Big Red Book

Celebrating television's This Is Your Life

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THIS IS YOUR LIFE - The Reverend Dr Philip Thomas Byard Clayton, Anglian clergyman and founder of Toc H, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the audience at the BBC Television Theatre.

Tubby, who was born in Queensland, Australia, studied at St Paul's School, London and Exeter College, Oxford. After ordination as a priest of the Church of England, he served as a curate at St Mary's Church, Portsea. During the First World War, he became an army chaplain in France and Flanders, where, in 1915, he and another chaplain, the Rev Neville Talbot, opened Talbot House - a rest house for soldiers at Poperinge, Belgium.

Toc H, as the movement became known, fostered a spirit of friendship that continued after the war, with more houses opening in London, Manchester and Southampton and the introduction of a women's league. From 1922 Tubby was Vicar of All Hallows-by-the-Tower church in the city of London but travelled widely across Britain and the British Empire promoting Toc H and encouraging the establishment of new branches.

programme details...

• Edition No: 53
• Subject No: 53
• Broadcast live: Mon 3 Feb 1958
• Broadcast time: 8.15-8.45pm
• Venue: BBC Television Theatre
• Series: 3
• Edition: 19

on the guest list...

• Ernest Royalton-Kisch
• Lt Cdr George Potter
• Bert Stagg
• Lady Annie Clayton - sister-in-law
• Dr Leonard Browne
• Alfred Victor 'Inky' Bean
• Rev Fred Molyneux
• Dr John H Nicholson
• Alison Macfie
• Rev Ronnie Royle
• Peter Pedrick
• Bill Howells
• Neville Minas
• Robert Reid
• Stewart Moore
• Sampson Othigo
• Ralph Hundsalz
• Ernest Shivutso
• Margaret Collingridge
• Ivor Smith

production team...

• Researchers: Ray Marler, Bill Nolan, Michael Williams
• Writer: Ray Marler
• Director: unknown
• Producer: T Leslie Jackson

Life's Vocation

celebrating the 'men of God'

Photographs of Tubby Clayton This Is Your Life

The Manchester Guardian 4 Feb 1958

Television Notes

"THIS IS YOUR LIFE"

Distasteful approach

By our Television Critic

This Is Your Life is probably one of the BBC features about which people now say "It's come to stay." Meaning that there is no use arguing whether it should be there or not. When This Is Your Life (copied from the United States) was first put on by the BBC, the way in which people (some of them modest and much embarrassed by the publicity) were shanghaied on to the platform and made the object of a mercilessly sentimental spotlight, was regarded critically. Time has passed and nobody takes much notice any more. Yet, though the subject of this programme is often a person of character and courage, with a life story well worth telling, and though we are told they mostly do not mind it, there remains something distasteful in the way it is done.

This was particularly striking on Monday, when the Rev. P.B. ("Tubby") Clayton, of Toc H fame, was the chosen "life". It was a story so eminently worth telling, about so famous a personality, and yet he himself, completely taken by surprise, appeared bewildered and overcome. This is a natural man, who probably does not know much about television, for when his old friends were brought on, one by one, to meet him he seemed regretful that he was not given a little more time to talk to them. But a programme is a programme and must keep to time.

It is the camera that holds the face in close-up that one dislikes; the tricks of the trade, the pompous recital of Eamonn Andrews, the pinning down of the specimen whether with or without his consent. And when the life story is one that is really good to hear about, then one can detach this dislikable element due to the method, and be sure that there is in fact something to dislike there.

The Manchester Guardian 8 Feb 1958

"THIS IS YOUR LIFE"

To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian

Sir – I think your Television critic is being a little ingenuous. This Is Your Life is fundamentally phony because the programme method is well known and the live audience from which the victim is taken is small. Nobody whose career is at all notable can truly be "taken by surprise" if he is "shanghaied on to the platform".

The real surprise must lie with those viewers who have not switched off, on finding such a person as the founder of Toc H in the studio at all, taking the obvious risk of being "bewildered and overcome." Are these people also shanghaied from their firesides into the studio?

Yours L Munroe Clark, Kirkella, Hull

(Our Television Critic writes: The BBC has many ingenious ways of getting people into this programme without their realising it. The "audience" method is only one.)