Till Death Us Do Part

The series became an instant hit because, although a comedy, in the context of its time it dealt with aspects of working-class life comparatively realistically. It addressed racial and political issues that had been becoming increasingly prevalent in British society. Mitchell imbued the character of Alf Garnett with an earthy charm that served to humanise Alf and make him likeable. According to interviews he gave, the fact that some viewers overlooked Alf's racist views and regarded him as a "rough diamond" disappointed Speight.[3]

Warren Mitchell, who played Alf Garnett in the series

The show captured a key feature of Britain in the 1960s — the public perception that the generation gap was widening. Alf, and to a lesser degree his wife, represented the old guard, the traditional and conservative attitudes of the older generation. Alf's battles with his left-wing son-in-law were not just ideological but generational and cultural. His son-in-law and daughter represented the younger generation. They supported the aspects of the new era, such as relaxed sexual norms, fashions, music, etc. The same things were anathema to Alf and in his opinion indicative of everything that was wrong with the younger generation and the liberal attitudes they embraced.

Alf was portrayed as the archetypal working-class Conservative. His two primary passions were football and politics, though his actual knowledge of either was limited. He used language considered unacceptable for television in the 1960s. He often referred to racial minorities as "coons" and similar terms. He referred to his Liverpudlian son-in-law as "Shirley Temple" or a "randy Scouse git" ("Randy Scouse Git", as a phrase, caught the ear of Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, who heard it while on tour in the UK and used it as the title of the group's next single — though their record label renamed it "Alternate Title" in the UK market to avoid controversy), and to his wife as a "silly [old] moo" (a substitute for "cow" which was vetoed by the BBC's head of comedy Frank Muir). However, Michael Palin writes in his diary for 16 July 1976 that Warren Mitchell told him that "silly moo" was not scripted, "It came out during a rehearsal when he forgot the line 'Silly old mare'." Controversially, the show was one of the earliest mainstream programmes to feature the swear word "bloody". The show was one of many held up by Mary Whitehouse as an example of the BBC's "moral laxity".[4]

In a demonstration of Speight's satirical skills — after a successful libel action brought against Speight by Whitehouse[5] — he created an episode, first broadcast on 27 February 1967, in which Alf Garnett is depicted as an admirer of Whitehouse. Garnett was seen proudly reading her first book. "What are you reading?" his son-in-law asks. When he relates that it is Mary Whitehouse, his son-in-law sniggers. Alf's response is "She's concerned for the bleedin' moral fibre of the nation!" The episode ends with the book being burnt.[6]

Ultimately "silly moo" became a comic catchphrase. Another Garnett phrase was "it stands to reason", usually before making some patently unreasonable comment. Alf was portrayed as an admirer of Enoch Powell, a right-wing Conservative politician known particularly for his strong opposition to the immigration of immigrants from non-white countries. Alf was also a supporter of West Ham United (a football club based in the East End) and known to make derogatory remarks about "the Jews up at Spurs" (referring to Tottenham Hotspur, a north London club with a sizeable Jewish following). This was a playful touch by Speight, as Warren Mitchell was both Jewish and a Tottenham Hotspur supporter.[7]

In interviews, Speight explained he had originally based Alf on his father, an East End docker who was staunchly reactionary and held "unenlightened" attitudes toward black people. Speight made clear that he regretted that his father held such attitudes, which Speight regarded as reprehensible. Speight saw the show as a way of ridiculing such views and dealing with his complex feelings about his father.

However, it was later claimed in the book about the series, A Family at War by Mark Ward, that the only similarities between Alf and Speight's father were that his father was a hard-working, working-class East End docker and manual labourer who voted Conservative, revered traditional British values, and was very polite to everyone he met, no matter their background. It is claimed that Speight picked up the idea for Alf's bigoted personality from railway station porters he met when he had worked in temporary jobs for British Rail in the London area. The political views of both Alf and Mike were reflective of Speight's own perception of people both on the left and the right, with the ignorance and bigotry of those on the right represented by Alf and the idealism of many sections of the left represented by Mike.

