The description “special” is overused in television schedules; Stanley Baxter’s programmes justify it. The comedian is one of the few stars whose reputation rests on a handful of astonishing one-offs – standalone comic extravaganzas screened in the 1970s and 1980s, first by ITV’s London Weekend Television and then the BBC.
In both cases, the networks ended their associations with Baxter not because of lack of audience interest – at their peak, the shows reached more than 20 million viewers – but due to the colossal costs demanded by the performer’s vast and perfectionist visual ambition. One of Baxter’s favourite conceits was to re-create, in witty pastiche, scenes from big-budget Hollywood movies that made it look as if his versions had also spent millions of dollars.
Cashflow was further stretched by the fact that Baxter played multiple roles – 18 of them in one sketch. Recent digital technology has made such multiplications relatively easy, but at the time Baxter was sharing a screen with several selves, primitive image-mixing technology left a giveaway outline – like the chalk marks homicide cops put around a corpse on the sidewalk – when scenes recorded at different times were merged together.
To avoid this, Baxter built up his multicharacter spectaculars moment by moment, often spending hours in costume and makeup between two lines of dialogue. Back views of doubles had to be carefully positioned in shot to produce the illusion that he was in conversation with others. Whereas most comedians – even the equally ambitious and meticulous Morecambe and Wise – routinely made a Christmas show in addition to a series of weekly episodes, Baxter would spend a year working on his.
Baxter’s performing fortune lay in two body parts: his ear and his legs. He was a precision mimic of celebrity and everyday voices, a skill that began, he told interviewers, when, as a child in Glasgow, he noticed the spectrum of Scottish accents, from a posh mock-Anglo to a patois so thick that it could sound initially to outsiders like Italian. The latter twang later inspired one of his most popular sketches, “Parliamo Glasgow”, a perfect showcase for his vocal virtuosity, in which a host with clipped BBC English “translated” densely Glaswegian sentences, such as the warning from a female to a male acquaintance that he was becoming overfamiliar by touching her buttocks: “Takyurhonaffmabum.”
As well as his exceptional listening, Baxter was also lucky with his limbs. Not only could he do impressions with them as well – never having learned to tap-dance, he made it look as he had by copying the trained – but they had the ideal dimensions for someone frequently required to play female characters.
A surprise to those rewatching TV comedy from the 1960s to 1980s is the prevalence of drag acting. This was largely necessity. Because almost all star comedians were male but their material often involved marriage and/or misogyny, light entertainment resembled an all-boys school trying to put on a production of The Trojan Women. But, whereas frequent cross-dressers such as Les Dawson, Dick Emery and Terry Jones were built to play somewhat squat matriarchs, Baxter had calves and ankles of such unusual shapeliness for a man that he could plausibly portray superstar actresses of the Hollywood golden age. When he portrayed Fred Astaire, he could also play his dance partner, Ginger Rogers.
In a 2019 Channel 5 profile in the Comedy National Treasures strand, the then 93-year-old Baxter explained that he did detailed impressions of Hollywood legends before knowing who they were. His mother, who had been prevented from becoming an actor by parents who believed that the profession was a euphemism for prostitution, trained Stanley from a very young age to entertain relatives and friends with versions of her favourite chanteuses, such as Marlene Dietrich and Gracie Fields. As her son had never seen nor heard the originals, she would do impersonations for him, from which he would create his own version. In retrospect, this was another key stage in the development of his exceptional ability to re-create cinematic scenes.
He was a well-read man, his London flat filled with well-used books, and a notable feature of his shows was that they trusted the mass audience to enjoy collisions of high and low culture. Wouldn’t it be funny if the classical actor Sir John Gielgud presented the light entertainment show The Generation Game? Another speciality was to mash two franchises, so that a Michael Crawford sitcom and a sub-aquatic nature show became Jacques Cousteau Presents Some Mammals Do Ave ’Em. There were also extended spoofs of Dallas and Upstairs, Downstairs, and a spoof of the Queen’s Christmas message, with Baxter in regal drag, which prompted outrage in parliament and middle-market papers.
