The Shock of the New Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance

'In this series, Lucy and I have joined forces to uncover

'the British love affair with dancing.

'I've been putting her through her paces on the dance floor.

'And she's been giving me a history lesson.'

Lucy, chop, chop, a little bit quicker, please, time for lunch.

'From the 17th to the 20th century, we've been finding out how much

'our favourite dances tell us about the nation's social history.

'From money and morals to sex and snobbery,

'you can find it all on the British dance floor.'

Twerking - nothing new...

-Yeah.

-It's from the Charleston!

Yeah!

We've visited fancy ballrooms to see how the other half danced...

and factory floors to find out what the rest of us got up to.

Moira, I think Len's wiggling his hips.

'We dressed to dance in perfect period style.'

I'm a bit of eye-candy for a lot of the ladies.

'From the tips of our toes to the tops of our wigs.'

'And each episode, we've been experiencing the era's most

'iconic dances for ourselves...'

And then back to your partner.

When in the hell are we ever going to get together and link arms?

The next bit, the next bit. You've got to get the tension between you!

'..as we learn them for a grand finale,

'where we're dancing cheek to cheek!'

By the turn of the 20th century,

Victorian ideals were becoming a bit of a bore.

People were still waltzing,

but it was starting to feel a bit out of step with the times.

Out of that erupted the most dynamic period in the whole

evolution of dancing in Britain.

There were new dances, daring dances, dances for a generation

who didn't want to do it the way their parents had.

These new dances weren't home-grown. Foreign dances were all the rage.

We danced in unprecedented numbers,

two million taking to the floor every week.

This was boom time and there was money to be made.

So, how did we get from

the straight-laced Victorian ballroom to this?

Throughout the 19th century, new dances had arrived in London

almost exclusively from Europe via Paris.

Edwardian Britain may have been rather conservative,

but by the turn of the 20th century,

people were tired of the same old dances,

and were hungry for something new.

What they got was surprisingly radical,

and came not from Europe, but from further afield.

New dances driven by a brand new sound.

-Hello, Ted.

-Good morning.

We're so used to listening to different styles of music,

it's hard to imagine what it would have been like

to hear a completely new sound,

a radically new kind of music for the very first time.

Imagine if you'd been used to hearing this...

HE PLAYS OFFENBACH'S BARCAROLLE

..and then suddenly you heard something like this!

RAGTIME MUSIC PLAYS

It's irresistible.

This was the African- American music of ragtime.

It was syncopated rhythms and improvised melodies.

It was exhilarating, energetic and downright dangerous.

For some, this was exactly what was needed.

A new tempo for the changing times.

The radical sound of ragtime arrived on these shores

arm in arm with some pretty quirky dances.

RAGTIME MUSIC PLAYS

That was fantastic.

Thank you, thank you very much.

-So those were the animal dances?

-Yeah.

You did like a mix, didn't you?

-Yeah.

-You slipped in a bit of...

Yeah, grizzly bear, so it was like wah, wah.

-Yeah.

-Forward and back, forward...

-And then we got little bit of...

-Turkey.

-Yeah.

The turkey trot.

And the bunny hop was that, boom.

The bunny hop.

-Where did they come from?

-They came from America.

They were basically, erm,

African-American dance forms that were actually danced

on the plantation, dances - they were called plantation dances.

And African-American slaves and plantation workers would teach

their masters the dance steps,

and the upper classes would actually go and do these dance steps

in private parties and clubs, places like this.

I would imagine that the white people were seeing all this fun...

-Yeah.

-..going on.

-Yeah.

And they thought, well, we want a bit of this fun.

Exactly, yeah, and it was actually seen as very risque, you see.

There was a story that was written in one of the art papers

that a lady was given

50 days' imprisonment for doing the turkey trot.

So, you can see how they didn't it want to be, you know,

associated with negro dance forms.

Yes. So there's a real racial element to this story?

Yes, there was a lot of racial, you know, segregation.

Basically, ragtime, we look at 1890 to 1910.

I certainly wouldn't be here talking to you, Len, no way.

So, how did they arrive over here?

Well, it came over in two ways. First, through the music,

cos within ragtime music there were a lot of dance steps to do.

-And also another way was the upper classes.

-Yeah.

They brought it over, and the crossover that happened

and the integration of them both just made, you know,

African-American and, erm,

American Europeans that went over there,

a whole genre of dance forms that influenced the world -

not just Europe, the whole world.

Yeah, there's nothing new, you can watch, you know,

-singers of today...

-Yes.

..dancing and, and you still see those movements in their perf...

-Tina Turner!

-Yes.

Chuck Berry. What about Chuck Berry going along?

-All doing that, all that.

-Yeah.

Oh, the backslide or the moonwalk, Michael Jackson did it.

