down from the nave of St Margaret’s, and I wondered whether the standard of the Second Battalion, the London Regiment, was among them. Popularly known as the Two-and-tuppences, this was the regiment my father joined in 1915. He’d volunteered as soon as the Great War broke out the previous year, but as a spotty fifteen-year-old couldn’t convince the red-sashed recruiting sergeant that he was ‘sixteen, coming on seventeen’. Twelve months later he enlisted as a boy bugler and was posted to Malta, where he was introduced to the seamier side of life in the quarter of Valletta the troops called the ‘Gut’. There were peep shows where for a penny you could see a naked lady, but Dad was perpetually hungry and preferred to go instead to the Salvation Army. They gave him a cup of tea and a fairy-cake in return for him standing on the roof of the building, bashing a tambourine and pointing at the red-light district. ‘That’s the way to the Devil,’ he’d shout, ‘and this is the way to the Lord. Come on in!’ And whenever one of the lads followed his advice Dad would get another fairy-cake.

From Malta he sailed to the Dardanelles, where a desperate engagement against the Turks was being fought. He later recalled that as he clambered down the troopship’s side to wade ashore off Cape Hellas, a huge Marine asked where his rifle was. Touching the musician’s badge on his arm, Dad replied, ‘I don’t carry a rifle. I’m a bugler.’ The Marine snorted, ‘There’s only one bugler around here – that’s Gabriel. He’s in heaven and you’ll soon bleeding well be joining him without one of these. Catch!’ With that, the Marine threw him a rifle and Dad became a serious soldier. Unable to move inland from the beaches, under constant Turkish shelling and German aerial bombardment from Taube biplanes that dropped steel darts to skewer you to the ground, Dad spent weeks sleeping in the freezing rain amid the bodies of his comrades and scurrying rats. He grew up during that doomed and brutal campaign. There was precious little chivalry around; the Turks mutilated prisoners and the Allied soldiers sometimes retaliated by hurling hand grenades into the POW cages where the Turkish prisoners were held.

Dad’s mother didn’t know he’d been posted abroad until she got a home-made Christmas card from him. He’d drawn a soldier holding a Christmas pudding with a bubble coming out of his head that read, ‘With thoughts of home from your loving son, Will.’ It was postmarked the Dardanelles. She nearly had a fit and started proceedings to buy him out of the army, an option open for boy soldiers. It cost thirty pounds, a king’s ransom, but somehow she scraped the money together. However, by the time the army’s bureaucracy creaked into action the Dardanelles expedition had ended in disaster and Dad was evacuated with everybody else. On the way home he helped stoke the boilers on the old three-funnelled battleship Mars, which was on its last voyage to the breaker’s yard via Southampton. When the Mars docked Dad queued up with the rest of the complement, clutching his pay-book. His turn came and the paymaster smiled sardonically, ‘Run along, son, I’ve got no chocolate.’

He had to find his own way home from Southampton. By this time the family had moved from Westminster to Kilburn, so he caught a train to Victoria then a bus up the Harrow Road, where he met a postman doing his rounds at ten o’clock at night. He asked the man if he knew where the Cotton family lived. The postman looked at this boy with a pack and rifle, obviously exhausted, and immediately said, ‘Yes, I know Joe Cotton’s house; it’s a bit of a walk but I’m going that way.’ While this wasn’t entirely true, he nonetheless picked up Dad’s kit and helped him home.

Dad was given a hero’s welcome but found a huge gap in the family he’d left. His elder brother Frederick had been in a reserved occupation as a draughtsman at Vickers. When he saw Dad leave for the army he couldn’t bear not being in uniform, and told his mother he too was going to enlist. He was killed in France within a fortnight.

Being a returned juvenile hero held no attraction for my father, so at the age of seventeen he again volunteered, this time for the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the Royal Air Force). When it was suggested during the interview by one of the board that Dad was too young to be commissioned in the RFC, the presiding officer said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, if he’s old enough to fight in the Dardanelles, he’s old enough to fight in the RFC.’ So Dad began a lifelong love-affair with flying and became a pilot, though because of a crash in training he never fought in the air – which probably saved his life: on the Western front, the life-expectancy of RFC aircrew was measured in weeks.

He left the RAF with a gratuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, spent ninety of it on a belt-driven Norton motor cycle and started looking for work. He tried motor-cycle racing in Ireland; then tried being a mill-wright’s assistant; and finally got a steady job as a bus conductor. Throughout this time he was playing football regularly. He played in the Middlesex Senior League and eventually got a trial for Brentford, whose manager with gritty realism told him, ‘Remember one thing. Brentford can’t play football so we make bloody sure nobody else does!’ Dad was not a professional and whenever Brentford didn’t pick him he got a game for Wimbledon, which at that time was an amateur side in the Athenian League.

Army buglers were also trained drummers, and Dad decided to cash in on his experience by joining a part-time band called the Fifth Avenue Orchestra – not Fifth Avenue, New York but Fifth Avenue, Queen’s Park. He played the drums badly until the best musician in the band, the pianist Clem Bernard, suggested the sound would improve if Dad quit the drums, stood in front and waved his arms about in time to the music – which he did brilliantly for the rest of his life.

In 1921 he married my mother, Mabel Hope Gregory. She too had a brother killed in the war and her mother was an invalid, so she played a vital part in her father’s business (he owned a chain of butcher’s shops in which my father worked for a time). He was less than entranced about his Mabel marrying a penniless musician-cum-amateur footballer, but eventually accepted the inevitable. Dad and Mum took a couple of rooms behind a barber’s shop in Kilburn Lane, where they were poor but happy. Sometimes of an evening, coming home from a gig at a dance hall, they would toss a coin to decide whether they should eat or ride home on the bus – it didn’t matter which way the coin fell, they always chose to buy something to eat and then walked home, lugging a set of drums between them.

Then Dad and the band were offered an engagement at the Regent, Brighton which was part cinema and part dance-hall. He decided that the Fifth Avenue Orchestra needed a more sophisticated name now they had hit the big time, so they became the London Savannah Band. After Brighton came Southport, then the Astoria on Charing Cross Road, London, and finally Ciro’s Club. By now, instead of playing for dancing they had become a stage band, putting on a show including vocalists and much clowning around. Billy Cotton had emerged as a showbiz personality in his own right; he was no longer just the leader of the band, he was its chief attraction.

Dad was now able to indulge his favourite pastimes. He gave up football but played cricket for Wembley when his engagements allowed, and he’d take me and my brother Ted with him. The whole family was there the day he scored a century, and my mother said it meant more to him than when he appeared in his first Royal Command Performance.

But he couldn’t wait for the day when he would be able to afford to race motor cars at Brooklands. When the time came he bought a clapped-out Riley Nine and got it tuned by an Italian mechanic called Charlie Querico. Being a professional, Charlie had a healthy contempt for all amateurs – especially showbiz types – so Dad decided to teach him a lesson. Just as all the cars were on the grid with their engines warming up, Dad raised his hand and beckoned to Charlie, who had a limp and hobbled over in a panic.

‘What’s the trouble?’ he yelled over the roar of gunning engines.

‘Which gear do I start this thing in? I’ve forgotten,’ Dad roared back.

‘First, of course!’ shrieked Charlie. Then, seeing the old man grinning at him, added, ‘You’re bloody mad,’ and got quickly out of the way.

Memories … Dad’s had been a boisterous, generally happy life. He swept us all up – family, friends and fans – in his warm, jolly embrace. Wherever he was there was noise and activity – I’d never known him as quiet as he was that afternoon in St Margaret’s. For an instant I was tempted to shatter the solemn silence by shouting out his famous slogan ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ with which he had begun a thousand performances. But I knew that this time it was no use. He had dominated my life, now I was on my own. No more amusing incidents where people mistook me for my Dad or got our names mixed up. An extraordinary Double Bill had come to an end.

But that afternoon, as one does when reluctant to face a tragic present, I dwelled on happier days …

ONE

My father had two sons and each of us inherited different parts of his nature – which just shows what a larger-than-life personality he was. My brother, Ted, who was five years older than me, shared my father’s love of flying – just as Dad had piloted Bristol fighters in the First World War, Ted flew Mosquito fighter bombers in the Second. As Dad’s younger son and named after him, I was fairly good at sports such as football and cricket, but chiefly I inherited my father’s love of show business and some of his flair for popular musical entertainment – though neither of us could read a note of music.

I think my earliest memory of my father was of him being very upset. When I was about four years old we lived on a new housing development in Kingsbury, north London. There was still plenty of building work going on and a constant stream of lorries passed our front gate. Apparently, one day someone left our gate open; I ran out into the road and got pinned to the ground by the front wheels of a truck. Miraculously I wasn’t seriously hurt but a doctor was called and, so the story goes, I remained utterly silent while he used a fork to dig out the stones that had been imprinted on my back by the lorry’s wheels. When he’d done he gave me a couple of sharp slaps on the backside and I screamed the place down. My silence had not been bravery but shock.

Meanwhile, in the road outside, my father was lambasting the poor lorry driver who’d really done nothing wrong. When my father was aroused he could be frightening; he had a Cockney’s ripe turn of phrase and was a trained boxer – I once saw him knock a motorist who picked a fight with him right across Denmark Street. He wasn’t particularly proud of the bellicose side of his nature but he had learned as a boy in the backstreets of Westminster that you either stood up for yourself or went under.

In a way, it’s poignant that my earliest memory should be of him being fiercely defensive of me. I recall him as an unfailingly loving father; I remained secure in that knowledge even when he did things I found puzzling or even upsetting. When I was small I didn’t realise that he was a famous band leader. I didn’t know what he did for a living, he just seemed to live life the wrong way round. He would set off for work as Ted started his homework and I was being put to bed, and it’s a miracle we didn’t become chronic insomniacs for he had a habit of bawling up the stairs, ‘Anyone awake?’ at whatever time he got home. If he got any answer, he would carry us both down to share his supper. We were a tightly knit family, and always if it was humanly possible Dad came home. Even when the band had played miles away he would drive through the night to get back to his own bed.

Though Dad was my hero, throughout my childhood my favourite band-leader was in fact Henry Hall, whose BBC Dance Band broadcast every weekday evening from Savoy Hill. After I’d had my bath, brushed my teeth and hair and put on my pyjamas, I was allowed into the front room to listen to the programme. I loved his music, especially ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which he made a hit. Years later, when I was running BBC TV Entertainment we did a programme celebrating fifty years of broadcast music. We got Henry Hall to conduct a band made up of all the top session-musicians, and they played a medley of the famous signature tunes of big bands of the thirties, which included amongst others Jack Hylton’s ‘Oh, Listen to the Band’, Jack Payne’s ‘Say It With Music’, Henry’s own signature tune, ‘Here’s to the Next Time’, and of course Billy Cotton’s ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’. It was a magical, nostalgic occasion. At the end the band gave Henry, by then in his eighties, a standing ovation, and he said afterwards that he’d never officially retired as a band-leader until that moment. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including mine.

It was at the Holborn Empire that I heard Dad’s band for the first time. My mother, my brother and I caught a bus from Kingsbury which dropped us off in Oxford Street, from where we took a cab for the rest of the journey so we could arrive in style. For me the star of that evening wasn’t my father but my Uncle Bill, who happened to be the senior commissionaire at the theatre. There he was, dressed in a magnificent green uniform with gold piping, war medals clanking on his chest. He opened the taxi door, saluted and called me ‘Young sir’. I was speechless with pride. A page-boy took us up to a luxuriously upholstered box in the circle. I was about to see my first variety show; it included dancers, jugglers, comedians, a ventriloquist and a magician. Then the melody of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ rang out, the curtain went up and there was my father in white tie and tails conducting his band. When the signature tune ended he turned to the audience to do his opening patter and I couldn’t contain myself. I jumped up and shouted out in a loud voice, ‘Hello, Dad!’ Quick as a flash he called back, ‘Now, don’t give me away, son,’ and there was a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. I sat back proudly and clutched my mother’s hand.

A few years later when my brother went away to boarding school, Dad would take me on my own to any nearby theatre he was playing at. I would stand in the wings and when he took his curtain call run onto the stage and solemnly bow to the audience with him – the old girls in the front stalls loved it, but not half as much as I did. It was on trips like this that I met face to face some of the great stars of the day, especially at the Palladium. There would be American superstars like Joe E. Brown and Laurel and Hardy whom I had seen only on the screen of the local cinema at Saturday matinées. There was also home-grown talent such as Will Hay, Max Miller, the Crazy Gang and Bud Flanagan.

