The Story of Variety, BBC Four

For those whose only knowledge of the form is the Royal Variety Performance, this programme (part of BBC Four’s variety season) gave a nice, if all too brief, overview. The first of a two-parter was presented by Michael Grade, whose family is variety royalty - generations of Grades were performers and agents, and latterly television executives.

Grade is not a natural TV performer but knew to keep his pieces to camera to a minimum (clearly a memo that failed to reach Alan Yentob’s desk) and instead was happy to listen to the anecdotes - and joyfully there were lots of them. Ken Dodd, Roy Hudd, Val Doonican, Mike Winters and Doreen Wise (the former dancer who is Ernie Wise’s widow) reminisced, alongside people such as Maurice Sellar, performer and agent, and agent Peter Pritchard.

It was a treat to hear these old troupers’ stories, but Grade wasn’t fronting a reminiscence hour - this well-researched programme, which I suspect had hours of extraneous material, charted variety’s success and explained its demise. After variety’s post-war heyday, with two shows a night at hundreds of theatres across the country, the advent of rock‘n’roll music did for this family-friendly entertainment. Turns spinning plates, unfurling flags or telling decades-old jokes simply couldn’t compete with sexy young singers gyrating their hips.

Various old troupers and agents explained variety’s hierarchy; Moss Empire theatres, including the London Palladium and the Hackney Empire, were top of the tree, while the long-defunct music hall at Ashton under Lyme, a number-four theatre, had rats in the dressing rooms.The size of a performer’s lettering on a bill, meanwhile, determined how big their dressing room was; when Bruce Forsyth was bottom of the bill at the start of his career he was given a changing room with the collies from a performing-dogs act.

Talking of animals, several people recalled Karimba, who “charmed” snakes and crocodiles - “She used to drug them, of course,” said a stage manager, laughing heartily at the memory - and some of the speciality acts recalled were simply bizarre. One involved a man coming on stage with a bull and asking the audience to guess its age.

It was estimated that acts could tour the British Isles for 18 months non-stop and appear at a different theatre each week. But there was one - the Glasgow Empire - that even Max Miller, the greatest variety comic of all time, would baulk at. When his agent offered him a booking there Miller replied, "I'm a comedian, not a missionary," while Ken Dodd recalled the instruction he was given by the stage manager before going on. "No football gags - we need the seats." A young Des O'Connor even pretended to faint rather than continue being barracked by the notoriously aggressive crowd.

The funniest stories were about theatrical digs, where landladies were notoriously mean and snobbish. “Once-nightly” acts - actors in plays - were treated to tablecloths and cruets in the dining room while “twice-nightly” variety performers had to make do. But performers would make their mark; anything signed off with “quoth the raven” (nobody knew why this phrase was used) in visitors’ books meant “this is a shithole”, and Roy Hudd recalled one digs where the landlady served up baked beans on toast for his supper every night, generously throwing in a chipolata sausage on Christmas Eve.

Despite the laughs, this was a sad programme in many ways. When variety theatres closed many of the several thousand variety acts in the UK had no homes to go to - they had lived in digs all their lives - while some of Britain’s most beautiful theatres became homes to seedy nude shows or bingo halls or, worse, were knocked down.

• Watch The Story of Variety on BBC iPlayer
• The Story of Variety continues on BBC Four on 7 March