Big Night Out

“Seen Millard's new post? He's finally tackling Big Night Out.”

“Ooh, Vic and Bob?”

“No, not that Big Night.”

“Bruce Forsyth's?”

“I think you'd better sit down.”

One of the legendary showbiz heckles was said to have livened up a performance by Mike Winters, at the moment Bernie poked his head round the curtain, inciting a withering cat-call of “Oh Christ, there's two of 'em!” As regulars here will know, one Winters brother is more than enough, and in my unending sift through of random old telly, Bernie has become my nemesis; the analogue ghost in the VHS machine. With decade-spanning unexpected appearances in anything and everything, there's truly no safe space from Bernie randomly showing up like a fucking bailiff to go “ehhhhh!” ATV's Big Night Out aired on Saturday nights between 1960 and 1965, so pre-dates the 'I've got a big dog!' era, with Bernie still speaking to, and more importantly, performing with, big brother Mike, as co-hosts for an hour-long variety show.

There's something quite freeing about not having to prepare for the jump scare of Bernie suddenly lurching from the wings, as he'll be in plain sight, on camera and doing his... thing for multiple hours, over the course of five episodes from the third series. I believe this is the oldest thing I've covered, and much of it's out of my cultural wheelhouse, leaving me mostly flying blind. Episode one aired on June 29th of 1963, six years before the Manson murders. If he'd have watched it, cheeky Charlie would've escaped from prison especially to do them early. Though not included in the shows I'm watching, later in the run, the Beatles would mime some songs and partake in skits, and a contemporary comment under said performance by an American remarks of Bernie: “Wow, the guy on the left reminds me of Steve Carell!” God, some sick bastard's going to AI him into The Office one day aren't they?

We open with the pair comically bickering, Mike breaking a prop bottle over Bernie's head and smashing a chair over him, as is every boy (called Millard)'s dream. Bernie's in a stripy spiv suit, and though it's in black and white, you can just tell it's a horrible colour. Shame it's not a black screen. Less than a minute in, we get a “you gorn potty or summink?” from Bernie, the gormless gutter presentation of which made me laugh so much when he did it in my 3-2-1 video, I physically could not stop rewatching it. You can all thank ITV's voracious thirst for copyright that “you gorn potty or summink?!” hasn't appeared in every video since.

As a double act, it's not quite the expected joker/straight man, where Bernie's interrupting like Bobby or Eddie, but more like Mike's been lumbered with his oafish brother in an Of Mice and Men scenario, parents forcing him to take Bernie along to the studio, cos the last time he was left alone he let the bath overflow and it fell through the ceiling. Mike's got both the look and mannerisms of someone who's playing a showbiz agent in a film, while Bernie's in his prime, a handsome, energetic young performer. Only joking. One thing you can say about him is he realises he's been born with a funny mug, and is never not pulling a stupid face, biting into his top lip to showcase the buck teeth, like a bloke with a big cock who keeps taking it out. One of the real cultural 'what if?' questions is to imagine a world where Bernie Winters wasn't born with big gnashers, so never made it onto television. Like Dexter Fletcher, a freeze frame of any moment will land on a grotesque gurn.

Thankfully it's not All Winters, All The Time, but like every 'variety' show, the bill is eighty percent singers; Craig Douglas and Dickie Valentine and Matt Monro; the latter doing I Get a Kick Out Of You, a classic big band number which very casually has a verse about cocaine being boring. Ronnie Hilton puts on a Jamaican accent to sing a calypso about future Indoor League presenter Freddie Trueman. I'm having a real old man “all modern singers look the same!!” crisis with the parade of neat chaps in suits and bow ties crooning away, each approaching the camera with the overfamiliar confidence of someone about to talk me into setting up a direct debit. None of them dance, but they all click their fingers. Maybe it's a joke and it's just one singer introduced with a new name for each song. Adding to the sense we're merely watching a parody sketch set in the 1960s, this is an era before the old standards got written; almost every song here about break ups that you can Google the lyrics for and come up empty handed. Though I do recognise Gulf Aid's Gerry Marsden, him and the Pacemakers so boyish and clean cut, his guitar's virtually up by his chin, not like those low-slung punk rockers lurking around the next decade.

The female singers are easier to discern. Petula Clarke, Susan Maughan (with hair like those apps that turn your photo into a silly 1950s yearbook picture), the Peters Sisters from America. I was shaking with excitement when I went to their Wiki page in the hopes one would be called Andi, but alas. Still, that beats the Kaye Sisters, who despite appearances here, turn out not to even be bloody related, like the Undertaker and Kane. Gulf Aid's Vera Lynn pops in, and it's absolutely mental to see her doing something other than We'll Meet Again, especially as this is decades closer to WW2 than, well, every performance since. Evidently, each passing year shoved her further into the box of Force's Sweetheart. Three numbers she gets, none of which even remotely allude to Hitler's hi-jinks. I'm this close to throwing rotten fruit at the screen for such flagrant disrespect to our troops.

