Big Red Book
Celebrating television's This Is Your Life
Anna NEAGLE (1904-1986)
THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Anna Neagle, actress, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre while being filmed discussing music for her latest film, and first as a producer, Wonderful Things, with composer Stanley Black.
Anna, who was born in Forest Gate, London, made her stage debut as a dancer in 1917 and later appeared in the chorus of C.B. Cochran's revues and the musicals Rose Marie and The Desert Song. In 1931, she starred in the West End musical Stand Up and Sing with Jack Buchanan and was spotted by film producer-director Herbert Wilcox, who offered her a contract.
Under the guidance of Wilcox, whom she married in 1943, Anna became a box office sensation in British films for over 25 years, providing glamour and sophistication in musicals and comedies such as Spring in Park Lane and Maytime in Mayfair and historical dramas such as Nurse Edith Cavell, Victoria the Great and Odette.
Anna Neagle was a subject of This Is Your Life on two occasions - surprised again by Eamonn Andrews in March 1983 at the Royal National Hotel in London's Russell Square.
"unforgettable and wonderful experience... never have I felt the Press to be so completely out of touch"
programme details...
- Edition No: 55
- Subject No: 55
- Broadcast live: Mon 17 Feb 1958
- Broadcast time: 8.15-8.45pm
- Venue: BBC Television Theatre
- Series: 3
- Edition: 21
on the guest list...
- Edith Archibald
- May Lee
- Victor Silvester
- Hilda Critchley
- J B Williams
- Herbert Wilcox - husband
- Elizabeth Wilkins
- Odette Hallowes
- Stanley Black
- Frankie Vaughan
- Anne Brusselmans Filmed tribute:
- Anton Walbrook
related appearances...
- Jessie Matthews - Apr 1961
- Ben Lyon - Mar 1963
- Joe Brown - Dec 1970
- John Alderton - Feb 1974
- Ray Cooney - Jan 1975
- Cyril Fletcher - Mar 1977
- Cathleen Nesbitt - May 1980
- Susannah York - Nov 1983
- Danny La Rue - Apr 1984
- Donald Sinden - May 1985
- Gerry Marsden - Dec 1985
production team...
- Researcher: Michael Williams
- Writer: Ken Smith
- Director: unknown
- Producer: T Leslie Jackson
- names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life
second tribute
spotlight on the stars
surprised again!
This Is Your Life by Eamonn Andrews
Weekend Magazine reports from behind-the-scenes
'This Is Your Life' But It Dominates MINE!
Producer Leslie Jackson recalls some heart-stopping moments
Torture, Treacle, Tears and Trickery
The Controversy Surrounding This Is Your Life in the 1950s
Photographs and screenshots of Anna Neagle This Is Your Life
Not very long ago I was one of the 'guests' on This Is Your Life. The 'subject', clever John Alderton, who had been with me in Person Unknown. I was asked by so many people, as I had been on a number of similar occasions, 'They aren't really taken by surprise, are they? They must know it is going to happen.' I assure them that when I was the 'victim' it came as a complete shock.
It happened at the end of These Dangerous Years [Bigredbook.info editor: actually the film was Wonderful Things]. Stanley Black was composing the background music for the picture and it was thought that my discussing this with him would make an interesting item on a TV programme the BBC were running at the time. I duly arrived at the studio, the old Shepherd's Bush Empire. After being made up, I was called down for a rehearsal. Stanley was already at work with the orchestra, set up under the Circle. We worked for a few minutes on a certain passage of music to go under a scene, then started a run through.
Almost immediately the lights dimmed. I looked around to see what was amiss, to find Eamonn Andrews, with that engaging crooked smile of his, holding out a hand to me and saying: 'Anna Neagle, This Is Your Life!'
He led me up to the stage in a complete daze.
As he talked to me, photographs of my early days in the theatre were thrown on the TV screen we were watching and then followed a scene of Jack Buchanan and me in Goodnight Vienna. Only a few weeks before Jack had died and seeing him there made me very emotional. I hadn't time to pull myself together before the guests were coming on, all saying the kindest things. I always am far more upset by kindness than harshness. Perhaps this is a strange contradiction but this is how it affects me. I was very weepy. The next day, one paper had a headline 'This key-hole snooping should stop'. Well meant, I'm sure, but when thinking about the whole experience later on, realised the compliment we were paid by Eamonn and his colleagues who invite us on the programme.
