These technical innovations would have meant nothing without Mercer’s increasingly sharp dialogue. Morgan’s cockney Trot mum, played to the hilt by Anna Wing, had some beautifully turned lines worthy of Hancock: ‘Your dad wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to public school in a chain gang. He was an idealist, was your dad.’ But the main event was Ian Hendry’s Morgan, manic in all emotional directions. ‘I’m a bad son,’ he mused. ‘Is it the chromosomes, or is it England?’ He castigated Leonie’s suave new suitor, saying, ‘He slid into our lives like a boa constrictor. You’ve never seen him with her – he undulates. Turned my back one day and he gulped her down like a rabbit.’
This unprecedented play left critics straining for parallels. The slapstick incursions and head-banging philosophy put many critics in mind of Spike Milligan. ‘Like Milligan, Morgan Delt was either a thousand years ahead of his time or, more likely, probably an essential antidote for his time,’ judged Derek Hill, approving what was ‘less a play than a welcome disturbance of the peace.’107 Michael Overton applauded what he saw as a long overdue BBC response to the dominance of Armchair Theatre. ‘The BBC has been steadily playing safe and countering ABC-TV’s adventurousness with dull doldrum plays unimaginatively directed and indifferently acted. David Mercer’s play must have shaken the antimacassars in the most staid middle-class homes, and made the majority switch straight back to Sunday Night at the London Palladium.’108
Scheduled after Mercer was a repeat of Anthony Newley’s The Johnny Darling Show, a pseudo-sequel to Gurney Slade in which the eponymous teen idol senses the end of the world and embarks on a philosophical fantasy journey of social and spiritual Armageddon, with songs by Leslie Bricusse. For some viewers, a whole evening of visual experiment and existential despair was too much, and in the following edition of Points of View many antimacassars were shaken at the Beeb, and Mercer especially.
Mercer’s protagonists were not so much off the beaten track as frolicking in the tall grass several fields away: a young man who takes an axe to a middle-class Sunday tea party; a leather-clad septuagenarian vicar biker; a childlike pair of zookeepers who fill a disused swimming pool with inflatable animals and trapezes. ‘Mercer is not just a nonconformist,’ reckoned Don Taylor, ‘he is a nonconformist nonconformist, for whom a beard and a guitar are as square as a dark suit and rolled umbrella. He is his own strange self.’109 A Suitable Case … became a film, Morgan!, in 1966, adapted by Mercer but sweetened, he felt, too much by director Karel Reisz into a poppy tale of swinging outsiderism. ‘Dropping out’ was now a cultural buzzword, on its way to becoming a mini-industry. Only conformist nonconformists need apply.
For a confirmed outsider, Mercer was gregarious to a fault. Joan Bakewell recalls the ‘hotbed of neo-Marxism’110 he presided over in Maida Vale, where she would dash after presenting Late Night Line-Up to hobnob with Pinter, Kenneth Tynan and company. He was the most visible of the new TV playwrights, interviewed by everyone from Melvyn Bragg to David Coleman. His goatee and polo neck became familiar enough for Michael Palin to impersonate him on Monty Python, chain-smoking behind a typewriter, captioned simply: ‘A Very Good Playwright’.
Mercer’s TV output declined in the seventies. Despite quirky successes like the half-hour Me and You and Him – a triumph of videotape editing in which three Peter Vaughans conduct a psychiatric slanging match – his style was sidelined in the push toward naturalism. Even the introduction of high-definition colour seemed set against him. In 1972’s The Bankrupt, a crisis-hit Joss Ackland experiences the same kind of black limbo dreams as Morgan Delt, though where the original monochrome abyss sold the hallucination, the colour camera merely highlighted what Kenneth Tynan once dismissed as ‘the platitudinous void, with its single message: “Background of evil, get it?”’111
And anyway, argued critics, TV had moved on from this sort of experimental tinkering, hadn’t it? ‘I’m afraid this kind of crossword-puzzle drama may find a place in the so-called “intellectual” theatre,’ opined John Russell Taylor, ‘but it cannot make much sense to the average television viewer.’112 Clive James thought The Bankrupt showed a writer losing his way: ‘Mercer, like John Hopkins, is likely to eke out a half-imagined idea by double-crossing his own talent and piling on precisely the undergrad-type tricksiness his sense of realism exists to discredit.’113
Mercer died in 1980, firmly out of step with the timid TV mainstream, which duly gave him a retrospective but otherwise continued to be suspicious of the risky and remarkable. Mercer set the template for the bold, confessional playwright who was as at home appearing on television as writing for it. His more concrete, if less eye-catching, quality was noted by Mervyn Johns: ‘A television writer who cares, and is encouraged to care, about words is a rarity; without Mercer’s example, that rarity may become an extinct species.’114
THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JOHNNY CARSON (1962–92)
NBC
The king of chat show kings.
TV excels in two areas – sports and Carson.
David Brenner, comedian and frequent Carson guest, 1971
THE CULTURE OF THE United States tends to treat any new field of endeavour like the Wild West – a vast wilderness to be colonised and tamed. The TV schedules were no different – beyond the evening hours lay the call of the untamed daytime slots in one direction, and in the other the heart of late-night darkness. NBC launched a daytime expedition in 1952, beginning with early morning chat-in Today. Two years later came a companion trek into the late-night zone, which opened up a lucrative and fiercely contested new territory.
Tonight! was shaped by its first host, Steve Allen. A classic vaudevillian drifter who fell into TV comedy after a subversive stint on local radio, Allen turned what was planned as a fairly straight talk-show-plus-sketch format into a self-contained world – a club with its own rules and customs that made the viewers feel part of something wonderfully mad. He’d arrange complex one-shot gags such as being dunked into hot water wearing a suit festooned with teabags, but most of his comedy was cheaply improvised. Regular stunts included walking out into the New York streets in police uniform and stopping motorists for various bizarre reasons, or just pointing a camera at the passing street life and reeling off an impromptu commentary on its comings and goings. Late night was established as a freewheeling refuge from the daily schedule grind.
Allen moved on to Sunday prime time after an unsuccessful splitting of Tonight! duties with Ernie Kovacs. Reverting to the chat format, the show gained a new, more earnest host. Jack Paar gathered a round table of fellow wits (including token Brit Hermione Gingold), welcomed heavyweight guests from JFK to Castro, and put his own thin-skinned personality centre stage. A fragile star, Paar would fight the network on-screen, most famously calling out their censorship of a whimsical gag based on misinterpretation of the initials ‘WC’.
Paar’s successor couldn’t have more temperamentally different. Johnny Carson boasted the ultimate down-home American background, having grown up in a backwater of Nebraska. His first TV success was the unpromising daytime game show Who Do You Trust? (formerly Do You Trust Your Wife?) where he built up the introductory banter with the contestants into