Glamour on a budget Scripts and sets were recycled, the old stable of B-movie players repeatedly cropped up. There were jokes about how many times that white Jaguar had tumbled over that cliff road. see below History Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com The rise and fall of TV’s top hit-maker BY JOHN RENNIE HE was one of the big figures of 1960s British television. Any evening in front of the box back in the 1960s would likely involve an hour of crime, sci-fi, conspiracy or fantasy courtesy of Monty Berman and his collaborators… not least among them that East End giant of the entertainment business, Lew Grade. Yet by the time Berman died in 2006 at the age of 101, he had been out of television for almost 40 years. After a stunning decade perfecting his ‘production line’ system of ‘tele fantasies’ and churning out hit after hit, he produced two crashing duds, and never worked in TV again. For the next four decades, Berman became a recluse. Never granting interviews, never being seen in public, and refusing to comment as his creations gained cult status. Nestor Montague Berman was born in Whitechapel on March 26, 1905 and was in at the very beginnings of the British movie industry, joining Twickenham Studios as a camera assistant in 1922. But there were few opportunities to get the really good jobs in the closed shop of British film. The war would intervene but, as with so many media figures of his generation, it proved the making of his career. Just as many aspiring actors and comics got their break with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), so Monty joined the Eighth Army Film and Photographic Unit, recording the travails and triumphs of our boys in North Africa. There he struck up a friendship and working partnership with a fellow cameraman and amateur film maker called Robert S Baker. Back in London after demob, the pair set up their own production company, Tempean Films, and decided to take on the British movie industry. It was a tall order. Although London and the Home Counties had numerous studios – Elstree, Gainsborough, Ealing, Beaconsfield and the rest – film making was a studio-bound business, not least because of the difficulty of manoeuvring the massive fixed cameras of the day. The pair made a virtue of necessity and took to the streets of London. “We used to shoot in natural locations,” recalled Berman years later. “The fact was that with our budget we couldn’t afford to build the sets that the films required. This has now become the norm, but we made a hell of a lot of films on location back then.” He and Baker produced A Date With a Dream (1948) and Melody Club (1949), two low-budget comedies that introduced Terry Thomas to UK audiences (the first also featured Norman Wisdom). Berman also moonlighted on The Third Man directed by Carol Reed –a British film noir starring American greats Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. That gave the cost-conscious pair an idea. Gangsters, shootouts and all things American had an enormous appeal to a 1950s London slumbering amid peasoupers and rationing, and over the next ten years Tempean became a production line for British B movies featuring slightly over the hill (or never quite reached it) American players. Rod Cameron plays an American in London who becomes embroiled in a crime syndicate when his friend is murdered in Passport to Treason. In Impulse, Arthur Kennedy plays an American estate agent living in London who finds himself enmeshed in a plot involving a diamond robbery, gangsters and murder. In Stranger in Town, Alex Nicol is an American reporter on holiday in London who goes to investigate the ‘suicide’ of a composer and discovers… well, you get the idea. Behind the American stars, Berman assembled a reliable group of British actors: James Robertson Justice, Lois Maxwell, Dora Bryan, Thora Hird, Michael Balfour, Dinah Sheridan and many more. The Yanks added a touch of exotica to the London locations (West End clubs, Mayfair apartments and Docklands shoot-outs) and pulled in the British punters, while the movies, anchored by a recognisable American accent but a flavour of Europe, ran as B-movie openers to the main features in the US. “The films were good value,” said Berman, and the pair would secure bigger budgets to make the likes of Sea of Sand (1958), with Richard Attenborough and Blood of the Vampire (1958) with a superbly over-acting Donald Wolfit. At this point the pair might have given the nascent Hammer Films a run for their money, with a run of sci-fi and horror movies to add to the crime stable. Berman went back to the East End for inspiration for Jack the Ripper. We all know that Scotland Yard made a terrible job of solving the case back in 1888 – luckily in the 1959 dramatisation, they can call on a visiting American cop (Lee Patterson) to clear things up. And the lack of any documentary evidence of what actually happened during 1911’s Siege of Sidney Street didn’t prevent Monty filling in the gaps, with Peter Wyngarde playing a marvellously camp Peter the Painter. But the astute Baker and Berman realised the writing was on the wall for B-movies. Commercial TV had been launched in 1955, shaking up staid BBC drama and keeping the punters at home. The pair simply transferred their B-movie approach to telly, negotiating with writer Leslie Charteris for the TV rights to his character The Saint. Associated Rediffusion turned down the show as too expensive, but Lew Grade (a Whitechapel boy) offered to finance it through his company, ITC. The series was a massive hit, making a star of Roger Moore, running in the UK from 1962 to 1969, with 185 hour-long episodes and selling around the world. Gideon’s Way (1964-65) followed and then the partnership ended, Berman alone producing The Baron (1966-67) and Department S (1969) before moving straight on to Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-71). Scripts and sets were recycled, the old stable of B-movie players repeatedly cropped up as heavies, doctors, policemen and femmes fatales, and car chases became curiously familiar. The Champions (1969-71) featured three agents gifted with telepathy and ESP; Randall and Hopkirk two private eyes… one of them dead. And Department S featured three counter-espionage agents (the lead agent an American, of course), though Peter Wyngarde as ‘ladies man’ author Jason King, was such a hit that he was given his own spin-off, Jason King (1971-72). And then, as dramatically as it had flared, Berman’s star waned. Both Spooner as writer and Wyngarde as star seemed to be sending the whole thing up in Jason King, and the audiences turned off. And while most of the Berman-Spooner- Baker shows of the time have achieved cult status, nobody talks about The Adventurer, with fading and ageing star Gene Barry playing a globetrotting US secret agent. Two stiffs in a row, yet surely Berman could have come back. Instead, he simply stopped working, becoming a recluse. Hardly a photograph exists of the man who, with a handful of others, brought British TV drama out of the 1950s and into garish, glorious colour. (Right) Monty Berman (Far right) Department S, which made a star of moustachioed Peter Wyngarde as Jason King (Below) Berman’s production of The Siege of Sidney Street; and the hugely successful The Saint, which he brought to TV, first making a star of Roger Moore, then Ian Ogilvy 8 – 14 SEPTEMBER 2014 N E W S F R O M T O WER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 13
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