Now, you look at the camel walk. You've got...

Yeah.

-That is your...

-Moonwalk. Don't fall down the stairs.

Moonwalk! No, I won't, your moonwalk.

Even when you look at Beyonce when she's doing all this.

-Shaking all the back, the bottom. Nothing new.

-No.

They were doing it all the time. Twerking, nothing new.

-Yeah.

-It's from the Charleston.

Yeah!

You've got it all, you know, and that's all the animal dances down,

nothing is new.

Ragtime music paved the way for a whole new generation of dances

to cross the Atlantic from America,

setting up a battle with the British dancing establishment

which would shape the decades that followed.

'The most controversial

'and recognisable of these dances would emerge almost 20 years later.

'The Charleston is the dance

'Len and I are learning for our 1920s night out.

'So, I've come to take a lesson with historical dance teacher

'Darren Royston.'

Right, everyone, up on your feet,

-we're off to do the Charleston today.

-Hooray!

So, I hope you've got lots of energy,

cos this dance is a crazy dance, OK?

The legs are going to be going in weird positions, you're going to be

moving your arms around and you're going to be having

a bit of a frenzy.

Now, Lucy, you'll be with Len, so there'll be moments where you

meet him and you have to stick together and really dance together,

looking as if you're doing this mad dance together.

-But then there's moments when you break away.

-Yeah.

And it's your moment to completely be a star.

Do your own little thing, your own little show-off.

Right, let's come to the mirror, then.

Now, we're going to have to now look at the basic Charleston step,

-the step that everybody needs to know.

-Hm-mm.

So, it's the step touch, where you're stepping on one foot

and letting the other foot touch.

So, I'm going to come and stand next to you so you get the idea, OK?

Now, you're doing a step, and just touching the foot there.

A touch of the foot against the floor, that's it.

So you're just having that little step.

That's it - better, and then as it moves, now you can start to move

the foot, that's it, good,

and letting the arms go with the legs, good.

So, let's just walk around the room now, OK,

just walking with that step.

Just a normal walk, as you see someone, step, touch.

-I see you and it's like, "Hello there."

-"Hello there."

And back. We're still in the 1920s...

Hello there!

..so it's all kind of high with the hands.

Yes, that's it, the head's up - better, that's it,

now you're Charlestoning, Lucy, well done.

Good. Step touch, step touch.

And how are you finding it with this sort of wild frenzied dance?

Well, these hands just want to go the other way,

they're really confused, they don't know what they're doing.

Yeah, you've gotta have that control of the opposition.

So it's there all the time,

but this is kind of a dance where you're meant to let go as well.

Let's all get into one long, straight line - Lucy, you come

and stand next to me and we'll put some of these steps together, OK?

Now, the first thing we do as the music starts is everyone's

going to do a little shunt.

Why don't we do it towards each partner?

So you're going, shunt and away and towards and away.

And this time face your partner

and do your runs crossing with the right shoulder

all the way around...

to come back into line. OK?

Let's play the music.

And a shunt.

And with your partners.

Get ready to Charleston - and one!

And one.

Big finish and step! And down. Brilliant, well done.

Stretch out, stretch out.

Now, I thought I'd be quite good at this dance

cos I've got the right haircut for it,

but obviously that is not enough - and the prospect of doing

this for "Head Judge Len" in a very short time is, is quite terrifying.

'The first decade of the 20th century had seen

'the invention of the electric typewriter,

'the radio receiver and the rise of the automobile.

'From technology to art, the world was changing faster than ever.

'In 1912, hot on the heels of the animal dances,

'another imported dance came along to shake up the British.'

The Argentinian Tango was foreign.

It was exotic, it was daring.

There was the close embrace, the general sexual overtones.

This was truly shocking, this was a dangerous new world.

From shopping to socialising,

the tango changed everything.

The Argentinian Tango first emerged in the 1850s

in Buenos Aires, in bordellos.

Here, poor young working men would dance with each other

because the only women around were prostitutes they couldn't afford.

Wealthy Argentinian men would hang out in these bordellos

to learn the dance.

They were the ones who would take the tango on its travels.

Through them it arrived at the turn of the century in Paris.

And what sort of impact did it make then in the early 20th century?

Well, it was enormous.

It became much more than a craze as young people wanted to...

To move on a dance floor

in a way that they hadn't been able to before.

It was a dance that influenced fashion,

mainly by loosening the skirt.

French women, of course, were the first to shed their corsets,

they were the first to adopt the tango earlier,

so round about 1910, the lingerie suppliers in Paris

were bemoaning their lack of business.

A skirt that was slit to the knee,

you have feathers, for example, going up in the air

instead of being wrapped round your face,

because you couldn't get close to the man with a feather in his eyes.

-Ah!

