Bill Cotton - Double Bill (Text Only)

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.