Darrol Blake Transcript

Interview with Darrol Blake by Dave Welsh on Tuesday the 21st of September 2010 Dave Welsh: Okay, this is an interview with Darrol Blake on Tuesday the 21st of September 2010, for the Britain at Work Project, West London, West Middlesex. Darrol, I wonder if you'd mind starting by saying how you got into this whole business. Darrol Blake: Well, I'd always wanted to be the man who made the shows, be it for theatre or film or whatever, and this I decided about the age of eleven or twelve I suppose, and at that time I happened to win a scholarship to grammar school, in West London, in Hanwell, and formed my own company within the school, I was in school plays and all that sort of thing, so my life revolved around putting on shows. Nobody in my family had ever been to university, so I assumed that when I got to sixteen I was going out to work. I didn't even assume I would go into the sixth form or anything. So when I did get to sixteen I wrote around to all the various places that I thought might employ me. Ealing Studios were going strong at that time, Harrow Coliseum had a rep. The theatre at home in Hayes closed on me. I applied for a job at Windsor Rep, and quite by the way applied to the BBC, and the only people who replied were the BBC, and they said we have vacancies for postroom boys, office messengers, and Radio Times clerks. So I thought, 'how dare they!' and was out of work for three weeks after I left school. DW: And this was roughly?... DB: Oh 1953 we're talking about. 1953. And so eventually I answered the BBC thing and went up to a building near Broadcasting House, and was interviewed, and got a job as it happened in Lime Grove Studios, which had been taken over by the BBC at that time. Well, taken over in 1950. This is autumn of '53, and for a few months I was what turned out to be a messenger at reception, so you would receive... a bell would ring in your little room and you'd leap out of there and take someone like Adrienne Corri or whoever up to see a director. It was the most extraordinary building because it had been a film studio. It had... what's the word... gradually grown, so it was a complete mess as a building, but those few months gave me the knowledge of that warren and I knew the building like the back of my hand which was very useful later. And then what had happened was that the first bit of Television Centre had been built, what was known and still is known as the Scenery Block. The rest of the site was just the ruins of the White City Exhibition. There was nothing there at all, and the design department had moved out of Lime Grove and into the Scenery Block as had quite a few others, but it was basically the design department. And I'd always built model theatres and sets and things like that, so there was an interest, and because they were setting up anew in Television Centre, they bought a machine that printed all the studio plans and drawings for the workshops and things, and they wanted someone to work it. So I applied for that and got it, and I did that officially from the beginning of January '54 until my national service fell due which was the end of '55. But for the last three months of that time, my replacement had appeared already, so I was free to attach myself to a working designer, and worked on Quatermass 2... 1 DW: Nigel Neale's... DB: Yes, yes indeed, Nigel Neale. Tom Neale as he was known. And also a series of programmes called Music For You which was a sort of design plum in those days, because it had bits of operas, and bits of ballets, bits of this and bits of that. And that happened to be produced by the wife of the head of the design department, so it was a design plum, which the man I attached myself to, Stephen Taylor, designed. So I had this good grounding as it were, in studio work, and then went off to national service in the RAF. Volunteered for Cyprus, Singapore, and Gibraltar and all the trouble spots and got sent to Epping. Well it was North Weald actually, North Weald a fighter base, but I always say Epping because it gets a laugh. But it was at the other end of the Central Line, as you are well aware, so I was back in the studio whenever Stephen Taylor had anything interesting on the floor, and one would have weekends off anyway. What I was doing was, I was a fighter plotter and we were based at North Weald as I say, but our working place was Kelveden Hatch I think I can talk about it now since it has tours around it. It was a secret establishment in a dummy hill. And two hundred of us would disappear into this hill, every watch change, and it was like something out of a Bond film, it really was. It was supposedly the brain centre of the London area in terms of defence. But we did a lot of crosswords, at least I did, and I was back in the studios, as I say, whenever Stephen had anything interesting. It was very boring, but I managed to start another drama group and produced a play and did all the things I would do anyway. And then, one of the advantages of doing national service was that if you were employed before you went into national service, the company that employed you had to take you back afterwards, which was very fortunate, and so I came back into the BBC design department at the beginning of 1958, and was instantly working as an assistant designer for one or two people . And then, I can't remember how soon it was, but quite soon, I was put in a little group called SDU which was the studio design unit. And the four of us were responsible for all the chores of tv. Which were in those days, women's programmes, talk shows, 'What's My Line?' 'Panorama', all the things that had the same set every week, with some variations, and they were all over the place. I mean some days I was doing three shows a day in Riverside, in Lime Grove, in the Television Theatre, which is better known perhaps as The Shepherds Bush Empire. Because the Television Centre as a studio didn't operate until 1960, although all our offices were there of course. And the women who produced the women's programmes in the afternoon knew that I wanted to be a director, so they let me direct some little films and some live shows, bless them, and that gave me a start, but I was still officially a designer for quite some years. And then I worked with a man called Ned Sherrin who was extraordinary and a talent spotter, and what he really wanted to do was big musicals, but he got stuck with 'Tonight' and sort of talk shows and things like that, and because he was so successful with That Was the Week That Was, they let him do the odd musical, and that's how we met because I was designing those, doing the sets. And, to backtrack a bit, I did fill in for my flatmate Ridley Scott on 'That Was the Week...' once or twice, and I did the whole of 'Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life,' which we did on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, as a designer. And we were walking down the road one day Ned and I, and he said, 'Well, I've asked for you for the autumn again.' So I said, 'Oh, not as designer. If I don't make the jump into being a director I'm going to be a dustman or something! I'm very old, I'm 27!' And he said, 'Oh yes, mmmm, okay.' And a piece of paper 2 went up very high in the BBC, landed on the head of design's desk, and it said you will loan Darrol Blake to Ned Sherrin for six months. And suddenly I was directing the pilot of BBC3 which was the third attempt at the satire bit, you know. We're now in '65. And I directed that every week for six months, live on a Saturday night. And after that, you can do anything, and we had unrehearsed chats, sketches, musical numbers. DW: When you say do anything, can you say a little bit about the nature of that. The demands at that time. DB: Well, being live in front of anywhere between five and ten million people concentrates the mind wonderfully. And so we would go on the air, obviously with a rehearsed show, but parts of it were unrehearsed deliberately, and you never really knew what was going to happen, but one learned to cope. That's really what I mean in that you've done all the things you do with any show, talked to the designer, the choreographer, whatever, and put the show together, and rehearse it on camera during the day. But then you go on the air and I think my third or fourth week, Ken Tynan said that word on a live show, and we had about five and a half million audience I think at that point.

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