As we all know, there are two genres of variety; singer and ventriloquist, and Big Night Out's got plenty of the latter too. Saveen's your classic top hatted toff with a common as muck alcoholic dummy, whose disproportionately small legs hang down Polio-limp. But it's Daisy May who made his name. A pigtailed girl, she's much smaller than your regular puppet, requiring Saveen to put his face right next to hers, both their voices down to whispers, in a routine where a middle-aged man seduces a baby-sized child puppet. She asks him for a kiss, but he refuses. “I do want to, but not now, I can't kiss you in front of all these ladies and gentlemen.” A third puppet, pulled from a bird cage, appears to be made from an actual taxidermied parrot, and what a fate, to have your corpse reanimated to make jokes for the Brothers Winters. What must the parrot's ghost think if he's watching from the afterlife? Please, nobody manipulate my dead body when I'm gone, not if Stephen Mulhern's hosting.

Another vent, Dennis Spicer puppets a moth-eaten, one-eared chimp which looks like it came from a jumble sale, before an honestly very funny routine using two audience members to 'sing' in silly voices. But I wish we'd seen the act he'd perform a year later at the Royal Variety, with a dummy which came to life played by Kenny Baker. Two weeks after that, Spicer was killed crashing his sports car, with the actual Queen sending a tribute to the funeral. His dummy, in the back seat during the accident, was (suspiciously) completely unscathed. Perhaps there's a Big Night Out curse, as comic Don Arrol – a surname which can only be said in an Albert Steptoe voice – would be dead four years after his spot here. Even though he's being ironic, he does a bit of string magic, and a final song celebrating livin' life, which has a line about “places to go,” where the pianist plays a, shall we say, Eastern riff, and Arrol makes his eyes go all slitty.

But sandwiching all these guest acts is the comedy, song 'n' dance of Mike and Bernie. For a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, their dance routine's like what kids at a birthday party make the parents watch after five minutes choreography in the garden. If it's true you can tell what someone's like at sex by the way they dance, I think Bernie Winters somehow accidentally puts it up his own arse. The sketches are even worse, Bernie's gurning amped up to max, teeth out for the lay jehmen. A Noddy (Bernie) and Big Ears (Mike) is so lazy, Big Ears doesn't even have big ears, with a beard made from individual cotton balls glued to his cheeks. “Have you got a fairy godfather?” “No, but I've got an uncle I'm not sure of!”

A weekly sports reporter sketch casts Bernie as various figures; a female tennis star, a race driver who's not wearing any trousers; Cassius Clay. For that, Bernie's doing the voice but not blacked up, and delivers an actual good joke about Clay's tricky new left hook. Why is it so tricky? “Cos I deliver it with my right hand!” When he's a ballet dancer, praise be for low-res standard definition, as we don't have to see what he's packing. I don't think I could live with myself if Bernie Winters was really slinging some meat. He ends up doing the Twist – “You heard of Chubby Checker? I'm his brother, Double Decker.” That's not how surnames work! It's all exactly what you'd expect from sketches by these two, but does provide one unexpected moment, when Bernie loses everything on a game show, pulling a gun from his pocket and shooting himself right in the head. Violence on television is having a terrible influence on our kids! (in 1963) Distressingly; and fittingly, as he's always going on about birds; one sketch shows Bernie (in a Scrooge sleep-hat) sleeping in a bed with two women. Bernie Winters is in a throuple, and I can't even get a text back. I'm kidding, I never text anyone.

Bernie's performance style is that of a child given one line in a school play and deciding he'll steal the show, and there's a sense, like Jimmy Fallon on SNL, that when he starts laughing, it's a deliberate act to draw the attention onto himself. Thankfully, we get the breather of a commercial break where a woman with impeccable posture and one of those 1960's bras so pointy, her boobs resemble that He-Man toy with a drill for a head, sells us a hoover. Another ad has the PG Tips chimps out for a drive, one of 'em dressed like a copper, and presumably all their teeth pulled out, just in case. If they'd have done that with Bernie, he'd have been in trouble. Incidentally, for someone whose catchphrase is threatening to smash people's faces in, how'd we think he'd have fared in the UFC? First port of call for anyone with a time machine, surely. One episode starts with Bernie's silhouette for a Hitchcock gag, and he must be the only man whose teeth are visible on a shadow.

