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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