Episode 4 Happy Birthday BBC Two

-Good evening.

-This is BBC Two.

-Blast off!

I've got a story to tell you.

What happened?

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo doo-doo-doo... #

-Gissa job.

-My darling John.

I miss it but I know I shouldn't do this!

Hello and welcome to this week's Whistle Test.

BBC Two hit the air on April 20th 1964.

This anniversary series tells the stories of some of the programmes that shaped it.

When I was a researcher,

I'd worked with Clarissa,

and I'd always wanted

to do something else with her

because I thought she was fantastic.

But I really struggled to find the right format for her.

Pat had rung me up and said,

"Do you know Jennifer Paterson? Because I've had a vision." And...

I said, "Well, I've met her once at a lunch party in Tuscany,"

and she said, "Well, come to London, because I've had an idea."

# Those two fat ladies are itching

# To get into your kitchen! Yeah! #

I went to Clarissa first and said,

"Jennifer's come up with this interesting title for the show.

"I don't know what you think of it. And her reaction, of course, was,

"Well, if Jennifer thinks it's all right, I think it's fine. Why would I have a problem with it?"

And Jennifer had the same reaction, really.

"If Clarissa doesn't mind, I don't. Of course we're fat!"

This dish was made with an old cock.

Not an old hen, an old cock, because they have the flavour.

Lot of good in an old cock, isn't there?

Jennifer and Clarissa, I would say, tolerated each other.

I think they had a huge professional respect for each other

but they didn't necessarily see eye to eye.

And don't suggest a supermarket.

I know you won't go into an ordinary little shop, will you?

When you are working with strong characters, I mean,

there's a certain amount of, um... diplomacy that goes on.

Take out your aggression... Look at that, isn't that a lovely thing?

And I often feel like writing to Kofi Annan and saying,

"When you retire, if you need somebody to do the job,

"I've probably got the qualifications."

-Here's to your beautiful eyes.

-And yours, dear. Chin-chin.

Why don't we skip dessert and get out of here?

Why? What have you got in mind?

Nothing.

It's just that you're already quite fat, innit?

LAUGHTER

Check, please.

Goodness Gracious Me actually originated as a television idea,

and what we did is, we helped pay for a radio pilot

and then a radio series

to begin to develop these scripts and that ensemble.

We have a new man starting with us today,

a new man joining the team.

His name is, um...

..Jo...Ju...

Oh. It's Jonathan.

Jo-noh-tan!

When it first went out on BBC Two,

there were people who kind of rang in to the BBC every single week

complaining that the show was racist towards white people.

Jonathan.

Jonatawala!

Jamuen-kashmir!

I don't know, you English with your completely different...

And I just thought, how great

that we had six regular viewers who watched every episode.

Victim's wife's over there.

SHE SOBS

OK, thanks. Better go talk to her.

This is the part of the job I really hate.

Goodness Gracious Me came about because the community at large

was just getting more confident. We just did the telly bit.

You know, there was East Is East at the pictures

and there was loads of music groups and loads of businesspeople

and I think they all contributed equally to the British Asian scene as we did.

We just did it in a way that was more public.

HE CHANTS

Bollocks!

The brutal facts are,

the handful of valuable pictures are worth about 400,000

so we'll take the valuable pictures

and all the rest will have to be disposed of.

They will have to be destroyed.

Me and Simon Curtis, the producer,

went out to Stephen Poliakoff

and the idea that Simon presented to me was,

"Let's book Stephen Poliakoff to make a film.

"He should come back to the BBC and make a film."

Michael Jackson said to me,

"Try to make something that people will remember."

And so I came up with the idea of making things of irregular length,

incredibly slow, trying to slow down television.

It was based on an idea which actually was a semi-true story

of a photo collection that belonged to a British film studio

that suddenly changed ownership and they were going to burn the photos.

Very extreme, sounds like something out of Nazi Germany,

but actually, it was a true story from the '90s.

-Here it is, Emporia.

-Jesus, there it is.

You're there somewhere, saying,

"Hey, Dad, let's go close the local museum, it's not worth shit."

Well, thanks for finding that.

At that time, the late '90s, when I conceived the show,

most television, and certainly most television dramas,

were in very, very short scenes.

