Bill Cotton - Double Bill (Text Only)

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.