Family Britain, 1951-1957 Read Online Free PDF Page A

any television personality of his time.’3 That such a set of attitudes could, so soon after the ‘1945’ welfare-state revolution, strike such a chord was suggestive indeed.
    The film of the summer, premiered about a fortnight before the launch of
What’s My Line?
, was undoubtedly
The Lavender Hill Mob
, an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness in which the police were treated somewhat less deferentially than in the previous year’s
The Blue Lamp
, but not radically so. Gore Vidal would claim that Guinness modelled his part on the young actor-turned-critic Kenneth Tynan, especially ‘the way that Tynan stagily held a cigarette between ring and little fingers’. Tynan himself, signed up by the
Evening Standard
, was now making his mark. Danny Kaye at the Palladium was first in his sights (‘trades on sex-appeal too openly ever to be a recruit to the small troupe of great clowns’), then the ‘periwinkle charm’ of Vivien Leigh, starring that summer with her husband Laurence Olivier in
Antony and Cleopatra
: ‘Hers is the magnificent effrontery of an attractive child, endlessly indulged at its first party.’ Letters of disgust immediately followed, but Tynan was unconcerned; Noël Coward soon afterwards found him to be ‘charming, very intelligent and with a certain integrity’. Neither was at the Coventry Hippodrome in early September for the first night of
Zip Goes a Million
, an American-style musical about a man who has to spend a million dollars in order to inherit a fortune of seven million. ‘George Formby is the undisputed star of the show, an eminence he gains by being determinedly and more than ever George Formby,’ declared the local paper. ‘He displays his old genius for provoking laughter by the least of his broad-vowelled asides. Once again he is the one-man pantomime that never palls.’ Admittedly the ukulele-playing Lancashire comedian told ‘a clamant audience’ at the end of the performance that there had been ‘a bit of a muck-up at times’, but there was justifiable confidence that the under-rehearsed production would be in good order by the time it got to London the following month.4
    The summer’s big sporting drama, attended by massive publicity, was also an Anglo-American affair. No one gave Randolph Turpin, a black boxer from Leamington Spa who had been a cook in the navy, a chance in his fight on 10 July at Earl’s Court against the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title. In the event he won quite comfortably on points – even though the radio summariser, the fruity W. Barrington Dalby, badly misled almost twenty-five million listeners by pronouncing that ‘only a whirlwind grandstand finish can possibly snatch it for Turpin’, an assessment with which Raymond Glendenning (‘portly, pertly-voiced commentator with handlebar moustache’, in Frank Keating’s words) concurred. Dalby afterwards claimed that he had meant ‘clinch’ not ‘snatch’, but that did not save the patrician pair from an avalanche of criticism. Just over a fortnight later, the far from proletarian Dorian Williams was the television commentator for the
Horse of the Year Show
at White City stadium. ‘My cup of happiness was full,’ recorded Vere Hodgson (there in person), ‘for we saw Foxhunter jump with Colonel [Harry] Llewellyn riding and we saw Rusty with Miss Kellett and we saw Miss Pat Smythe. We all held our breath while Foxhunter jumped, and then he was cheered to the echo . . .’ Later, Hodgson went round to the stables and fed the mighty Foxhunter with sugar. It was exactly a week later, on the Saturday at the start of the August Bank Holiday weekend, that Wally Hammond, the great Gloucestershire and England batsman of the inter-war era, was persuaded to come out of retirement to play against Somerset at Bristol. A crowd of 10,000 saw him survive a first-ball lbw appeal from Horace Hazell and then scratch around for 50 minutes, making only seven, before being clean