Bud was a great joker. I remember Dad treating me and some school pals to lunch at the Moulin d’Or. You’d see all the big stars there – it was the place to eat, and to be seen. Bud was at another table, and when we got up to leave and our coats were handed to us he jumped up and started shrieking, ‘Stop! Call the police!’ I was embarrassed beyond belief as he proceeded to tip out of our coat pockets knives, forks and spoons he’d bribed the waiters to plant in them.

I loved going with the band when they did cine-variety, playing between film-showings at two cinemas such as the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road and the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle. They started at two in the afternoon and by the time they finished at ten p.m., they’d done seven shows. Though I was allowed to travel with the band, I don’t think they were all that keen on having me aboard because my father didn’t tolerate bad language in front of his family. When I appeared the band members would pass the word along: ‘Ham sandwich’ was their warning they’d better watch their tongues. Why ‘ham sandwich’ I don’t really know; perhaps it was rhyming slang for ‘bad language’. Another code word was ‘Tom’, their private name for Dad so they could discuss him without outsiders realising who they were talking about.

It was around this time that Dad adopted ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ as his signature tune. When asked why he said the idea had been put into his head by his nephew Laurie Johnson who was in the orchestra. On one occasion Laurie had observed Dad standing on the edge of the dance-hall floor, turning every dance into an excuse-me whenever a pretty girl whirled past him, and said to him, ‘You’re always stealing somebody’s girl!’ Dad responded by singing him a verse of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’, and one thing led to another.

Dad was constantly on the move and the family didn’t see as much of him as we would have liked. He had become involved in what were known as Blue Star Flying Visits to the various Mecca dance-halls all over the country. The proposal had come from a Dutchman called C.L.H. Heimann who had heard Dad’s band in one or two theatres and been very impressed. He had just bought a chain of Mecca cafés and proposed to turn them into dance-halls. He engaged Dad and supplied a state-of-the-art motor coach to take the band on one-night visits to every Mecca venue. Thus was born what later became an institution of British popular culture before, during and immediately after the war – Mecca Dancing.

Dad soon began to take the idea of flying visits literally and bought himself a second-hand Puss Moth, a wooden aircraft, very reliable and simple to fly. In it he flew to the nearest aerodromes to the towns where the band was performing – I was thrilled by the drama and excitement of it. I recall my cousin Laurie telling me of an occasion when he flew with Dad to a booking at Great Yarmouth Pier. They flew to the Boulton and Paul aerodrome at Norwich where a car collected them and took them on to the coast. The next day they drove back to the aerodrome, and while they were sitting in the club house an official came in and told them they ought not to fly because the weather was deteriorating. The misty rain and murk for which the Fenlands are notorious was closing in.

Dad chose to ignore the weather warning and fly on to Leicester, where the band was performing that evening at the Palais de Dance. Visibility was nil and in those days the only available navigational aid was a bubble and compass. In such conditions the single course open to aircraft was to ‘Bradshaw’ – follow the railway lines. But railway lines to where? Dad was hopelessly lost and realised that he was also low on fuel. He decided to hedge-hop in the hope of spotting a familiar landmark. He pushed down the stick, and the aircraft was swooping towards the ground when Laurie screamed through the voice tube, ‘Look out!’, whereupon Dad hauled back the stick and just missed a place in the history books as the man who demolished Peterborough Cathedral.

He had just enough fuel left for a quarter of an hour’s flying, so decided to land at the first flat field he saw. It turned out to be the jumping arena of a stables, complete with fences he had to sail over one by one until he came to a halt. Plenty of horses had taken the jumps but this was the first time an aeroplane completed the course. The owner came out to greet them and Dad introduced himself; they had a drink together then pushed the Puss Moth, wings folded, into a shed. The owner’s driver took Dad and Laurie to Melton Mowbray station, from where they caught a train to Leicester. The next day Dad returned, collected the aircraft and flew it back to Croydon. The joys of flying in those carefree early days! Little wonder that Dad was my childhood hero when his life was punctuated by escapades like these.

It was much to our delight that for one period in the 1930s Dad spent much more time at home. This was while he and the band were the resident orchestra at Ciro’s Club in London’s Park Lane. It was a very upmarket, even exclusive, establishment, quite different from the general run of variety theatres in which Dad spent much of his professional life. Entertainment correspondents of various newspapers were astounded at the appointment and predicted that it would be a very brief engagement – just long enough for Dad to open his mouth, as one unkindly put it. Because Ciro’s was a very select place the band had to play very quietly, muffling the brass by stuffing scarves and handkerchiefs down the bells of their instruments. The clientele didn’t want to hear the band so much as feel it; it was an accessory, like the vastly expensive flock wallpaper or the periwigged flunkeys in knee-breeches who manned the cloakroom and served the drinks.

When Dad returned home from nights at Ciro’s he would tell us about some of the more exotic or distinguished people he’d met. For a while the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was an habitué. He was fond of night-life and partial to the club’s dark, romantic atmosphere. Though flattered by HRH’s presence, the owners of the club found him a bit of a pain because he would arrive with an entourage and insist on being treated like royalty, killing an evening stone dead. All the other guests sat in respectful silence as the Duke chuntered his way through the wine list, ate his meal and eventually left (which he’d do after requesting the Billy Cotton Band to play his favourite tune, the Waltz Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana – not a theme calculated to set feet tapping or bring the crowds onto the dance-floor).

The third time the Prince requested the same piece Dad, exasperated, said to the club manager who’d brought the message, ‘Go and ask the silly so-and-so if he knows any other tune.’ The following day Dad was summoned to the presence of the chairman of the board, Lord Tennyson, who told him that although he and the band were popular with members, they did expect a little more courtesy. ‘You mean “servility”,’ replied Dad. ‘That’s not my style. I certainly believe in greeting people in a proper manner, but they’ll get no bowing and scraping from me.’ Lord Tennyson then broached the subject of HRH, pointing out that even among club staff the heir to the throne was not to be referred to as a silly so-and-so. ‘The problem is, Cotton,’ said the noble lord, ‘that you are too outspoken. You’ll be calling him that to his face next.’

The upshot was that Dad and his band were banished to Ciro’s in Paris for three months, in a role-exchange with the club’s resident band, the Noble Cecil Orchestra, and he found the clientele there much more responsive and uninhibited than their London counterparts. Cecil’s band was initially greeted with shock at the London Ciro’s, because every one of its players was black – though nothing unusual these days, the fact was considered scandalous at that time among the club’s many ex-colonial members.

However, whereas at home Dad was ‘one of us’ and expected to behave as such, Noble Cecil and his orchestra got away with murder. As Dad himself acknowledged, all the noisy, catchy tunes he had been barred from playing, the Cecil band blasted out – and the clients, including the Prince of Wales, came to love them. When the two bands swapped venues again, Dad found he was able to play his own kind of music, the Billy Cotton sound, trombones blaring, saxes wailing and drums thumping out the rhythm. He also enticed one of Noble Cecil’s band to stay and work for him: trombonist Ellis Jackson was still playing in the Billy Cotton Band and doing a credible tap dance well into his eighties.

I was absorbing the ethos of show business through my skin when I was still a boy. I learned a lot; things like the significance of the running order on a variety bill. In those days the Billy Cotton Band would be one of perhaps three or four star attractions whose names were emblazoned in huge letters across the posters, but I also watched from the wings as the names in little letters – the supporting acts, especially comedians – performed. With desperation lurking behind the laughter in their eyes, they worked frantically to get some response from audiences who were waiting impatiently for the big stars and daring these lower-order comedians to make them laugh. Their act done, they’d leave the stage to the hollow sound of their own footsteps, head for the bar and demolish half a bottle of whisky while they waited to die the death again in the second house. Comics suffered this ritual humiliation year in and year out in the hope that one day there might be a talent spotter in the audience who would pluck them from obscurity. It amazed me how few stand-up comedians gave up in despair; they all seemed to be incorrigible optimists.

A boyhood spent standing in theatre wings watching the contrasting scenes before me – stars excited by roaring crowds and also-rans withering at the sparse applause of bored audiences – bred in me an empathy I have never lost towards showbiz performers. When eventually I became a BBC Television executive and had the power to employ musicians and entertainers, though I couldn’t let my professional judgement be distorted by sentimentality, every time I auditioned a TV hopeful I willed him or her to succeed. In my mind’s eye I could see some miserable comedian gloomily staring into an empty whisky glass waiting for the call of destiny that would never come.

In the late nineteen-thirties we were living in a family house in Willesden which had a large garden, stables and a proper snooker room. There Dad entertained an eclectic mix of the kinds of personality who occupied the gossip- and feature-columns of the day’s newspapers. There was the motor-racing set, many of them the younger sons of the aristocracy; flying aces like Amy Johnson; show business stars; music publishers; and the sporting mob – footballers, cricketers and boxers. One regular visitor was the world snooker champion Joe Davis, who would play a dozen of us at once and we’d get just one shot each before he cleared the table. The only person who could beat him was the comedian Tommy Trinder, who reduced him to such helpless laughter that he fluffed his shots. In fact, Tommy had everyone present in stitches except for his wife, Vi, who never laughed at anything he said – ever. Tommy had a lifelong ambition to get a smile out of Vi but he never realised it; my father, on the other hand, had only to make a mildly amusing remark and she’d explode with mirth.

Vi was an extraordinary character. She put the kibosh on a tour Tommy made of Australia when they were both interviewed by the press on the airport tarmac before they flew home. Tommy rhapsodised about Australia, its wonderful climate, its beautiful scenery, its marvellous audiences … Eventually, a reporter asked Vi what was the best thing she’d seen in Australia. She said, ‘This aeroplane that’s going to take me back to my bulldog in Brighton.’ She hated the razzmatazz of show business, and I think she warmed to my dad because he was totally without any overweening self-regard. Fame left him totally unaffected. To the end, he remained a big-hearted, down-to-earth Cockney, noisy and affectionate.

My mother ran our family effortlessly. She’d inherited her father’s head for business and had the only bank account in the family, from which she doled out cheques to my father as he needed them. And she wasn’t dealing in loose change either – Dad made big money in his time, but since one of his famous sayings was ‘Money is for spending’, it was up to Mabel to keep the ship afloat. She was the still centre of a hurricane. There was noise and frantic activity all around her, and she went on calmly holding the family together while my father dashed about playing the theatres, driving racing cars, flying aeroplanes and sailing boats. She graciously entertained the big show-business names who blew in and out of our house, but she wasn’t overly impressed. All that was another world; what mattered to her was giving her sons as normal and loving an upbringing as possible, and looking after the old man.

That in itself was a full-time job. One day when I was quite small, Dad complained of pains in his arms and legs and developed a high temperature. Rheumatic fever was diagnosed, he became seriously ill and was looked after round the clock at home by two nurses. The house was darkened and Ted and myself were sternly enjoined to keep quiet. I was given the job of keeping guard at the entrance to our drive and waving down passing vehicles if they were going too fast or making a lot of noise – even the Walls ice-cream man was asked not to ring the bell of his tricycle or call out his wares until he was beyond earshot. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go as to whether or not Dad would make it, but he was as strong as an ox and once he turned the corner he quickly recovered. Whilst Dad was ill, though, the entire brass section of his orchestra, which included some of the finest trumpet and trombone players of the time, the best-known being Nat Gonella, was enticed away by a rival band-leader called Roy Fox. Dad screamed ‘Theft!’ and never forgave those who deserted him; the rest he rewarded with inscribed silver cigarette boxes which became known as ‘loyalty boxes’.

When I was nine years old I joined Ted at Ardingly College. As a new boy I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with him – we travelled there together, but as we approached the school Ted warned me that tradition decreed juniors mustn’t socialise with seniors during term-time. As is often the case with younger siblings, my elder brother had excited in me both admiration and envy, so I had been desperately keen to follow him to public school. But on that day, as Ted left me behind and strolled away chatting and joking with his contemporaries, I stood there alone, clutching my suitcase, gazing at this gloomy Victorian building which made Bleak House look like a holiday camp looming ahead in the dark winter afternoon, and I just wanted to be back with Mum and Dad. I lived for their visits and pursued a curiously schizoid existence. For one third of the year I mixed at home with the stars who made a great fuss of me, the other two thirds were spent in this miserable barracks of a place where the masters beat any cockiness out of me.

It was only when I had settled down at school and got to know my school-mates that I realised how famous my dad was, and I did quite a brisk trade in enrolling them as members of his fan club for two-pence each. I remember one weekend he visited Ted and myself in his state-of-the-art car, a Lagonda which boasted a car radio – a real novelty in those days. Every Sunday, Radio Luxembourg transmitted a programme – recorded in advance – called the Kraft Hour, which featured Dad and his band. On this occasion showing off the car, Dad turned the radio on, and hey presto! there he was on the air. Since these were the early days of radio, when pre-recorded programmes were rare, some of my astonished school-mates didn’t understand how Dad could be in two places at once.