I also realised that I'd been extremely slow-witted. Maybe two or three weeks before there had been a telephone call from Miss Archibald (my former Headmistress) who, after a few moments chat, had asked if Herbert was in. I called him to the phone, then went off to do something. I am not by nature curious, apart from things that concern me, so didn't even ask him what she had to say. I'm sure I supposed she was wondering if he could suggest someone to open a bazaar or fete, as I had done for her the previous year.
Need I add, Miss Archibald was one of the guests on my This Is Your Life!
Tears of sentiment aplenty were provided by the film star Anna Neagle when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in 1958. 'Anna Neagle Weeps Before TV Millions' was the Daily Express headline, noting that the main cause of her tears had been a clip showing her friend and colleague Jack Buchanan singing to her in one of their early films. When Neagle's husband, the film director Herbert Wilcox, came in, she hung on to him and sobbed, and then struggled to speak about Buchanan, who had died of cancer a few months before. One of Neagle's many starring roles had been as Nurse Edith Cavell, in a Hollywood dramatisation of the heroic nurse's life and death, directed by Herbert Wilcox in 1939. The reading of an admiring telegram from the nurses at the Brussels nursing home named after Cavell again reduced Neagle to tears. Edith Cavell, about to be shot by a firing squad, had remained firm. Anna Neagle, looking down the barrel of a TV camera, dissolved in tears. Press coverage tended to sympathise with Neagle, but to denounce the programme for its unforgivable intrusion into her private emotions. The Express thought the broadcast was 'the most embarrassing' yet of all the episodes of this 'American-invented' programme. The Daily Sketch agreed: the show had reached its 'high-water mark, measured in the sobs and tears which reduced this lovely and well-liked actress to humiliation'. The Daily Mail called it 'maudlin mush'. Another critic blamed the BBC's determination to beat commercial TV for the unforgivable intrusion of this 'weekly peepshow' of shock, embarrassment, and sentiment. To see someone's emotions leaking through tears was, it seemed, not only embarrassing, but more or less obscene.
Anna Neagle and her husband, however, defended the BBC against the charge of intrusion. They did not mind her grief being observed by millions. Neagle was quoted as saying that she had reacted with 'genuine emotion' of nostalgia and gratitude, and that she had not thought 'that millions of people were watching my tears'. Now the thought had occurred to her, she was not worried: 'I know the public is not adversely affected by genuine emotion - it's only false emotion which makes them shy away.' Wilcox agreed that the show revealed nothing more than the 'ordinary emotions' of an 'ordinary woman'. Critics, if not viewers, remained unpersuaded of the virtues of This Is Your Life. William Connor's Cassandra column in the Daily Mirror conducted a concerted campaign against the programme, calling it 'icky-icky', 'saccharine-encrusted', a 'phoney, cloying, repulsive stunt', and a 'preposterous, snivelling charade'.
Daily Express 18 February 1958
FILM OF JACK BUCHANAN LOOSES HER TEARS
By ROBERT CANNELL
ANNA NEAGLE was brought to tears on TV last night by a film extract of Jack Buchanan singing to her in one of their films. The 53-year-old actress was the subject of the BBC's This Is Your Life programme. The cameras surprised her as she was recording another programme.
After a few moments she said to compere Eamonn Andrews: "I must sit down. My legs are all wobbly."
Then came the film extract. As she watched it – Buchanan died last October – she began to cry and could not stop.
When her husband, producer Herbert Wilcox, came in she clutched him, sobbing, and then hid her head behind his shoulder. Wilcox slipped her a handkerchief and his wife's distress forced the cameras to move away from her for several moments. "I am so emotional," she said helplessly.
Tears again
The tears flowed again with the reading of a telegram from the nurses at the Brussels nursing home which commemorates Nurse Cavell, 1914-18 heroine whom Anna portrayed in a film.