-And you had, you know, demonstrations and classes.

Everybody seemed to take to the tango.

It was the height of fashion.

Everything was orange, completely bright coloured,

but especially orange, which really was the colour of the tango.

So there's this tango mania going on in London.

-Tango mania.

-Who was it that disapproved of the tango?

This was an age in London, we were very conservative in 1912.

The Church particularly disapproved.

Establishment disapproved, I mean, this was a very raunchy dance.

It was perceived as being about sex,

and it was man and woman together

in a, kind of, hold that had never been seen before.

This is interesting because this is a message from the Pope.

-The Pope?!

-The Pope.

-The Pope is against the tango, is he?

Absolutely!

-"Pope denounces new paganism, the tango."

-The tango!

You'd think he had other things to worry about. I love this.

Well, presumably in January 1914, this is what he said.

"The tango, which has already been condemned by illustrious bishops

"and is prohibited even in Protestant countries,

-"must be absolutely..."

-"Absolutely prohibited."

"..in the seat of the Roman Pontiff, the centre of the Catholic religion.

"If parents do not protect their children from corruption,

"they will be guilty before God,

"a failure in their most sacred duties."

Well, if that wasn't enough to put people off, I don't know what was.

But it didn't put them off, they couldn't have cared less.

Everybody danced the tango.

In an age before mass media,

new foreign dances, like the animal dances and the tango,

arrived in Britain via stage shows and exhibition dancers.

These couples toured an international circuit

centred on Paris, London and New York.

'But a new innovation was to create the first ballroom superstars.'

Brit Vernon Castle and his American wife Irene

were the first professional dancers

to exploit this powerful new technology,

spreading their influence further and faster than any of their rivals.

Now let me tell you, I love Vernon and Irene Castle,

and one of the things that amazes me about them

is the impact they had on British dance.

Despite the fact they didn't live here

and only visited this country a handful of times.

And one of the reasons we Brits fell in love with the Castles

is down to this - the big screen.

'This was the dawn of the age of cinema

'and the Castles captured that moment in 1915

'with a silent film called Whirl of Life.

'It was not only a very early feature film,

'it was also, in effect, the first instructional dance film.'

Well, Allison, of course we all think of Fred and Ginger,

but of course there was a couple way before that,

that in their time were just as famous.

Absolutely. They were in fact so significant

to the history of dance and so famous that Fred and Ginger,

in their heyday, made a film about them.

-They were so huge in Britain...

-Mm-hmm.

..and yet they virtually never came here.

And I suppose a lot of that's down to the films they made.

Exactly. They were some of the first dancers to be filmed,

so they do really pave the way for the cinematic dancers

that we think of more readily, like Fred and Ginger.

You know, I can only speak personally,

but the reason I got so interested in dancing, was films.

You know, and I used to walk in

and I'd waltz out.

And I guess that's partly what happened with the Castles.

Astaire said that they were his heroes.

He did, and I think they really were the first dancing screen icons.

What did they bring to the world of dance

that hadn't been seen before?

Well, there had been a really dramatic transformation to dance

that had been associated with the rise to popularity

of ragtime music.

And with ragtime music came a series of dances

and they were not like dances that anyone had ever seen before.

There was also a racial element to this,

since many of them originated in African-American culture

that made the white dancing public a little uncomfortable.

So what the Castles were able to do was to take those dances

and transform them into something that was a little bit smoother,

a little less wild and something that went, er,

a little bit more mainstream.

RAGTIME MUSIC

They were the type of couple that people watched

and wanted to emulate.

Exactly. They really embodied the early days of Hollywood glamour.

Irene in particular really became a fashion icon.

She bobbed her hair before that was the fashion,

she wore a shorter skirt, she wore a looser corset.

The Castles were wonderful self-publicists.

They were, they really were a brand. Everything that they did,

you know, there were a lot of products that bore their name -

Castle House, Castle cigars, Castles by the Sea,

their name was on everything that they did.

They were in some ways kind of like the Posh and Becks of their day.

Since Queen Victoria's death,

Britain had been increasingly open to influences from abroad,

but while some people embraced foreign dances like the tango

and the foxtrot, a group of middle-class philanthropists

were leading a different movement.

They thought traditional English dancing was a wholesome

and moral alternative - dancing that could do you good.

100 years ago, this was one of the most impoverished parts of London.

There was a charity worker called Mary Neal.

She took over the running of an evening club for sewing girls

who weren't very well off.

Now, Mary Neal had been inspired by the suffragettes.

She wanted to help these girls improve their lot

and she thought that the best way to do this was

by teaching them how to Morris dance.

MORRIS DANCING MUSIC

Industrialisation had seen people flock to the cities

from the countryside, leaving rural traditions like music and dancing

under threat of extinction.