I confess I swelled with smug pride whenever my father visited Ardingly College on open days. He would sign up for the Boys versus Parents cricket match, knock out a quick half-century, bowl some unplayable balls and then dash off to Croydon where he kept his aeroplane, fly back and, to the delight of the boys, buzz the school. No doubt some sniffy parents thought it was all outrageous exhibitionism, but Dad was so artless in his desire to give people pleasure it would never occur to him that anyone could think he was doing it to stroke his own ego. In spite of his great fame, there was an engaging innocence about him; he had no pretensions about his importance. He was, for example, terrified of Ardingly’s headmaster, Canon Ernest Crosse – of course, we all were in our early days in the school. Even when I became a sixth-form prefect and counted Canon Crosse more as a friend than a teacher (he later conducted my marriage service and baptised my children) Dad never lost his apprehensiveness about having to make conversation with him. ‘He’s your headmaster,’ he used to say. ‘You talk to him.’

After I’d been at boarding school for a couple of years, World War II broke out and Dad, who was on the Reserve of Air Force Officers, was called to a board at Uxbridge which tried to decide the best use to make of him. Obviously he wanted to fly in combat; they on the other hand decided that although he was a very fit forty-year-old, he should become adjutant to an RAF squadron at Northolt. Dad was outraged – Billy Cotton a pen pusher? The Air Marshal who presided asked him why he was wearing glasses. ‘Is it true that you have a defect in your left eye?’ Dad had to agree that he had sight problems, and that was that. They spared him an office job and recommended that he and his band should be loaned to ENSA to entertain the troops in France during that first cold winter of the war. Then, after Dunkirk, he was seconded to the Air Training Corps and spent the rest of the war trying to keep up morale on the home front as well as doing his bit to ginger up the teenagers who enlisted in the ATC as the first step to service in the RAF. It was my brother, Ted, who did the family’s stint in the RAF.

When I came home for school holidays, my Dad often took me touring with him. People needed something to take their minds off the war, so the theatres were packed. The band played patriotic songs like ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ and ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ over and over again. Petrol was rationed and we had to travel everywhere by slow train. The hotels were unheated and the food was pretty basic but I still enjoyed myself. Many of the younger stage performers were in the forces, so the old stars came out of retirement to do their bit. I got the chance to see the likes of G.H. Elliott, who was truly a show-business legend. He was known as the ‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’ because he wore black face make-up. I heard him sing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and watched his soft shoe shuffle; it was an education in stage technique. Even in old age he was a song and dance virtuoso.

A great friend of my father’s was Jack Hylton, probably the most famous of the pre-war band-leaders. By the time the war began, he’d become an impresario and got the rights to do stage versions of two hit radio shows, Tommy Handley’s ITMA and Garrison Theatre which was set in an army base and fronted by the actor Jack Warner, later famous for his lead in Dixon of Dock Green. Jack introduced variety acts and kept lighthearted banter running through the show. On radio these two shows were great successes but good theatre demands action and spectacle – the eye as well as the ear has to be entertained – and Jack Hylton realised he needed to add an extra dimension, so he engaged the Billy Cotton Band to bolster the stage show.

Thanks to Tommy Handley’s genius, ITMA did well in the wartime theatre. Garrison Theatre, though, was a real turkey, so when it transferred to Blackpool, Hylton persuaded Tommy Trinder, one of the biggest comedians of the time, to join the show for a limited season. Then began the great dressing-room saga. Contractually, my father was entitled to the No. 1 dressing room and Jack Warner to No.2. These pecking-order squabbles might seem trivial to outsiders, but they mattered a great deal to stars whose self-worth as well as bankability could depend on a detail such as the number on a dressing-room door. Where was Tommy Trinder to be accommodated? As he was a great pal of my father’s, it was suggested that Tommy should move in with him. (Jack Warner had no intention of moving out, and who could blame him?) Instead, Tommy insisted on having a special dressing-room built out of scenery on the side of the stage.

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, which began developing into a mass medium once the war was over. With the exception of a couple of Royal galas – celebrating the Coronation, and then the Queen’s return from Australia – he refused invitations to appear. His reasons for doing so were strictly commercial: so long as the BBC had monopoly of television, their fees would remain unrealistically low – too low, Dad decided, to make it worth his while to put together elaborate programmes which could be used on only one occasion. Once the public had seen a show, that was that, he thought. Radio was different: the listeners were curious to see in the flesh the performers they had come to love. It was the arrival of ITV which changed his mind.

Meanwhile I had left school and toured the country with Dad while I waited to be called up for National Service. For Ted’s twenty-first birthday, Dad bought him a brand-new MG Midget, in those days virtually the only mass-produced sports car on the market. A few months later, Dad and I were driving through Coventry and stopped off at a garage for petrol. There in the garage’s showroom was a brand-new fire-engine-red MG. I was gazing at it longingly when Dad came up and said, ‘By the way, that’s your car. Look after it.’

Later he told me that Ted had felt uncomfortable about having a state-of-the-art sports car while I was driving a clapped-out pre-war Fiat Topolino. He lobbied Father to get me one for my eighteenth birthday. What a way to get your first car, and how typical of both Ted and my father’s generosity of spirit! I was a very lucky lad, and knew it.

My father loved cars, every type of car, from Rolls Bentley through Aston Martin to Jaguars and Mercedes and the latest line in runabouts. He had a Morris Minor which we called ‘Leapin Leaner’: it leaned when he got in and it leaped when he got cat! One day I was in his office when he received a phone call from Jack Barclay, the distributor for Rolls Royce and Bentley in Hanover Square. Jack invited him for a sherry. When we arrived at the showroom there was a magnificent Rolls Bentley gleaming in its newness and with the number-plate BC 1. Dad took one look and said, ‘I’ll have it.’ The sherry was swapped for champagne and joy was unconfined – until they produced the invoice. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘It’s the number-plate I want – I’ve got a Bentley and you sold it to me!’ Jack Barclay took it very well and gave the old man the number-plate. BC 1 was on many a car until Dad died.

I was eventually called up, and joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in late 1946 when the world was comparatively peaceful. On the basis that I preferred to ride than walk – especially with full equipment on my back – I was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as a transport officer.

The only truly terrifying thing that happened to me during my military service was my encounter with the legendary Regimental Sergeant-Major Brittain on the parade ground at Mons Barracks, Aldershot. He was a fearsome sight and had a voice that could shatter glass at half a mile. One exchange with him when I was dozy on parade still lingers in my memory.

RSM: ‘Are you a spiritualist, sir?’

Me: ‘No, sir.’

RSM: ‘Well, you’ve got your head on an ethereal plane, your body in the West End, and your feet are just about in Aldershot. Put him in the guard room.’

Long after I left the army, I met the RSM again. I was producing a record show for television and a girl singer known as Billie Anthony had a new record out called ‘Fall in for Love’, on which Brittain, long since retired from the army, appeared at the beginning of the song bellowing the command, ‘Fall in for love!’ So we booked Billie Anthony and also Mr Brittain to perform the song live in the studio. When Britten arrived I went up to him and said, ‘I have waited a long time to say this, sir. Stand there and don’t move till I tell you.’

The only time I fired a shot and hit a live target was not during my army career but shortly afterwards. We were staying at Sandbanks for Christmas, and there was quite a big house party that included the composer and impresario Noel Gay. We used to go sailing every day, and on this occasion I took with me a four-ten shotgun to shoot shag, the voracious green cormorant. Fifty yards off our port bow, a beautiful swan gave us a disdainful glance and then lazily spread its wings to take off. Jokingly, I said, ‘I’ll ginger him up,’ and fired quite casually into the air in the general direction of the bird. To my horror, this freak shot killed the swan outright. My father said, ‘That’s illegal. All swans belong to the Queen. You could go to gaol for that.’ Someone else suggested that ‘we’d better suppress the evidence’, so we pulled the body into the boat and cruised around until dusk fell. Then we went ashore and marched in single file up to the house, the swan over Dad’s back while the rest of us chanted the Seven Dwarfs’ ‘Heigh-ho’ song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

We found Noel Gay dozing on a settee in the sitting-room. ‘Look, Noel,’ someone shouted, ‘a Christmas goose.’ Noel opened one eye. ‘I never eat goose,’ he confided and went back to sleep. Just so he wouldn’t feel left out of the fun, we decided to stow the swan in the boot of his car, until Christmas night, when we all dressed in dinner jackets and boarded a dinghy to bury the swan at sea. The corpse was tied to a trawler drag and heaved overboard. We underestimated its weight: all that happened was the swan’s neck went under and its bottom bobbed up. I doubt whoever found it with an iron bar round its neck would think it had died a natural death.

Dad was at his most exuberant on holiday at Sandbanks, when laughter, joking and frenzied activity surrounded him. Next door to our house was the Royal Motor Yacht Club whose Commodore was an ex-naval officer called Bersey, a splendid man but a stickler for protocol. Every morning at eight o’clock a saluting gun would be fired and a Blue Ensign run to the masthead. It so happened that in the garage of his Sandbanks house Dad kept a whole load of old stage-props, including the Soviet flag, the Hammer and Sickle, which had been used for a stage song called ‘Comrades’. This was in the early days of the Cold War when the former camaraderie between Russia and the West had evaporated.

One morning the steward came out of the club house, checked his watch, fired the saluting gun, tied the furled Ensign to the halyard and looked up to see the Hammer and Sickle already flying proudly from the masthead. He dashed inside and brought out the apoplectic Commodore in his dressing-gown. The local constabulary was called in just in case the Russians were planning an invasion of the Bournemouth area and had landed an advance raiding party. About a year later, the Commodore came up to my father who was drinking in the Club verandah. ‘Don’t think I don’t know who put that Russian flag up,’ he spluttered.

I was demobbed in the latter part of 1948. I had a place at Clare College, Cambridge but I didn’t fancy taking it up; the world of academia wasn’t for me. So I became slightly unfocused and, having nothing better to do, went on tour with Dad, protesting all the time that I really must set about getting a career. He couldn’t see the problem. He’d say, ‘You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?’ and point out that we enjoyed each other’s company; he was doing very well financially and I was very useful to him. That was debatable. I had two main tasks: one was to act as his chauffeur; the other to reconnoitre every town the band was visiting to find out which cinemas might be showing cowboy Western films in the afternoons.

I went to enormous trouble to locate these local flea pits where Dad would sit down assuring me we were in for a treat. Before the opening titles had finished running, his head would drop onto his chest and he’d snore his way through the entire film. Having woken up, he’d take off in search of a cup of tea, murmuring appreciation of a film he’d never seen. That happened again and again.

During this period, my father took a week off which happened to coincide with the British Grand Prix for Formula One racing cars. He suggested we drive up to Silverstone to watch the practice laps for the great event. Since pre-war days, he had been a member of the prestigious British Racing Drivers’ Club, so he knew most of the personalities in the motor racing game. He also displayed proudly on his radiator the Brooklands 120 mph badge commemorating the occasion he clocked a lap at 123.89 mph in an MG and became one of a very select group.

We waved goodbye to my mother who fondly imagined that Dad was going to the Grand Prix as an interested spectator. When we arrived at Silverstone, Dad sought out Wilkie Wilkinson who used to prepare his racing cars before the war and had joined forces with a couple of wealthy up and coming drivers to form an ERA (English Racing Automobile) team. It soon became clear that Dad had arranged beforehand to drive one of Wilkie’s cars.

I was dumbfounded. Dad was forty-nine years of age and suffered from high blood pressure. I watched in amazement as he got his crash hat and visor out of the boot of our car, put them on, and drove off round the circuit. He clocked up a respectable if not spectacular lap time and on returning to the pits said that since there were still four days of practice before the big race he’d plenty of time to sharpen up. On the drive back home he said nonchalantly, ‘Best not to tell your mother about this, she’ll only worry.’

And so this charade went on throughout the rest of the week. Each morning at breakfast he’d spin some yarn about his plans for the day and Mother would nod, apparently understandingly – until Saturday, the day of the race, when she cut short Dad’s fanciful musings. She said, ‘I don’t mind you not telling me you’re driving in a motor race today, it’s the insinuation that I can’t read that upsets me. The story’s in every newspaper, including the fact that I’m not supposed to know about it. So off you go and if you kill yourself I’ll never talk to you again. And don’t come home stinking of petrol as you’ve done every day this week.’

