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Authors: Alwyn Turner
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the ATV variety show Get Happy , which made a household name of the comedian Arthur Haynes, though when he got his own long-running series, The Arthur Haynes Show , it was written by Speight alone, fast emerging as the most plausible rival in ALS to the four founding fathers. Soon afterwards, Barry was to emigrate to Australia, where he continued to find work writing for television.
Meanwhile Nation, rather than striking out on his own, had formed a new partnership. (‘None of them were fully fledged writers, so they gravitated towards each other,’ noted Beryl Vertue.) This time it was with two of the newer arrivals at ALS: John Junkin and Dave Freeman. Of the trio, Freeman was significantly the senior. Born in London in 1922, he worked as an electrician before enlisting in the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm on the outbreak of war. On being demobbed, he had joined the Metropolitan Police, spending some time in the Special Branch, before becoming a security officer at the American Officers’ Club in Regent’s Park. Throughout this period, he had harboured ambitions of writing, submitting stories to Lilliput magazine as early as 1941, while still serving in the Pacific. But it was at the Officers’ Club that he found his true calling, involving himself in the booking of entertainment acts and striking up friendships with new comedians, most significantly with Benny Hill. By 1953 he was selling gags to Frank Muir, who provided him with the encouragement to continue, and in September 1955, having contributed material to Hill’s television series and to the Terry Scott and Bill Maynard vehicle Great Scott – It’s Maynard , he abandoned his existing career path and joined ALS as a full-time writer. ‘He was quite gentle,’ recalled Ray Galton, ‘a tall fellow, big bloke.’
So too was Junkin, who like Nation and Freeman was well over six foot tall. Born in 1930, the son of a London policeman, Junkin had spent three years as a teacher in an East End primary school, though his career in education ended with an incident when he saw a boy in the back row chewing gum. Calling the child to the front, he issued the familiar instruction, ‘In the bin!’, and was horrified at the extent of his own power when the boy misunderstood and climbed into the bin, looking humiliated, resentful and hurt. Concluding that he ‘was not cut out for the teaching profession’, Junkin took up dead-end jobs to allow him time to try writing. Following the same path claimed by Nation, he wrote a script for The Goon Show and submitted it to Spike Milligan. Milligan’s response was sufficiently favourable – ‘I think you can write and I think you should’ – that Junkin too ended up on the agency’s books.
In January 1956 the new team of Nation, Junkin and Freeman had a meeting with Alastair Scott Johnston at the BBC to pitch an idea for a radio comedy they had devised, to be titled The Fixers. The stories would centre on a trio of characters: Colonel Harry Lashington, his cockney manservant Herbert Cooper (or perhaps Collins, the proposal gives both names) and a fiercely patriotic Welshman named David Owen Glendower, who ‘is intensely proud of his family tree, which he can trace back as far as his parents’. Together, they seek to right wrongs, motivated by ‘a strong sense of moral justice’, though ‘unfortunately they have more enthusiasm than good judgement’ and are liable to ‘insist on helping their fellow men whether their help is wanted or not’. The suggested storylines included the rebuilding of a house for an old lady who can’t get her landlord to do any repairs (though they get the wrong house), and the rescuing of a Victorian music hall comedian who was lost in the Amazonian jungle in 1901 (and doesn’t want rescuing); they return him to civilisation, ‘well, not quite civilisation, but show business’.
The fact that each of the three central characters sounds as if he could be played by one of the writers might
Meanwhile Nation, rather than striking out on his own, had formed a new partnership. (‘None of them were fully fledged writers, so they gravitated towards each other,’ noted Beryl Vertue.) This time it was with two of the newer arrivals at ALS: John Junkin and Dave Freeman. Of the trio, Freeman was significantly the senior. Born in London in 1922, he worked as an electrician before enlisting in the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm on the outbreak of war. On being demobbed, he had joined the Metropolitan Police, spending some time in the Special Branch, before becoming a security officer at the American Officers’ Club in Regent’s Park. Throughout this period, he had harboured ambitions of writing, submitting stories to Lilliput magazine as early as 1941, while still serving in the Pacific. But it was at the Officers’ Club that he found his true calling, involving himself in the booking of entertainment acts and striking up friendships with new comedians, most significantly with Benny Hill. By 1953 he was selling gags to Frank Muir, who provided him with the encouragement to continue, and in September 1955, having contributed material to Hill’s television series and to the Terry Scott and Bill Maynard vehicle Great Scott – It’s Maynard , he abandoned his existing career path and joined ALS as a full-time writer. ‘He was quite gentle,’ recalled Ray Galton, ‘a tall fellow, big bloke.’
So too was Junkin, who like Nation and Freeman was well over six foot tall. Born in 1930, the son of a London policeman, Junkin had spent three years as a teacher in an East End primary school, though his career in education ended with an incident when he saw a boy in the back row chewing gum. Calling the child to the front, he issued the familiar instruction, ‘In the bin!’, and was horrified at the extent of his own power when the boy misunderstood and climbed into the bin, looking humiliated, resentful and hurt. Concluding that he ‘was not cut out for the teaching profession’, Junkin took up dead-end jobs to allow him time to try writing. Following the same path claimed by Nation, he wrote a script for The Goon Show and submitted it to Spike Milligan. Milligan’s response was sufficiently favourable – ‘I think you can write and I think you should’ – that Junkin too ended up on the agency’s books.
In January 1956 the new team of Nation, Junkin and Freeman had a meeting with Alastair Scott Johnston at the BBC to pitch an idea for a radio comedy they had devised, to be titled The Fixers. The stories would centre on a trio of characters: Colonel Harry Lashington, his cockney manservant Herbert Cooper (or perhaps Collins, the proposal gives both names) and a fiercely patriotic Welshman named David Owen Glendower, who ‘is intensely proud of his family tree, which he can trace back as far as his parents’. Together, they seek to right wrongs, motivated by ‘a strong sense of moral justice’, though ‘unfortunately they have more enthusiasm than good judgement’ and are liable to ‘insist on helping their fellow men whether their help is wanted or not’. The suggested storylines included the rebuilding of a house for an old lady who can’t get her landlord to do any repairs (though they get the wrong house), and the rescuing of a Victorian music hall comedian who was lost in the Amazonian jungle in 1901 (and doesn’t want rescuing); they return him to civilisation, ‘well, not quite civilisation, but show business’.
The fact that each of the three central characters sounds as if he could be played by one of the writers might
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