‘Esther, the singing dog won’t sing!’ Rantzen and group on the happiness of That’s Life! | Television

The series ran till 1994, and its developer went on to discovered the emergency situation contact services Childline, for mistreated kids, and The Silver Line, assisting lonesome older individuals. But that Saturday was the start of whatever. “We ‘Lifers’, as graduates call ourselves, remember it as the hardest work we have ever done,” says Rantzen, “but the most rewarding in the sense that we were in constant touch with our viewers, who were telling us exactly what they thought of what we had done, and what they wanted us to do next – 15,000 letters in the days before emails. It was a real partnership with the audience.”

Rantzen had actually formerly been a researcher-reporter on 103 episodes of Braden’s Week, hosted by Canadian customer champ Bernard Braden. When he ended up being not available to the BBC due to opportunities in other places, Rantzen, at 32, took control of as host, with the credit, unusual then and now, of “presenter-producer”.

William Nicholson – now a double Oscar-nominated screenwriter, for Gladiator and Shadowlands – was a student on the very first series, accountable for Heap of the Week. “Consumers would write in and say they had a product that had badly let them down but they were not getting any response from the manufacturer,” he says. “So they got to destroy it in an emotionally satisfying way. A woman sent in boots that the heels had come off. We took her to a fairground and an all-in wrestler took them into the ring and ripped them to pieces while the young lady and her family leaped up and down in delight.”

Curtis was likewise the scientist on the program’s most popular family pet product: a dog that presumably said “Sausages!” This had a transcontinental spin-off: “After the dog who said ‘Sausages’, someone wrote in about a dog in Australia who could say ‘Scissors’ and ‘Mother’, and they did an international satellite link-up where the dogs would have a conversation.” Curtis estimates canine discussion: “Sausages!” “Mother!” “Sausages!” “Scissors!” “Esther,” he says, “was amazingly good at knowing how to get laughs.”

And tears. One “Dear Esther” letter had to do with a deceitful equity release plan. The handwriting altered midway through – a child was continuing a plea for help begun by her dad who had actually killed himself in anguish at being fooled. Increasingly, in between the dogs and blown-up toasters, the program campaigned for organ transplants, rear seat belts in cars and trucks, softer bone-safe surface areas in kids’s play areas – and an exposé of sexual assault at a school, which resulted in the charity Childline.

“Our clout came from the size of our audience,” says Rantzen, “which meant that decision-makers, even prime ministers, knew we were watched by the people they answered to. It helped that Sunday night was the evening MPs were most likely to watch TV.”

Bryher Scudamore, who dealt with the program for 14 years, ultimately as editor, keeps the That’s Life! archive in her London home, consisting of every typed running order. She likewise unfurls for me what appears like a sheet of wallpaper for a cartoonists’ rest home. Each week’s credits were drawn to order: the artist Rod Jordan “got sent the script on a Saturday morning. Every picture was hand-drawn and all the credits done in Letraset, to the precise length of the exit music. If we lost an item on the Sunday – for legal reasons, say – he had to stick a new section over. Then it was unwound on rollers in front of the camera.”

The program was tape-recorded to length early on Sunday night, enabling it to be examined by manufacturers and attorneys. “It was just in case you got a name wrong or put up the wrong photograph. People were very litigious. So we did what were called ‘rock’n’roll edits’, where you went back to where the mistake was on two-inch tape, and then dropped the right thing in. Sometimes you were very close to transmission.”

Watched now, the very first edition has a noticeably cabaret feel, with Rantzen in a black velour evening gown flanked by an onstage band that backed 3 tunes, recommending a cross in between Parkinson (the chat program had actually begun in 1971) and Nationwide, BBC One’s early night publication program (considering that 1969) that would include a skateboarding duck, something often misattributed to That’s Life! The impact was not unexpected: 3 of the younger program’s early stars – Rantzen, press reporter Bob Wellings, and comic songwriter Richard Stilgoe – dealt with Nationwide.

Curtis fascinatingly uses to Rantzen the deep cultural analysis familiar from his programs such as The Power of Nightmares: “Esther was part of that political moment of change away from a collective idea of society to the rise of individual rights. That’s Life! was very much part of Thatcherism. Esther wasn’t interested in community action: it was the plucky, preferably funny or peculiar individual who took on a big institution. Although, to be fair to Esther, she didn’t distinguish between state and private bureaucracies.”

On earlier publication programs, stumbles from small to major products had actually popularised the sort of expression satirised by Monty Python’s Flying Circus as: “And now for something completely different.” That’s Life! wished to prevent such editorial swerves.

“We started with high-street vox pops,” Rantzen discusses. “Then the first consumer item was also light-hearted, to seduce viewers into watching. Next we put a ‘half-hard’ consumer item” – curious coinage, possibly, in a program otherwise so alert to innuendo – “which led into the centre of the show where we put our most serious reports. The transition out of the most serious – and we did life-and-death issues, so they could be very serious – was usually done via recaps by the reporters, bringing past stories up to date. The last recap was a fun one, so we could finish with talented pets or a live piece of nonsense that meant we could end on laughter. Ruthlessly, I also used to start the show with a pre-title clip of the funniest item from the previous week, to remind viewers of what they missed if they failed to watch us. Serve them right.”

Curtis says: “You know how movies learned to get rid of the transitional shots – people driving a car or walking down a corridor? Now you just cut from a bedroom to a theatre. Esther also got rid of the transitions. There were no ‘links’. She would just cut. She was actually quite modern in how she used television.”

Even the music – from Stilgoe, folk vocalist Jake Thackray or, in a few of her earliest television looks, Victoria Wood – was not a diversion however part of the primary journey, discusses Curtis. “They were asked to report an event from the week, or spin off from an item.” This musical hair resulted in a routine function called Get Britain Singing. Rantzen says: “Myself, I only once sang a single note in a hospital – and a patient died!”