In the actual race he did remarkably well. He was due to take the car over at the halfway point when it stopped to refuel. Just before the car arrived at the pit, the petrol bowser drew up and through some fault starting spewing fuel under pressure all over the place. Dad was crouched on the pit counter ready to jump into the car as soon as it arrived and so got a face-wash of high-octane petrol. His goggles were soaked and he obviously couldn’t see clearly. I begged him not to get into the car, but he said, ‘If you think I’m missing this, you’re out of your mind,’ and off he went. He started slowly but the wind soon blew away the petrol film on his goggles and he finished the race a creditable fourth. Some of the legendary pre-war drivers, George Easton, John Cobb and Earl Howe, came up to congratulate him and they all agreed that he’d taught the youngsters a thing or two and shown there was still life in old dogs. However, the strain had obviously taken its toll on him and on the way home he confided in me regretfully that he was hanging up his helmet and goggles. His part-time career as a racing driver was over.

TWO

When I came out of the army, the Cotton family had a house on the Thames, at Old Windsor. There was a whole colony of showbiz people living on Ham Island, and one of them, Reginald Armitage, better known as Noel Gay, was a great friend of my father and mother. He was a successful music publisher who also wrote best-selling songs: ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Round the Marble Arch’, ‘There’s Something about a Soldier’, ‘The Fleet’s in Port Again’, ‘Hey! Little Hen’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’ – just the kind of music my father’s band played best. One day Noel Gay invited me for a trip up river on his launch. I set out unemployed and I came back with a job as a song-plugger for the Noel Gay Music Company based in Denmark Street, better known as Tin Pan Alley.

In these jargon-ridden days, song-pluggers would be known as exploitation men. This was a time when many people still had pianos in their front-rooms and made their own music. They’d go along to a Littlewoods store and there in the music department would be a song-plugger sitting at a piano inviting them to buy the song he was playing. If you strolled down Denmark Street in the summer when office windows were open, you’d hear a piano in every room bashing out the publisher’s latest song for the benefit of singers, band-leaders and anyone else who might perform or broadcast it. The song-plugger spent his life trying to bribe, cajole and persuade performers to include his songs in their programmes, which in turn created a market for the sheet music.

We paid special attention to bands and artists who had spots on radio. Record programmes were becoming a big thing in the broadcasting schedules – there was Jack Jackson’s Record Round-up on a Saturday night, for example, which played many records and helped to create some hits. The ultimate goal was to get your song played in programmes like his or Two-Way Family Favourites, Housewives’ Choice or The Billy Cotton Band Show. We’d even shell out a fiver, which was a lot of money in those days, to get hold of an advance copy of the Radio Times to find out which stars and bands were scheduled to appear on air a couple of weeks later. Then we could badger them to play our music. The band-leader Geraldo was a very big star at that time; he was always on the air, so if you could get him to add one of your songs to his repertoire you were quids in. Another target of the song-pluggers was a vocal group called the Keynotes who had a weekly spot on a radio show called Take it from Here. And at that time every self-respecting cinema had a resident organist. There was a regular spot on the BBC’s Light Programme at around ten o’clock two or three times a week, which was dedicated to cinema organ music, so organists like Reginald Dixon and Robinson Cleaver were among the song-pluggers’ favourite prey.

The seamy side of the industry was the payment of ‘plug-money’ to bribe artists to sing or play particular songs. A popular singer called Issy Bonn used to start at the top of Denmark Street and call on the music publishers one by one, telling them he had a number of radio engagements coming up and asking if they would they like him to sing one of their songs. He invited them to put their responses in a plain brown envelope. Eventually the BBC, which was still the only domestic broadcaster around, put a stop to plug-money by warning performers they would be banned from the airwaves if they were caught taking bribes. But there was an atmosphere of desperation about the whole business as records became more and more popular and the sales of sheet music plummeted.

When I first joined Noel Gay, I had business cards printed with my name, William F. Cotton, inscribed on them. One day I tried to get to see the band-leader Oscar Rabin to sell him a song. I gave my card to his secretary who returned it to me smartish saying that Mr Rabin was far too busy to see me. Oscar was a good friend of my father’s but I took his refusal philosophically and was just leaving when he came out of his office.

‘Hello, Bill,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘I’m a song-plugger for Noel and I popped in on the off chance you might be interested in our latest number, but you were too busy to see me,’ I said.

He looked puzzled and then said, ‘So you’re William F. Cotton! For heaven’s sake, don’t embarrass your dad’s friends by not letting on who you are. You’re not William F. Cotton, you’re Billy Cotton Junior. That’s what your card should say.’

Thus was my identity in show business fixed by my relationship to my father, and though he’s been dead for more than thirty years, I’m still conscious of being the junior member of a wonderful though sometimes stormy partnership.

I didn’t work for Noel Gay for very long. Noel had brought his son Richard Armitage into the firm at the same time as I joined, and although Richard and I got on very well – indeed, he was among my dearest friends to the day he died – there wasn’t really room for two apprentices in the business and I wasn’t learning much, so I moved over to Chappell’s in Bond Street, which was run by two American brothers, Max and Louis Dreyfus. They were probably the biggest music publishers in the world at that time, so song-plugging was a serious part of their operation. A chap called Teddy Holmes was the boss of a whole army of song-pluggers and he kept us on the hop; we must have made three or four visits every night to theatres and broadcasting and television studios.

One of the great things about working for Chappell’s was that they controlled the music for most of the big American musicals around at that time. Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel … name any Broadway show, Chappell’s would probably have the rights to it. I put some of these American songs my father’s way. The very first, I recall, was ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’. Played by a pianist called Bill Snyder, it had gone to the top of the Hit Parade in the States and the Billy Cotton Band was among the first to play it in Britain. At that time Chappell’s had an office in St George’s Street above which there was a flat where a very young and gorgeous Joan Collins lived with her lover at the time. It was a volatile relationship; they clearly didn’t always see eye to eye. We in Chappell’s office could tell this was the case because it wasn’t only sparks that used to fly above our heads – I remember hearing plenty of furniture and crockery being smashed. That’s perhaps how the delectable Joan trained for some of her later roles.

It wasn’t all hard grinding labour – we started a show-business football team. One of our numbers was a big strong Scots lad who was in the chorus of South Pacific. He wasn’t all that good a footballer but he made a super special agent. His name was Sean Connery. Eventually the showbiz football team became famous and had a star-studded line-up: Tommy Steele, Kenny Lynch, Glen Mason and Ronnie Carroll all played for us regularly. Ronnie had been in the Northern Ireland youth team but by the time he joined us his footballing brain was having ideas his body couldn’t cope with.

I was sharing a flat in London with Gerry Kunz, a childhood friend whom I’d met again in the Army. Gerry’s father Charlie was the famous pianist, and he was a great friend of my father’s. We lived in London during the week and spent the weekends at our respective parents’ homes. One day Gerry said to me, ‘Can you lend me a fiver?’ I asked him why he needed it. Solemnly, he replied, ‘Because I want to take out the girl I’d love to marry.’ Until that moment I didn’t know of her existence. I hadn’t a spare fiver but I did offer to get him a couple of free tickets to my father’s show at the Victoria Palace. I was off to play football but I said casually that I’d pop round to the theatre after the game and perhaps we could persuade my father to take us all out to supper. My offer may have sounded offhand but I was consumed with curiosity about this girl. Unfortunately, during the game someone kicked me in the ribs and afterwards I was in too much pain to pay much attention to her.

That Christmas, Gerry spent Christmas with the Cottons and then in my red MG we drove down together to his family in Middleton for New Year. On New Year’s Day we were invited to a party at the home of Gerry’s girlfriend. Her name was Bernadine Maud Sinclair but she was universally known as Boo – a nursery pet name derived from her Norfolk nanny’s insistence she was a ‘booty’. This party was the climax of a highly alcoholic festive season – I vaguely recall at some point drinking gin from a tea pot. I was already fairly merry when I got to the party. I was chatting to the girl I had taken there, looked up and saw Boo standing on the other side of the room in a grey dress with a rope belt round it. It was a moment of revelation; it was as though I was seeing her for the first time, and I was bowled over. I went over to her and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to marry me?’ She grinned and said, ‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’ ‘All right,’ I replied, ‘I’ll ask you again when I’m sober.’

As these parties do, we moved on to someone else’s house and eventually staggered home to bed, but at eight-thirty a.m. sharp I was up and in my right mind and presented myself at Boo’s house again. Her mother’s housekeeper opened the door, obviously not amused that I was disturbing the family at such an hour. She closed the door in my face and left me standing on the doorstep while she went to fetch Boo, who said, ‘Hello, what do you want?’ I replied, ‘Well, I’ve just come to say that I’m now stone-cold sober and will you marry me?’ She laughed and said, ‘No, but I’ll give you a cup of tea.’ The family was at breakfast, and her stepfather, who harboured the deepest suspicions about the motives of any young man courting his stepdaughter, was less than cordial. But I’d learned a thing or two as a song-plugger about the art of ingratiating myself with people I needed a favour from, so I behaved towards Boo’s parents in a most deferential manner, calling her stepfather ‘sir’ and charming her mother with my sunny smile.

Boo had a pied-à-terre in London, a flat over the family’s undertaking business in Kentish Town, and every day I contrived somehow to propose to her either by letter or phone or face to face in the romantic setting of stacked coffins and blank tombstones. First I had to establish that my pal Gerry was not a contender for her affections. She quickly reassured me: she’d grown up with Gerry and it was one of those relationships that could never move beyond the stage of close friendship. A year or two older than me, Boo had served in the WRNS during the war and been engaged to an RAF officer, but the relationship didn’t survive the anti-climax of peacetime and they split up. She insisted she wasn’t looking to marry anyone at the moment, but that didn’t put me off my daily proposal ritual, and after my laying siege to her for about six months she finally surrendered.

I was ecstatic but slightly apprehensive about telling my parents. I knew my mother would be a pushover – Boo’s genuine charm was bound to win her over – but my father was a different matter. He had a very curious attitude to his sons’ girlfriends; it was almost as though he resented them for taking our attention away from him. So I summoned up my courage, picked up the phone and told him that I had got engaged and I’d like him to meet the girl. ‘Engaged?’ he growled. ‘What do you want to do that for?’ I’d no intention of getting into a pointless argument with him so I asked him if I could bring her along to the Brixton Empress where he was performing. ‘Fine,’ he said casually. I persisted. ‘Is there any chance you might take us out for a meal afterwards?’ No, he already had an arrangement. ‘Fine,’ I said casually, put the phone down and waited. Sure enough, he phoned back and said, ‘Your mother says I should take you out.’

I introduced Boo to Dad in his dressing-room. He was barely polite, though in mitigation it should be said he was always extremely nervous before a show, pacing the floor, clicking his fingers and wiping the sweat from his brow. Boo was quite unfazed by his cold manner. When we left him and went for a quick drink in the bar, she didn’t ask anxiously, ‘Do you think he liked me, and if not, why not?’ She was one of those poised, self-possessed personalities who are at peace with themselves. If Dad took against her, that was his problem, not hers.

After the show, we waited in a corridor while he changed. Then my mother turned up, obviously anxious things should go well. Dad decided to impress Boo with his importance by taking us to the exclusive Albany Club in Savile Row, which was run by a man called Bill Little who knew everyone who was anyone. As Billy Cotton, Britain’s most famous band-leader, friend of the stars, confidant of royalty, strutted in, Bill Little came hurrying up, but then to Dad’s astonishment and chagrin he swept right past him and greeted Boo like a long-lost friend, kissing her on both cheeks and enquiring how she and the family were. Dad couldn’t believe he was being upstaged by my girlfriend whose name he could barely remember. Later, in a heavy attempt at humour, he surveyed the menu and said gruffly, ‘Make the most of it, it’s the last time we’re coming here.’ Quick as a flash, Boo said sweetly, ‘If you can’t afford it, I’ll pay.’ It took time, but in the end they became close friends because Dad had to admire her independence of spirit and honesty.

To celebrate our engagement, I took Boo to see Frank Sinatra at the Palladium, Dad having fixed a box for us. Frank was then at the peak of his career as a singer before he became better known as a movie star. He was sensational. When we left the theatre, Boo was very quiet, and when I pressed her she said, ‘Do you think we are being a bit hasty, getting married?’ I went cold. In a clumsy attempt at a joke, I protested, ‘But I’ve already bought the ring.’ She laughed it off and I delivered her to her flat and went home to mine, only to spend the whole night staring at the ceiling, convinced that my life was about to disintegrate. Years later, after Sinatra had been performing at the Royal Festival Hall, I had breakfast with him. I said, ‘Do you realise you nearly buggered up my life?’ I told him the story of Boo’s strange turn and he howled with laughter. ‘In the end it came out all right,’ I said, ‘but how many other people are walking around cursing you for breaking up their love affairs by doing nothing more than singing to them?’

