More than one motherly viewer who has seen her in TV plays has telephoned Ursula Howells to advise her how to get some happiness into her life. She has had to play so many neurotic, ill-treated women, that some viewers have convinced themselves that she must be unhappy in real life!

She is, however, happily married to an industrial consultant; and the only time she gets anywhere near “the mopes” is when his business takes him abroad and she is missing him.

Despite her run of tragic TV parts, she says she is very happily “at home” at Lime Grove. She has worked so much in TV that she finds the job like working among friends. Even the dingy rehearsal rooms she likes, as familiar places, full of the memories of other happy occasions in preparing previous plays.

It was the theatre, however, that gave Ursula her TV debut. That was when a West End theatre production of the play Frieda was taken to the Alexandra Palace studios. To this West End part Ursula had come by dint of hard work in the provinces.

At the time of evacuation in the last war, Herbert Howells, Ursula s famous composer father, decided his daughter had best move from London to Dundee. The girl, hardly out of her teens, began to get back-stage jobs at the local repertory theatre. A chance came for her to start playing parts.

Then the producer Anthony Hawtrey went to Dundee, promoted Ursula to leads, and took her with him when he took over the management of that “shop-window” theatre in London, the Embassy.

Soon Frieda followed, then other West End parts, good supporting roles in films, and a string of TV parts. She went with Patrick Barr and Peter Cushing to Germany with the TV play Portrait of Peko, which the BBC “exported” to the German Radio Show.

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Twenty-four is a grand age for a girl to find her engagement book crammed full, to have a fashionable flat in Mayfair, an expensive car, and as many clothes as she wants. These are the marks of good fortune which have come to Shirley Abicair.

This Australian girl was a university student in Sydney when she started singing at private parties to earn a bit of money towards her educational fees. Accompanying herself on a zither, unearthed in the Abicairs’ musical home, she entered a radio talent contest and won a radio series as a result.

Shirley often talked of her ambition to come to London to storm the BBC. In the end she took the chance, and flew to Britain—stopping twice en route to sing in cabarets in order to earn her fare. Because she looked attractive, a photographer snapped her leaving the plane at London Airport. A BBC sound-radio producer saw the picture in an evening newspaper. He wanted another act for a radio show by Commonwealth artists, and asked Shirley to bring her zither along. Geraldo heard the broadcast, and fixed her a concert date at Bournemouth. He also got her an audition for a new London show.

In the theatre as she took her audition was TV producer Kenneth Carter. Impressed, he gave her the Centre Show date which so memorably made her an instant TV success. Those were the strokes of good fortune which not only enabled Shirley Abicair to streak to the top, but also challenged her to polish her talent and so maintain her position.

So much work has gone into that, as well as into collecting folk songs for her act, that she says she has had no domestic life at all in England yet. In 1954 she sent for her air-hostess cousin, Maureen, to come from Australia and act as her manager. This Maureen did; and the Abicair business, founded on good luck and nerve, looks surely to the future.

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Rare indeed is the artist who can stir the viewing public to enthusiasm by a first appearance. When Sally Barnes came to TV in one of Henry Hall’s Face the Music shows, there was no doubt of the impact she made. Here was good fun with a hint of that pathos which begets affection for a likeable waif. Sally Barnes went straight to the heart.

The BBC, rocking under criticism of its variety shows, leapt at Sally as though she were the answer to a prayer. They gave her a series.

But it was almost as though the pathetic character in her act had now got a hold on her work. That night she had been an undoubted and an all but unparalleled success; but her next TV appearances, having lost the freshness of novelty, seemed to have nothing fine or big enough with which to maintain her talent. Sally is enjoyable viewing at any time; but there is an uneasy feeling about that the fanfare came too soon.

This the twenty-seven-year-old Sally knows. She has been “in the business” since girlhood, and that is long enough to equip her to “take it.” Henry Hall had found her in a seaside show at Scarborough, in 1953. Prior to that she had spent nine years plodding round provincial music halls, and in seaside concert parties — in one of which she met her husband, Bobby Beaumont, an impressionist and straight actor.

Before her TV début, Henry Hall had offered her a contract in his touring stage show, and she had to decline this because she was expecting a baby. The tour was postponed for other reasons, and a month after baby Laura arrived Sally was able to go out with the show.

After her initial TV success her name crept up from the foot of the music-hall bills to the middle, and then to the top. This, TV did for Sally Barnes — and provided the privilege of appearing before the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, when they visited the Lime Grove studios.

