John Wyver writes: ‘Hurrah for Big Bill Campbell!’, wrote Listener critic Grace Wyndham Goldie after seeing the singer host the third edition of Western Cabaret on the afternoon of Saturday 17 June 1939. ‘What speed! What verve! What vivacityI What gaiety! What a change!’
A re-run of a show transmitted the previous Tuesday evening, this edition of Western Cabaret featured host Big Bill Campbell and his Hill-Billy Band, together with among others The Three Van Strattens, Harry Lester and his Hayseeds, and ‘Pop’ Tom Soulsby. ‘Big Bill’ himself had been born in Canada, but settled in England in 1930 and, up until his death in 1960, popularised ‘cowboy’ music with radio shows and frequent UK tours. Wyndham Goldie was a fan:
The point – the great, glorious and unprecedented point – about this show was that it had life in it. From the opening tune played by the Hill-Billy Band to Big Bill’s own chorus song, ‘Old Macdonald had a Farm’ and the high spot comedy singing of Evelyn Dall the thing had enough zip and go to raise the roof of Alexandra Palace. And, what is more, it was fun.
This is what all too many television cabarets aren’t. They may be expensive, they may be elaborate, they may give us close-ups of female limbs from the ankle to the thigh, gentlemen may do strange things with canes and opera hats, singers may assure us in tones of liquid gloom that ‘as long as hearts shall beat lovers shall always meet in purple dreams’. But, to adapt George Robey, no one would suggest that they’re gay.
As so often Wyndham Goldie used a specific show as the focus for the spinning of a more general argument about a genre of programming, as she did in this column about cabaret.
The truth is that gaiety has disappeared from sophisticated entertainment. Here, for example, are two television cabarets, also from last week’s programmes. One was Cochran’s Night Lights from the Trocadero and the other was made up of scenes from Henry Sherek’s Floor Show from the Dorchester (below).
I felt that it was ungrateful of me not to enjoy them. for these are, aren’t they, twin peaks of high London living? And here I was getting them, by the grace of Alexandra Palace, for nothing or as near nothing as makes no matter. Yet I didn’t enjoy them.
Their whole tone was that wail in a minor key which marks all fashionable entertainment. Their high-stepping choruses and the inevitable acrobatic ball-room dancers presented that curious combination of physical energy and languor of spirit which is dust and ashes in the mouth…
So we come to the fact that in this matter of light entertainment the television authorities are in a quandary. There is no doubt that the intimate style suits television. But where do you get the intimate style? For the most part in sophisticated cabaret. And not only does this lack gaiety but it isn’t as a rule intended to stand by itself. It is meant to be·an adjunct to Sole a la Bonne Femme, a trimming for Duckling Bigarde. It cannot be expected to bear the strain of the full attention of a circle sitting solemnly round in the dark.
What, then, is the solution? Good turns are scarce; the cameras are voracious; light entertainment is always in demand. This has become a very serious problem. For television cabaret, of which we get something like thirty hours a week, is sinking more and more deeply into a rut. I suggest that in the long run and in spite of the enormous and obvious difficulties the only way out will be to have light entertainment specially written for television…
Not only would this solve the problem of material but it would also enable the cameras to be used satirically and with point instead of merely photographically as they are for the most part at present. This last issue is important. I remember a little feature of Mr. Kelsall’s some time ago in which he used the cameras to make humorous comment upon the things that were being said. I have never seen the experiment repeated but it surely has immense possibilities in television comedy and light entertainment.
[If only we had more details of this…]
Meanwhile, pending the Millennium when all these things are done, let me say ‘Here’s to Big Bill Campbell’ and, if this is the right expression, ‘Let’s hope we’ll be seeing you’.
Image of Big Bill Campbell in the studio courtesy of the Alexandra Palace Television Society.
[OTD post no. 182; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
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