Anna Neagle was trying hard to control herself, but she wept again when the curtains parted and she met Odette Churchill, GC, subject of another Neagle film. This had become the most embarrassing of all the editions of the American-invented programme. Only in the last few minutes, when the tension was relieved, did Anna Neagle find it possible to pull herself together.
AFTERWARDS, Miss Neagle said: "I cannot remember thinking of anything but that wonderful man Jack Buchanan... the great chance he gave me... the wonderful things he did for so many people."
"There is no one like him left in show business." Then she went for a stroll in Hyde Park with her husband.
Daily Herald 19 February 1958
FOUR MPs have tabled a protest against British newspapermen for alleged intrusion on private grief in the Munich hospital where the Manchester United air crash victims are fighting for their lives.
The BBC has duly reported this complaint in its usual holier-than-thou manner of aloof superiority – in spite of proof that the protests were made on the flimsiest of grounds.
Photographers, after all, do not find their way, uninvited, into private wards where patients are critically ill.
But the BBC reports the fact as if the Press had been guilty of the sort of thing that I (and I suppose millions) saw on BBC TV on Monday night – Anna Neagle, weeping and obviously off-guard in This Is Your Life.
Watching herself dance with a dead man, Jack Buchanan. It was in outrageously bad taste.
I've seen unsuspecting old ladies, whose hearts might be fatally affected embarrassed to the point of tears as voices came, unexpectedly, out of their past in other editions of this harrowing show.
Even Eamonn Andrews' tact and charm cannot conceal that this is something far more yellow than the lowest of Fleet Street tabloids has ever achieved.
Generally speaking, the BBC behaves like a spinster aunt, frightened out of anything more controversial than old-fashioned Gilbert Harding.
I've, therefore, delayed my complaint about this subtly disgusting programme – for fear of encouraging their out-of-touch cowardice by criticising this out-of-touch insensitivity – until most of the people I know convinced me that it was too unpleasant to be allowed to go on.
Daily Mail 19 February 1958
ANNA NEAGLE broke down in floods of tears the night before last during the BBC's programme entitled This Is Your Life.
Of all the television programmes this is the most revolting – a non-stop exercise in embarrassment wrapped up in unbearable sentiment. It is about time this maudlin mush was broken up.
A golden opportunity awaits some future character who is trapped into having his or her past life unrolled like a trail of scented glue before a gawping public.
All the victim has to do is refuse to carry on with the programme and tell the goggling supporting cast of friends and relatives to beat it while the going is good.
Then they can all go and have a good cry – in private.
Daily Sketch 19 February 1958
No! It's shameful agony
CANDIDUS says: Drop this show at once!
PEOPLE ARE FUNNY. That happens to be the title of a singularly nauseating TV show which was hurriedly withdrawn in the early days of independent television. It also happens to be true. But now another contender for TV notoriety gives it a new and highly unwelcome topicality. I refer to that weekly tear-jerker This Is Your Life.
This is a programme which does not think people are funny. It thinks that they are slobbering morons, whose idea of a good evening's entertainment is to watch some celebrity or other suffering agonies of embarrassment before an audience of millions.
Tear-jerker
As I see it, the only essential difference between This Is Your Life and its blush-raising predecessor is that This Is Your Life substitutes tears for giggles. With its latest offering, in which Miss Anna Neagle was the chosen subject, it reached its high-water mark, measured in the sobs and tears which reduced this lovely and well-liked actress to humiliation.
It was a painful experience to watch. Lured to the TV studio by a trick, Miss Neagle – like other famous people before her – was suddenly exposed to the full, carefully stage-managed treatment. Her life as a star and as a woman was brought before her, and before the viewers.
Early in the proceedings she was shown a film of herself acting with Jack Buchanan, who died so recently that any revival in this context was already in dubious taste. It was too much for Anna Neagle, the girl who owed him her start in show business. She burst into tears, and – such was the piling-on of the agony – she did not recover.
