Looking for an Anniversary - 12 December 2003

On the rare occasions when a commentator is flummoxed for a topic, what does he do?

He looks through history timetables for an anniversary, and this past week the New York Times got the jump on everybody with a reprinted photograph, exactly 70 years old, of a waiter pouring from a silver vase - a shaker, if the word means anything - with the smiling approval of a seated, pretty woman.

The caption was a date: December 5, 1933, and the piece was headed: "When the country went wet again".

The waiter was pouring - in public, in full air - a cocktail, a public act that had not been possible for 13 years after 16 January 1920.

So 5 December, 1933 was the date on the tombstone of what the late President Hoover called "the noble experiment", an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited the manufacture, transport and sale of alcohol anywhere.

The idea was to purify the nation of the demon rum. However, the effect of the law was to make the forbidden apple the most desired object in the garden.

Secret taverns sprouted in every main street of every town. The drinking population tripled.

An underground criminal industry known as bootlegging organised its own ships, rail cars, trucks, agents, spies, salesmen, the lot.

Quite respectable people - bankers, judges - were bought off to ease the unenforceable law.

A Bostonian businessman named Kennedy, son of a poor Irish immigrant, made a fortune from the transatlantic Scotch whisky monopoly.

The release from this huge and lamentable experiment was celebrated quietly last week in a small room of an original speakeasy by three public men.

One of them was former mayor Ed Koch.

As he emerged into the daylight, he said aloud: "It made Joe Kennedy rich and that's how he got his son."

Talking of a journalist's search for anniversaries, I think I must tell you about a producer who was crazy for anniversaries and about the most desperate search in the shortest time that ever happened to me or to any other journalist I ever heard of.

Just 50 years ago - there we go again, that's just coincidental - anyway, in 1953 a regular part of my working week was absorbed in a weekly Sunday television production. It was the first 90-minute show of any kind in this country.

Each programme was a mixture or collage of short features, running from a 40-minute play through a science session, a bout of music, a brief political profile, a sketch history of trial by jury, down to a 30-second motion picture X-ray of two old ladies' skeleton faces chatting over the backyard fence. (We'd been warned by the radiologist that 30 seconds was the limit of human exposure to what was then a fascinating, if rather hideous, novelty - skeleton jaws in motion.)

In those far-off days there was no such thing as taping a show for subsequent broadcast. Every show - however dead as a work of creation - was live, which for quite a time redounded in our favour.

The show was handsomely funded and for dramatic pieces we could have our pick - and did - of the most distinguished stage actors and actresses of the time.

Note, I stressed "stage". In the beginning of television the great majority of movie actors ran a mile from live television.

They were used to filming scenes lasting a minute or 30 seconds in which they were required to memorise dialogue lasting rarely longer than 40 seconds, say.

On the other hand stage actors now had the new chance of a lifetime to gain national exposure without having to travel the length and breadth of America to get it. It was a godsend to theatre stars.

And so we found, from the christening day of the programme on, that the most eminent stage stars in America - and quite a few from England - came begging to be on our show.

By the same blessed token we had no trouble getting the metropolitan opera company to hasten in to do the first opera performance on American television.

Well, one thing led to another and in no time, it seemed, everybody distinguished in their field wanted to get on our show.

From the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan company to Groucho Marx.

However, not to give you the idea that we ruled the roost in a rose garden - if that's possible - I may say that on live television there is always the threat of a crisis, and down nine years we had lots of crises, from a set falling down to reveal a lovemaking couple backstage, to a union boss trying to urge on us - 10 minutes before a show - two camera directors instead of one. He won.

But the most hair-curling moment - two minutes in fact - of my life as a television host came in the middle of a performance, live of course, of a comedy by a French playwright, when the star American actor fell into a dose.

He'd acted in a strange fashion during the dress rehearsal and in the luncheon break - we decided later - he must have consumed a little too much of his luncheon contained in a flask.

In retrospect he might well have come back for the actual performance complaining, like WC Fields: "Somebody has put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice."

Anyway, the star was alarmingly unsteady on his feet and the producer ordered an emergency, commanding the autocue or teleprompter man to copy, in the next hour, the actor's lines on to three separate teleprompters. One was planted upright facing a sofa and each of the other two had to be tilted sideways at each end of the sofa, suitable for a tired man to be able to read lying down.

It seemed a blessed solution. The happy, if lackadaisical, star mumbled his amusing lines well enough until suddenly - none of his doing - all three teleprompters went berserk, on the fritz, haywire, all at once.

They simply whizzed through, as it came out, seven minutes of dialogue, which escaped of course the other two actors as well.

The wobbly star blinked and yawned and took up without a murmur when the prompters righted themselves.

Still, seven minutes were lost from the programme and in those days the test of a programme's excellence, however bad in content, was that it finished after precisely 89 minutes and 50 seconds.

There came a fade-out of the play for the interruption of a two-minute commercial.

Never did a field marshal and his staff do more in two minutes to devise and deliver a flank attack.

Within 10 seconds of the break, the producer - a spry but gentle, tall man with a John the Baptist beard - came leaping out of the wings carrying a small box he'd found in the props department.

It could have been a set of engagement rings.

"What," he hissed, "do you know about jewels?"

I said: "I, er, er, I, I mean, well, absolutely nothing."

"Too late," he cried, and he opened the box.

We had one more minute of the commercial.

"Here," he shouted, "are six of the world's most famous jewels - glass imitations of course - and on the inner lid is a short piece describing each.

"Get a pillar!" he shouted to some stage hand.

A fake cardboard pillar arrived from nowhere.

John the Baptist planted the little box on it, opened the lid, said: "Take each one in turn, hold between your thumb and first finger - the camera will stay on your hand. Off-camera you'll improvise from the printed pieces. Fifteen seconds coming up, clear the set."

Cough, straighten the tie.

"Hold it." I shouted back at the retreating figure, "What's the hook, why today?"

He hesitated for about one second.

"It's an anniversary - the 100th anniversary of Queen Victoria getting the Koh-i-noor from India. You're on your own."

He darted out. The floor manager counted, like the dispatcher at Cape Canaveral - six, five, four, three, two - we have lift off.

Fade in. Half shot of me holding the precious box.

"It occurred to us," I said blandly, "that this is a dazzling anniversary in the history of the British Empire and the history of jewels.

"Just about a hundred years ago, Queen Victoria held durbar - a grand public levee on her only visit to India, and was presented with the hugest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-noor."

I take it out, twist it, put the box back on the pillar and we have a glistening close up as I twist the fabulous stone.

Passing it off-camera to an invisible floor manager I announce we have five other famous stones and -twirling each of them in a dazzling close-up - I go on eloquently off-screen about Evelyn Walsh McClean and the Hope diamond, the Dresden diamond, until I felt in my bones, as you learn to, that we had about 28 seconds left.

Back on camera I ended with some such anecdote as I think, about the mine in Colorado that made a Mr Brown famous but not as famous as his wife, who was a heroic survivor from the Titanic and became known around the world as the unsinkable Molly Brown. Goodnight.

When it was all over, general backslappings and hilarity all round.

The next week I went up to our charming, persuasive producer, Bill Spear: "How did you come on 1853 and what was the Queen doing in India? She wasn't there." I said.

Bill Spear was a charming man and an honest one.

He looked me straight in the eye: "Well," he said, "that's what I heard."

Still, after that, I never forgot one of the lessons Mark Twain said he learned from his years out West: never trust a man who looks you square down in the eye.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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