They had lots and lots of cuts in between different narrative stories,

tiny, tiny little scenes, and I thought, "Let's do huge scenes!

"And use photographs." Really perverse.

These now are the pictures I was able to put together

because I got the connection.

I got the connection that Oswald made.

We had this story, we knew where it went,

but we hadn't made the connection with Ireland, where Hettie came from.

We never traced it back until Oswald started delving into your background.

WOMAN'S LAUGHTER

So, you find my grandmother playing in an orchestra.

Your grandmother's going to surprise you.

I really believe she is.

In the spring of 1998, controller Mark Thompson took

what would prove to be a fateful decision.

To me, the lesson of One Man And His Dog is

that the fact that people aren't watching a programme

doesn't mean they don't want it to be there.

HIGH-PITCHED WHISTLE

I had no idea when we cancelled it

that actually what we were doing for many people,

many people who hadn't watched it for years,

was cancelling a bit of the countryside.

And the news didn't come out for 18 months, two years,

I mean, long after I'd left BBC Two, but it was a minor earthquake.

And the person who felt the tremors

was the incoming controller, Jane Root.

I had absolutely no idea

of the campaign that would be run around it.

HE WHISTLES

There was front pages of tabloid newspapers,

people talking about a march of shepherds and their dogs

on Television Centre, which never happened, I'm pleased to say.

It was a baptism of fire.

It's one of those things that... I wouldn't wish it on my successor

but you have to know that sooner or later,

a One Man And His Dog moment

happens to every channel controller of BBC Two.

Another moment of drama in every trial.

That'll do.

People now think, and I think we do as well, of our programme as quite extreme

and yet, at the beginning, we tried to make it real, didn't we?

We had a big thing in our head about it being very documentary-like,

Mike Leigh, almost, and the people in the Restart room being very real.

Some of it, some of it.

Not the bit, like breast-feeding a pig and all that.

That wasn't like a documentary, was it?

Hokey-cokey, pig in a pokey!

Ahem!

CLOCK STRIKES

Hello, gents. Oh, it's half past nine.

Time for men, men with jobs to go to work.

When we first...when we first started our first ever live show,

-you were going to be Pauline, weren't you?

-Yeah.

-Why didn't I do it?

-And I was going to be Papa Lazarou.

-You didn't want to do it, did you?

-No, I said, "I'm not confident."

So I ended up doing Pauline

and then he took on the Papa Lazarou character

-and you know, now it's the way it should be.

-Yeah, yeah.

You can shout out as many jobs as you like, Ross.

You're never going to bloody get one, you worthless dole scum.

-Do a bit of Pauline.

-I can't do her now.

-"Hello, Dave!"

-"Hello, Dave!"

Hello, Dave!

I can do, anyone can do Papa Lazarou.

-That could have been anyone.

-Don't say that!

-But you know, there's only one Pauline.

-Yeah, that's true.

Can I get your age, please, Pauline?

-I think that's a lady's prerogative...

-I need to know how old you are for the records.

-Let's say I'm as old as me gums and a little bit...

-How old are you?

48!

There were some characters who had a definite life span -

Mr Chinnery, the vet who kills animals.

Hello.

There were only so many animals that you could kill, basically.

What's that?

It's compressed air.

Basically, a short, concentrated blast

should perk him up a bit.

We kind of ran out at the end of the first series,

then before the second series

had to watch a load of All Creatures Great And Small for inspiration!

VALVE WHINES

And a little bit more. We can afford to be quite bold.

Well, he's here. Do you want a word?

CRACKLING

How's she doing?

Naked is what I call my way of cooking.

What I cook in the restaurant isn't what I cook at home.

I think we commissioned The Naked Chef with Jamie Oliver,

I think in less than 24 hours of seeing the tape.

Pat had found this boy in the kitchens of the River Cafe

and just thought he was a natural star.

Lovely jubbly.

I saw this guy in the background and

I honestly thought he must have been about 13 or 14,

he looked so incredibly young,

and incredibly proficient making this wonderful spinach dish.

We met and I think he thought it was a joke to start with.

He thought one of his friends was winding him up.

No way! It's not me, it's the food.

The Naked Chef pretty much, from the first moment, was a hit for us.