It was Mary Neal and her girls' group, called the Esperance Club,

who preserved that most English of traditions, Morris dancing.

Now... Theresa, when I think of Morris dancers,

I think of beer and I think of bearded men,

but there's a whole female side of it too, isn't there?

Yes, and we can trace that right back to the early 20th century,

when in the revival, the very first dancers were actually

working-class girls from the East End of London.

Led by this character, Mary Neal.

How did Mary Neal get started with the folk dancing?

Well, a key person in this, of course, was Cecil Sharp.

He's often thought of as

the architect of the English folk song and dance revival,

but of course, without Neal, it would never have happened.

Up until the point of meeting Mary Neal,

he was known for his folk song collections.

Neal was interested not only in the songs, but also in the dances.

And then that prompted both of them to go to search for dancers

and to adopt actually different ways of collecting the material,

so that for Sharp, he believed, you know, that what he was recording

was something which had been passed on from the mists of time

and he needed to fix it and for it to be accurate.

For Mary Neal, she would get the dancers,

the male dancers from the countryside to come to London

to teach her girls.

Once Mary Neal had got her club of girls dancing,

how did the news spread?

She made sure that her girls were performing at places like

the Queen's Hall, and it was covered by all the top papers

and she would send her girls out to teach...

-Oh!

-..all up and down the country.

And in fact, within, you know, within a very few years

they'd covered every county, pretty well, and, er,

there are some wonderful pictures in here of the Esperance girls.

The girls! Look, look,

they're floating in the air.

They must be leaping up there.

So the Esperance girls take to the road, if you like?

Yes, absolutely.

One of Mary Neal's most successful pupils was

a young woman called Florrie Warren.

She was the best dancer of the group

and she had a life that she would

never have anticipated when she was born in the East End of London,

because she travelled, indeed, to America, danced at the Carnegie Hall

and ended up marrying an American.

So if Mary Neal set out to improve the lot of East End girls

like Florrie Warren, wow! She really succeeded there, didn't she?

She certainly did.

It seems to me that Mary Neal was interested in the sort of lost world

of Merrie England and fields and villages and all that sort of thing.

It's certainly the case, and she wasn't alone.

It touched a nerve, the idea that English dancing was wholesome

and good for you and rooted in the countryside and in tradition.

This was one of the arguments

against the introduction of dances like the one-step and the tango

that really, they are foreign,

that, er, really people should be dancing English folk dancing

because it's actually in their genetic make-up,

we would say today.

There is something a bit goody-goody about "A-Nutting We Will Go".

Yes! I mean, to us now, looking back on it,

it does seem rather twee in a way,

but at that time, this was material

that most urban people and middle-class people

had had no contact with.

Mary Neal set in motion a folk revival that would eventually

see English country dancing taught in many British schools,

including my own.

I think Mary Neal would be rather pleased to know that

there still are female Morris dancers,

but I'm not sure she'd approve of this.

We'll be starting on our right foot.

We'll be dancing...

right, left, right, hop.

Left, right, left, hop.

Right, left, right, hop.

BELLS JINGLE

-Give it a little flick.

-You have to jingle your legs,

-you can't just kick them, you have to jingle them.

-Yes.

-Is that too much jingling?

-It might be a little bit too much.

LAUGHTER

-I can tell you're excited.

-I am!

BOTH: One, two, three. One, two, three.

Hold it there.

-Shall we do the dance from the beginning?

-Yeah.

OK, this time, and clash,

right, left, right...

Right foot, left foot,

-feet together, oh!

-Oh!

Double time, step it!

MUSIC GETS FASTER

Haul up!

Whoo!

APPLAUSE

I'm feeling the joy of dancing, as expressed by Mary Neal!

And it's really great to be dancing here on this spot

where she and her Esperance Club girls danced 100 years ago.

The joy of dancing would be the last thing on people's minds

as Britain became engulfed by the First World War.

On the dance floor, things would never be the same again.

The Great War had a profound effect on Britain -

on the lives of the men at the front,

and also the women at home, who took on traditionally masculine roles.

It also changed the way that men and women danced together.

This was a really pivotal moment

in the whole history of dancing in Britain.

After the horror and the austerity of wartime,

people wanted to dance like there was no tomorrow.

QUICKSTEP JAZZ MUSIC

Ragtime had evolved into jazz

and everyone wanted to dance to the very latest tunes. Rich or poor,

soon there would be a glamorous place to dance for every pocket.

1919 saw the first of a new type of venue built solely

for the purpose of dancing - the Hammersmith Palais.

Admission was cheap. On opening night, 7,000 queued to get in.

Soon, 11,000 more palais would open across the country

and would be crammed with people

trying out each new dance as it came along -

the quickstep, the foxtrot, the modern waltz!