Johnny Speight gained a reputation for late delivery of scripts, sometimes unfinished and still in the form of rough notes (which would be finished and finalised as a script by the script editor and cast during rehearsals), either close to, on, or occasionally past the deadline. This was claimed by Speight to ensure maximum topicality for the series, although this was disputed by the programme's first producer, Dennis Main Wilson, who stated that Speight was frequently found late at night in a regular selection of West End bars, and that on more than one occasion the writer had to be physically dragged out of such establishments by Wilson and driven home to get the scripts typed up and finished.

This was the reason for the second series consisting of ten episodes rather than the commissioned thirteen. As three scripts that were scheduled to be recorded and broadcast towards the end of that series were not ready and actors, crew and Speight had already been paid in advance for thirteen episodes, it was decided that an Easter Monday bank holiday special – "Till Closing Time Us Do Part" – would be made and that this would mostly be made up of the cast and crew ad-libbing within the broad confines of a plot. For accounting reasons, this would be considered an 11th episode of the second series. At double the usual length, it also made up for screen time of a 12th episode. The addition of this episode meant that only one week's worth of pay was wasted, rather than three. Normally, a sitcom would have plenty of time (ranging from several weeks to several months) between recording and transmission to iron out any such script delivery problems. However, to ensure maximum topicality, most episodes of the second series of Till Death Us Do Part were recorded less than seven days before their intended transmission date, and as all studios would be booked on other nights for other – sometimes more important – productions, this meant that the recording of Till Death Us Do Part episodes could not be moved to another night or another studio should the script not be ready in time for rehearsals or recording. Should this happen (which it did towards the end of the second series), this would mean no episode ready for transmission that week and – because of the very short gap between recording and transmission and lack of unbroadcast episodes to replace them, other programmes had to be used to fill in the schedule in the last three planned weeks of the second series' thirteen-episode run. It is because of these problems of topicality delaying (sometimes cancelling) scripts that the third series is noticeably less topical than the second and had some weeks between recording and transmission to act as a "cushion" to ensure continuity of the series should one or more episodes fall through.

The late delivery of scripts had been a problem that had first reared its head during production of the first series. The second series got off to a good start in this respect with the first four scripts being delivered ahead of the deadline, but it became clear as that series wore on that Speight was having these problems again. Amongst a myriad of other problems (detailed below), the final straw for the original run appears to have been a script in the final (third) series of eight episodes not being delivered in time for rehearsals to begin and thus losing one episode. This confirmed to the BBC their suspicions that Speight was not an ideal writer to be writing for a topical sitcom.

To combat these problems, it was suggested by the production team that there be "windows" or "spaces" within the script that could easily be excised and replaced with more topical jokes (a frequent tactic used in other topical sitcoms like Yorkshire Television's The New Statesman twenty years later), a suggestion that was initially refused by Speight in the 1960s run of the series but which was taken up during the 1970s run. This came to be particularly useful to ensure maximum topicality during the 1974 series, some episodes of which reflected and satirised the UK miner's strike and the Three Day Week. However, Speight's initial refusal to accept these suggestions, combined with his constant demands of pay increases (eventually becoming the highest-paid comedy writer and then - after another increase - the highest-paid TV writer, during a time of strict public-sector pay restraints imposed by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, which was a source of particular embarrassment to the BBC) and the increasing clashes he and the BBC were having with Mary Whitehouse, came to a head. Over time, Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVLA) had several court cases with the BBC directly or indirectly related to the series, some of which Whitehouse or the NVLA won. During the first two series, the programme was originally broadcast on weeknights in a 7:30pm timeslot, before the post-9pm "watershed", and both Whitehouse and Speight campaigned for such a change in scheduling, the only aspect of the programme that they agreed upon. The reluctance of the BBC to reschedule the series at first can possibly be explained in the fact that the "watershed" was a relatively new phenomenon at the time and there was no consensus between the BBC and the ITA over what should and should not constitute family-friendly broadcasting, nor when this "watershed" should start, the responsibility over what constituted family-friendly viewing being primarily placed with the child's parents.

