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interludes provided by the cabaret star Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, the show was not a success; it failed to receive a recommission, and Bluett rejoined Ray’s a Laugh for the following series in 1956 after her year’s absence. Nation was later to describe it as ‘a rotten show, a terrible show’. He also admitted that it was a huge step to have taken, from writing the occasional short sketch to being jointly responsible for thirteen half-hour shows, and he talked about coming through a real ordeal by fire, getting something out there every week, getting it prepared, ‘whether it was funny or not’.
    Despite the challenges of writing All My Eye , and despite its failure to win the affection of the audience, Nation and Barry hadn’t blotted their copybook entirely with the show’s producer Alastair Scott Johnston, for he was to employ them later in 1955 as contributors to The Frankie Howerd Show. (‘Everybody wrote for Frankie Howerd,’ noted Alan Simpson.) In fact the amenable Johnston was to emerge as one of Nation’s chief supporters at the BBC in the early days, seeing something in the young writer that was worth nurturing. ‘He was supportive of people,’ remembered Beryl Vertue of Johnston. ‘He was very double-barrelled all the way down the line. He always wore a blazer. Very BBC, very nice, not pushy. He was good at his job, but he was not what you would imagine a typical producer to be.’ Ray Galton had similarly fond memories, though shaded with a significant qualification: ‘He was a lovely man, a man you could trust, a man you’d go into the jungle with. But not a man you’d want to produce your programmes.’ Others evidently came to the same conclusion, for although Johnston went on the BBC course to become a television producer, he never did make that leap, as so many of his colleagues did; instead he had to content himself with bringing to the radio its longest-running comedy series, The Navy Lark , which debuted in 1959 and lasted for over eighteen years, helping to establish the reputation of its stars Leslie Phillips and Jon Pertwee.
    The partnership of Nation and Barry was not destined to last long. They were, by all accounts, an oddly assorted team. Ray Galton rememberedthem arriving at ALS ‘all hairy tweeds and walking sticks’, but the image appears to have been determined more by Nation than by Barry. ‘Terry tried to be extremely well dressed,’ recalled Alan Simpson, and the same memory struck Beryl Vertue: ‘He was always well dressed, liked nice things.’ A slightly more sardonic take was offered by Ray Galton: ‘He came down here with a cane. He was looking like an upper-class guy with a stately home somewhere, and he was acting a part of being amongst the peasants. He did try to look like a country gentleman. We all used to take the piss out of him.’ Though, as Simpson pointed out: ‘He must have got away with it with people who didn’t know him.’ Dick Barry, on the other hand, was remembered primarily for being self-effacing, in stark contrast to his more extrovert colleague. ‘He was a nice bloke, you knew straight away he was a nice guy,’ commented Galton, while Vertue added: ‘He was a very quiet person in the place, very quietly spoken.’ Simpson concluded: ‘Dick was much more diffident. He was very quiet. They were as different as chalk and cheese, apart from their accent.’
    Perhaps the differences proved too much, or perhaps it was the need to break from their background and reinvent themselves, but by the end of 1955 the partnership had split. Barry teamed up instead with Johnny Speight, and made immediate progress. Over the next eighteen months or so, they wrote BBC television shows for both Frankie Howerd and Norman Evans, as well as providing the independent channel with That’s Life, Says Max Wall and The Dickie Valentine Show , in which Britain’s first true pop star was joined somewhat incongruously by Peter Sellers. Their biggest hit was