The 200th edition of Twenty Questions with Jack Train, Joy Adamson and Anona Winn
Richard Dimbleby’s other great radio programme was Twenty Questions, a game in which he could use his very quick intelligence to amuse a huge mass audience. He always recognised that broadcasts must be entertaining and he never lost his flair for showmanship. He stayed on Twenty Questions for eighteen years, with Gilbert Harding and then Kenneth Horne as chairmen, and Anona Winn, Joy Adamson and Jack Train as the other regular members of the team. Mike Meehan, for long the producer of Twenty Questions, recalls:
I remember one evening, while we waited for the programme to start, Jack Train, a past master in story telling, turned to Richard and said, ‘I don’t know whether I’ve told you this one before.’ ‘Is it funny?’ asked Richard. ‘Yes,’ replied Jack. “Then,’ retorted Richard, ‘I haven’t heard it!’
During one programme, when the chairman was the late Gilbert Harding, Richard sat quietly, while the other members of the team talked over one another in trying to ‘find’ the object. Gilbert, annoyed by their chatter, called a halt, turned to Richard and said, ‘You’re very quiet, Richard.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Richard, ‘I’m just waiting for the others to wear themselves out.’
Once when we were discussing the different ways the team members played Twenty Questions, Anona Winn confessed to hating ‘abstracts’ because, she said, ‘I have a photographic mind, and like to snatch a clue that flashes a picture of something tangible in my mind’s eye.’ Later that evening her ‘solo’ was ‘The missing arms of Venus’. She, as usual in her solos, got it eventually. Richard promptly asked, ‘Well, what did your mind’s eye see then? Venus or her arms?’
And Anona Winn herself adds:
I remember the evening when Richard’s ‘solo’ was ‘a weighing machine’. I think he had an idea of this, early in his questioning, but he went on in a mischievous vein with: ‘Is it used by men and women?’ ‘Is it publicly owned as well as privately?’ ‘Does one pay to use it?’ ‘How much?’
When the answer to his last question turned out to be ‘a penny’, Richard sighed an enormous sad sigh and said, ‘Ah well, I’ve enjoyed the years I’ve had with the BBC.’
It got an enormous laugh from the audience, who had been rocking all through the questioning.
Kenneth Horne writes:
We all had tremendous admiration for him. He was unselfish to a degree, especially in the actual game of Twenty Questions. But what impressed me was the fact that he never tried to show anyone up. Many a time I have given an answer which he knew to be wrong, but he thought it a poor show to correct ‘The Chairman’.
During the three or four years that we knew he was ill (he told us), he always appeared in the best of spirits, and indeed he looked well too.
Never pompous – never.
Norman Hackforth, for many years the ‘Mystery Voice’ of Twenty Questions, became one of Richard Dimbleby’s closest friends, and took his place in the team for the 1965 series. He recalls an incident which had nothing to do with the panel game:
In January 1955 I was in Jamaica, playing an engagement at a hotel on the north shore. My wife was at that moment on the high seas, on a small banana boat on her way to join me.
At 7 o’clock one morning my telephone rang, and a voice asked if I would be ready at eight o’clock to take a call from London from Mr Richard Dimbleby.
I told them I would, and then proceeded to work myself into a fever of anxiety, wondering why on earth Richard should be telephoning me all the way from London. By 7.30 I was firmly convinced that something ghastly had happened to Pamela, and that Richard, my loyal friend, had said: ‘Leave it to me. I will break the news to him.’ The minutes dragged by and at last, at nearly 8.15, the phone rang again.
‘Hackett?’ a cheerful and familiar voice enquired, ‘this is Dimbleby.’ ‘Yes, Dick,’ I replied. ‘What has happened? Where are you?’ ‘Oh, I’m at London Airport, covering the departure of Princess Margaret to Jamaica, for television. I just thought it would be a good idea to find out from you how the weather is there.’
I looked out of the window, and burst out laughing. ‘If you really want to know,’ I said, ‘it’s – hissing with rain!’ And it was, too!
Just another instance of the master’s passion for authentic detail.
Alongside Twenty Questions and Down Your Way Dimbleby was doing more and more work for the expanding television service. He turned his versatile hand to all kinds of broadcasts commentaries on the Lord Mayor’s Show and the Boat Race, ‘Other People’s Jobs’, visits to the Zoo and to many other parts of ‘London Town’ or places ‘About Britain’. Those were the days before either a daily television news service or Panorama.
