‘Amazing’: How Stanley Baxter’s TV shows reached 20 million | culture

The description “special” has been overused in television schedules; Stanley Baxter’s programs justify this. The comedian is one of the few stars whose reputation rests on a handful of spectacular one-off comedy specials – independent comedy shows run in the 1970s and 1980s, first by ITV’s London Weekend Television and then by the BBC.

In both cases, the networks ended their association with Baxter, not because of a lack of audience interest—at their peak, the shows reached more than 20 million viewers—but because of the enormous costs required by the artist’s broad visual ambition and perfection. One of Baxter’s favorite conceptions was to recreate, in an ingenious way, scenes from big-budget Hollywood films, making it appear as if his version had also spent millions of dollars.

The cash flow was further stretched by the fact that Baxter played multiple roles – 18 of them in one sketch. Modern digital technology made such strikes relatively easy, but at the time when Baxter was sharing the screen with multiple selves, primitive image mixing technology left a clear outline—like the chalk marks made by homicide cops around a body on the sidewalk—when scenes recorded at different times were stitched together.

To avoid this, Baxter built his amazing multi-personality characters moment by moment, often spending hours on costumes and makeup between two lines of dialogue. The double’s rear views had to be carefully placed in the shot to produce the illusion that he was talking to others. While most comedians – even the no less ambitious and meticulous Morecambe and Wise – routinely present a Christmas show as well as a series of weekly episodes, Baxter would spend a year working on his show.

Baxter’s wealth of performance lies in two parts of his body: his ears and his legs. It was an accurate imitation of celebrity voices and everyday sounds, a skill that began, he told interviewers, when, as a child in Glasgow, he noticed the spectrum of Scottish accents, from posh, sarcastic English to thick patois that could initially sound to outsiders like Italian. The latter tune later inspired one of his most popular sketches, ‘Parliamo Glasgow’, a perfect display of his vocal prowess, in which the presenter with a BBC English clip ‘translated’ dense sentences from Glasgow, such as a female warning to a male acquaintance that he had become too familiar by touching her buttocks: ‘Takyurhonaffmabum’.

In addition to his exceptional listening, Baxter was also blessed with his limbs. Not only could he do impressions with them, too—he never learned to tap dance, but rather made it look like he had done so by imitating the instructors—but they had the perfect proportions for someone who was often asked to play female characters.

A surprise to those who have rewatched TV comedies from the 1960s to the 1980s is the prevalence of drag representation. This was largely a necessity. Since almost all star comedians were male but their material often involved marriage and/or misogyny, light entertainment was like an all-boys school trying to produce a “Trojan Women” play. But while cross-dressers like Les Dawson, Dick Emery, and Terry Jones were designed to play rather squat mothers, Baxter had legs and ankles so unusually graceful for a man that he could portray the star actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When he portrayed Fred Astaire, he could also play his dance partner, Ginger Rogers.

In a 2019 Channel 5 profile in the National Comedy Treasures series, 93-year-old Baxter explained that he did detailed impressions of Hollywood legends before knowing who they were. His mother, who was forbidden from becoming an actress by her parents who believed the profession was a euphemism for prostitution, trained Stanley from a very early age to entertain her relatives and friends with versions of her favorite songs, such as Marlene Dietrich and Gracie Fields. Since her son had never seen or heard the originals before, she would impersonate him, through which he would create his own version. In retrospect, this was another key stage in the development of his exceptional ability to recreate cinematic scenes.

He was a well-read man, his London flat was filled with well-used books, and the striking feature of his shows was that they trusted mass audiences to enjoy the collision of high and low culture. Wouldn’t it be funny if classic actor Sir John Gielgud presented the light entertainment show The Generation Game? Another specialty was mixing two franchises, so that Michael Crawford’s sitcom and Jacques Cousteau’s underwater nature show Presents Some Mammals Do Ave ‘Em. There was also an extended parody of Dallas and Upstairs, Downstairs, and a parody of the Queen’s Christmas Letter, with Baxter in royal drag, which sparked outrage in Parliament and middle-market newspapers.