Born in 1926, Baxter came to showbiz partly through a narrow route specific to men of his age, serving in the Ensa (Entertainments National Service Association), which was set up in 1939 to provide entertainment for soldiers, sailors and airmen serving overseas, provided by colleagues with theatrical or musical ambitions. Its early recruits included three people who became significant in television: the comic magician Tommy Cooper and the writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft, whose greasepaint war service informed one of their sitcoms, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81).
A teenager in his native Glasgow during the second world war, Baxter joined the troops’ troupe during national service in postwar, pre-independence Burma and Singapore.
Ensa’s acronym was mocked as Every Night Something Awful, but Baxter’s pack included others with a significant showbiz future: comedian Kenneth Williams, film director John Schlesinger and playwright Peter Nichols, who comically fictionalised their experiences in the play and film Privates on Parade. Two frequent styles for the uniformed performers, parody and cross-dressing, became Baxter’s signature strengths.
However, while other broadcasting stars of his era had their first professional exposure in music hall theatre (including Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, Ken Dodd, Clive Dunn, Bruce Forsyth, Max Bygraves), Baxter is relatively unusual in having been discovered when young by broadcasting, then in its own infancy. His mother having achieved her ambition of turning him into a child prodigy, he came, in the 1930s, to the attention of Children’s Hour, an early BBC radio series, the Scottish edition of which was presented by “Auntie Kathleen”.
In the early 1960s, Baxter appeared in a run of British movie comedies – Crooks Anonymous, The Fast Lady, and Father Came Too! – and briefly seemed destined to become a disguise-master movie actor, in the manner of Peter Sellers. However, cinematically, Baxter’s greater talent was for caricature, rather than whole-cloth creation, and he found his happiest outlet as the comedian who brought the big screen to the small screen at one remove.
The titles of early specials, such as The Stanley Baxter Big Picture Show and The Stanley Baxter Moving Picture Show, acknowledged his cinematic inspiration though their use of “picture”, as cinema was called in his era. His most ambitious sketches included shot-by-shot re-creations of scenes from movies such as Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, with the twist that all the personnel were Baxter impersonations.
It helped that the weekend schedules in which his breakthrough work appeared featured movies in peak time, in a way that would later be restricted to major religious or banking holidays. The first edition of The Stanley Baxter Picture Show (a series of 30-minute episodes), when it played on LWT at 9.30pm in 1972, immediately followed a Sunday night screening of the 1941 western Belle Starr, starring Randolph Scott. So, while many of the sketches drew on a cinematic literacy that Baxter had possessed since childhood, he could also assume that viewers would get the references.
While classic movies were his initial fuel, parodies of TV drove the later shows, a shift recognised in the double-meaning titles of Stanley Baxter on Television, and Christmas Box.
Baxter was an intellectually inquisitive, well-read man, who spent his final years quietly and alone, described in profiles as a “widower” after the death, in 1997, of his wife, Moira. However, in November 2020, aged 94, he agreed to the publication of The Real Stanley Baxter, a biography by Brian Beacom that he had previously stipulated should only appear posthumously. The book disclosed that Baxter, who had always known he was homosexual, had wed Moira, against his instincts, following societal and showbiz fashion. The marriage had been a disaster, and the couple had lived separate lives, including, for Stanley, many gay relationships.
This publication, from such a private man, felt like a brave final accounting, and had the effect of focusing attention – in his final years – on his work, rather than delayed private revelations.
The people who never found Baxter’s TV shows funny were the accountants at LWT and the BBC, who, at both networks, ultimately declared the productions unjustifiable. Retired by TV, he returned – after a period of exile – to radio, which thus came to frame his career in a way Baxter found artistically satisfying but financially dismaying, joking that “Radio is all work and no pay.”
First commissioned to mark his attaining octogenarian status, The Stanley Baxter Playhouse developed into a regular series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from 2006 to 2016, in which Baxter and another actor (including Richard Briers and Geoffrey Palmer) performed two-hander dramas. It was a perfect final platform for a performer so vocally adept.
Although greatly admired by younger TV stars who had grown up watching him – such as the impressionist Rory Bremner – Stanley Baxter had, unlike most great performers, no later imitators. This was partly because no network could have found the budgets, but also because there has been nobody since with such impressive ears and legs. Each of his best shows was genuinely a special.