I first met Richard in 1951. We were both going to the Festival of Britain, I for the BBC’s Picture Page, he for another television programme. I had lost my BBC staff pass. Richard said, ‘Find some piece of paper and wave it about’. I happened to have been working on papers about the Great Exhibition of 1851 and had in my pocket an entry pass to that exhibition of a century before. Following Richard’s advice I shoved it in my wallet and used it for several days to enter the Festival with no one noticing.
Shortly afterwards, Stephen McCormack enlisted me to join George Moresby White as co-writer of London Town, already a top rating 45-minute television magazine about the world’s greatest city.
The mercurial McCormack, loyalist, royalist, empiricist, humorist, was the ideal mentor, foil and friend for the incredibly busy Dimbleby, who was juggling his diary with Down Your Way, Twenty Questions and much more.
London Town was, in the best of all possible senses, the product of a team – Richard Dimbleby himself, a producer studio director, a film director, two writers, and a production secretary. Looking back, and when I consider how technically difficult it was (at the time), it now amazes me how much one has to pay these days for sledge-hammers to crack peanuts. Richard earned peanuts for what he did, and so, in fact, did we. No matter: it was tremendous fun. Richard always treated us as professionals, and so did Stephen McCormack, and in this way we learned our trade.
The areas we covered together were enormous. I imagine some people remember London Town, with its four or five items, covering such diversities as Lloyd’s, the College of Arms, the sewers, the dustmen, Greenwich and Of Alley (that oddly named street called after the Duke of Buckingham), Smithfield and Billingsgate, St Bride’s and the Tower of London. The brief was to produce a programme about London which would interest the London audience. There was no great social content. We didn’t knock anyone; we merely tried to find out how they ticked.
In time, and as BBC television network away from London expanded, London Town became About Britain.
Stephen Hearst joined me as co-writer for Richard and we went through the team process all over the country. Later we wrote for him in Malta and Vienna before the team broke up.
The machinery was this. McCormack would come with us on reconnaissance to a given area – Wales, Skye, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Ulster. In co-operation with the BBC Sound experts we would construct a script. This started as a film shooting-script, which was handed over to John Rhodes. Whilst Rhodes was filming McCormack and Dimbleby on the spot, Hearst and I would be working up the studio sequences. The machinery was such that filmed shots could be matched with studio sets on back projection.
When it came to the ‘live’ show much, and indeed all, depended on the professional rapport between Richard and Stephen McCormack. The show was usually studio-based, which meant that Richard had to rehearse and master his exact cues into film, and his moves left to right, right to left. He was dealing on the studio floor with participants who had no experience of marks and moves and telecine. Together with McCormack, he had the knack of putting people at their ease. Hearst and I often wrote the most complicated moves and cuts for him, from film to studio, from set to set across the studio. So far as I can recall he never got one wrong.
Hearst and I were usually up in the production gallery for transmission, standing behind McCormack. He took our badgering with the humour and calm which characterises him. I remember one time when an essential camera failed, McCormack simply said ‘good’ and pressed on. On the studio floor Dimbleby got the message and reacted as if nothing had happened.
He never queried anything we wrote for him unless it didn’t square with his particular view of the world. He would reject anything he thought snide or sour in the commentaries which we used to write for him overnight and sometimes only just before he recorded. I once suggested that he should say that a particular place in Wales was ‘ugly’. This he couldn’t take and asked for my co-operation in saying that ‘X is not the prettiest town I have seen’. A professional without malice is a rare bird.
In 1955 Independent Television started, and both Stephen McCormack and Peter Hunt went off to join its ranks. Richard Dimbleby received many tempting offers from the commercial companies to go over to them: he always refused, never asking the BBC even for a guarantee contract. He was a freelance who wished to broadcast only for the BBC, for fees which were agreed and regularly revised without acrimony.
He was naturally used for all the great state outside broadcasts, but one of his reasons for deciding to stay on the BBC side of the fence (apart from a profound belief in public service broadcasting) was his personal satisfaction that he had at last achieved a weekly current affairs programme in which his past experience in news and his wide knowledge of other countries could be regularly used to proper effect.
Unknown to viewers and to most of his colleagues, from 1960 for over five years Richard Dimbleby lived with cancer. His doctors and family helped the ‘Daily Mail’ to reconstruct those five years to show how living with cancer need not be impossible:
It was early in 1960 when Richard Dimbleby first noticed he had a swelling. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t painful and he was a busy man.
