They range from a snoozing Frankie Howerd in a script conference to Miranda Hart cheerfully sharing a joke with the crew – unguarded moments chosen for an exhibition charting more than 60 years of BBC comedy.
The Howerd shot is particularly unguarded: he really is fast asleep. “No star would let that out these days,” said Steven Parissien, director of Compton Verney in Warwickshire, where more than 100 photographs, many previously unseen, will go on display next month.
The show is a collaboration with the BBC and is drawn from the corporation’s photo library of more than 4m images. “We were keen not to have promotional pictures,” said Parissien. “We are trying to get behind the veneer of the posed publicity shot.”
The pictures were chosen by Parissien and two guest curators, Paul Merton and Adil Ray. They have helped to write texts for the show, with Merton recalling how important Hancock’s Half Hour, which transferred from radio to TV in 1956, was to him as a young boy.
“I was about 12,” he recalled “I would play back this show and try and practise comic timing by copying how they were doing it.”
The exhibition includes strikingly poignant photographs from the set of Steptoe and Son, which starred Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett, a serious method actor who had been branded Britain’s Marlon Brando, but found himself typecast on the wildly popular sitcom. He picked up only minor TV and cinema roles after Steptoe and died of a heart attack aged 57 in 1982.
Written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the programme ran from 1962 to 1965 and again from 1970 to 1974. Merton said it was the first time he could remember “seeing comedy that had the power to move you as well as just make you laugh. The depth of the writing, the depth of the characterisation – fantastic.”
The exhibition includes photographs from more controversial, divisive sitcoms, not least ‘Til Death Do Us Part, which starred Warren Mitchell as the foul-mouthed and all-round sexist, racist and homophobe Alf Garnett. It tackled social and racial issues head-on, sometimes a little too head-on, with few of the episodes ever repeated.
Ray, the creator and star of the BBC1 sitcom Citizen Khan, said he regretted that “perhaps comedy has become a bit safe. We absolutely loved it, we absolutely got it ... There was something quite bold here.”
Another sitcom featured in the show and seldom seen now is It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum as a result of the casting of the white actor Michael Bates as the Indian bearer Rangi Ram. Ray has fonder memories. “We absolutely loved it. Wow, there’s an Asian on the telly! Stop what you’re doing, call your friends up!”
Parissien said the exhibition came about after a meeting with Robert Seatter, the head of BBC history, who was keen to get the BBC’s collections seen outside London. It chimed in with a Britain in the Fifties exhibition Parissien was planning, also opening next month, which will attempt to redress some of the bad press that the decade gets.
“It is always seen as a dreary, drab black and white time but it was also a time of great colour,” said Parissien. “Britain by the end of the 1950s had become a far more visual society. It had changed because of television. People are talking about what they have seen rather [than] read or what they’ve heard.”
Comedy by Hancock and The Goons – or the Go-ons as one BBC mandarin thought they were – has a legacy that can still be felt, Parissien said. “It was about being brave and challenging existing formats, that’s what was happening in the 1950s. It was not a time of retrenchment, it was a time of experimentation.”
The exhibition will include images of the some of the best-known names in British comedy, including Joyce Grenfell, Morecambe and Wise and Victoria Wood. It ties in with the BBC’s plans for a sitcom season this summer, which will mark the 60th anniversary of Hancock’s Half Hour on BBC television. It will include a Keeping Up Appearances prequel, a one-off reboot of Are You Being Served? and a raft of new sitcom pilots.
Shane Allen, controller of BBC comedy commissioning, said: “We wanted to reflect our audience’s enduring love of these iconic comedy shows and performers with this new exhibition. It’s a fabulous photographic roll-call of the comedy and sitcom greats post-war.”
• Faces of BBC Comedy is at Compton Verney 19 July-2 October 2016.
