All together into the Swinging Sixties

The first broadcast of this innovative landmark British television pop show was transmitted live in black and white on August 9, 1963, and there were another 172 programs before they called it a day on December 23, 1966. Each one was shown at 6pm on a Friday evening, allowing “Ready Steady Go!” to claim – and no one seriously disputed it – that “The Weekend Starts Here”. Producer Vicki Wickham recounts that kids could be seen running home to watch.

Youth was indeed grabbing its place in austere 1950s Britain. Post-war food rationing lasted nine years until 1954, television started to become widely available and National Service in the Armed Forces, or conscription, formally ended in December 1960. In 1961 came the birth pill, finally ending Victorian attitudes to sex, with English writer Philip Larkin noting that that “Sexual intercourse began/ in nineteen sixty-three/(Which was rather late for me) – /Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”. And then there was rock’n’ roll, which inspired all those budding singers, guitarists, drummers, keyboardists and more.

Andy Neill got the idea for his book in 2003 and so it has been 17 years in the making. It is a triumph, mostly for those oldies who remember the revolutionary show and but also for those just generally interested in this mightiest of decades.

Previously television music shows had grown out of light entertainment and were put together by grown-ups, with neat singers mostly in the same age bracket. “Ready Steady Go!” bucked the trend completely and it was exciting. Instead of being a glitzy showbiz presentation, here was an au naturel show bereft of frills.

The setting was one cramped studio in the basement of Television House on Kingsway in central London. This was the headquarters of Associated-Rediffusion, the British ITV franchise holder for the London area. The channel was run by blokes who had been in the Royal Navy but when their Head of Entertainment, Elkan Allan, presented the idea of a show with artists mixed in with a dancing/viewing audience, they agreed. You could call it one of those cases of handing the asylum over. In the small studio t olborn, tthe audience was indeed right up close to the performers who, if they had been placed on a small pedestal, learned to share it with the dancing teens. The audience was an important part of the show and there were no barriers between them and the stars. RSG! broke the mold, and bulky cameras could be seen on air pushing through the milling crowd, with teens sometimes accidentally blocking the action.

The timing was perfect, the end of 1963 as the Beatles were exploding and other great new groups (they weren’t called “bands” much yet)  and singers seemed to appear on a weekly basis. “Ready Steady Go!” championed all this emerging talent: the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Searchers, Who, Yardbirds, Brian Poole and the Tremoloes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Manfred Mann, Kinks, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, PJ Proby, Cilla Black and scores more. Donovan was on when he was basically unhead and didn’t even have a recording contract.

Andy Neill conducted more than 100 interviews over the 17 years, from camera technicians upwards. Mick Jagger: “Ready Steady Go! was the best rock’n’ roll TV show of all time. It just seemed more vibrant and real and could, sometimes, be sensational. It was exciting to be on, while the other shows, ’Thank Your Lucky Stars’, ’Top of the Pops’, ’Ed Sullivan’ were more like commercial vehicles, rather than being shows in themselves.”

Georgie Fame: “RSG! was very exciting because it really portrayed what was going on in the clubs whereas there weren’t any other shows that did that. All the bands were actually doing it at the time on the various scenes, whether it was Newcastle, Richmond, Ealing, Soho or wherever, it was all happening like crazy but the media and the record companies weren’t really aware of it. Vicki had her ear to the ground, she visited the clubs and saw what was going on and found a way of actually getting it on television.” .

Ray Davies: “Ready Steady Go! encourged groups and artists to do what they wanted to do, to be themselves without being manufactured… The Kinks’ first-ever TV appearance was on RSG! It was a big deal for us. As a student, I would watch the show with the guys on a Friday night. We’d sit down in front of the black and white telly at my sister’s house because  the show’s catchphrase, ’The Weekend Starts Here’, really applied to our generation.”

John Steel of the Animals: “We came down from Newcastle to London in December 1963 and we were playing the Scene Club in Soho when Vicki and Cathy (presenter Cathy McGowan) saw us. Vicki got us on RSG! once we had our first single out, ’Baby Let Me Take You Home’. There was a nice, easy atmosphere about the show. To us it seemed a fresh and lively way of doing things.”

Pete Townshend of the Who: “ For me RSG! felt like a second home… It was rare to see an artist on the show who didn’t have something very special going on.”

And so on. Indeed, artists who weren’t even on that week would turn up and socialise in the Green Room with those who were. The drinks were free and industry gossip was exchanged. Groups were constantly touring, so it was a great chance to catch up.

Mistakes were tolerated. Burt Bacharach conducted an orchestra through the entire “Always Something There to Remind Me”, looking over his shoulder for singer Sandie Shaw to arrive. She didn’t. She was in the dressing room watching the show go out live on TV. “Well, nobody called me,” she said. “There was so much happening backstage I kind of got involved in that.”

Marianne Faithful was all set to mime “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the top of a staircase but to her great embarrassment the Kinks’ “Long Tall Sally” came blasting through the studio speakers instead. Rod Stewart was drunk on air and fell down a ladder.

“Ready Steady Go!” showed a lot of black American acts for the first time on British TV. It came to define the early 1960s, not just the music but the clothes, hair, makeup, dances. There was an edge but the attitude was fun. Wickham went round the London clubs to find dancers but they didn’t have to be great. It was more important to have a look. If you did, you got a ticket to the next filming. Professionals certainly weren’t required.

McGowan was an everyday girl who didn’t speak the Queen’s English and had no television experience, but she was chosen for the show and became a face of the 1960s youth revolution. It was a magical time to be young.

In 1964 the rival BBC wanted to get in on the act and started “Top of the Pops”, broadcasting it on Thursday evenings to pre-emp RSG!. “Top of the Pops” was based on the singles chart and made inroads into RSG!’s ratings. In 1965 RSG! switched to the much bigger Wembley Studios and went all live with no miming. The move out of central London lost it some of its intimacy.

With the writing on the wall, RSG! presented its last show on December 23, 1966. Tape was expensive and the television company thought rock ’n’ roll was a fad, so all but nine of the 173 shows were wiped.  It is regarded now as a tragedy but that was the practice, at the BBC too. Some of the surviving footage has found its way onto the internet.

And we have Andy Neill’s fabulous book documenting it all: brilliant photos with informative captions, reminiscences and ephemera, newspaper cuttings and magazine articles, legendary performers and has-beens, letters to musicians and a full episode guide, truly “The Definitive Story of the Show that Changed Pop TV”, as it claims.