Monday was a fourteen-hour day working on Panorama. Tuesday was spent at Richmond with his newspapers until the evening, when he did a Twenty Questions broadcast. Wednesday was spent working at home. Thursday and Friday he was at Richmond again, working on his newspapers.
Often he was out all day Saturday on extra jobs. He ran two film companies producing industrial films.
Richard Dimbleby was a very busy man. He ignored the swelling.
But by August 1960 the swelling had increased considerably though it still gave no pain. Dimbleby thought it best to go to his local doctor.
His doctor examined him and was in no doubt what was wrong. As he looked out of the window, wondering how best to break the news, Dimbleby said to him: ‘You needn’t tell me what it is. I know.’
Richard Dimbleby’s family and his doctors have made available the history of his case to help combat the general fear and ignorance of the disease. Many doctors believe the fight against cancer is being frustrated by the public’s treatment of it as a ‘taboo’ subject.
This is the story of five salvaged years; of what a man can achieve despite the disease; of how fear, even in a very bad case, can be overcome.
Richard Dimbleby went into St Thomas’s Hospital, London, on 15 August 1960, and was operated on the following day. The chances in favour of a complete cure at that moment were four to one – provided the original growth had not started to spread.
After the surgeon had removed the lump Dimbleby was examined carefully. He was a big man – 18 st. 7 lb. at the time – and the urologist on the case, Mr Ronald Robinson, found it difficult to feel anything under the fat of the abdomen.
But, under an anaesthetic, a mass was felt to the right side of his abdomen. The original cancer had already spread along the lymphatic glands to a new site.
The doctors decided to tackle the secondary growth with a five-week course of radiotherapy. The course of treatment began on 1 September at St Thomas’s, under Dr Ian Churchill-Davidson. Massive destructive doses of X-rays were directed at Dimbleby’s abdomen five times a week.
Five days after the treatment began Richard Dimbleby was on television to introduce a new series of Panorama. The following day he was on the radio, chairing Twenty Questions.
The affected glands shrank. On 3 October Dimbleby went in for his last dose of radiotherapy treatment after appearing on that night’s edition of Panorama. The second round in the battle seemed to have been won.
Leaving hospital for Twenty Questions after first operation for cancer, 23 August 1960
By this time the disease had become Dimbleby’s special subject. He was learning all he could about it. He arranged to see demonstrations of the machines used in treatment. He listened to all the theories about what caused cancer and discussed cancer research in detail.
His interest was insatiable. After the final treatment Dimbleby went off for a drink with a few of the hospital staff – it had become a custom and they went either to the local pub or the staff canteen – to talk some more about cancer.
The next day he was back at work at the newspapers in Richmond and he remained well and fit in every respect for the next nineteen months.
From time to time Dimbleby revisited St Thomas’s for detailed examinations – all aimed at detecting the first signs of any new growths.
He was able to work at his normal pace. In early November 1960 he went to America for Panorama, came back in time for the Festival of Remembrance Service and the Cenotaph outside broadcast for television; in December he covered the royal wedding in Brussels; in April 1961 he went to Moscow; in May he went to Rome and Naples to cover the Queen’s visit.
It was on 2 May 1962 that Dimbleby complained of a dull ache in the upper reaches of the back. He went into St Thomas’s, where the radiographs revealed that the glands were enlarged alongside the vertebrae and in the structure that stands between the lungs.
Another course of radiotherapy began. On 2 May and 5 May both areas were given radiotherapy treatment. On 7 May Dimbleby was on television as usual introducing Panorama. On 9 May he was back for another dose of radiation.
Once again the glands that appeared to be affected by cancer reverted to their former size.
The pattern of Dimbleby’s life continued uninterrupted. Before the end of the month he was in Sweden for a special edition of Panorama. He covered the Trooping the Colour ceremony, the Middlesbrough byelection, the first Telstar broadcast, King Olav’s visit to Scotland and the funeral of Queen Wilhelmina. For nine whole months he remained free of trouble.
However, in March 1963 Dimbleby began to have pain in the lower portion of the back when he was standing a lot. X-rays showed growths in the second and third lumbar (loin) vertebrae, and a further abdominal examination under a general anaesthetic on 14 March showed a recurrence of the enlargement of the glands in the earlier site in the belly.
Between 15 March and 29 March the abdomen was treated with radiotherapy, though the treatment did not prevent Dimbleby appearing as usual in his chair in Panorama.