Now, women are not at their best when they're crying. Not even the most accomplished of actresses can turn tears to physical advantage. Miss Neagle was no exception, and my heart went out to her. Not all the hand-patting and shoulder-hugging by compere Eamonn Andrews and her husband, Herbert Wilcox, could console her for her ordeal, or the unseen audience for its angry embarrassment. We were intruding – and there lies the key to this particular programme's unpleasantness.
Intrusion
Intrusion is a favourite catchword among those who dislike the popular Press. But on this showing the newspapers have nothing to teach the Smart Aleck producers of TV shows. I know no other circumstances in which, for the sake of a public entertainment, husbands would deceive their wives and sworn friends connive in a fabric of lies. Yet this programme is put on by the BBC. Though American in origin, it is presumably considered by the men who matter to conform to those standards of decency which the BBC is so self-righteous about. I say it does nothing of the kind.
IT HAS REACHED THE STAGE WHERE ITS IMPACT ON THE PUBLIC SEEMS TO BE JUDGED PURELY BY THE AMOUNT OF EMOTION GENERATED BY ITS WEEKLY VICTIM – AND THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DECENCY, OR WITH HUMAN DIGNITY.
Drop it now
According to the BBC's Audience Research Department, This Is Your Life is watched by 10,250,000 people every week. But the BBC – however desperate it may be to hold its audience – should now drop this programme at once. It has had a two-year run, and cost the corporation a tidy sum of money.
I'm not surprised that the BBC are coy about the actual cost involved. But I'm sure of one thing. Whatever that total weekly bill may be, it takes no account of the cost – in shock and emotion - to the "favoured" celebrity.
How soon will one of them, when abruptly confronted by the beaming Eamonn Andrews turn on his heel and walk out? The BBC must be asking themselves the same question. They can spare themselves further apprehension on that score easily enough – by taking this bag of tricks off the air.
Daily Express 19 February 1958
THAT'S WHAT I'D CALL 'THIS IS YOUR LIFE'...
by James Thomas
ANNA NEAGLE'S London flat was piled high with flowers yesterday…flowers from friends, flowers from people she didn't know and never will know. Flowers which flooded in because the tears of Anna Neagle had blurred the eyes of a whole nation.
Millions saw her on Monday night on TV sobbing on the shoulder of her husband, overwhelmed with sentiment and nostalgia at the memories of her 53 years which Eamonn Andrews brought into the limelight in the BBC's This Is Your Life programme. The sober, cautious BBC brought this show from American TV, where the unctuous, fulsome Mr Ralph Edwards runs it as a weekly peepshow which specialises in shock, embarrassment, and intrusion.
TREMBLING
I first saw it in Hollywood when Bebe Daniels, in tears, was being put through the public hoop. I watched her, shaking, toy with the dinner provided later, gratuitously by Mr Edwards. I went to see her the next day and found her still trembling. I was never more sure of anything than that tasteless, sentimental saga would not be one of the BBC's imports. But it came as part of the BBC's battle to beat commercial TV. It has one of the biggest BBC audiences of the week. And although the brashness has been beaten out of it, it is still too often liable to base its appeal on embarrassment. Anna Neagle went home from the show unable to eat "anything but a bit of rice pudding."
Emotionally pulverised, she went out in the sunshine yesterday morning and walked until lunchtime in Hyde Park. And when she got home to the flowers and the telegrams she told me: "I have been trying hard to get my thoughts sorted out again. For me a long walk is always the cure."
"But now I have thought it all out I don't believe it was an intrusion. When I am acting a role I have to imagine emotion. This was genuine emotion – of nostalgia and gratitude and all those things."
"I was so completely oblivious of having an audience that I never thought for a moment that millions of people were watching my tears. Now I have realised the situation I'm not worrying. I know the public is not adversely affected by genuine emotion – it's only false emotion which makes them shy away."
'REHEARSAL'
When the This Is Your Life spotlight abruptly fell on Anna Neagle, she believed she was rehearsing for a spot in the BBC's film magazine "Picture Parade." Before the bewilderment was off her face, the 53-year-old actress was meeting her old headmistress, talking to Odette Churchill, whose story she portrayed in a film. She wept when she saw herself on film with the late Jack Buchanan, who helped her so much in her career.
