Radio Who?
Doug Stanley was born in Halifax. In the late 1950's, Stanley joined or was drafted into the Canadian army, and from there ended up stationed in Germany in the late 50's. He ended up working for ‘British Forces Broadcasting’ in Cologne, Germany. When he got mustered out, instead of going home he stuck around and went into Radio.
Now around this time, the late 50's, early 60's, BBC Radio pretty much has a monopoly on the British Airwaves. So what you had starting up was ‘Pirate Radio’ - Radio stations which were operating outside of England, but broadcasting powerful radio signals that could be picked up.
These ‘Pirates’ sustained themselves by selling advertising from British businesses. The BBC, of course, didn’t accept advertising at all, so if businesses wanted to advertise their wares, the pirate radios were the game. There was a vacant niche, both in the airwaves and the economy, and the pirate radios moved in.
Doug Stanley was actually broadcast on the first pirate station, the poetically named ‘Commercial Neutral Broadcasting Company’ or CNBC. The piracy was literal, it broadcast from a ship anchored off the Dutch coast in 1960-61. It didn’t last, the signal was too weak to reach far into Britain.
After CNBC went down, Doug moved into Radio Luxembourg, which had a seriously powerful transmitter, capable of blanketing much of the British Isles. With good coverage, and a listening alternative to the BBC, audiences and advertisers flocked. It must have been such an amazing,optimistic time, such a remarkable thing to be involved in.
Radio Luxembourgn wasn’t just in Luxembourg. It may not have been in Luxembourg at all. All it needed was a transmitter outside of England powerful enough to reach the Isles. It had offices and operations in England. It’s commercial market was there, so they had to have English offices.
Their purchases were English music, performances English bands, and Drama were English actors. The broadcasts took place from Luxembourg, but a fair bit of the business and production was certainly in England. Radio Luxembourg may well have done in house productions, but the way that the Radio Pirates worked, I suspect they contracted out to fill their airspace.
".....there was a Canadian-born disc-jockey, Doug Stanley, who I had met whilst I was serving with the British Forces in Germany and he was just ending his period of operation there and he was looking for other things to do. He came back to England and got involved with a company called Mitchell Monkhouse Associates run by Malcolm Mitchell who was running a trio that was very well known and Bob Monkhouse who of course needs no introduction. And they were producing shows for Radio Luxembourg which were sponsored by Cadburys Chocolates and people like that and Bob Monkhouse was fronting this programme. Doug Stanley was one of the producers."
Moving from Disk Jockey to Producer, Doug Stanley forms ‘Stanmark Productions’ around the mid-sixties, which seems to be a personal company. Stanley decided to get into producing Radio Drama.
Now, between the 1930's and late 1950's, Radio Drama was pretty hot. The Shadow had begun on the radio, Superman was a radio staple. In the days before television, Radio Drama, Comedy, Variety shows were huge businesses.
But starting with the sixties and the proliferation of television Radio Drama declined fast. It didn’t disappear altogether, popular programs could occasionally make a dent, and it was hanging on in outlying markets in Africa and Asia. But the economic model of radio was changing rapidly. Why listen to a drama on the radio, when you could watch it on television. Radio stars, even whole radio shows were making the jump to television.
Even Radio Luxembourg was shifting from drama to music programming.
There were reasons for that - songs were short, you could basically pop them in and out pretty much at will, stick commercials in them. They were more compact, more versatile and easier to manipulate than a half hour block of radio drama.
They were also a lot cheaper to produce, all a music program needed was a disk jockey, a radio drama needed a script, staff, actors, producers, foley effects.... And let’s face it, television was a killer. So you were seeing this precipitous decline of Radio Drama and a big sea change in the Radio Industry.
So seeing Doug Stanley hanging in there, there’s something admirable about that. This was one of the original Radio Pirates. He was a guy who had gone from disk jockey to producer, who lived and breathed the airwaves. So if Doug Stanley was doing Radio Drama, or trying to do it in the 1960's, then it was for two reasons, he really wanted to do something he loved, and he smelled enough money to make it work.
How was it going to work? Outselling. If Radio Drama was failing in England and the United States, there were a lot of markets out there - Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Egypt, where television hadn’t turned things inside out. Television might be coming, but it wasn’t there yet, not to the same degree, and so Radio Drama was still viable.