The dancing profession, the teachers and demonstration dancers,

no longer held sway over what was in or out of fashion

on the dance floor.

The dancing public quite literally voted with their feet.

This was the greatest dance boom Britain had ever known

and it was dance finally fully democratised.

The palais were perfect for ordinary people

who just wanted to dance.

They went in their droves, they danced for hours and they drank tea.

There were people with a bit more money in their pockets, though,

who had a taste for something stronger.

And there were those savvy enough to seize the opportunity to cash in.

One of those was the legendary Queen of Soho, Kate Meyrick,

known to her regulars as Ma Meyrick.

She rode the wave

'of a desire for a nightlife

'that extended beyond the sober confines of the Palais.'

-Do you fancy a drink?

-Oh, yes.

Two cocktails, but what we'd like, something from the '20s.

-I think so.

-Yes.

What about a Hanky Panky, sir?

-A Hanky Panky.

-Couldn't be better.

-Us two, we're always up for a bit of hanky panky.

-Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

Thank you.

So tell me a little bit about Ma Meyrick.

Well, she was very notorious.

She was London's most fashionable nightclub owner in the 1920s.

People crowded to go there.

There was only one problem - they were illegal.

Blimey, yeah?

Absolutely. They were illegal

because she served alcohol after the official hours.

So these were quite dangerous places to go,

so there must have been a bit of a buzz going in?

Oh, yes, they were very edgy.

I mean, the 43 was really a shady club.

That was part of its allure.

So was it just drinking or was there music and dancing going on?

Well, drinking was important.

Also, erm, at the 43, gambling, card games upstairs

and dancing, of course, dancing.

She had very good musicians and she had very pretty dance hostesses.

But it had a dark side to it,

especially for Kate Meyrick, who was accused by the press

and hounded by a lot of people for running a decadent clip joint.

They said her dance hostesses were all hookers.

They said she ran drugs. She went to prison five times.

There were other people running clubs like this. They were all men.

-Hmm.

-They didn't get sent to prison.

What type of person would it have been that frequented these clubs?

Debutantes or gangsters,

-war profiteers.

-Yeah.

The Prince of Wales, erm, half of the House of Lords,

but at Ma Meyrick's, you had to be wealthy enough to pay ten shillings

to get in, and if she didn't like the look of you,

she would charge a pound. And this is in an era where,

you know, the average wage was only £3, maybe £5.

So she was a proper businesswoman.

Money was very important to Kate, absolutely.

Legend has it that she would have the takings for every night

in a big black handbag, and she was never parted from it, you know,

and it was sort of under her chair,

and wherever she was, she had this black bag stuffed with money.

She was a naturally gifted businesswoman.

Kate Meyrick said that

anyone who opened a club with a halfway decent dance floor

could make a living in the 1920s

-because everybody wanted to dance.

-Yeah.

This is what it was all about.

Dancing was all the rage and there was plenty of money to be made.

Two more of those gorgeous Hanky-Pankies.

Women had done masculine jobs during the war, and now they could vote.

One dance perfectly captured this new spirit of female independence.

THEY SHRIEK

When the Charleston arrived from America in 1925,

it took the dance floor by storm.

CHARLESTON MUSIC

It allowed women to break free from a man's embrace

and dance on her own.

The Charleston became a full-blown dance craze,

synonymous with the definitive 1920s dancing girl, the flapper.

It was such a unique moment for British dance

and I'm still trying to get into a flapper state of mind.

Well, I'm about to learn the Charleston.

Now, I do know a bit of Charleston,

but of course, it's the ballroom version.

I bet Lucy wants to do the 1920 raucous flapper version,

and I'll be honest, I'm not looking forward to it.

I've got a bad knee.

HE WINCES

-Ah, hello.

-Ah-ha, here we are.

I'm stripped and I'm ready for action.

Well, you're going to need to strip

because this is going to be very energetic, isn't it? Charleston,

all the dance manuals tell us about the dangers of the knees,

about how dangerous it's going to be moving in the knees,

so turning in, so do a bit of a warm-up getting those...

I've got bad knees already.

-Right.

-Well, this one.

This knee is particularly nasty.

This knee is in fine fettle.

I will do anything you want with my right leg.

So let's put you two together

and let's just see, just nice and slowly,

let's just step one leg forward and back.

Oh, excuse me!

-That was a great start.

-You went, we both went forward.

-Let's use the leg closest to the front.

-Yes, so we go...

# Bam, ba-da, ba, ba

# Ba-ba ba-ba-ba, hey! #

-Len, if you want to do a little...

-# Lucy, Lennie... #

-Yes, good.

# Lennie and then Lucy...

# Oh, yes, we're doing the Charleston! La, la... #

-And what about a few jumps, a few little jumps?

-Jump, jump?

-A little shunt one way.