There's no doubt that you could tell immediately

when you put the camera on Jamie that he certainly had a presence,

a sort of star quality,

but like anybody who's faced with a camera for the first time,

he did find it, I think, rather intimidating

and rather nerve-racking. He, um...he gabbled.

So what I do is, I put all the figs around the plate,

just sort of really rough, yeah.

Beautiful figs, which are in season now.

I brought these from London, got them at the market.

You couldn't get a word in from one beginning...

from the beginning of a recipe to the end, he just talked and talked.

What you want to do is just get your ham and you want to sort of weave it

in amongst the figs and the mozzarella...

Which is why we actually used that technique of asking him questions

and trying to interrupt him, actually.

Ever had any terrible disasters?

Oh, mate, I've had so many disasters you wouldn't believe.

I've lost count, I've had so many bad ones.

It was very practical at the time just to try and find a way

of ordering Jamie's thoughts, I suppose.

I'm going to get the leg of lamb.

I'm going to put it straight onto the bars, right?

And put the empty tin underneath to catch all the goodness

and all the drips and all that kind of Marmitey lovely jubbly staff.

Jamie had this...just big life force

and I think women found that very sexy

and men thought this was the kind of cooking they could actually do.

-All right, all right.

-Hey!

You're too kind, mate.

Jamie had a relationship with Sainsbury's, who he advertised for,

which was very difficult for the BBC to handle.

The BBC has very strict rules about those kinds of things

and we just got to a point where we couldn't see a way around it.

And if I was going to list regrets as a channel controller,

number one would be the day Jamie Oliver left. Terrible, terrible.

Welcome to The Weakest Link.

I've never been a fan of quiz shows.

I mean, mostly because I found them cheesy and patronising.

Colin, are you as interesting as your shirt?

Not much good at geography, are you?

-What's so funny?

-Nothing.

The worst thing a contestant on The Weakest Link can do

is get on the wrong side of the team in the green room

before they are on the podiums.

I mean, sometimes on that first round, someone gets voted off

who's got all the questions right

and you think, "Ha-ha! You didn't behave yourself an hour earlier."

Bye, you lot.

I hope none of you win.

I've been voted the rudest woman on television,

the meanest woman on television,

the most unpopular person on British television,

and isn't that great?

Who wants to be loved?

Goodbye.

Based on the original transcripts,

Conspiracy told the story of the meeting that would set the seal

on the Final Solution.

So, to begin, we have a storage problem in Germany with these Jews

and there have been conversations for almost a year now about this Jew and that Jew

and the complexities of the law

and this problem, as you, I'm sure, know, has tormented us.

It takes fantastic bravery in making a drama

to strip out everything else.

But the brief remains clear.

All of Europe, England, from Lapland to Libya,

from Vladivostok to Belfast, no Jews.

Not one.

There's always a tendency to spend money on big set pieces

and hundreds of extras.

Carbon monoxide, what it does is...

The bodies come out pink.

HE SNIGGERS

-The gas turns them pink.

-It's a nice touch.

No, this is a drama that's going to run in almost real time.

We will not sterilise every Jew and wait for them to die

or sterilise every Jew and then exterminate the race. That's farcical.

It's going to be incredibly historically accurate.

Dead men don't hump, dead women don't get pregnant.

Death is the most reliable form of sterilisation, put it that way. TYPING IN BACKGROUND

It's done as if it's just another, you know,

annual general meeting of...

..you know, of a stationery wares office.

I am pointing out the difficulty

of casting every Jew and non-Jew into the sausage machine,

and if that's the plan, I'm asking that some legal framework be built.

It's like, you know, "I think we're going to need

"another bonding on this paper, it looks very nice but it's blue..."

Let's get it done, and if we skip a few steps so be it.

Skip a few steps!

When you plane down a piece of wood, a few chips go flying.

It's done like that, and that's why it's so chilling.

60,000 Jews every day go up in smoke.

We can achieve that.

Imagine.

One of the things of being controller of BBC Two

is that in the first few years

you're always getting these great presents

that have been bequeathed to you by your former channel controllers.

It seemed to me that there weren't enough programmes

that really told the big stories.

I thought that it was amazing

that no-one had ever done a history of Britain,

and, you know, it sounds incredibly obvious and simple.