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Shustoke is not a bit of nonsense. It names a point on the map of central England where Reg Dixon farms seventy-two acres, with pigs, Ayrshires, and hundreds of chickens. There, too, is Mrs. Dixon, an Austrian by birth and British by adoption, and their six-year-old daughter, Josephine. Reg also has a step-son, Toni, who is going into the hotel-management business.

Reg, the Coventry son of a midwife, went into a butcher’s shop, a carpenter’s, a hairdresser’s, a watchmaker’s, a greengrocer’s, and took a turn as a gentleman’s valet before performing for pay. He started in the entertainment business at a local circus, not intentionally entertaining the public as cleaner of elephants.

For six years he toured the small music-halls as half of a double act, and first broadcast a week after the Abdication of King Edward VIII. Then, playing a music-hall in the North, he had a bad cold one night. He wanted the audience’s sympathy, so when he went on he told them frankly that he was “feeling proper poorly.” He never looked back.

He considers his most nerve-racking experience lasted all of two years —the whole time he appeared in radio’s Variety Bandbox, writing his own scripts for each fortnight’s broadcast.

It was Henry Hall who heard him sing “Confidentially,” and suggested it should be finished — it was only half a song then — and be published. It became a best-seller. Mr. Dixon, albeit, takes TV seriously. He always tries to do something new for the viewers, and refuses to come before them at all regularly. He knows that the TV millions, having seen and heard once, are not going to care so much when they see and hear the same stuff again. He says he won’t be able to appear at all frequently on TV until the BBC buys him four scriptwriters to keep up a constant flow of new material for him. But that would make the BBC feel proper poorly.

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This attractive comedienne with the beautiful voice tells the story of her ascent to stardom in her own way:

“I started in show business when fourteen — and the show was called Hot From Hollywood! It was at the Queen s, Poplar. Imagine what a fat podge I was at that age — with fringe, short socks, and Shirley Temple dress; and I had the nerve to sing Grace Moore’s ‘One Night of Love’

“After that first show I got the push for telling the theatre boss what I thought of him — and of myself. And I didn’t get back into the business until I d swallowed an awful lot of pride. Meanwhile I took jobs in shops — usually sweet-shops, where I could chew as I worked. This did not make me very popular with the shopkeepers. Then I did an audition for Carroll Levis, but he passed me over. Since then we’ve worked on the same bills and often laughed about that audition.

“I went out in a revue called Overnight Success. I wasn’t. But it went on, I going from digs to digs all over the country, until I met my husband. I was now seventeen. The war came, and he went into the Navy. When he had got himself sunk four times, we got married before he had a fifth wetting. He is a solicitor in Lincoln, where our home is.

“I left the stage for four years after getting married. For some reason, when I came back, I got on like a house on fire. But since I got on, I worry more. The old story — ‘It’s tough at the top’ — is very true. Nowadays, while my baby daughter is so young, I spend most of my time in London at Mum’s. Everything is going so wonderfully for me, I can’t believe it’s true — a radio series, TV, Blackpool last summer with Jimmy Edwards, a lovely baby, and good health … I’m paralysing my hands keeping my fingers crossed!”

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Two business men, by chance encounters in their daily work, turned a suburban housewife into a top-line singing star. The housewife was Joan Regan, and the first man to change her life was her bank manager. She told him she loved singing and was really a bit stage-struck.

Among the bank manager’s clients was a theatrical impresario. An introduction was arranged, and Joan went to the impresario’s office and sang. He was impressed enough to have a record made.

Now on to the scene comes the second business man. He was Bernard Delfont, agent and manager of many top variety stars. In the course of business one day, he walked into that impresario’s office.

A record was being played, and a young woman, her back towards him, was listening to it. It was Joan Regan’s one recorded song. Bernard Delfont said: “I like that — who is it?” The impresario said: “Meet the owner of the voice,” and the young woman turned round, and Joan Regan was introduced to Mr. Delfont. As a result, her record was sent to a recording company and Joan was given a contract. She recorded “Till I Waltz with You, Again” and “Sad, Sad Day.”

For months the recording studio was the only studio she knew. But Jack Jackson started playing her records on the radio. They became popular—so popular that Joan became a recording star, a radio broadcaster, and was asked for in America. There she built up a great following, her record of “Till They’ve All Gone Home’’ becoming a best-seller.