During this period of treatment Dimbleby was given a general anaesthetic each time to reduce the risk of radiation sickness which might have resulted from the concentrated dose of radiation.
It was usual for Dimbleby to have his radiotherapy treatment on Friday evenings whenever possible. This gave him the weekend to rest in – radiotherapy treatment may have a temporary weakening effect on some patients – before Monday’s exhausting day on Panorama.
He had by now become adept at his own diagnosis. When he felt a pain he was always able to work out how the cancer had travelled from the last known site to attack the new area. Each time the doctors only confirmed his own diagnosis.
In this way, by taking a deep interest in what was happening to him, Dimbleby was coming to terms with his illness.
Dimbleby had already undergone two of the main types of treatment for cancer – radiotherapy and surgery. The third main method – hormone treatment – is mostly used in treating cancer of the breast. All these forms of treatment have advanced substantially in the past decade.
Surgery: If the growth is visible, accessible and reasonably circumscribed, it can be cut out. The great forward strides in the techniques of surgery and the use of antibiotics, transfusions and better anaesthetics have made success possible in operations that could not be attempted ten years ago.
Radiation: Certain forms of radiation cause cancer, making groups of body cells behave in the erratic way that is the characteristic of cancer. But massive doses of radiation destroy the imbalanced cells, curing the cancerous growth.
Many of the enormous machines now used in radiography rotate about the patient so that the target is always being hit from a different angle, in order to spare the skin and healthy tissues in the track of the beam. The patient feels nothing during treatment, needs only to rest for a while afterwards.
By the time of the third spell of treatment Dimbleby had been living with a particularly virulent form of cancer for three years. According to the mythology of cancer he should have been dead long before or, at least, in great agony.
In fact, at this stage, it was still possible Dimbleby might be completely cured.
Radiation and surgery techniques have developed to the point where much pain can be relieved, even when growths are too widespread or advanced to be cured. When enlarged glands, for instance, start pressing on sensory nerves, they can be irradiated sufficiently to dispel pain if not to cure.
From March 1963 until January 1965 Dimbleby had no sign that he was not free of the disease.
He went about his business with great vigour. In that period he covered Princess Alexandra’s wedding, the State visit of the King of the Belgians, the lying-in-state of Pope John, President Kennedy’s visit to Germany, the Coronation of Pope Paul, the State visit of the King of Greece, the service at Westminster Abbey for the death of President Kennedy, the Pope’s visit to Israel, special editions of Panorama from Paris and Germany, from Canada and Luxembourg, the opening of the Forth Bridge, the American election.
But in January 1965 Dimbleby began to get pains in the lower part of his back and numbness in his right flank. Radiographs showed that the eleventh and twelfth dorsal vertebrae had collapsed through destruction by secondary growths.
Between 15 January and 9 February he was given three sessions of radiotherapy, which relieved the pain. Also between 15 January and 9 February he appeared each Monday on Panorama, covered Churchill’s lying-in-state and the State funeral, and appeared in a number of programmes of reminiscences about Churchill.
Despite Dimbleby’s refusal to give in or to ease the pressure of his work through the next six months, this period was in fact the beginning of the end. The occurrence of growths was beginning to accelerate. Further secondaries were found in his diaphragm, his back and ribs.
Yet, an incident in the summer of 1965 shows that even at that late stage Dimbleby found the disease neither physically intolerable nor nerve-racking. He went off on his summer holiday feeling, as he said, ‘as fit as a fiddle’.
The Dimbleby family together with Churchill-Davidson, now a close friend, went boating in Devon.
One day off Dartmouth they ran into a nasty storm. It was a fearful moment – for the doctor.
Churchill-Davidson had already warned Dimbleby to be careful of falling while his spine was still in a weak condition. A fall could have meant instant paralysis.
David Dimbleby turned the boat into the 8 ft waves to avoid being swamped, but it was lifting sickeningly over them, then slapping hard down into the troughs between them. Richard Dimbleby stood in the wheelhouse, holding the rail, riding the waves on his tiptoes. And behind him, Churchill-Davidson’s face turned white.
As the boat lifted up and down, Dimbleby nudged his son, indicated the anxious doctor and winked.
When they got into harbour Dimbleby apologised to Churchill-Davidson for the rough ride he’d been given and said he was sorry if he’d been made seasick.
‘I wasn’t sick,’ replied Churchill-Davidson, ‘I was just worried about you. But if your back can stand that it can stand anything. I shouldn’t worry about falling any more.’