Public outcry over the episode "The Blood Donor" as being a particularly distasteful episode and a new Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors – Lord Hill (who had been appointed as Lord Normanbrook's successor when Normanbrook died suddenly in June 1967) – taking a rather different, more conservative approach to the running of the BBC than the liberal and laid-back attitude of his predecessor, were two other factors that turned up the heat of criticism against the series. Lord Hill had previously been the chairman of the Independent Television Authority and ensured that the ITV network remained relatively controversy-free. He shared many of the same opinions as Whitehouse and the wider NVLA, which also clashed with the opinions of the then BBC Director General, Hugh Carleton Greene (he is quoted as having the "utmost contempt" for Hill), who had been the series' biggest champion and gleefully ignored Whitehouse whenever he had to. Many other members of BBC management also voiced their opinions directly to Hill over his appointment, most notably the then Controller of BBC2, David Attenborough, who compared Hill being Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors to "giving Rommel the command of the Eighth Army". It should be added that neither Hill, nor his predecessor, Normanbrook, had any direct influence over the series itself (as the BBC Charter prohibits this), but their relationship with the Director-General indirectly influenced the programme. Because of his total personality and culture clash with Hill, Greene resigned in July 1968 (soon after the series ended its original run) and, with the series' biggest champion now out of the BBC, it looked like the show would be cancelled. Another champion of the series – Head of Comedy output at the BBC, Frank Muir had resigned his post between the second and third series to take up a new, similar, post at David Frost's fledgling new ITV franchise London Weekend Television, which would launch on 2 August 1968. His replacement, Michael Mills, recognised that the series had enormous potential but did not understand why it had to be so topical, controversial or full of swearing and blasphemy, which hugely irritated Speight.

The final straw for the BBC at this time came when a script for the third series, which was intended to be made up of eight episodes, was so late that it missed the scheduled beginning of rehearsals. This episode was intended to be between the fourth and fifth episodes, putting a break in the recording dates and leading to one week's less space between recording and transmission of episodes.

Given the problems the series had given the BBC with steep pay increases in the midst of a government-imposed public sector pay freeze, scripts being delivered in varying degrees of completeness (and sometimes not at all), several court cases (usually libel or blasphemy), hundreds of complaints, several run-ins with Mary Whitehouse and the NVLA, the loss of the series' two biggest champions (first Frank Muir, then Hugh Carleton Greene), the new management having different opinions over the programme and the general stress its production placed on staff (primarily down to the incomplete scripts submitted by Speight), all despite its ratings success over ITV (particularly over Coronation Street) in its first two series and its general popularity as a whole, contributed to the BBC getting cold feet over the programme. A planned fourth series, scheduled for autumn 1968, was scrapped.

The programme was revived in 1972, during a time when the BBC were reviving some of their more successful sitcoms from the 1960s for colour production (Steptoe and Son being an example). A contributory factor to this decision may have been that, since the ITV franchise changes of the summer of 1968, ITV had paid a lot more attention to making sitcoms, particularly those featuring, and appealing to, the working class, which had previously been the preserve of the BBC during the 1960s. This can be attributed as a direct effect of the popularity of Till Death Us Do Part, The Likely Lads and Steptoe and Son, which were the first sitcoms to truly depict the realities of working-class life in Britain and were not set in typical "middle-class sitcom suburbia". In amongst these programmes, Till Death Us Do Part would not look as out of place as it did in the late 1960s, particularly now as the show would be less topical (bar some 1974 episodes) but no less political or controversial, as it had originally been. This was of great help to Speight, as it now meant that he did not have to wait until the very last minute to submit completed or half-completed scripts.

However, this was also the series' downfall, as viewers noted the increasingly less-topical plots and the satire was much less vicious than it had been in the 1960s, with the style of the series in both 1975 series bearing little semblance to those transmitted in the late 1960s. Speight has put this down not only to reducing the pressures of working on a topical sitcom but also to his own personal declining interest in politics, which may be an explanation of why In Sickness and In Health was much less political, and not as vicious as its predecessor could be.

Additionally, towards the end of the series Dandy Nichols fell ill and was unable to attend the live-audience recordings. So, in a later episode Else was seen leaving for Australia, to Alf's dismay. Her scenes were recorded separately from the rest of the episodes. The plan was for Nichols to tape scenes from time to time set in Australia where she would phone Alf or Rita in short segments, but only one episode featured such a scene and the idea was dropped due to Nichols' poor health.

Patricia Hayes, who had been seen from time to time previously as next-door neighbour Min, became a starring character along with her husband Bert, previously played by Bill Maynard and now by Alfie Bass. The show's rating began to suffer and when it was clear Nichols was not returning as hoped by the writer, in 1975, the series was cancelled. The final episode saw Alf lose his job and receive a telegram from Else asking for a divorce.