When Richard Afton first asked Joan Regan to sing in the Quite Contrary series, she was too far away from town on tour. She entered the series in the second programme. This was her first-ever TV appearance.

Joan Regan is Irish, and twenty-five years of age. She has two growing boys, Danny and Russell.

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The flippant panel shows are popular enough, but it took the educational Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? to send viewers’ appreciation soaring more rapidly than it ever climbed for What’s My Line? This unpredictable occurrence also shot a university archaeologist into the top rank of TV personalities. Nobody was more surprised than Dr. Glyn Daniel, Fellow of St. John s College, Cambridge, and lecturer at the University in archaeology and human geography.

Daniel was one of a number tested for the panel of this programme. They sent for him when they ran short of a chairman for the third edition. The bonhomie and twinkle he brought to that position have also packed in the viewers for his Buried Treasure series.

From Barry, in Glamorgan, Glyn Daniel went as a bright grammar-school boy to undergraduate studies in geography and archaeology at Cambridge. Travelling scholarships took him abroad on excavations, and then followed a research fellowship at Cambridge.

The war found a use for his knowledge, in the job of reading aerial photo-maps. He ran an air-photo unit in India, there meeting a WAAF who is now Mrs. Daniel. They live in a “college house” at Cambridge.

Glyn Daniel has faith in the assumption that Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? has whetted the public’s historical curiosity. His success lies in the fact that he treats it all as a bit of fun—a bit of useful fun.

His personality has had a remarkable impact on viewers. On a railway station in France a Frenchwoman all but embraced him, crying — “Ah — Animaal, Vegetarble, Mineraal!” She had seen the programmes during a holiday in England. When he came off a plane at London Airport a customs official held him back, sure he was a “wanted” man. A senior official was sent for and had to tell the subordinate that this was the face he had seen on TV, and not the one from the Custom’s black list!

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George, with his newspaper and his pipe, struck a new vein of comedy in the none-too-rich TV field. So far he has shared with Norman Wisdom the boon of making only occasional appearances on TV. This is not to say he could not support a regular series; indeed, he did once bring that off. But his popping up only now and then is peculiarly advantageous to his type of inconsequential humour, always refreshing after the normal run of gag-cracking comics.

From the Army town of Aldershot, George and his two brothers made a comedy trio which entertained the troops at home and in Europe. An accident broke up this act, and George returned to engineering work in the local Army workshops. But his heart was on the stage, and his young wife encouraged him to drop all security and really go and have a try to “get it out of his system.”

George took an audition at London’s Windmill Theatre, and, having no money for the fare home after it, spent that night in a bombed building. They had asked him to call back at the Windmill next morning, and when he did so they promised him a trial run there—and gave him £10 to go on with then and there. The Martin act, in those days, was comedy with an accordion and songs. It was Val Parnell, ruler of London’s Palladium, who told George that his originality was in his comedy, and advised him to drop the instrument and most of the singing.

This he did, and when TV sneaked him in one night as a last-minute addition to Music-Hall, George Martin established himself in seven minutes. So much so that music-hall, concert and pantomime appearances have kept him fully engaged ever since. So Mrs. Martin was wrong to think he would get it out of his system, but very right in letting him have his go. With a new house at Aldershot, and a bonny family, she is very pleased she did.

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By adding dancing to her TV appearances, singer Eve Boswell cornered her own bit of the 1954 TV limelight. In fact the dancing was not new to Eve. As a young girl going round the European circuses with her parents — a circus act — she pirouetted and hand-balanced as though born to it. As indeed she had been.

But her voice took on a more dominant role in her grown-up career — until the summer before last, when the dancing feet appealed for attention again. She was in a summer show at Blackpool, and at rehearsal one day was watching the show’s corps de ballet practising. The tune and the movement took her feet into a number of spins and movements, as she waited in the wings. Seeing this, the ballet master challenged Eve to do the same high jinks with the corps de ballet. Doing so. Eve found herself feeling very much at home. So she took a refresher course in dancing.

Hungary is Eve Boswell’s native land, though she was discovered in South Africa, largely as a radio singer. She worked there for some years, and married there at the age of eighteen. Before the war, her parents appeared in their comedy-instrumentalist circus act on TV at Alexandra Palace. Eve, even smaller than now, was with them and passed all but unnoticed.