We fixed the wedding for 21 October 1950. Predictably, Dad decided to be difficult. He said he couldn’t make it; ‘In October, I’m working in Newcastle.’ I knew he’d plucked the excuse out of thin air; he never knew his dates off the top of his head that far in advance. I rang my mother and told her what Dad had said and added, ‘Tell him, will you, that I recall a time when he changed his performance dates to fit in with a motor race, and if he doesn’t want to do the same for my wedding, ask him to send along a cheque and I’ll let him know how things went next time we meet.’ I saw him a few days later. He cleared his throat and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I managed to change those dates in October.’ When I recounted the saga to my brother, he said, ‘You’re lucky! When I told him about the date of my wedding, he actually altered his programme to make sure he was so far away he couldn’t possibly get to the ceremony. But when the great day came, he duly appeared in top hat and morning suit, having switched his dates around yet again.’ Neither Ted nor I doubted that the old man loved us dearly; he just had this very strange quirk.

Chappell’s recognised my married state by raising my salary to twelve quid a week and Dad let us have the bungalow at Ham Island as our first home – he bought a more spacious house in Farnham Common. The bungalow may have been too small for him but to us it was a palace and we knew most of the bohemian set who lived on that part of the island. As well as Noel Gay there was Lupino Lane, the star of the original pre-war Victoria Palace production of Me and My Girl, Bill Weston Drury, one of the original casting directors in the British film industry, and his son Budge, who did the same job at Pinewood. Budge’s wife, Jean Capra, had been Poppy Poo Pah, the sexy female character in Tommy Hanley’s ITMA. Then there was Jack Swinburne, the production manager for Alexander Korda, and his wife, Mamie Souter, an old music-hall star who had a habit of going on an alcoholic bender every now and again. There was also Russell Lloyd, a film editor, who had once been married to Rosamund John, a star of the silver screen, but had then married a gorgeous model called Valerie. My brother Ted and his wife Beryl also had a bungalow on the island, and he and Russell Lloyd worked together at the Shepperton Studios. The odd ones out were the Clarkes. He was a typical banker who worked at Hambros and went native every weekend. All in all we were a very happy community.

One day I called into the BBC studios when Dad was recording a programme and I ran into Johnny Johnston who had done well for himself master-minding the singing groups who provided the musical backing to radio comedies – he ran the Keynotes for Take it from Here, the Beaux and the Belles for Ray’s a Laugh and the Soupstains for Ignorance is Bliss. They were more or less the same singers, Johnny just changed the name for each show – he sang in the group, composed some of the music, arranged the rest and acted as manager. He was a multi-talented musician who, like my father, had come up the hard way, so they were soulmates.

Johnny had founded a company with a woman called Micky Michaels. It was called The Michael Reine Music Company, a combination of the surname of Micky Michaels and the maiden name of Nona, Johnny’s wife. Apparently, Micky Michaels wanted out, and Johnny asked me whether I would be interested in buying her share. I talked to my father and he lent me the money, which was fifteen hundred pounds. So I gave in my notice at Chappell’s and went off to make my fortune at Michael Reine’s.

The first project I was involved in was a song based on the old Irish folk ballad called The Bard of Armagh’, whose traditional tune had also been used for a couple of Western songs, ‘Streets of Laredo’ and ‘The Dying Cowboy’. Johnny Johnston adapted the tune, Tommy Connor wrote lyrics for it and they created a hit called ‘The Homing Waltz’. Because the original tune was out of copyright, we were able to register our song and as a bonus got a percentage when any of the other versions were played. Johnny took the song along to Vera Lynn who had just enjoyed a huge success with ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart’. She sang it, Decca recorded it and the very first effort of Michael Reine reached the top of the pops.

Vera also recorded our next big hit, which was called ‘Forget Me Not’. This time, Johnny had written it with Bunny Lewis who was a successful agent. But on the way to the studio they still hadn’t managed to put lyrics to the middle four bars of the song. In a slightly inebriated state I burst out into poetry and suggested the six words: ‘Parting brings sorrow; hope for tomorrow’. ‘That’s it!’ they cried. It didn’t win me an entry in the Oxford Book of Poetry but I ended up securing for myself the royalty on a third of the song, which proved to be a nice little earner.

We published ‘Forget Me Not’ in the run-up to Christmas and put in a lot of graft publicising it. One morning I read in the newspaper that the children in a spina bifida ward at Carshalton Hospital intended to sing it on Christmas Day in a programme presented by Wilfred Pickles who was a big radio star at the time. I showed the article to Johnny Johnston and we agreed that we’ve have to spend a fortune entertaining any singer we were trying to persuade to plug it, hence we ought to offer the same amount in kind to the children in hospital. We set off for Carshalton loaded down with toys, sweets and books.

When we arrived, the ward sister was fulsome in her gratitude. She explained that the children were from very poor homes and would probably be in hospital for a very long time. Johnny noticed a piano near the ward and was soon belting out popular songs, including, of course, ‘Forget Me Not’. All the children joined in except for one little girl who was lying on a kind of board to keep her spine straight. She just looked on wistfully, and the sister told us that she never spoke; she had been virtually abandoned by her parents. After we’d done our round of the wards, we went up to the little girl and told her we’d be back again after Christmas and we’d expect her to join in the singing. We duly went back and she did join in. The presents were piled up round the Christmas tree and I was glad I wasn’t there to see them opened – I’d have cried my eyes out.

At Christmas, the BBC often asked the old man to present a week of Housewives’ Choice, the enormously popular record programme on what in those days was the Light Programme. He passed on to me the job of picking the records and writing his script in return for my being able to keep the fee as a Christmas present.

On one occasion, I included a Sophie Tucker record in the show and with eight million other listeners heard him announce, ‘And now for all Sophie Fucker tans …’ ‘Do you think anyone noticed?’ he asked me anxiously after the transmission. Dad was no mumbler, he spoke always at a near shout. ‘Naw,’ I said, ‘I only just caught it and I was listening very carefully.’ The listeners obviously realised it was a slip of the tongue and didn’t hold it against him.

When he was invited to appear as a guest on Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs, Dad asked me to sort out the records he should choose. When I showed him the list he was indignant. He’d assumed all eight would feature the Billy Cotton Band. He obviously had never listened to the programme.

Johnny and I imported a novelty song from America called ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ which brought me for the first time into contact with a lovely girl, Alma Cogan, who was to remain a firm friend of mine for the rest of her tragically short life. She recorded three of our songs – ‘Bell Bottom Blues’, ‘I Can’t Tell a Waltz from a Tango’ and ‘Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo’ – all of which did very well at the sales counter. One day I met Alma in the street and invited her up for a cup of tea with Johnny and myself in our office, which was a pretty tatty back room in Denmark Street. I asked our factotum, Ronnie, to go out and get some tea. Meanwhile, Alma looked round the office and somewhat sniffily commented on the state of our sofa. I pointed out that it was actually very useful and doubled as a put-you-up bed, which I demonstrated by pulling it apart – whereupon a rat the size of a small cat jumped out and vanished into the back room. All three of us fought to be the first to get up on the desk. We were all standing on the desk when Ronnie came back. He looked up at us and said, ‘I didn’t realise you wanted high tea.’ We moved out of the office very soon after that and got better premises on Denmark Street.

Our next stroke of luck had to do with a television series called Friends and Neighbours. Its theme tune was written by an excellent musician called Malcolm Lockyer. He’d been under contract to one of our competitors, David Platt of Southern Music, whose reaction to the song was, ‘Don’t bring me this sort of rubbish. Write me something decent.’ Upset, Malcolm withdrew the song and offered it to us. It was perfect for The Billy Cotton Band Show, and shot into the Top Ten. We hit on a novel idea to plug it. There was a busking group called The Happy Wanderers who used to perform in Oxford Street, so we paid them a fiver to march up and down Denmark Street playing ‘Friends and Neighbours’. It drove the other publishers crazy, though our visiting celebrities thought it a hoot. This wheeze got the Happy Wanderers an appearance on television, and it also got one of their number into plenty of trouble when his wife saw him on the box. When he went back home, she threw his supper at him: she’d never told the neighbours he was a busker; they thought he had a job in the city.

As well as my song-plugging, I had a sideline as a journalist writing a gossip column, ‘The Alley Cat’, for the New Musical Express. I enjoyed being the Nigel Dempster of Denmark Street and it confirmed my opinion that nearly everyone loves to see his or her name in print even if the story isn’t particularly complimentary, just so long as the name isn’t misspelled. My journalism helped our business along because a steady flow of performers came into the office with tidbits of gossip about show business in general and themselves in particular, and this mine of information produced all kinds of good business contacts.

One afternoon I took my weekly copy round to the New Musical Express offices and the editor asked me if I’d like to buy the paper. I thought he was being funny, but apparently the proprietor felt he was getting too old for all the worry of running a newspaper and he wanted to sell up. At the time our business, Michael Reine, was flourishing and quite cash-rich, so the more I thought about the idea of being a newspaper proprietor the better I liked it. At the asking price the NME was undoubtedly a bargain and its circulation was rising to the point where it was becoming a threat to the Melody Maker, the leading paper of the business. There was one catch. Another potential buyer was coming round to see the editor at seven o’clock that evening and he had instructions to do a deal with whoever came up with the asking price first.

When I got back, bursting to tell Johnny we were onto a fortune, he was out of the office and despite all my frantic efforts I couldn’t contact him. At eight o’clock that evening the NME editor phoned me at home to tell me that Maurice Kinn, agent of Joe Loss and Cyril Stapleton, two of the leading band-leaders in the country, had made an offer and he was now the new proprietor of the paper. I was quite sad. What made it worse was that Johnny chewed me off for not assuming he would have gone along with my decision. And to add insult to injury Kinn sacked me and took over my column himself. I would probably have done the same thing if I were him, so we remained friends. He went on to make the paper an extremely valuable property and became a very wealthy man when he eventually sold out.

During this period, political argument had been raging about whether or not there should be a rival television channel funded by advertising to break BBC TV’s monopoly, and eventually the legislation was put in place to set up the commercial companies. This prospect sparked off a frenzy of activity in advertising agencies. They realised they’d need musical jingles to punctuate their commercials, so they began to look closely at the BBC’s radio programmes and were impressed by their catchy theme tunes, the best of which had invariably been composed by Johnny Johnston. Soon a procession of bowler-hatted, grey-suited advertising executives were beating a path to our door. Johnny knew exactly what was required. To order, he could hammer out on the piano a catchy piece, both music and words; then he’d arrange it for one of his groups, sing the lyric himself and record it in his own studio. He made a lot of money, and deservedly so, because he had a genius for this highly specialised form of music and rhyme.

Nona, Johnny’s wife, had a good head for business and was running the office very efficiently, and Johnny himself was on a creative roll as TV commercials took up more and more of his time. It was clear to me that the sheet-music industry was sinking into irreversible decline, and there wasn’t much place for me in the business – though Johnny never even hinted that I was becoming virtually a passenger. I began to look around, and the larger than life figure of my dad again loomed into view. By now, independent television had been established and Lew Grade, who ran ATV, one of the biggest companies, contracted Dad to do half a dozen variety shows. Though popular, they lacked a distinctive format and so presented Dad with a problem. He couldn’t afford to use material people were paying good money to see in the live theatre, and a radio show didn’t usually adapt well to a visual medium. Hence, he wasn’t a very happy man.

Dad shared his worries with me and I suggested to him that though the ITV shows didn’t satisfy his high standards, the independent companies were trouncing the BBC in the ratings, which must be worrying the corporation no end – they might welcome an approach from him. I encouraged him to go and see Ronnie Waldman, who was the BBC’s Head of Entertainment, to talk about a combined radio-television deal. In April 1955, Ronnie took Dad out for a meal and was most enthusiastic about the whole idea until they got down to talking about money. Quite simply, the BBC did not pay realistic fees. Although The Billy Cotton Band Show on radio gave my father priceless publicity, financially he was actually out of pocket because he only got the statutory fee for a half hour’s broadcast, out of which he had to pay the wages of eighteen musicians.

The BBC’s founder, Lord Reith, saw the BBC as a public service corporation for whom it is a privilege to work; vulgar questions of monetary reward ought to be of no consequence. Ronnie asked Dad outright how much he wanted. Without much hope that a deal was possible, Dad wrote down a figure on a paper napkin, folded it in two and handed it to Ronnie, asking him not to open it until he got back to his office in case it spoiled his lunch. Ronnie couldn’t resist opening it on the spot and immediately agreed to meet Dad’s price, though, as he told me afterwards, he had no idea how he could persuade the BBC to pay such a figure for one television act. Most of the BBC’s top managers were still bogged down in the radio era. The show-business mentality, which ITV adopted from the beginning, had not yet permeated the corridors of Broadcasting House.

