Variety Parade

Variety Parade was originally a BBC radio show on the Home Service which began in the late 1940s. Steeped in the old music-hall tradition it was a showcase for stars of stage and radio such as Elsie and Doris Walters and Ted Ray. Other variations included Festival Parade and Christmas Parade and there were even regional editions such as Northern Variety Parade.

On Saturday 24 October 1953 at 9.20 it came to television with something of an impressive line-up that included Max Bygraves and Morecambe and Wise.

Its intention was to recreate and reinvigorate that same music-hall spirit which had dwindled over the previous thirty years, although it arrived on our screens with very little fanfare - just a small snippet in the Radio Times that read - Max Bygraves returns to television on Saturday to head the new Variety Parade which will be broadcast from the Television Theatre. He will be joined by Eve Boswell in a new role: as a dancer. In one sequence she will be with Ernest Maxim (sic) and the famous Tiller Girls. Gladys Morgan and her company (husband, daughter, son-in-law) will bring a touch of Welsh humour to the screen, and the bill also includes Morecambe and Wise, who made a successful appearance recently in a broadcast from Blackpool. Brian Andro, a young man just out of the Services, will make his television debut with a tight-wire walking and dancing act.

Ernest Maxin would, of course, go on to coreograph some of Morecambe and Wise's most famous musical/dance routines.

Variety Parade was produced by the prolific Bill Lyon-Shaw, the man who produced and directed Sunday Night at the London Palladium in 1956, was credited with discovering Benny Hill and became head of light entertainment at the BBC. He later became the programme controller of Tyne Tees Television in the North-East and passed away in May 2010 at the grand old age of 96. Lyon-Shaw intended to work as a surveyor but went into repertory and ran his own company at Margate. He joined TV after working as production manager to Jack Payne. "When I produced Sunday Night at the London Palladium we had 18 million viewers. Now there are hundreds of channels, not 18 million between the lot of them," he said in 2009, adding, "Now it’s (television) ceased to be an entertainment industry and become a business."