Circus work took her right across South Africa in circus trains and in a caravan home. When her caravan was parked for the night in a railway siding, a sudden storm struck down some overhead electric cables, which fell on the circus train and set it on fire. Lions and tigers escaped, and one tiger looked in on Eve as he passed by her caravan door. A great deal was lost in the fire, but Eve and her home on wheels escaped. Now she lives in London, in a flat behind the BBC, and goes down to the country to see her young son at his prep school.

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His is the radio voice which, when transferred to TV, revealed that it partnered an appearance quite able to match the handsomeness in the voice-box. For some time Donald Gray had been a frequent actor in radio plays. His broadcasts in this sphere were somewhat confined to villainy, because the BBC radio producers seemed to think the “deep-brown’’ voice more suited to that than to heroics.

Donald was in fact in the BBC Drama Repertory Company for three years. He then took the usual series of tests for TV announcing, followed by a trial on the screen as a guest announcer. He is now a regular relief announcer, whose early hesitancies have consolidated into a personable manner very human in appeal, and in nice contrast to the personality of McDonald Hobley.

He was born in South Africa, and began work there, not in the theatre but on an ostrich farm. His acting urge brought him to Britain, where there are more stage opportunities. He worked with a number of repertory theatres, and then got into films. The war interrupted this, and in 1944, in a fierce action during the advance on Falaise, he lost his left arm.

When he afterwards starred with Linda Darnell in the film Saturday Island, the script was adapted to take account of his one-armed-ness. At Lime Grove they tell a human story of his announcing test. There were other candidates there, nervy in a suspense-taut studio. The studio manager, to put them at their ease, asked each in turn to relate some happening in his life. Simply and straightforwardly, without heroics or pathos, Donald told how he lost the arm. The tension in the studio vanished, leaving instead a sense of comradeship and inspiration which was helpful to all.

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A flair for conjuring, when he was a schoolboy, led David Nixon to the music-hall stage. This in turn led him to occasional TV appearances. But it was determination to get further on, and win headline fame, which got him into What’s My Line?

Every other Sunday, in the TV Theatre at Shepherd’s Bush, there is an audition for would-be What’s My Line? panellists. Here unknown actresses, fashion models, writers, journalists, and amateur comics mix with famous actors, actresses, and novelists to have a go on a dummy What’s My Line? show, while producer Dicky Leeman watches to see if any of them show enough promise to get on the reserve list for the real panel.

David Nixon went all out to get one of these audition tests. With charming persistence he worried Dicky Leeman into it. He took the test, and went down on the reserve list, very near the top. Months passed. Then, when Jerry Desmonde had to leave the panel, Leeman put David in. His success there has bolstered his stage conjuring career and made him a certain ace in the coming shuffle for TV fame which commercial TV will stir up. It has meant a brighter and more secure future for David and his wife Paula, who is a singer, and with whom he has played in pantomime.

Yet this break is the ultimate sequel to another one—save the pun, a break in his leg. For it was when he broke his leg as a Boy Scout and was unable to take the part allotted to him in a Scout concert, that his father bought him some billiard balls and suggested that he should mock up a bit of conjuring. “You can stand still, doing that,” he said. Today, standing still is the last thing to interest David Nixon.

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When, after two studio tests, the BBC appointed Avis Scott a relief announcer, the success put her in a quandary. As an actress, she was due to play the feminine lead in the Norman Wooland TV serial, The Dancing Bear. As an actress, too, she had reaped some success on the London stage and in such films as Waterfront — appearing with Richard Burton and Robert Newton.

But she had asked for the TV announcing tests because stage and film work had lapsed so seriously that she had been earning her keep as a waitress. Miss Scott went into the TV studio as a relief announcer realizing that she would not be able to play in the TV serial, but hopeful that appearances on the screen would jog the memory of the film and theatre managements about her talents.

Her first spell of announcing duty did just this. She was offered two film parts. But again there was that twist of fate, for her success at announcing brought her a second announcing spell — and the dates of this clashed with the offered film work. So that she had to decline, too.

A great deal of publicity fell at Avis Scott’s feet as a result of her TV appearances. She was called “this wide-eyed zany” and “that delightful forgetter of lines.” Certainly her unorthodox announcing method introduced variety into this familiar field of TV action—and even opened up new possibilities. But, ideally. Miss Scott would rather work as an actress —in TV, on the films, and on the stage—and take a turn at relief announcing at Lime Grove only once or twice a year.

That might be the perfect life. So rarely is life perfect. And this she knows only too well.

Avis Scott is the daughter of a country rector, is thirty-one, and unmarried.

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