Born in 1926, Baxter came to the entertainment industry partly through a narrow route reserved for men his age, serving in INSA (the National Entertainment Service Association), which was founded in 1939 to provide entertainment for soldiers, sailors and airmen serving overseas, provided by colleagues with theatrical or musical ambitions. Among the early recruits were three people who would become prominent in television: comedy magician Tommy Cooper and writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft, whose war service in oil painting served as the inspiration for one of their sitcoms, She’s Not Half Hot Mum (1974–1981).

Baxter was a teenager in his native Glasgow during World War II, and joined the Forces Band during national service in Burma and Singapore after the war and before independence.

The Ensa short was mocked as “Every Night’s Something Awful”, but Baxter’s group included others with big futures in the entertainment industry: comedian Kenneth Williams, film director John Schlesinger and playwright Peter Nichols, who fictionalized their experiences in comedic form in the play and film Soldiers on Parade. Two recurring styles of uniformed performers, parody and cross-dressing, became Baxter’s signature strengths.

However, while other broadcasting stars of his era got their first professional exposure on the music hall stage (including Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise, Ken Dodd, Clive Dunne, Bruce Forsyth, Max Bygraves), Baxter is relatively unusual in that he was discovered as a young man by broadcasting, then in its infancy. After his mother fulfilled her ambition of turning him into a child prodigy, in the 1930s he turned his attention to The Children’s Hour, an early BBC radio series, of which “Aunt Kathleen” provided a Scottish edition.

In the early 1960s, Baxter appeared in a series of British comedy films – Tricksters Anonymous, The Fast Lady and Father Too Came! – And for a while, he seemed destined to become a movie actor who was a master of disguise, in the manner of Peter Sellers. However, cinematically, Baxter’s greatest talent was caricature, not whole cloth creation, and he found his happiest outlet as a comedian who brought the big screen to the small screen in one fell swoop.

The titles of early specials, such as The Stanley Baxter Big Picture Show and The Stanley Baxter Moving Picture Show, acknowledged his cinematic inspiration through their use of the word “picture,” as cinema was called in his day. His most ambitious drawings involved recreating scenes from films such as Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, frame by frame, with the twist that all the staff were imitations of Baxter.

It helped that the weekend schedules on which his masterworks appeared showed films in prime time, in a way that would later be restricted to major religious or public holidays. The first edition of The Stanley Baxter Picture Show (a series of 30-minute episodes), when shown on LWT at 9.30pm in 1972, immediately followed the Sunday night showing of the 1941 Western Belle Starr, starring Randolph Scott. So, while many of the sketches were based on the cinematic knowledge Baxter had from childhood, he could also assume that viewers would get the references.

While classic films were his initial fuel, parodies of television drove later shows, a notable shift in Stanley Baxter’s double-entendre titles on television, The Christmas Box.

An intellectually curious and well-read man, Baxter spent his final years quietly and alone, described in personal files as a “widower” after the death of his wife Moira in 1997. However, in November 2020, the 94-year-old agreed to the publication of The Real Stanley Baxter, a biography by Brian Beacom which he had previously stipulated should appear only posthumously. The book revealed that Baxter, who always knew he was gay, married Moira, against his instincts, following societal and showman fashion. The marriage was a disaster, and the couple lived separate lives, including, for Stanley, several homosexual relationships.

This publication, from such a man, was a courageous final reckoning, and had the effect of focusing attention – in his later years – on his work, rather than delaying private revelation.

The people who never found Baxter’s TV shows funny were the accountants at LWT and the BBC, who at both networks eventually declared the productions gratuitous. Having retired from television, he returned – after a period of exile – to radio, which subsequently came to shape his career in a way that Baxter found artistically satisfying but financially dismaying, as he joked that “radio is all work and no pay”.

First commissioned for Stanley Baxter’s play to celebrate his octogenarian, it developed into a regular series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from 2006 to 2016, in which Baxter and other actors (including Richard Briers and Geoffrey Palmer) performed duet dramas. It was the perfect final platform for a very skilled artist.

Although much admired by younger television stars who grew up watching him – such as impressionist Rory Bremner – Stanley Baxter, unlike most great artists, had no later imitators. This was partly because no network could find the budgets, but also because there had been no one since with such impressive ears and legs. Each one of his best performances was truly special.