Long before Olly Murs’ birth, and even before Simon Cowell’s in 1959, the popular talent show was a mainstay of the TV schedules. Within months of ITV’s launch in 1955 as commercial opposition to the BBC, the avuncular Hughie Green was presiding over Opportunity Knocks, in which variety acts new to television (some prodigious, others eccentric) were given a three-minute shop window to entertain the public on national TV. After a contraption called a ‘clapometer’ measured the applause of the studio audience for each act, viewers at home were invited to vote by post for which one they would like to see return on the next show. In this way, acts like the comedian Les Dawson, singer Mary Hopkin and comic poet Pam Ayres made a breakthrough.
Running for 22 years until 1978, Opportunity Knocks was essentially a kindly show, letting the audience make the decision over its favourites. But from 1973, it was joined in the schedules by the Saturday-night series New Faces, unearthing fresh faces like comic songwriter Victoria Wood and teenage impressionist Lenny Henry. Its most successful musical discovery was the eight-piece rock’n’roll group from Leicester, Showaddywaddy, who racked up many hits between 1974 and the early 1980s.
What New Faces inaugurated was a star panel of judges who passed comment on the acts. Though many of the guest pundits (entertainers, DJs, comedians) encouraged these rising stars, the ones who grabbed the headlines were two record producers and songwriters. Tony Hatch had made a name as a composer of TV theme tunes – some, like Emmerdale (formerly Emmerdale Farm) and the Australian serial Neighbours, survive to this day – and had written and produced pop hits like Petula Clark’s international smash hit of the mid-1960s, ‘Downtown’. Producer Mickie Most’s formidable list of credits during the 1960s and 1970s included hits for Lulu, The Animals, Donovan, Herman’s Hermits and Suzi Quatro.
Hatch and Most could praise acts, too, but they are remembered for being blunt, outspoken and direct if they felt an act wasn’t up to scratch. Some thought them cruel but they acted as a balance to the often supportive comments elsewhere on the panel, and had a perspective from behind the scenes that the performer judges did not necessarily share. And one viewer watching at home who greatly enjoyed Hatch and Most’s contributions to the show (who indeed loved talent shows in general) was the teenage son of an EMI record executive. ‘I remember thinking those two were hilarious,’ Simon Cowell told ITV’s The Talent Show Story in 2012.
Cowell loved the speciality acts (spectacular, risky or just downright odd) which sometimes turned up on Opportunity Knocks and New Faces. He could see that they were the natural successors to circus performers. And Olly Murs was part of an extended family that stretched way back to the Big Top. His great-grandparents Edward and Kathe Murs, who hailed from Latvia in north-eastern Europe, toured the world as circus acrobats in the 1920s and 1930s. In 2009, their daughter-in-law Maureen recalled some of their crowd-pleasing antics: ‘My husband’s mother used to balance a pole carrying Edward on her mouth while he stood on top playing a guitar and performing other tricks.’ Three years after the end of the Second World War, in 1948, Edward and Kathe settled in England.
Maureen’s own son, Pete, was born in the same year as Simon Cowell: 1959. In the early 1980s, some 20 years before Matt Lucas and David Walliams would dream up the character of Vicky Pollard for television’s Little Britain, Pete married someone actually called Vicky-Lynn Pollard, who was born in 1961. Their first child, daughter Fay, arrived in October 1982 and was soon followed, on 14 May 1984, by twin sons. They were named Oliver and Ben. Olly was born 15 minutes before Ben.
Olly’s childhood was an idyllic one, with a great deal of love and support. ‘I was lucky to have a great upbringing and lots of love. You’re just so carefree, you just don’t care what’s happening.’ The only wobble in his well-being as a youngster came when he had to have grommets (tiny tubes) inserted into his ear because he could not hear properly. Fortunately, his hearing would be fine thereafter.
Pete Murs, whose trade was toolmaking, was always music-mad. The family home was forever filled with the sounds of his eclectic record collection. Music even became the soundtrack to household chores, usually hastily completed just before Vicky-Lynn arrived home. ‘My dad used to do the cleaning round the house,’ remembered Olly many years later. ‘And he’d put T. Rex on, and the Hoover would come out, the ironing board. “Right, Mum’s home in a couple of hours, get this done!”’
‘He was such a good boy at school, a little angel,’ was Vicky-Lynn’s memory of Olly as a child, also describing him as ‘a mummy’s boy who was never naughty’. For his part, he enjoyed his education and claimed never to have skipped classes. ‘I always had one hundred per cent attendance because I loved being at school.’ Though his reasons for attending may have not just been academic. ‘I was always hanging around with the girls, trying to be Mr Smooth.’
‘It’s not shocked me, what he’s doing now,’ Pete would say after Olly became a national star, ‘because he’s always sung at home. You’d be shouting upstairs to him, “Dinner’s ready!” You’d open the door, he’d be posing and dancing.’
The influence of music was assimilated by all three Murs children, to the delight and amusement of the grown-ups. Visits to their nan’s house would be enlivened by impromptu performances of the much-loved Proclaimers hit of 1988, ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’. ‘Me and my twin brother Ben, and my sister, were all around the same sort of age,’ Olly told BBC Radio 2’s Ken Bruce in April 2012. ‘She used to love us entertaining her ’cause we were just scatty, cheeky kids. And for us to be good, she used to get us to sing this song! ’Cause it made her laugh. We never knew the words – we just used to make it up as you go along.’ For their reinterpretation of the Scottish twins’ greatest hit, the three children were rewarded with the prize of chocolate biscuits.
Celebratory family gatherings often had a musical element. ‘My nan’s side of the family used to do a lot of singing,’ said Olly. ‘My auntie Pat used to be a singer in the West End and stuff like that, so there’s always been some musical side to the family. So we used to have dancing, a lot of parties.’ This was the early days of karaoke, singing to backing tracks, and the Murs clan were fast in acquiring a karaoke machine. ‘It was almost like “Pass the Mic”. The mic used to go round the room and everyone used to sing a song.’ Olly has particularly fond memories of one of his solo spots at a New Year’s Eve party that made everyone in the room burst out laughing – the cheesy 1992 country hit ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ by Billy Ray Cyrus, dad of Miley Cyrus.
Although both Opportunity Knocks and New Faces enjoyed brief revivals on TV in the years after Olly Murs’s birth, the big TV talent-show phenomenon during his boyhood and teens was Stars in Their Eyes, which began on ITV in 1990. Hosted over a 15-year period, originally by Leslie Crowther, then by Matthew Kelly and, finally, by Cat Deeley, its premise was simple and unchanging. In an age where households like the Murs lapped up karaoke contests (a pastime which had spread across the globe from its origin in Japan), the series gave the ordinary viewer the chance to dress up and sing as their musical idol. They would walk through the doors, surrounded by dry ice, and emerge in costume as anyone from Shirley Bassey to Chris de Burgh. Part talent contest, part fancy-dress party, the series did not really discover new stars, at least none who would become long-term artists in their own right because they were aping their idols (though often extremely well).
In the same vein, the 1990s brought the outbreak of the ‘tribute band’, most notably The Bootleg Beatles and Abba revivalists Björn Again, where famous but inactive groups were recreated as authentically as possible for live performance. But, as with Stars in Their Eyes, the appeal of cover versions had its limitations in terms of spawning credible recording artists. Though there were always revivals of old songs in the charts, what made pop music