-Oh, you go that way.

-Now...

-Now the do-si-do?

Do-si-do, do-si-do back round you go...

LUCY LAUGHS

The more of a flapper you can be, Lucy.

Is he supposed to do it like a fairy?

-Well...

-Yeah, it's all like that.

They're kind of all enjoying it.

What do you want me to do, stroll round like Colonel Bogey?

He's been doing that.

# Ba-dum, bam, bam da-da, bam, bam, diddily-do-dee-do. #

# Do-do... #

I can do that, you see.

# Da-da-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee... #

Yeah, you look a bit...

-It looks a little too...

-A little kangaroo.

-I think it just needs to be little ones.

-Light and dainty.

Very tiny little ones.

-That's better. That's it.

-On your balls.

-That's it.

On your own balls!

Right, let's get this music on.

And one, two...

CHARLESTON MUSIC PLAYS

One, two, three, step,

and shunt, shunt.

And shunt, and shunt.

-Run round.

-Do-si-do.

That's it, all the way around.

And knees, join,

and one, two, three, four.

And jump, two, three, four,

step, kick,

and step, kick and...

# And then it's Lucy! #

Go!

Don't show him all the tricks.

OK!

And over to Len.

Right, we'll have to work on this.

HE LAUGHS

And back.

And join together.

Charleston,

and Charleston.

And turn all the way round together as a couple

and finish with a knee up.

Put your arm across there,

can't she jump? Jump, jump up.

-Yeah!

-Fantastic, how's the knees?

Well, as long as it's only that, and we get it right.

-That's perfect.

-Better than the knee up.

Better than the knee, we'll see it.

Go home bouncing. Off you go.

-Lucy, come on.

-Let's bounce out of here.

-Off you go bouncing.

-# Dee-dee-dee-dee...

-Dee-dee...

# We're going to do the Charleston. Lucy, Lennie... #

THEY HUM TOGETHER

If dancing has always been basically about romance,

the Charleston-dancing flappers

were flying in the face of that convention.

The flapper bobbed her hair, she wore trousers, she smoked,

she drank, she danced the Charleston with reckless abandon.

To some people, this represented

long-awaited independence and freedom.

For others, she represented womanhood gone dreadfully wrong.

The Charleston was not a dance for romance,

for boy-meet-girl intimacy,

it was a dance of careless individual self-expression

and it had got dangerously out of hand.

In the early 1920s,

readers of the Daily Express wrote a series of letters

debating the state of relations between the sexes

in the light of the post-war dancing frenzy.

It was sparked by a letter from a soldier who

had endured his time in the trenches by dreaming of the girls back home.

"Out in France, or under the tropical sun,

"how often the temporary soldier saw in his cigarette smoke

"the face of a dear, affectionate, typical, home-loving English girl.

"Instead of the girls of our fondest imagination, we find them

"madly given over to dancing."

"Sir, referring to an article in the Daily Express

"headed Girls Who Shatter Men's Ideals,

"I would just like to say that we are not all fogeys and old-fashioned now,

"nor do we wish to look on the serious side of life just yet.

"I think it is up to the girl

"to remain as young and fascinating as she can,

"even up to the age of 30."

"The majority of men much preferred a girl of modest disposition,

"that is, one who does not smoke, flirt or jazz."

"The spirit of feminine independence rules in the ballroom.

"We no longer, for instance, wait to be taken to a dance.

"We pay for our own ticket at the door, our own refreshments."

"No seriously-thinking man would ever look for his dream girl

"in a jazz hall or nightclub."

I might.

Lucy! Chop chop, a little bit quicker, please. Time for lunch.

But despite its critics,

millions were going out dancing every week.

The dance hall business was booming.

And one remarkable innovation

would fully exploit the potential of this growing market.

The way we listened to music was changing, and changing fast.

In 1922, the BBC lined up its first ever radio broadcast.

If you could tune in your radio, which was no easy task,

then you could hear dance band jazz live from the Savoy Ballroom.

And then there was this.

Oh-ho, yes!

This put you in charge of what you listened to,

when and even where.

Before 1918, the popular music industry were limited to

sales of sheet music, but the gramophone changed all that.

Oh, yes.

This simple machine helped create a new mass audience for music

and for the dances that went with them.

You could listen to the very latest music in your own front room,

or host your own gramophone dances.

And this, the portable, meant

you could even take your music out with you,

in the boot of your brand-new motor.

Ho-ho, what a life!

GENTLE SWING MUSIC PLAYS

Oh, yes!

Ho, ho, what a life.

In just a few short years, record sales rocketed.

Music and dance were now not just part of British culture,

but an integral part of the economy too.

And it was the public spending power that dictated

what happened on the dance floor.