It just hadn't been done.

On January 30, 1649,

the English killed their king.

That's why we decided to...

not just to do A History of Britain, but to do it big.

And the person chosen to tell the story was historian Simon Schama.

They saw in me

someone who loved the subject

and who could get almost, you know,

embarrassingly excited about it!

SOLDIERS CHANT

Imagine yourself, then,

on the morning of Saturday, 14th October, 1066.

He is a dramatic writer,

you know, he's somebody who writes to move you.

You stand on the brow of the hill and look down, hundreds of yards away

at the opposition.

He's a man of peaks and troughs, that's how he writes.

He's a man of winding stories that gradually draw you in

and beguile you with somebody's character.

Surely after all the blunders and bloodshed, the botched coups

and the futile slaughters, he would do the right thing,

he would share power.

But Charles was constitutionally incapable

of being a constitutional king.

He had this view of British history

that came from being both British but living in America,

and he had a kind of, a sort of subjective objectivity.

It was on these unforgiving backless oak benches

that the first Jews to be admitted

since the expulsion 360-something years before parked their behinds.

It's Oliver Cromwell we have to thank for that,

for opening a new chapter of Anglo-Jewish history. My history.

This isn't duty viewing. This isn't like doing your A-levels,

where you've got to sit down and do a bit of revision.

We never, ever wanted it to be like that.

DRUMBEATS

I think reconstructions we always treated with a little bit of caution, you know.

Anyone who's had anything to do with them

knows that you go into the world of reconstruction at your peril.

Actually, I said, "OK, you know,

"I'm going to now invent the Python alert."

And anything that looked really like

the Batley Ladies' Guild version of Pearl Harbour, you know,

anything that looked really stupid,

we'd all fall around laughing and say, "We can't possibly do that."

CANNON FIRES

For the men in the Parliament lines,

watching a distant trot turn into a canter and then a charge

and seeing their own muskets have no effect on the suddenly terrifyingly hurtling horsemen,

the moment of truth had arrived.

History is a form of direct personal communication

and often unblushingly subjective, provisional,

you know, history as an argument, not history as authority.

Television is perfect for that

and history needs TV, and you know, I think TV needs history too.

Britain, Britain, Britain.

Land of technological achievement.

We've had running water for over ten years,

an underground tunnel that links us to Peru, and we invented the cat.

Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, the eyes, not around the eyes,

don't look around the eyes. Look into my eyes. You're under.

So tell me a little bit about yourself.

I'm a lady! I'm a lady!

And because I'm a lady, I like to do ladies' things.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!

You like the film and this one's got Michael Bald in it.

-You like Michael Bald.

-Yeah, I know.

I'm the only gay in the village.

No, I'm the gay in this village!

Yeah, catchphrases when people tell you who they are,

that's what we have got.

-Which one do you want to see?

-That one.

Three, two, one. You're back in the room.

Stuart Murphy on BBC Three and I commissioned this together.

We always had this plan that it would show first on BBC Three

and then show on BBC Two.

I'm hard, yet soft. I'm coloured, yet clear.

I'm fruity and sweet. I am jelly. What am I?

And it's a kind of wonderful word of mouth thing.

No, but, yeah, but no, yeah, but no, but, yeah, but no,

cos I'm not even going on the pill

cos Nadine reckons they stop me from getting pregnant.

I make the better woman, David always says, because I'm rounder.

I've not really noticed that myself.

SCREW YOU!

I inherited quite a lot of

quite small, not particularly brilliantly funded programmes

about disability,

and one of the things I wanted to do was just make very big things

right in the middle of the schedule

that were great programmes in their own right.

It's 4:20 in the morning.

I've just got up and Joseph's just been telling me what he's doing.

That sense of really great programmes that everybody can watch.

I was bored, so I drawed a picture of Karate Man there. And then...

And made an awful lot of mess as well.

-You're so defensive.

-Me? Defensive?

-Hey, that's mine!

-Come and get it.

MUFFLED: My chocolate!

SHE SQUEALS

THEY LAUGH

We decided that you could, it was better to spend more money,

and that's what we did. We put more money in

and we tried to get really great people working on them.

'I didn't want to touch her.'