Somehow Ronnie managed to persuade the BBC to meet Dad’s figure, pointing out to his bosses that quite apart from Billy Cotton’s star quality and drawing power, he would become a reliable fixed point in the schedules. While most big stars tended to get bored, develop itchy feet and move on, the Billy Cotton Band constituted a built-in stabiliser – BBC work paid the band’s wages bill for a significant part of the year, and that guaranteed Dad’s loyalty to the corporation. So Dad signed up and became a BBC man for the rest of his life, simply on the strength of a figure scrawled in ink on a crumpled paper napkin which he and Ronnie accepted as a binding contract. It specified a three-year contract and ran for twelve.

If money was one problem Ronnie had to solve, the other was the creation of a distinctive production style with which Dad would be happy. Here Ronnie knew exactly what he wanted to do. In his department, there was a young producer called Brian Tesler who had a most unusual pedigree, having arrived in the television service by way of a first-class honours degree at Oxford. ‘Trust me,’ Ronnie said. ‘He’s a protégé of mine and I don’t get paid to make mistakes.’ He went on to point out that television was a much more complicated medium than radio, one which used expensive equipment and large production teams. He believed producers should be highly organised and possess brain power as well as creative flair. ‘And Brian’s got it all,’ he added. Well, Dad went through the motions of huffing and puffing at all this highfalutin’ Oxford stuff, but one good professional always recognises another and Brian soon won him over with a combination of genuine charm and great efficiency. Little wonder Brian ended up as Managing Director of London Weekend Television. After working with Dad, the rest of his television career must have been a doddle.

Brian recalls going to introduce himself to the old man who was working in Manchester, and hanging about waiting for the show to end. He and Dad went off for a late meal, during which Brian explained his ideas for the television series. As they parted, Dad patted him on the back and said, ‘Sleep well, son. Don’t worry. I’m much too good for you to be able to bugger up.’ When Dad pitched up in the studio to meet Brian for a first rehearsal, he was confronted by a line of dancing girls called the Silhouettes. He was appalled. The main attraction of every Cotton Show was Dad prancing around on the stage, but professional dancing was different. ‘I’m no Anton Dolin,’ he snarled, referring to one of the leading male ballet dancers of the time. ‘I can’t dance, and I’m much too old to learn now.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Brian cheerfully. ‘You are going to like these girls so much the urge to join in with them will be irresistible.’ And it was, though only after Dad went to the studio week after week and practised with the head girl and the choreographer, who commented that playing football and moving around a boxing ring must have given Dad a natural sense of balance. Eventually, he was to cherish a report in the Dancing Times which said, ‘It takes a band-leader of sixty to show the British dancing public what a pas de deux should be.’

Dad’s career might have been flourishing, but on the domestic front there was pain and strife. I don’t know whether it was because my brother and I had both got married and set up our own homes or that Dad was going through some sort of male menopause, but he drifted into an affair with Doreen Stephens, the female vocalist in his band. He was quite open about it – indeed, he flaunted it, almost as though a relationship with a much younger woman was an affirmation of his virility. At first, my mother ignored what was going on, but it all became so embarrassing that she could stand it no longer. She moved permanently into the Sandbanks house and Dad bought a flat in London. All his friends tried to warn him that he was making a fool of himself, but the more people tried to dissuade him, the more stubborn he became and the whole thing reached the proportions of a public scandal. It was sordid beyond belief – at one point, Dad and a very close friend demeaned themselves by vying for Doreen’s affections. To those of us who cared for him, the spectacle of two middle-aged men trying to out-macho each other in the pursuit of a young woman was utterly gruesome.

My mother behaved with great dignity throughout the whole business, which lasted for about four years. We none of us knew what was going to happen; Dad could be mulish in his single-mindedness. The extraordinary thing was that though he was a national figure, the press did not expose this affair; there was none of that intrusiveness into public personalities’ private lives masquerading as investigative journalism to which we’ve since become accustomed.

All this took its toll on Dad’s health. He was by now a man in his mid-fifties, and having to behave with the ardour of an ageing Lothario as well as working seven days a week put intolerable pressure on his system. He would work all week in some theatre or other, dash down to London for his weekly radio show and then travel to another town for the start of the following week’s engagements. I think that deep down he hated himself for the way he was behaving towards my mother; he loved her deeply but couldn’t resist the flattery implied by the attentions of a younger woman. Eventually, in 1955, he performed one time too many, did a show, took his bow, came off stage and collapsed. He was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack; in fact, he’d had a nervous breakdown. The doctors insisted that he needed three months’ complete rest. We were relieved his condition was not more serious but the problem was what would happen to his band. Dad cared for them and worried about them. In fact, my cousin Laurie, a member of the band, took over as temporary leader so they were able to meet their immediate touring engagements.

The Sunday broadcast was a different matter. I phoned Jim Davidson at the BBC to discuss the crisis. To my astonishment he said, ‘Why don’t you do the broadcast? In fact, do the lot. There are only three left before the summer break.’ When I recovered my equilibrium, I realised his proposal made sense. 1 often went to the broadcasts and indeed contributed to the scripts. I knew the band, they knew me, and I could rely on them absolutely to see me through. And this solution would put my father’s mind at rest. He had been worrying about his radio show and loathed the prospect of the BBC’s own house band taking over the slot. There was also the fact that I would be no threat to him. He behaved towards the band like a benevolent headmaster and he would see me not as a successor but as just the head prefect filling in while the beak was away.

Aided by an excellent scriptwriter who made jokes about Dad’s absence and my ineptitude, and bolstered by the good-natured badinage of the band, I made a modest success of the three broadcasts. So much so that Dad’s agent, Leslie Grade, rang me and said that Moss Empires, who had booked the band for the summer, would be happy to stick to the original schedule if I would carry on waving my arms around in time to the music. I agreed because this meant the band would be paid and Dad could enjoy a worry-free break in the south of France.

My first engagement with the band was at the Theatre Royal, Portsmouth on a Saturday evening, an easy start because at the weekend the place was sure to be packed. I made a deal with the leading saxophonist that he would beat time discreetly with his instrument while I gave the audience the impression that I was in charge. After a fairly chaotic rehearsal, I left the theatre and walked across the road to a café opposite. As I was tucking into a meal, I happened to look up and saw people queuing to get into the theatre. God Almighty! It suddenly struck me that what I was about to do was sheer lunacy. I’d never even been on the stage before, let alone faced an audience who had the highest expectations of a Billy Cotton Band show. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked myself desperately, barely avoiding the urge to bang my head on the table top.

I remember virtually nothing about the show that followed, so it must have gone well. Indeed, I went home to Boo with a feeling of euphoria which lasted all of twenty-four hours until I drove up to the band’s next engagement in Peterborough. As I was to discover, a rainy Monday night in middle England is an entirely different proposition from Saturday by the sea. The place was only a third full, and in the front were the serried ranks of local landladies who’d been given complimentary tickets in the hope they would recommend the show to their guests. These dragons sat there glowering, arms folded, daring us to entertain them. If you want a really super-critical audience, hand out free tickets. When punters have to pay for their tickets, they are on your side because they have a vested interest in enjoying themselves, otherwise their money’s been wasted. So I waved my arms around like crazy and babbled away, desperate to get some reaction from the audience. The band members, meanwhile, smiled cynically – they’d seen it all before. It certainly made me realise what my father had gone through in the lean years before he became famous.

To discomfort me even more, in a box surrounded by her acolytes there was Cissie Williams, the chief booker for Moss Empires. She was an awesome figure in the entertainment industry, able to make and break the career of performers by giving or withholding work or by placing them either in big London theatres or remote regional flea-pits. At the interval, she appeared in my dressing-room and I preened myself, fully expecting her to utter some words of congratulation or encouragement – after all, I’d taken over the band at short notice and, in all modesty, I thought I was doing rather well. Instead she snapped, ‘You are contracted to do fifty minutes and you only did forty-five’ – which was true, simply because we couldn’t include the number Dad always sang at the end of the show. I thought quickly and said, ‘I’ll ask Alan Breeze to sing “Unchained Melody”,’ a big hit at the time. She nodded, said, ‘Give my regards to your father,’ and swept out.

Alan Breeze, the band’s male vocalist, had been with my Dad for years and was the on-stage butt of his humour. He had a pronounced stutter which became worse in moments of stress. I told him the form and ensured the band had the music of ‘Unchained Melody’ on their stands. The following evening as the act came to its climax, we struck up the opening chords of the song and on came Alan Breeze, who looked at me desperately and muttered something I didn’t quite catch. We waited for him to take his cue and nothing happened; Alan just stared at me like a startled rabbit. We reached the end of the introductory chords. Dead silence. Having learned a thing or two from watching my father exchanging badinage with Alan, I turned to the audience and said jocularly, ‘I think we’ve got a problem here.’ Then with a great melodramatic gesture I picked up Alan by his collar and with a big smile on my face for the benefit of the audience, hissed at him, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Spluttering and stuttering, he whispered, ‘I … I … I’ve f-f-forgotten the w-w-words!’ I could have killed him with my bare hands. Everybody knew the lyrics of ‘Unchained Melody’ – for a time they were more familiar than the words of ‘God Save the Queen’. By enlisting the audience to sing along with Alan, I got us through the show and aged twenty-five years in five minutes.

Then we moved on to Brighton, where to my utter delight our takings for the week were up on the same period in the previous year when Dad was in charge of the band. I couldn’t wait to give him the good news: I thought it would aid his recovery if he knew how well things were going. Fat chance. He hated being upstaged, even by his own son.

One evening during the interval between houses at the Hippodrome Theatre, I went down to the bar and saw there a famous Brighton resident, the comedian Max Miller. Miller had done a memorable season with my Dad at the London Palladium which I attended virtually every evening because I admired his stand-up so much. Whether he was the greatest comedian of his day was a matter of argument, but he was indisputably the meanest. He had never been known to put his hand in his pocket and buy a drink, so I was not surprised to see him sitting staring glumly into an empty glass. We exchanged pleasantries and then I offered to buy him a drink. He was very grateful. We talked some more. ‘Can I refill your glass?’ I asked. He was beside himself with gratitude. Later: ‘Another one?’ I enquired. He overwhelmed me with thanks. Eventually I had to get back to business, but as I left, the barman called me over and he said, ‘Thanks very much for standing Max those rounds. If you hadn’t, I’d have had to do it. Every night he comes in here and just stands silently at the bar until I offer him a drink.’ Mean he might have been, but when he died Max left his entire estate to a home for unmarried mothers.

We ended our run with a week in Dublin. The Thursday happened to be St Patrick’s Day, which meant there were only two bars open in the entire city: one was at the Dog Show and the other at the Theatre Royal, where we were playing. Though the Billy Cotton Band was the star attraction, the theatre also had its own pit orchestra which accompanied the other turns. Since we were the final act on the bill, with an expansive gesture of the kind Billy Cotton Senior was noted for I handed a tenner to the stage manager and told him to send the pit orchestra out for a drink on me. I assured him my band would close the show with the national anthem. He was very grateful, and off went the pit orchestra for a drink while I warned our band how the show would end.

Half way through our act, I was happily waving my arms around when I had a sudden premonition of doom. I left the stage, got hold of the manager and said, ‘Where’s the pit orchestra?’ He told me they were in the pub where I’d sent them.

‘For Christ’s sake, get them back, quick!’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because my band doesn’t know “The Soldier’s Song”,’ I shrieked. ‘They only know one national anthem, “God Save the Queen”!’

‘Oh, my Gawd!’ he said, and dashed off. I spent the rest of the show with one eye glued to the orchestra pit, praying that the players would get back before we finished our act. By the time we reached the final curtain, there were just enough of them to strike up ‘The Soldier’s Song’. The Billy Cotton Band stood respectfully, blissfully unaware of the narrow escape they’d had. ‘God Save the Queen’ in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day in a house packed with drunken Irishmen!

‘You weren’t going to play what I think you were?’ the stage manager asked, scandalised. ‘What are you, a bloody kamikaze pilot?’ Speechless, I headed for the nearest bottle of whisky.

In spite of my success with Dad’s band, the experience did cure me of any idea of going on the stage permanently, though it was invaluable in later years when I had to deal with performers. I understood first hand the pressure they were under.

I had also come to believe that my future in show business lay in television, so I went to see Ronnie Waldman to ask if he would arrange for me to go on a BBC Television production course. I wanted no favours. I’d start at the bottom on a temporary contract, and if I didn’t make the grade he could get rid of me with no hard feelings. I’d got to know Ronnie well enough to work out his thought processes. To take me on as a trainee would only cost him the standard BBC rate of fifteen quid a week for six months, which would earn him the gratitude of his biggest stars and be another silken thread binding my Dad to the BBC. There can’t have been any other reason; I doubt Ronnie thought I was God’s gift to television.