The commercialisation of dancing

and the relentless tide of new dances from America

was pushing the professionals to the sidelines,

but they were determined to regain some control.

So, have you ever been in here, the Tower Ballroom?

I have not, I have not, my first time.

Oh! Well, you're in for a treat.

The Tower Ballroom in Blackpool has been at the heart of the British

ballroom dancing establishment for more than a hundred years.

I know Blackpool extremely well

and I want to show Lucy that it's still the place to come

to see ballroom dancing done properly.

-Thank you very much, sir.

-Thank you.

There it is!

Oh!

It's the most fan... I think it's fantastic.

-Wow!

-Oh, it's a wonderful place.

-Look at the ceiling.

Incredible.

Great, eh?

And then when you think of how many people have danced here over

all those years.

It's... It's just great.

Ohh! It's lovely.

-Shall we?

-Let's!

Hoh, hoh!

On your right. Oh, lovely.

Watch him. Don't start a fight.

Eh?

-Oh!

-Oh, we could dance like this for ever.

I like it so much.

-Excuse me.

-What?

Oh! I've been taken, sorry.

Liberty.

Sorry, what's your name?

Now if floors could talk, this one could tell a tale or two.

In the early 1920s, this place would have seen all the latest

dances come and go.

With the dancing public deciding what was in or out of fashion

on the dance floor, dance professionals organised a series

of conferences to discuss ways to get things back under control.

It was agreed there was a need to get rid of the so-called

freak steps from the new dances, and to agree on a standardised version

of the foxtrot, the one-step, modern waltz and the tango.

These standard four were the dances that would dominate British

dance floors for decades to come.

Leading the drive for standardisation was

Victor Silvester, competition dancer, musician

and founding member of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing.

Victor Silvester's big idea was to provide strict tempo

music for each dance.

So wherever you danced it, whoever was playing,

the tempo of the music would always be exactly the same.

Silvester started an orchestra that played strict tempo

and he sold a staggering 75 million records.

I think the musicians' standardisation took some of the fun

and freedom out of the playing of the music, but as a dancer,

strict tempo was a real asset.

It opened the way to competition dancing which has been my world

for 40 years - and its heart has always been here,

in Blackpool.

Well, now they've all gone, I've got the chance to do something

I've been wanting to do all afternoon, which is

to get my hands on the mighty Wurlitzer.

This famous Wurlitzer organ was played for 40 years

by the legendary Reginald Dixon, known as Mr Blackpool,

he was the king of strict tempo.

Hello, John.

-Hello.

-What an amazing instrument

you've got here - it looks awfully sophisticated.

Yeah, it's world famous.

How did Reginald Dixon get his job then in the 1930s?

Well, I believe that he said he could play a quickstep for dancing

in strict tempo, plus strict tempo is very important to the

dancers because they're the first to know

if we go slower or faster and er, he did that, he did it perfect.

So how do you keep the time, then?

We have a metronome and you can set it to the correct speed for the dance.

So did Reginald Dixon have one of those or was he like a human metronome?

I wouldn't think so, at that time he would just guess

the speed of a quickstep maybe, but, obviously it worked.

So can I have a demonstration of the quickstep at 200 beats a minute -

-that sounds pretty fast.

-Of course, yeah, here we go.

HE PLAYS: Bring Me Sunshine

APPLAUSE

That was brilliant.

Now, can you teach me how to do that?

-Oh, I'm sure we can...

-OK.

-..have a go.

So it goes...

C.

So we need a B, B flat, B flat.

-B flat?

-B flat, that's the one.

We're going now, we're going now...

and back to C.

Then we're going back to the B flat.

B flat.

Hello.

-ALL: Hi.

-Hi, Lucy.

'Now I've found my inner metronome, I'm raring to go for my final

'Charleston rehearsal, the last one before Len and I have to

'perform it in front of a crowd at an iconic 1920s nightclub.

'And Darren has come up with some moves for my breakaway solo.'

-And what we'd like to teach you...

-Yeah?

We'd like to teach you the Josephine Baker Scarecrow.

The Josephine Baker Scarecrow?

That's what I'd like to teach you,

do you think you could be a scarecrow?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Star of the 1920s stage and screen,

Josephine Baker was famous for her wild, exaggerated dancing.

I think I'd be rather good at that.

It's...you hang yourself up like a scarecrow and as you...

I knew she'd be good at this, it's great.

And then as you do that you're also bending up and down.

And now I'm just going to show how...

-Grrh.

-Exactly.

That's quite terrifying.

It is a bit terrifying, isn't it, but...

So, we have...

one and two and three and then the arms go right round

and then one more. One and...

and then do half a scarecrow one way and half a scarecrow the other way.

Arms are going one way...that's it.

That's it.

And then on the last one go all the way round to present Len who is next.

OK.

-Shall we give it a go?