Hiya.

Janet, this is Joe.

Hello, Janet.

'I felt like everyone was looking at me

'and I didn't want anybody to see me touch her.'

'Me own mam.'

What does that make me?

David Beckham and Robbie Williams are in,

but Constable and Wordsworth are not.

That's the news from the nationwide BBC poll to find

the greatest Britons of all time.

I think it is an example of television having great power

because there was so much oral history there.

-David Beckham!

-What about Alfred the Great?

It was a bit nerve-racking.

We did wonder if there would be lots of boy band members on the 100 list,

but in fact, it was an incredibly serious list.

Jeremy Clarkson's film on Brunel was outstanding

and allowed Brunel to nearly win.

All on its own, the Clifton Bridge

would have put him in the history books.

But there was a little bit more than that.

I used to bore people at dinner parties

about this Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

and they used to go, "Yeah, yeah,"

so then the opportunity presented itself

to make a programme about him. "Yes!"

Then there was the Hungerford Bridge...

Chepstow Bridge... Balmoral Bridge...

-Maidenhead Bridge...

-I remember watching it

and thinking, "If I had to vote, I'd vote for him."

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets.

From the beginning, passions ran high.

We shall never surrender.

There was an amazing moment

when Andrew Marr, I have to say, a little bit worse for wear,

went up to Jeremy Clarkson at a BBC One drinks reception,

poked him in the chest and said,

"If you think Brunel's going to beat Darwin, you've another think coming."

-I wasn't hiding this...

-Nobody is voting for Darwin.

-You're wasting your breath.

-Trying to be absolutely sure about it.

If I could just chip in, nobody's voting, it's fine, you're finished.

The final was electric, you know,

because we were live for more than two hours

with Peter Snow doing the results.

So we can now show you, just for the fun of it, a bit of swing.

It was difficult to know who was going to win.

We are now ready with the final result. Peter.

I saw no need to be competitive with Jeremy or with Andrew.

I didn't feel like that. I just felt we'd all done our best

and it was for the people to decide.

Winston Churchill has won.

He is your greatest Briton.

And the Golden Globe goes to...

Launching a new comedy is the single most risky thing

you can possibly do in television.

There's good news and bad news.

The bad news is, Neil will be taking over both branches

and some of you will lose your jobs. Yeah.

Those of you who are kept on

will have to relocate to Swindon if you want to. Yeah.

Almost anything else people can say was quite good or interesting

or well acted, even if they don't like it much.

The good news is, I've been promoted.

So...

every cloud...

If you make a comedy and it doesn't work, it just dies.

-You're still thinking about the bad news, aren't you?

-Yeah.

Great, daring comedy has been on BBC Two

right from the very, very beginning,

when you had The Likely Lads and Pete and Dud,

which were fresh, surprising, a bit edgy, bit shocking.

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo-doo-doo

As with The Likely Lads, all those years ago,

The Office came about as the result of an in-house BBC training film.

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo-doo-doo

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo

# Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo,

# Doo-doodle-oodle doo-doo-doo-doo-doo

# Mahna mahna na-na na na na-na-na-na

# Mahna mahna, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo... #

All right, I'll ask you straight.

Is there anything that could happen between us two while this is going on?

Like what?

What, specifically?

Yeah.

Hand job?

Look, don't answer, think about it.

If "don't know" wasn't there, what would you put?

-What are the options?

-"Not at all", "to some extent", "very much so",

-"don't know".

-Very much so.

-Do you remember what the question was?

-No.

I suppose my proudest moment, I suspect it's seeing Ricky Gervais,

a chubby Englishman, standing on the stage at the Golden Globes.

Two bookends. Excellent.

You need the set. One looks, you know...

LAUGHTER

Obviously I haven't prepared a speech.

I remember when, um... we first got BBC Two.

I was very young

and you had to get an aerial put up for some reason in those days

and the guy came and he was on the roof

and he was screwing this little aerial to the chimney

and my mum was in the garden and she said she was supervising it

but really, she was waiting for every neighbour on our estate to walk past,

so she could go, "Getting BBC Two, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

"What, that? Yeah, just getting BBC Two. BBC Two."

Never watched it. Never watched it.

MUSIC: "Handbags and Gladrags"