The BBC has not yet had – as they have in America – a victim who turned tail and fled (a spare, filmed programme is always kept handy in case it happens), but no one knows what kind of effect the shock of being pushed unexpectedly before the cameras might have.
Said Vere Lorrimer, the programme's production assistant, yesterday: "The case history of every subject is studied carefully. We would never put anybody on the programme who is likely to be overcome by the ordeal." In this case, it was Anna Neagle's husband, Herbert Wilcox, who advised the BBC that his wife could stand the strain. He said:- "I knew that whatever happened Anna would be mistress of the situation. Of course she cried; of course she went through a big emotional upset. But if she hadn't she would have been as hard as nails. I think the show revealed her as an ordinary woman with ordinary emotions."
"Intrusion? If it were an invasion of personal privacy, the BBC wouldn't do it. Their manners are too good."
GUILTY
Their manners are too good. This is a point the BBC honestly believes for itself. I say that it is keyhole TV. Despite the way the BBC has played down the American version, despite its efforts to get worthwhile personalities as subjects, I find it uncomfortable that too often while I am watching This Is Your Life I feel a little guilty I switched on...
The Manchester Guardian 20 February 1958
Television Notes
Relations share blame
By our Television Critic
The untoward effect of This Is Your Life upon Anna Neagle on Monday has caused a general outcry about a programme of which I have at intervals ever since it began complained in these notes.
Miss Neagle was reduced to tears several times by the emotional impact of the scenes, friends and voices recalled to her in the programme.
This was embarrassing for the viewer. The blame lies equally between the BBC and those relations and friends who are in the secret and agree to deceive the victim.
Some people believe that the subjects always know that they may be picked out of an audience. This is not so: the BBC uses various tricks to get people in the right place. The pretended rehearsal is one.
The whole basis of the programme is the exploiting of the emotions for the entertainment of the public, and no amount of saying that the subjects really like it can justify the BBC in carrying on a programme which they copied from America only when they had to fear the coming of ITV.
Incidentally, if Eamonn Andrews has to cope with any more tears, he should realise that patting tearful women on the head only makes them cry harder, and that the only sensible thing is to hiss, or mutter, at the weeping lady some taunt which will make her so cross that anger will dry her tears.
Evening News 3 March 1958
TO-NIGHT ON TV
by Kendall McDonald
IS it embarrassing or isn't it? That is the Monday question every time the schedules show another edition of This Is Your Life.
In the recent tear-strained arguments over the Anna Neagle "life," no one seems to have asked the man who really should know.
Is This Is Your Life embarrassing? Says Eamonn Andrews: "I really don't think it is..."
"Don't forget they did it to me so I know how the victims feel."
Cut it? No!
"The storm about Anna Neagle's tears was embarrassing, for you see they weren't those kind of tears"
"I said to her afterwards: 'If we had known the effect the Jack Buchanan film would have had we would have taken it out.'"
"She replied – 'I would have been furious if you had.'"
"I know who the subject is right from the start. In fact I know about three weeks ahead – the distance in the future we have to work."
Several dropped
"We never do one of these programmes without 'clearing' it with a near relative first. We ask a near and dear one – 'Do you feel it is a good thing?'"
"We have had several cases where a wife has said she didn't think her husband would like it and we have dropped the idea immediately."
Embarrassing? With that extra information you may now make up your own mind. Tonight's edition is at 8.15 on the BBC channel.
Series 3 subjects
Albert Whelan | Colin Hodgkinson | Vera Lynn | Arthur Christiansen | John Logie Baird | Richard Carr-Gomm | Jack TrainEdith Powell | Anne Brusselmans | Norman Wisdom | Victor Silvester | Jack Petersen | Lucy Jane Dobson
David Bell | Matt Busby | Minnie Barnard | Gordon Steele | Louie Ramsay | Tubby Clayton | Daniel Angel
Anna Neagle | 'Dapper' Channon | Frederick Stone | Paul Field | Noel Purcell | Barbara Cartland
Harry Secombe | Archie Rowe | Humphrey Lyttelton | Francis Cammaerts | A E Matthews