-Yeah, I think I can do that.

-So...

Len's solo!

Over to Lucy Worsley.

Whoo!

Here they come.

Um, this is clearly utter madness.

They go so fast, I'm never going to be able to keep up with that,

I can...I can see it all falling to pieces, quite frankly.

Standardisation had been devised by professionals

to restore order to the dance floor. By the late 1930s, it had taken

the edge off the public's enthusiasm for dancing.

We know Mecca for bingo,

but in the '30s, the company was a big dance hall chain.

Three, two, 32.

At its height, it was so successful,

that even the Royal Opera House was turned into a Mecca dance hall.

Allison, do you think it's true that as

ballroom dancing became standardised,

it also became a little bit boring?

Boring and overly complicated.

There was a feeling by the late '30s that for those who erm,

were not willing or able to invest in serious instruction, that it

had become a little bit out of reach.

With numbers dwindling, Mecca were at the forefront of inventing

new ways to get people back through the dance hall door.

So, who has creative control of dancing in the 1930s, would you say?

I think by this point it's, it's a combination of

the dancing teachers and the professionals

and a number of businessmen who were definitely having a decisive

impact on what people were dancing and how they were dancing it.

By the '30s you have this push towards, erm,

corporatisation or franchising, they had a slogan than went

something like, Dancing The Mecca Way.

So that, whether you were in Edinburgh or Birmingham or

Glasgow, you could know to expect walking into that hall.

And so, in fact, Mecca was really at the forefront of trying to

develop new dances that anybody could do, that anybody would

feel comfortable with, erm, and that was when they started

a series of novelty dances or party dances, as they're called, wherein

effectively, people just walk around in a circle doing silly things.

Erm, the most famous of which is probably the Lambeth Walk.

# Once you get down Lambeth way

# Any evening, any day

# You'll find us all

# Doing the Lambeth walk... #

What's the story of the Lambeth Walk then, where does that come from?

People think it's a sort of Cockney legend from days of yore, don't they?

It actually took on a bit of a life of its own.

Mecca was very much interested in suggesting that this had

a longer history, but the actual dance that was being

performed then was entirely a product of 1938.

It was just fun, it enabled people to er,

to dance even if they didn't really know how to dance correctly.

It's funny to think that they're coming up with new dances,

not in ballrooms, but in boardrooms.

Absolutely, people were very

excited about the fact that there was this very British dance,

and there was a lot of discussion that it was serving as a bulwark

-against Americanisation.

-Ah!

Because so much of what was coming into Britain in that period

was in fact American music and dances, and finally

they had something that was home-grown, that was a huge success.

# Any evening, any day

-# You'll find us all doing the Lambeth walk...

-#

And then even as the war broke out, there was

this important image of the er, vital dancing nation.

They thought that this was a really good morale booster.

There was this sense that if we keep dancing,

this distinguishes us from the Germans,

this is a sign of our fortitude and a sign of our national spirit.

It really was being danced all over the place and that was

part of the fervour, erm, people loved reading stories about unique

places that had been danced, or that the King and Queen had danced it.

Do you think it's possible, Allison, that

the Lambeth Walk in 1938 was the most danced dance of history?

I think for Britain that is very well likely the case,

it really was a very distinct moment in the history

of dance that we may never see again.

It's all been downhill from there, hasn't it?

To some degree, yes.

By the time that World War II brought Britain to its knees

once again, dancing had been through the two most rapid

and revolutionary decades of change in its history.

Most significantly in these inter-war years, dancing had been

thoroughly democratised and cannily commercialised.

That era had a truly glorious moment

in the short-lived dance craze of the Charleston.

And that's where our journey through 300 years of British dancing will end -

with one final performance at the famous Cafe de Paris in London.

Lucy, are you nervous?

I am...terrified, I've got the butterflies.

No!

I have, it's my favourite dance, this one

and I really want to do it well and it's really, really difficult.

I think if we just go out there and give it plenty of razzmatazz

and plenty of gusto,

I think we'll be fine, yes.

-I'll take your word for it.

-But I must say, you look very flapperish.

-Thank you.

-You do indeed.

You look very dapper...ish.

Let me have a look at your flapper face.

Oooooh! Yes, thank you.

MUSIC: The Charleston

Like every dance craze, before and since, along came

the Charleston, which shook up the status quo, it became the

height of fashion and then it died away when the next craze came along.

The dances may have changed, but the appeal hasn't.

We've always looked for the same essential ingredients -

relaxation, release,

and most importantly... romance.

Whether it's the minuet, the polka, the morris or the waltz,

the way we've danced hasn't just held up

a mirror to the world, it's changed it too.

Hey! Hey!

Hey!

-Ha-hey!

-Whoo!

Wo-ho-ho!

Got her!