Shortly before I left the music business to join the BBC, I was coming out of the office in Denmark Street when I ran into Dick James, the singer who had recorded the original title song to the TV series Robin Hood. He’d just finished a spell with the BBC Dance Orchestra and told me he was thinking of setting up a music publishing business. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out. It’s a dying industry. The record companies have it all sewn up; there’s nothing left for independent publishers.’ Like an idiot, he ignored my good advice, became the publisher of the Beatles and Elton John and made millions.

THREE

The first day I reported to the new half-built Television Centre at White City in January 1956 is indelibly imprinted on my memory. A young red-haired secretary who worked for Tom Sloan, the Assistant Head of Light Entertainment, greeted me. Her name was Queenie Lipyeat, and thirty years later she retired as my personal assistant because I was by then Managing Director of BBC TV. But on this particular day I was a trainee producer.

I knew Broadcasting House, the home of BBC Radio, very well. It had long, dark corridors and people worked behind closed doors. It had the hushed atmosphere of a museum or a library; John Reith called it (in Latin of course) ‘A Temple of the Arts’. It didn’t exactly buzz with excitement. Most of the actual broadcasting came from the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street and other studios around London. The Television Centre was quite different. It was noisy and bursting with life. Everyone seemed to be in a great hurry; the place echoed with shouting and laughter, and as you walked down a corridor you had to flatten yourself against the wall as technicians pushed past you trundling heavy camera equipment or pieces of scenery.

Since the BBC had begun as a radio service, all the big corporate decisions were made at Broadcasting House by a management who had originally been by and large lukewarm about television because they thought it was too expensive an operation to be paid for by the licence fee. However, against the BBC’s bitter opposition, the government passed the legislation which produced an Independent Television system, and in no time these companies were beating the BBC for audiences in the geographical regions where they operated. This created a certain amount of concern, even panic, at Broadcasting House as those who ran the BBC saw their position as the main purveyors of broadcasting being threatened. Hence, from being viewed somewhat superciliously, television was moved much higher up the governors’ agenda.

So in the very year I joined the BBC, it was decided that someone be appointed Director of Television. Gerald Beadle had no prior television experience and made no secret of the fact that up to the day of his appointment he didn’t even own a television set. He had been controller in charge of the Western Region of BBC Radio, was fifty-five years of age, and was looking for a gentle canter down the finishing straight to retirement.

Shortly after he arrived, Beadle summoned the entire production staff of the television service to a meeting. They all fitted comfortably into the Television Theatre at Shepherd’s Bush – by the time I left, it would have taken a football ground to contain them. I was present when Beadle asked what could be done about the mounting competition from ITV, and saw the legendary Grace Wyndham Goldie rise to her feet. She was a major figure in the Talks Department, then considered the serious side of the business, so her one-line intervention had a tremendous impact. She declared, ‘The trouble with the BBC is that it is considered vulgar to be popular.’ The roar of agreement from all the staff present shook Gerald Beadle and became something of a battle cry. He got the firm impression that the staff of the television service were a feisty lot, frustrated by lack of investment and the lukewarm endorsement of BBC management at Broadcasting House. Slowly the message got through to the powers that be and a new, exciting era dawned. I was fortunate to be there when it began.

I started work on the producers’ course. There were lectures on such things as the theory of camera direction and lighting, the importance of design and the organisation required to run a producer’s office. Clips of film illustrated many of these subjects. The problem was that every time they turned the lights down, I dozed off. But I’d learned a trick or two in the army and when the lights came up again I immediately asked the first question – which disarmed the suspicions of those who hadn’t realised that my eyes were closed in deep contemplation. In spite of this foible I had the privilege of learning from dedicated and talented instructors who, being the first generation in BBC TV, had virtually invented the techniques of television production.

After the course, we were sent back to our departments for the remainder of the six months to learn the practical side of the job under the supervision of senior producers. I was attached to a young lion, Francis Essex, who had built a great reputation as a programme director. He was later to become a major figure in ATV, and when he retired he created musicals, of which Jolson was probably his most successful. His production assistant was Yvonne Littlewood, who forty years later in 1999 earned a richly deserved place in the Royal Television Society’s Hall of Fame for her work in television.

There was also a production secretary, Hermione Doutre, and the four of us shared an office the size of a normal box room. Francis was a busy producer and for much of the time I just sat there and watched, very much a spare part. I sat at a small typist’s desk in the corner of the room, and at lunchtime I often used to pop down to Tin Pan Alley to my other office where I could luxuriate at a big walnut desk in a room with a carpet, armchairs, pictures on the wall and full cocktail cabinet and ponder whether I was doing the right thing by joining television.

But before long I was given some nursery-slope programmes. Going out under the generic title of Starlight, these were fifteen minutes long and used either a pop group or a solo performer. I did one with the Ray Ellington Quartet and Marion Ryan and another with the pianist Semprini. He was very popular with trainee producers, partly because he was so co-operative and partly because his piano was a useful prop – a director could shoot it from every possible angle. If the director was a beginner, he or she invariably got the camera cables crossed and ended up in a complete tangle. But it was all valuable experience.

By 1956 Boo and I had lived at Ham Island for six years. We arrived there as newlyweds and soon became a family – Jane was born on 26 September 1951 and Kate on exactly the same day two years later. I did myself no favours with Boo when in one of my more jocular moods I explained the identical birth-date of two of my children at a dinner-party: ‘If you work it back, it’s Boxing Day,’ I said. ‘After all, Christmas Eve, you drink, Christmas Day, you eat, so what’s left for Boxing Day?’ My wife’s laughter was dutiful but mirthless. I used to remind Dad every year as 26 September approached that it was the children’s birthday. Every year he would ask, ‘Which one?’ and every year I would say, ‘Both.’ And every year he would say accusingly, ‘You never told me that!’

We had thoroughly enjoyed living on the Island but now the children were getting near school age and Boo thought it was time to move nearer to town so that I wouldn’t have as far to drive to work. Our chance came when an old friend of my brother, Bob Snell, told us of a new development called Parkleys his firm had built at Ham Common near Richmond. Bob and Ted had been at school together and served in the RAF as pilots at the same time. Bob’s parents lived abroad, he spent his leaves with us and had become one of the family. He had moved into one of the new flats and there was another one on sale at £3500, which he assured me was a good investment. Boo and I went to see it. It had an open-plan living- and dining-room, two doubles and a small single room. There was, alas, no river at the bottom of the garden, but there were shops within walking distance. Boo was all for buying it, and I agreed, though I feared we might not get our money back if we wanted to sell it. Nevertheless her enthusiasm was irresistible.

The day we moved house, our bulldog, Bessie, had puppies. We’d always had dogs, starting with a Pekinese who was king of all he surveyed till one day he picked a fight with a boxer and a sheepdog and lost. So we decided to get a bigger dog; hence Bessie. Boo had arranged to make the actual house-move with the help of a friend, Patsy, while I was at work – in the morning I would leave from Ham Island and later come home to a new flat in Ham Common. It was a plan that suited a male chauvinist like myself down to the ground – or it would have done if Bessie hadn’t interfered with it. The bungalows on Ham Island were built on stilts against the possibility of flooding and Bessie chose to deliver her litter underneath the bungalow. I had to crawl around in the mud, passing one puppy after another up to Patsy. At last we got all the puppies out, eight of them. We couldn’t keep eight puppies in a flat, so we held on to two and the vet took the others. I left Ham Island for the last time feeling like a mass murderer.

Meanwhile, as part of Dad’s contract while he was waiting to get the Band Show on air, he was asked to present a musical programme produced by Francis Essex called The Tin Pan Alley Show. It was not a happy experience, though we had a few laughs along the way – wherever Dad was there was jollity. The problem in this instance was that he didn’t much like the show’s format and wanted out, and by God, he could be mulish when he wasn’t getting his own way. I swore at the time I’d never work with him again because it would obviously end in tears and I told Ronnie Waldman so.

Eventually I graduated as a full-blown producer and director on Off the Record, a show in which we put television pictures to records of current musical hits. We weren’t allowed to play the actual records because the BBC had an agreement with the Musicians’ Union who, naturally enough, wanted us to use live musicians rather than recordings. The show’s presenter, Jack Payne, was, like my father, a band-leader of pre-war vintage. He could be very awkward and difficult to handle, but coping with temperamental band-leaders was a skill I’d absorbed with my mother’s milk, so after a few preliminary skirmishes we got along fine.

It was on this show I was introduced to the world of special effects. Nowadays, they are an integral part of most shows, though all the fancy technical stuff is usually done after the programme has been recorded. But back in the fifties, when all shows were live, we had to put in the special effects during transmission as we went along. I remember Frankie Vaughan apparently walking through a series of doors while singing ‘Green Door’ – not an easy effect to create when all television was black and white. Frankie just lifted and put down his feet on the spot and the illusion was created that he was moving through space from one door to another. These days it would be laughably simple to get that effect but at that time it seemed like magic.

I recall in my early days in the department producing a show featuring the singer Carole Carr. Basically, we had three types of shot: long, mid-shot and close up. At that time, there was no such thing as a zoom lens – the camera had to be moved physically nearer or further away from the star. I started on a long shot and Carole looked so lovely I decided to track in closer as she sang her heart out. I called for the cameraman to move nearer. Nothing happened. I added what I thought was more authority to my voice and ordered the cameraman to move in. Still nothing happened. I was beside myself with fury until someone in the gallery said in a quiet voice, ‘If he does track in, there’ll be a terrible mess in the stalls. His camera’s at the front of the circle.’ Another lesson learned.

I had my first success as a television talent-spotter when I was working on Off the Record. I had a friend called Hugh Mendl who worked for Decca Records and whom I’d known since my days as a song-plugger. He asked me to go and see a young rock and roll star who was appearing in Soho. We found ourselves in a reclaimed public toilet that posed as a club in the heart of Frith Street. We ordered a drink and settled down to wait for the boy to come on stage. Suddenly at our table appeared a bouncer the size of a house who said the manager was aware we were auditioning in his club and he’d like to see us in his office. I refused his invitation – the reason being that he terrified the life out of me. We found ourselves on the street and called it a day. Hugh, however, was nothing if not tenacious and pestered me until I went along to another club where the boy was appearing. He was a sensation. I asked Hugh what recordings he’d made. ‘None,’ he replied, ‘but if you’ll give him a spot on your show I’ll record him tomorrow.’ We shook hands on it and Tommy Steele had his first recording, ‘Rock with the Caveman’, on the show the following week. I knew this was a big star in the making.

Discovering Tommy Steele presented me with an ethical dilemma. The man who wrote Tommy Steele’s hit was Lionel Bart, who when I came on the scene hadn’t found a publisher for the song. I had not divested myself of my interest in music publisher Michael Reine, but I had promised the Head of TV Entertainment, Ronnie Waldman, that I would not take advantage of my position in the BBC to advance the interests of my private company. I felt it right that I should not tell my partner at Michael Reine, Johnny Johnston, about the existence of Lionel Bart or the brilliant song Tommy Steele was turning into a hit. And that’s why we didn’t sign up Lionel Bart, who of course went on to write ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be’ and Oliver. Johnny was not best pleased.

By now, my dad’s show was nearing its transmission date. The combination of Billy Cotton as presenter and the Silhouettes worked a treat. Jimmy Grafton wrote the comedy script; there were some instrumental numbers and a guest spot. Brian Tesler had got an ideal television format, infinitely flexible, and Dad was smart enough to stick with it for his entire television career. He may not have been the best song and dance man in the business but when the audience saw the sweat on his forehead they knew he was giving everything he had to entertain them, and they loved him for it.

Because office space was at a premium at the unfinished Television Centre, I worked from a caravan behind the scenery block in the carpark. It was a little like a holiday camp, and the occupant of the next caravan along was a brilliant young producer called Jack Good who was busy working on an idea that was to revolutionise pop programmes. He named it Six-Five Special and proposed employing a quite original production technique. The perceived wisdom at the time was that none of the technology which transmitted the programme – cameras, lighting, microphones – should be visible to the viewer, who was supposed to assume the event was taking place in a corner of the living-room. It was a hanging offence to allow the tip of a microphone to appear in shot, and if one of the technicians was inadvertently picked up by the camera, the standard sarcastic quip was ‘I hope he’s a member of Equity’, the actors’ union.

Jack Good came up with the idea of letting the viewers see all the inner workings of television: cameras moving around, lighting rigs being adjusted, scenery pushed into place. It was an unheard-of innovation and some members of the department found it hard to swallow. Josephine Douglas, who was the co-producer and presenter of the show, came into my caravan in tears one day. She felt that Jack was taking all the magic out of television and blowing away its mystery. She pleaded with me to talk to Jack to persuade him to revert to the old formula. I did talk to him and thank God I wasn’t able to change his mind, because he had hit upon a way of revitalising television. He stayed with the BBC for a while and then left to join ITV to produce Oh Boy! which launched Cliff Richard’s television career.