Thankfully, those seeking laffs don't have to settle on the stylings of the Winters, with various guest comics too. Freddie Frinton does his 'dishevelled old drunk' routine, top hat, broken cigarette wobbling; basically the sort of thing Steve McFadden does in Easties. On a global scale, Frinton's best known for the Dinner for One sketch, shot later this very year, which to this day is traditional New Year's Eve viewing in much of central Europe. In my house it's Ghostbusters II. Comedian Al Reed starts off by complaining how bad things have gotten. Buddy, you have no idea, up in your cultural sanctuary, a good twenty years from the emergence of Bobby Davro. This old fashioned observational comedy watched from the future always has real 'cut to:' energy. “With your motor car, I mean, where can you park 'em?” Yeah mate, I bet there's nowhere to park in 1963. Do a bit about how expensive gas and electric are next. But a good thing about looking back is the Eye-Spy game of witnessing a real use of a bit which long-since fell into cliché or parody, and there's a rush of excitement when Reed produces a very genuine “take my wife; please!” He'll be recommending the veal next! Though it's far from a classic, when Bernie's in a school uniform sucking on a lollipop, we get a “Charlie Chan's a different man since he backed into an electric fan” which would later come out of Brian Connelly's mouth on The Keith Harris Show.

As stock monuments of comedy go, there's few greater than Max Wall. This isn't Freddie Starr as Max Wall, or Eddie Large or Wolf from Gladiators, but the proper Max. After the last seven years of Patreon, all and sundry marching about in a too-small dinner jacket and wig, it's like seeing King Arthur in person. But this is not the Max Wall everyone does; the Max who so frightened me as a boy; a prancing elfin Child Catcher. That jet black Hulk Hogan hair has been cropped short and hidden beneath a hat, like when KISS took off their make-up, and the legs are standing still, not flailing. What a swizz! Imagine buying tickets to see Gervais and he doesn't do any transphobic stuff.

Like I said, I'm out of my wheelhouse here, and it seems like this is Wall's post-modern period, deconstructing his act as the band come in too early on A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. “That was funny, wasn't it?” he remarks. “The orchestra all loud and quick. Everything went wrong!” Near the end, he announces “I am now going to do the walking up and down bit,” and then, the arse juts and out come the crazy legs. He's got a hat on, but we can see the white of his socks. “There it is again, look!” Sure, Metallica are in their LOAD era, all eyeliner and grade fours, but they just played the shit out of Battery.

Personal favourite act are The Three Monarchs, a trio of mouth-organ wielding fellas in dinner jackets, one a big doofus with an extremely 1999 goatee on the point of his chin, like he plays bass for Papa Roach. There's a use of the word 'pussy' before it meant fannies, a nice bit of business with a moving spotlight, which gets smaller as it's swept away with a broom, and some good lines. “I was born with a beard, my mum was tickled to death.” I note one gag down as a future comeback to any youths making loud speaker-phone calls on the bus: “Talk, talk, talk, that's all you do. I think you must've been vaccinated with a gramophone needle.” I'll enjoy the last words I hear being “what the fuck is a gramophone?” as I lay there getting my head kicked in. Also, in this time period, spaghetti bolognese is such a new and exciting dish, it plays as one of those 'misunderstood word' jokes. “Do you like it?” “Only when it's played by Mantovani.” That said, well into the millennium, spaghetti bolognese, along with pizza and pasta, was still categorised by my grandad as 'foreign muck'.

In another highlight, you know I love a dance troupe named after their choreographer, well, try and top The Lionel Blair Dancers, with young Lionel right alongside kicking and jiving with four ladies, while looking disconcertingly like the sinister doctor from Chris Morris's Jam. Everything takes place on a minimalist stage with a really retro feel – oh right, it's the real past, back when they'd stick one prop lamp post on a empty studio floor and pretend it was a street, and dancing girls jazzed up their routines by holding a sparkler. Annoyingly, a Richard III sketch steals the “Winters of my discontent” line I was going to use to sum up the dreadful nature of what's unfolding, with a massive theme of the series being 'cor, women just nag on all the bleedin' time, don't they?!' say, Bernie in a hospital bed, Mike as his doctor. “How's that pain in the neck?” “She's gone to live with my mother!” Unfortunately, sitting through this lot hasn't exorcised my Bernie Winters demons one blasted bit, even though I've now seen he's capable of slightly more than just feeding his dog then waiting for applause. If anything, it's given me a greater understanding of why Mike pissed off to America so he wouldn't have to see him ever again. Lucky swine.