The other keys, were that technology now allowed him to record and distribute productions from the cultural heartland of London. There were lots of cutting edge actors, writers, an entire entertainment industry just waiting for something to do, there was a lot of skilled production talent, now under-employed, waiting or a call.
Out in Australia, you had to painstakingly build that infrastructure up from scratch, but in London, all you had to do was make a phone call. In a sense, the possibility lay in England for a virtual radio production studio, in much the same way that Amicus had formed itself as a virtual studio. The key resources and infrastructure were all around, all you had to do was start making connections.
And try to make money, of course.
So the thing to do was to do highly produced, top notch, technically cutting edge productions in London, and then sell them to the peripheral markets that still ran Radio Drama but had a much harder time producing it themselves.
For it's first effort Stanmark produced a serial that seemed to have been somewhat successful - Bruce Courage.
....for a private company, Stanmark Productions, operated by Luxy DJ, Doug Stanley, I recorded a series of programmes, each programme 15 minutes in length called 'Bruce Courage.' It was really an up-to-date version of 'Dick Barton – Special Agent,' for all of you who remember the old Light Programme drama that ran for what seemed like forever when I was a young lad. Bruce Courage was played by Tom Adams, who used to be the face of D.F.S. in TV commercials and was also in 'The Great Escape.' He at one time was tipped to play a future James Bond. His side kick was Ginger, played by Australian, Bill Kerr. Bill is probably best known as Tony Hancock's side kick in the radio and TV shows 'Hancock's Half Hour' alongside Sidney James. Bruce's girlfriend, Vicky, was played by Valerie Kirkbright. These were recorded to sell to various radio stations throughout the world.
These weren’t shmucks off the street. That’s some pretty respectable and recognizeable on-mike talent on Bruce Courage. People during this period, would have known who these actors were, there’s name recognition.
Going by this remark, it seems to have made some kind of go of it. Like so much of Stanmark’s production, most of it is lost to us. But there are two segments of Bruce Courage that were publicly available on promotional flexi-disks, and these have come down through the years where they’ve been put up on Youtube. Check it out
here, and
here....
It was in 1965, sometime between August and December that Malcolm Hulke, with his radio Doctor Who, would hook up with Doug Stanley, in the middle of Dalekmania, while the fury over the Doctor Who and the Daleks reached a fever pitch....
NOTE: Almost all of this is still OTL. In particular, Malcolm Hulke's Doctor Who career is straight out of the book. Doug Stanley and Stanmark productions are real, as is Stanley's career, his effort to get into Radio Drama, and Bruce Courage.
There are few extrapolations based on ambiguous information.
First: I am making a leap in assuming that Hulke came up with the idea of a Doctor Who radio drama on his own. Hulke had been knocking at the door and submitting scripts and stories since before the show started, and he had a relationship with Sidney Newman. That seems logical to me. I'm not sure though. After all, Vegoda, Subotsky and Rosenberg had no prior connection or contact to the show when they started negotiating. So it's possible that Stanley had the idea, went looking for someone looking for an opportunity, and Hulke fill in with him.
Second: I am assuming that Hulke pitched it first to the BBC before he hooked up with Stanley. We don't actually know this. But we do know that BBC Radio looked at the proposal and passed on it. Hulke's script was discovered in the BBC files. Given Hulke's existing connections and affiliations with the BBC, it seems to me that if he had come up with this on his own, the BBC would be the first place he would pitch too. He wouldn't need to work with an independent like Stanley unless the BBC turned him down. Now, it's possible that Stanley was already involved with Hulke at the time of the pitch, or even that it was Stanley that developed the concept and recruited Hulke.
Third: From what I can reconstruct of Doug Stanley's business model, it seems to be based on outselling. ie - British production, foreign sales. This seems to be the thrust of his promotional materials. Frankly, I don't see how he could have assumed he would sell in England. By 1965, Radio Drama was absolutely dead in England. The youth counterculture had taken over, it was the time of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, radio was almost all music, and the only residue hanging on was some comedy and radio news. I can't imagine someone who knew the business as well as Stanley did believing that he could sell Radio Drama in England. Certainly, giving his history, I can't see him going with the BBC. So it's foreign markets.
Fourth: Timing. There's a very narrow window for these things to happen. In terms of the date of the script, 1965 seems to be the most likely period, given what we have for clues for the production. Promotional materials, which we'll cover, seem to date from no earlier than October, 1965 and no later than June 1966.