After Jack Good had gone, we took turns in producing Six-Five Special, and it fell to me to produce the first show from outside London. We transmitted it from the town hall in Barry in South Wales. The guest presenter was Lonnie Donegan who had very pronounced ideas about what he wanted to do, which included doing without the other presenter, Pete Murray. Lonnie insisted he could handle it on his own. In the end we reached a creative compromise: Lonnie would do a little of what he wanted and a lot of what I wanted. This is what being a producer is all about; he carries the can and in the end what he says goes, however big the star with whom he’s working. Compared to the Television Centre, the makeshift studio in the town hall was relatively small so I told the local BBC man that in order to allow as many people as possible to enjoy the show, we’d let in one audience to watch the run-through and another to attend the actual transmission.

There was only a thirty-minute gap between the run-through and transmission which meant we required a slick and orderly audience turn-round. At the due time, the red light went on and we were live on air. As we’d planned, I cued the number one cameraman to track in on Lonnie. He didn’t move. I was bawling down the intercom at the floor manager until another cameraman turned his camera round and showed me his colleague’s predicament. The first audience were so keen to see the show they refused to leave after the run-through, but the second audience had been allowed in and the camera was pinned against the studio’s rear wall by a mass of screaming teenagers. For the first five minutes of the show, the pictures were all over the place, but we eventually sorted it out and the viewers assumed the chaos was the style of the show.

In 1957 Brian Tesler, having produced sixteen of Dad’s shows, announced that he was leaving the BBC to join Lew Grade at ATV. The BBC therefore needed another producer to do the Cotton Show. Unbeknown to me, Dad had spoken to Ronnie Waldman to ask if I could take the show over, but Ronnie told him he and I had an agreement that I would not be asked to do shows with my father. Ronnie promised Dad he’d look around for a suitable replacement. I got home that evening to find my father sitting comfortably on the settee entertaining my wife with some of his numerous stories. Just a little suspicious, I asked him whether there was anything particular on his mind. He replied that he’d just come for supper – indeed, he’d brought it with him: smoked salmon and a good bottle of wine. So we had a very enjoyable evening.

At eleven o’clock he stood up, glanced at his watch and uttered one of his ritual phrases: ‘Time a decent man was akip in his bed.’ Then as he reached the door, he turned, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Why won’t you produce my show?’ I was completely unprepared for that question and it took me a few moments to realise I’d been bushwhacked. Eventually I said, ‘Dad, the producer of a show is in charge of it, and that often leads to arguments with the performers. I wouldn’t want to argue with you and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to win.’

‘OK,’ he replied, ‘you have my word that I will never argue with you in public; we’ll have all our discussions in private. Is it a deal?’

Of course it was. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse and I realised I didn’t want to. So ‘Produced by Bill Cotton Junior’ was the credit at the end of The Billy Cotton Band Show from April 1957 and for the next four years.

Thus ended my first year in television. I still went back to the office in Denmark Street occasionally and kept an eye on what was going on. Johnny was by then the uncrowned king of the TV jingle, though the music business generally was on the back burner. But every now and again, someone would record a song from our catalogue which ended up on the B-side of a hit, and then the royalties would roll in. It might be the A-side of a record the public wanted, but the B-side got the same royalties.

Back at the Television Centre, having completed a series of Off the Record, The Show Band Show and some music specials under the generic title of Summer Serenade with Geraldo and Frank Chacksfield, I was accepted as a full-blown producer/director. Around the department there were some mutterings about nepotism, but nothing serious. If anybody hinted at it, I would be quite brazen and unapologetic. In all walks of life, from the professions to the trade unions, being the child of an established father has its advantages. Sure, doors open and you get to walk through them, but the important thing is what you do with the chances you’ve been given.

Our boss, Ronnie Waldman, was a great talent-spotter and he laid the foundations of a department which in the 1960s and 1970s regularly out-performed ITV, the channel supposedly set up in order to be the nation’s main entertainment outlet. Elitists both inside and outside the BBC who had greeted the arrival of ITV with relief because they thought it meant the BBC could concentrate on education and information, leaving entertainment to the commercial sector, were forced to eat their words.

Some of my colleagues had come over from radio: Duncan Wood, who produced Hancock and Steptoe and Son; Johnny Ammonds, who was responsible for shows featuring Val Doonican, Morecambe and Wise and Harry Worth; and Dennis Main-Wilson, who was the glue that held together Till Death Do Us Part and The Rag Trade. Dennis was an extraordinary character; he’d been blooded on The Goon Show and became inured to the good-natured ridicule of Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. Dad christened him Dame May Whitty which fitted perfectly his rather fussy and punctilious manner – but no one doubted that he was a great producer.

Some of that first generation of television producers were imports from the theatre: Jimmy Gilbert, for example, who had written the successful West End show Grab Me a Gondola. He became one of the most distinguished television producers of situation and sketch comedy, and later whenever I had a risky new show to launch I entrusted it to him in the absolute confidence that if it was workable at all, Jimmy would bring it off. There was also the occasional producer who had started his career as an engineer or floor manager and moved up through the ranks. Outstanding among them was T. Leslie Jackson, who master-minded This Is Your Life and What’s My Line? Ronnie Waldman used to hold a producers’ meeting every Monday morning during which we discussed and critically analysed the previous week’s output. One of the most vocal contributors was George Inns, who had produced Jewel and Warriss’s 1950s radio hit Up the Pole. He suggested a solution to what had become an intractable programme problem and in the process launched one of the great television and theatre shows. Every year there was a Radio Show at Earls Court or Olympia which was set up along the lines of the Motor Show and exhibited the latest models of radio and television sets. For a couple of years, we had built a makeshift studio at the show from which we broadcast some of our television programmes. Our producers hated it because the audience kept invading rehearsals and there were numerous technical breakdowns. Frankly, it was a mess, an embarrassment to the department, yet it was unthinkable that the BBC’s Television Service should ignore an exhibition dedicated to selling television sets.

For ages, dear George had been plugging his pet idea of a black-and-white minstrel show, and yet again on this occasion he went through his usual routine, insisting that the Radio Show would be an ideal setting for his great project. We all groaned, but nobody could come up with a better notion, so George was given the go-ahead. The Black and White Minstrel Show was born, and as is often the case in television, everybody in the business hated it except the audience. It became and remained a huge success. It was the BBC’s first entry for the Montreux Television Festival and swept the board. In the end, political correctness decreed that the idea of blacked-up performers was racist, so the show died and has never been replaced.

Meanwhile I had turned my attention to the upcoming series of my father’s show. It was to go out fortnightly on BBC1, alternating with The Vera Lynn Show. Once I became Dad’s TV producer, the dynamics of our relationship changed. Throughout my childhood and schooldays, I had hero-worshipped him. During my time in the army and my career as a music publisher I had been quite dependent on his patronage, support and influence. Now the balance of power had shifted and to a marked degree he depended on me. Radio was still his great love but the proceeds didn’t pay the rent. His main source of income was the variety theatre. Television paid good money, provided the band with regular work and gave him huge publicity – so he just had to knuckle down and accept that I was now in the driving seat.

For my part, I was simply happy to be able to repay Dad for all he had done for me. He knew he could trust me; I would never put him in a situation on television where he was asked to do something he couldn’t do well. I was determined to exploit his strengths and build on the solid foundations his producer Brian Tesler had laid down. Our biggest problem was the one facing all general entertainment shows: how to find an adequate supply of interesting and talented guests. I looked around for a pianist, preferably someone who played the piano like the bloke down the pub. I mentioned this one day to Richard Armitage, who had taken over the Noel Gay agency. He told me about a young man EMI had just recorded and fixed it for me to hear him in Richard’s office. He was actually called Trevor Stanford but was renamed Russ Conway by EMI. The name stuck and I was glad to sign him because he played just the sort of music I was looking for. And he was to become a big star.

I was due to produce the Six-Five Special show from Barry in South Wales, so I booked Russ to appear on it. I wanted to see how he looked on camera. It was a disaster. The studio was filled with fans of the reigning king of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan. That’s what they’d come for, skiffle music, not honky-tonk piano-playing, so the applause was underwhelming. His confidence shattered, Russ dashed off the set and headed for the railway station. When I caught up with him in town, I managed to convince him that life on The Billy Cotton Band Show was going to be better than that. And it was, thanks partly to a song he’d composed called ‘Side Saddle’ which sold well and fitted the show like a glove. So Russ went from strength to strength, for quite apart from his good looks and pianistic virtuosity he got on well with my father. Jimmy Grafton wrote a duet for them called ‘What Will They Do Without Us?’ with flexible lyrics that could be adapted for different occasions: the chemistry between them was magical. Some of this magic must have affected me, for I seemed to have a capacity to communicate with Russ from a distance without benefit of wires. On the studio floor, he could look quite solemn while he was playing, so I’d mutter to myself, ‘Smile, you bastard!’ and at that instant, uncannily, he would look up at the camera and break into a broad grin.

The demands my father made on his orchestra were very heavy. They were committed to a season fifty weeks long on radio, television and in the theatre; they had to cope with a wide range of music thrust onto their stands at very short notice; and in addition they were expected to fool around as foils during my Dad’s comic routines. Some critics sniffily claimed that musically they weren’t outstanding. For my money, their work-rate, versatility and sheer discipline made them unique.

We also needed a new female vocalist, because Doreen Stephens had left to seek her fortune elsewhere. Johnny Johnston recommended a singer called Kathie Kay who had first appeared on the stage at the age of four and within ten years had appeared in every London theatre, including the Palladium. Then at the age of seventeen she retired, married a Scotsman and had three sons. She still did a certain amount of recording, and one day someone influential in the BBC overheard one of her records, so she started a second career in television and on radio. But her children took priority over her career, so she refused to make her home in London and instead travelled many thousands of miles every year between there and Glasgow. She wasn’t prepared to go on the road with the band, either, so Dad agreed that while her children were growing up she should confine herself to radio and television engagements. As the years went by, Kathie grew ever closer to Dad and became his main pillar of support until he died.

Dad, of course, had been in the entertainment business for so long that he knew everybody, so getting star guests for the show wasn’t too great a hassle. Max Bygraves was always good value. On one occasion we had two enormous puppet-heads made of the porcine stars of Pinky and Perky, a very popular show at the time. The sight of Max and Dad wearing these heads and performing a dance routine was hilarious, and we resurrected the routine later on for a Royal Variety Performance. Dad was absolutely dependent for his patter on cue cards scattered around the studio, and Max used to read out Dad’s words in a different order to produce utter chaos. On one awful occasion, the teleprompter roller stuck, and Dad was reduced to reading the same cue again and again until the contraption freed itself. But the public loved it; he could have done anything and they would have roared in appreciation.

Coping with the script for a fifty-minute show made great demands on my Dad’s memory – he was, after all, a band-leader not an actor. On one occasion, he kept muffing his lines and our rehearsal time was fast running out. I pressed the button on the production desk which enabled the studio to hear me and announced with a sigh that we would have just one more run-through of the routine. Unfortunately I forgot to take my finger off the button as I turned to the people in the control room: ‘If he’d learned the bloody script we could get on.’ Back came the unmistakable voice of the star: ‘If you are so clever, why don’t you come down here and do it?’ I immediately went down to the studio floor where the band members who were used to the rough edge of my Dad’s tongue looked expectantly at my getting some of the same treatment in a flaming row. But I was so appalled at my tactlessness that I immediately apologised: ‘I am sorry, Dad, I shouldn’t have said that.’ A broad grin spread across his face: ‘If I’d learned the bloody thing, you wouldn’t have had to, would you?’ I turned to the band, most of whom I’d known since I was a little boy, and in a spirit of camaraderie gave them the two-finger salute. In all the years I worked with my father, that was the one and only time we got near to a row.

Dad was a man’s man who was very much at home with the ladies. Alma Cogan was one of his favourites – and mine. I’d known her since my days as a song-plugger and I could always rely on her to help out if we were stuck for a star guest, even though she was under contract to commercial television at the time. She was utterly without any sense of her own importance. I recall visiting her home one evening and finding Cary Grant sitting chatting to Sammy Davis Jr while in another room Alma was saying encouraging words to a penniless songwriter. She treated everybody the same.

On the eve of one show, our main guest dropped out and I was really desperate – I rang everyone I could think of, except Alma, who had appeared just a few weeks before. In the end I called round to the flat where she lived with her mother and sister. It was very late and she had been out working, but within minutes she volunteered to fill the gap. We sat up into the early hours working out a routine based on the song ‘He’s Funny That Way’. It worked very well and we put it on an LP for Columbia records.

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