The most severe material shift in the series was from phallic-shaped veggies held up to cam with a snigger to graphic stories of sexually mistreated kids. “Sadly for Esther,” says Scudamore, “people keep going on about the rude vegetables, which were a small part of the show.” It may have been bigger other than for a previous UK prime minister. Boris Johnson, as a Brussels press reporter in the late 80s, specialised in pieces about EU guidelines making European legumes a uniform shape, minimizing the threat of a Brit’s Sunday veg looking like genital areas. “As an ardent Remainer,” says Rantzen, “my only gripe against the EU was their ban on wonky parsnips.”

That’s Life!’s most YouTubed product dates from 1988, nevertheless, however included lives saved 5 years previously. Rantzen put on the desk of junior scientist Katinka Blackford Newman, now an Emmy-nominated documentary-maker, a photo album discovered by the better half of a Berkshire stockbroker in their attic. It revealed that her spouse, Nicholas Winton, had actually arranged trains saving 669 Czechoslovakian, primarily Jewish, kids from Nazi genocide, discovering them British foster households. Blackford Newman discusses: “Esther said, ‘I know this isn’t really a That’s Life! sort of story but it could be really amazing if we could track down some children.”

The scientist called the British Czech and Slovak Association, which ended up being run by somebody Winton had actually saved, who supplied other names. “It was so moving. The first person I spoke to was Vera Gissing, who told me she had been taken by her parents to Prague station and that was the last time she ever saw her family. I will never forget it.”

Winton had actually never ever publicised his objective due to the fact that another tried rescue train had actually been prevented, in his view counteracting the redemptions. So his better half utilized a pretext to get him to the recording where he found he was sitting in between 2 of his refugees. “When he realised why I hadn’t let him sit next to his wife and stopped being angry at me, he became a friend,” says Rantzen. “Those reunions with the people he saved are everywhere on the internet.”

“It was electrifying in the studio,” says Blackford Newman. “And we appealed for others who had been rescued and the phones just kept ringing.” The following Sunday, Rantzen asked any kids of the Czech Kindertransport in the audience to increase. Winton gradually relied on see a standing ovation. “It was overwhelming,” says Scudamore. “Not only the survivors but the sense of all their children and their grandchildren that would otherwise not be alive. She was just a very good journalist. She didn’t throw things, she didn’t shout at people.”

She was definitely direct. James Hawes, a previous scientist, remembers: “I put forward a film idea once and Esther held the room pin-drop quiet and said, ‘James, darling, you’re not a director and never will be.’ I’ve carried that ever since.”

Curtis’s view is that “she was a ruthless TV executive who had to get a programme out every week. I found the men in the BBC more insidious. She thought she was more charming than she was, perhaps. I was wary of her smile, which usually meant you were going to lose something you’d been working on. But it was, effectively a newsroom, and newsrooms have to be tough.”

Nicholson feels Rantzen was likewise a victim of her pioneering profession: “This was a world where every male producer had a female PA, who he was probably having an affair with. Apart from that, women were there to make coffee and arrange meetings. And when Esther rose to power, there was a lot of ill-feeling, which was almost certainly sexism. Certainly she was tough and direct. But I’ve known very many male producers who were absolutely brutal and didn’t get the stick Esther got.”

Rantzen says: “I was always conscious of the fact that if I failed, it would make it even harder for other women in the industry to be given the opportunities they deserved. So I tried to be first to arrive in the office and last to leave.”

A specific element of her womanhood ended up being a complicating element; she had actually been the protege, next fan, then better half of Desmond Wilcox, her head of department. Nicholson says: “I was aware that there was a lot of ill-feeling about Esther and Wilcox. The feeling was, that was why she was where she was. But I completely reject that. Whether you liked Esther or didn’t, she was extremely good and was there on pure merit, as she went on to prove on That’s Life! and everything else she has created: Childline, Silver Line.”

Scudamore is disappointed that these stories are still being raised: “Esther’s very ill, and we’re trying to celebrate a programme that saved many lives and brought a lot of joy and humour. So I’d prefer not to talk about arguments at the BBC up to 50 years ago, involving people some of whom had other agendas.”

In 1994, Scudamore was contacted us to the director of tv and informed that the 21st series would be the last. “We were losing ratings – but then everyone was. And the culture was changing so it was harder to do that mix of items. I was just very sad and I sat with Esther as they broke down the studio for the last time. It was very emotional.”

The tradition of That’s Life! is a variety of other buyer-beware programs consisting of Watchdog, Scambusters and Rogue Traders. “Life has changed so much,” says Scudamore, “but exactly the same sort of scams are still going on. Tricks that used to be played by letter, phone, fax are now being done by email and text.” There have actually been different direct efforts to restore That’s Life! (for which the BBC and Rantzen share the rights), consisting of a pilot provided by Victoria Coren Mitchell, however none has actually yet reached the screen.

The series has likewise, through osmosis, routinely been honoured at the Baftas. Watching Curtis’s documentaries, it struck me that the bold juxtapositions in That’s Life! may have affected his own tapestries of the ominous and absurd. “I hadn’t thought about that. But, yes, it probably reinforced my interest in collage. She would go from incredibly serious stories to silly ones, and I learned from that.”

James Hawes, informed by Rantzen that he would never ever end up being a director, did, with credits consisting of Black Mirror and Slow Horses. He is presently completing One Life, a film in which Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn play the old and young Sir Nicholas Winton, with Samantha Spiro as Rantzen. During the research study, Hawes spoke to his old manager. Did he advise her that she said he’d never ever direct? “No,” he says. “Not yet.”

• One Life will be launched later on this year