The Granville has been sold

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A personal history of Associated-Rediffusion’s Studio 6, in a former theatre, which was sold in 1960

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Associated-Rediffusion sold the Granville Theatre, Walham Green, earlier this year to Mole Richardson. It will be used as a demonstration theatre and also hired out as a studio. We acquired it in 1955 and converted it into a television studio for the start of our transmissions. It was closed by us in October, 1957. During our possession it was, perhaps, most noted as the place front which the famous ‘Granville Melodramas’ were transmitted. So Fusion asked the director of those melodramas, CYRIL BUTCHER, to write an article about his time there.

 

Cover of 'Fusion' 12
From Fusion, the Associated-Rediffusion staff magazine, issue 12 for April 1960

Going, going, gone – and the Granville Theatre (Studio 6) is no longer with us. That’s just a bit sad.

All right – so it was in many ways hell to work in. The steeply-raked stage made tracking cameras something of an exhausting adventure – and the scenery leaned drunkenly forward; the control room was a minor Black Hole of Calcutta in which you were roasted alive; the building was murderously expensive to run. All sorts of things made the place rather white-elephantine.

But I loved it. There was an atmosphere about it which you felt the moment you passed through the stage-door. Those of us who have been brought up in the theatre tend to go much too far in sentimentality about the atmosphere and tradition of what, to more rational beings, is merely a heap of bricks and mortar. So, when I arrived to do my first television show at the Granville it was quite an occasion for me.

Then came the shocks. (In those days I had not yet become accustomed to a steady diet of at least 20 shocks a day.) I sniffed. Where was it – that indefinable aromatic amalgam of size, accumulated dust, the corporeal exudations of generations of playgoers, the staled tobacco of millions of stubbed cigarettes and the faint leaven of reluctantly applied disinfectant?

Associated-Rediffusion had cleaned the place up. In fact, Fred Pacey, that lovable and quite unforgettable character who was manager there, told me that, setting aside any rubble the builders ejected in the course of converting the theatre into a television studio, no less than six tons of sheer dirt were carted away.

Associated-Rediffusion had also removed the stalls, whose seats either pierced or numbed your bottom. Instead there was a shiny black floor which rose precipitously when you got to the rake I mentioned earlier. But they had left the tiled proscenium, cleaned the ceramic frescos – which were hideous in terms of pure art but rather beautiful in their setting – and the list of composers in the ceiling. Suddenly it all became very romantic; the live theatre of yesterday transformed into the electronic theatre of today.

But not even Associated-Rediffusion could remove the tradition of the Granville. In that endearing little auditorium audiences had laughed, clapped and cheered a fabulous list of names since 1898. I hate lists, but this one is a little staggering: Dan Leno (one of the original directors), Marie Lloyd, Gus Elen, Charles Coburn, Tom Costello, Harry Champion, Gertie Gitana, Nellie Wallace, Little Tich, George Robey, Billy Bennett, Charlie Chaplin, Marie Loftus, Vesta Victoria, Willie Bard, Naughton and Gold, Grade Fields – it seems to go on for ever.

By the way, in 1909 the management must have had a fit of pre-vision. For in that year, when I was born, they decided to feature the Bioscope – that early form of moving pictures – and one of the main offerings was an epic entitled ‘The Butcher’s Boy’.

By the ’fifties, things had become somewhat phrenetic. There were shows like ‘Nudes in the Night’, ‘Red, Hot and Saucy’, ‘Nude, Neat and Naughty’. And in 1955 Associated-Rediffusion cleaned the Granville up.

I was so happy there. I’m referring to 1955-6, when Maurice Browning and I were doing the ‘Granville Melodramas’ – a most unique set-up. We were a private little television world of our own. There was a permanent nucleus of players: Helen Shingler, Hattie Jacques, Victoria Grayson, Erik Chitty and John Bailey. (We gathered various other amiable souls to our bosom as we went along.) There was Bill Turner, floor-managing for us, Marie Holme, my P.A. and Penny Drummond, a stage-manager of vast experience with a gimlet eye for any artist who might be tempted to play the fool.

Our world also included Juan Cortez, who performed miracles in adapting these long melodramas into half-hour programmes; Henry Federer, who gave us the most wonderful scenery at practically no cost at all; and Ruth Pearl and Peter Moffat, who formed what we billed as ‘The Granville Ensemble’. And there we were.

We rehearsed at the Coleherne, a splendid hostelry in Old Brompton Road, which ever since has been my ‘local’ no matter where I happen to be living – and we performed at the Granville. Wembley was a place we had vaguely heard about, but we were not too sure of its exact location.

Visitors from there were treated with the old-world courtesy and guarded incredulity which the Edwardians extended to anyone coming from outside the British Isles – ‘Foreign fellers – don’t you know’.

Television House was an unattractive necessity, to be kept away from as much as possible. Our brave veterans may remember that this was a time when all members of the start had their own private pneumatic drills working alongside them and brick walls were falling on poor Tania Lieven with monotonous regularity. No, it was a place with only one possible thing to recommend it – and that was the privilege it had of paying us our money.

Even that was a fraught matter from time to time. Our artists were contracted on a weekly basis on the assumption that the Melodramas went on once a fortnight. Then we were suddenly put on weekly and the day of the week was altered the moment we got ourselves nicely re-adjusted. Sorting that out in terms of £.s.d. was a hideous problem. Perhaps that is why our financial colleagues were the first to develop that shade of complexion, which can only be described as Television House Green.

But left to ourselves we were perfectly happy – a small band, all brought up in the tradition that nothing mattered as long as the show went on – and we didn’t care how hard we worked to make that happen. That also went for Fred, Harry and Joe at the Granville.

Our permanent cast was unique in television. We tried to spread the leading parts around as evenly as possible. Sometimes, of course, the result was a little surprising – such as when Hattie Jacques played the constantly fainting heroine in ‘The Chain of Guilt’.

It was arduous enough for John Vere (playing her brother) to refer to the supine Hattie as ‘poor fragile flower’, but we were stopped in our tracks by a stage direction which said: ‘He picks her up and carries her, fainting, into the night’. ‘He’, the villain, was played by Erik Chitty, five-foot-seven, according to Spotlight. At this point Hattie looked at us squarely and said in her most glacial voice: ‘That is not possible’.

But in the main we treated these fine old plays very seriously and played them for all they were worth. Certainly there were some magnificent performances, such as John Bailey’s in ‘The Silver King’ and Helen Shingler’s in ‘East Lynne’.

I held my breath as she came to the famous line: ‘Dead, dead – and never called me Mother’ – wondering what our live audience, encouraged to laugh, cheer and boo, would do to us. But so poignant was Helen that you could have heard a pin drop.

Perhaps that is why people still remember us. And perhaps we added a small something to the tradition of the Granville.

About the author

Cyril George Butcher (1909–1987) was an actor and director

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