There are very few comedy performers who have made the transition from straight man to funny man. But Jack Douglas, who enlivened many a 1970s Carry On with his twitchy jittery Alf Ippititimus, is a notable exception.
When TV producer Johnny Downes launched Crackerjack (BBC television’s first children’s variety show) way
back in 1955, he was on the lookout for a resident comedy act to support the
show’s host Eamonn Andrews. Eamonn took
care of all the games, including Double
or Drop, an idea of his own, where correct answers were awarded with
armfuls of prizes while wrong answers or dropped prizes were punished with a cabbage.
For the show’s comedy content, Johnny Downes took a gamble on
a variety double-act that had trod the boards for a few years but had little
television exposure – Joe Baker and Jack Douglas. They were the perfect comedy combination,
short fat Joe and tall thin Jack, but it was only by sheer chance that the two
ever got together.
Jack Douglas was following his father’s footsteps, putting on
theatre shows and pantomimes. He had
cast Joe Baker as the Mate in Dick
Whittington, but the comic
playing the Captain took ill just before opening night. Jack, being the only one who knew the lines,
stepped in. A showbiz agent who was in
the audience signed them up immediately after the show. When he asked them how long they’d been a
double-act, Jack glanced at his watch.
‘About two hours and twenty minutes.’
While researching for my book – It’s Friday, it’s Crackerjack – I was very lucky to meet Alan
Fenton, who had not only been a Crackerjack
scriptwriter, he had also written sketches for Jack and Joe. Alan described their onstage relationship to
me:
Jack
Douglas was this big tall fellow, thick face, and he loved saying things like,
‘I’ll smash your face in.’ Joe Baker was much shorter, very fat, not the
most elegant in his manners, but he was
funny. They were wonderful in cowboy
sketches. Jack Douglas was the sort of man who kicked the doors open to come in and
threatened everybody – and Joe would be
cowering in a corner.
Jack and Joe were
required to come up with a new comedy sketch for each episode of Crackerjack, to be performed live to an
audience of children at the BBC Television Theatre (formerly the Shepherds Bush
Empire). This was in the mid-50s, when Television
Centre had yet to be built – though the Television Theatre continued to be the
home of Crackerjack throughout its
run until the very last show in 1984.
The scriptwriter was
Bill Douglas, Jack’s brother, who would go on to have a long career as a
theatre producer and writer under his real name of Bill Roberton. But, in fact, the scripting was something of
an afterthought. The sketches were
devised through improvisation and it was Bill’s job to make some scripted order
out of the creative chaos.
Although the straight
man of a double-act is often called the stooge, this wasn’t the case with Jack
and Joe. They were both idiots, but Jack
was the slightly smarter of the two. In
fact, if anyone was the stooge, it was the third member of the team, a
crotchety old man called Mr Grumble. He
was never credited under his real name, which was actually Joe Baker. Just as Jack Douglas came from a dynasty of
theatre producers, Joe Baker’s parents had been a variety double-act themselves,
and Mr Grumble was Joe Baker’s dad.
The sketches they did
for Crackerjack were mad, manic and
messy. It was one of few BBC children’s
shows that had no educational pretentions.
Eamonn said of the show’s origins, ‘All the important things were catered for, and it was our job to find
something unimportant.’ In the first show Jack and Joe attempted to
bake a cake. In later episodes they
built a brick wall, reopened a derelict railway station and went to the
seaside. Whatever the premise, there was
slapstick galore and Mr Grumble usually came off worse.
Every show ended with an
explosion, when Jack and Joe (dressed as mischievous schoolboys) would hand a
suspicious package to Eamonn. In the
first show, Eamonn emerged from a cloud of smoke with a blackened face to say
goodbye. In the final show of the series
he sent the package-bearers up to the production gallery and the whole theatre
exploded. Yes, the early days of Crackerjack were one huge orgy of
slapstick, anarchy and arson.
Jack Douglas and Joe
Baker returned the following year for another series of Crackerjack when there was a slightly different approach to their
sketches. Instead of a domestic setting for
the custard-pie capers, there was a vast array of historical events – The
Norman Conquest, The Great Fire of London, The Spanish Armada. Obviously this wasn’t a total change of
style. You couldn’t possibly do a sketch
set on a ship where somebody didn’t end up drenched with bucketloads of water. Slapstick and historical parody proved to be
the archetypal ingredients of every Crackerjack
sketch, and both elements were introduced during Jack Douglas and Joe
Baker’s time on the show.
After Jack and Joe
left, the physical contrast between straight man and funny man was perpetuated
when Ronnie Corbett, another television newcomer, was paired with three
different stooges over three series.
Then, after that, everything changed.
The short fat guy was now Peter Glaze, who became a permanent fixture for
nearly twenty years. But Peter was the
stooge. And so the tall one became the
comic – first Leslie Crowther, then Rod McLennan, then Don Maclean and finally
Bernie Clifton.
And Jack Douglas’s own
transformation from stooge to comic was also under way. The character of Alf had briefly twitched
into life during a theatrical performance, when Jack was playing a magician and
Joe was supposed to be a ‘volunteer’ from the audience. One night Joe was late making his entrance,
so Jack adlibbed a few comic convulsions, scattering the props over the stage,
and buying himself valuable time while he picked them all up again.
In 1961, Joe Baker
decided to go solo. For a while Jack
Douglas quit the business to run a restaurant.
But then he was persuaded to form a new double-act, with Des O’Connor as
the feed and Jack (or rather Alf) as the comic.
Although it is Alf who we mainly see in the Carry On movies, it’s possible to sample Jack’s considerable versatility
(both as comic and stooge) in the many Carry
On television spin-offs.
Alan Stafford is the author of It’s Friday, It’s Crackerjack – the inside story of a teatime TV
classic – available in hardback from Fantom Publishing. https://www.fantompublishing.co.uk/product/crackerjack/
It’s also available online
or can be ordered from any bookshop.
(Photo of Jack Douglas
and Joe Baker courtesy of David Bryceson)
You can follow me on Twitter @CarryOnJoan and on Instagram
You can follow me on Twitter @CarryOnJoan and on Instagram
