Writer and broadcaster, Richard Spendlove, worked for British Rail for the first 35 years of his career, holding a variety of positions within the company, including Regional Inspector - a role he would later play on TV - before opting to take early retirement at the age of 50 in 1989.
Having become completely disillusioned with the whole organisation - an organisation that he says had been in steady decline ever since Doctor Beeching began closing down smaller railway stations in the 1960s, in an unrelenting purge that became known as "The Beeching Axe" - Richard decided to devote his time to his other great passion: broadcasting.
Oh Doctor Beeching!
As well as becoming a well-known regional presenter for BBC Radio - a position that earned him an MBE for his services in 2000 - he also collaborated with David Croft - co-author of such British comedy classics as Dad's Army, Are You Being Served?, It Ain't Half Hot Mum 'Allo 'Allo, Hi-De-Hi! and You Rang M'Lord? - on a situation comedy based on his own experiences of working on the railways in the 1960s: Oh Doctor Beeching!
The show, set in 1963 just as Beeching was beginning his demolition job, ran for two years, from 1995 to 1997, and reunited many of the regular cast members familiar to millions through two of David Croft's previous efforts, Hi De Hi! and You Rang M' Lord? - principally Paul Shane, Su Pollard and Jeffrey Holland.
Oh Doctor Beeching!: Up and Running
Suite 101: Where and when did you first meet David Croft and how did Oh Doctor Beeching! come about?
"That in itself is a long story – it depends how long you’ve got! The situation was that at that point I was transitioning from railway into radio work, doing a bit of this and a bit of that on the side, as it were, while I was still on the railway. In 1963, when I first became a station master, we lived at a little outpost just outside Ely and there was a signal box there.
"There were only five houses and I was living in one of them and in this signal box - and I could never remember all the things - but in this signal box, you could get your hair cut, you could get your watches mended, you get your clocks mended, you could get bets put on, you could buy your groceries, you could get your bicycles mended and you could get your cars mended.
"Now that was just a few of the things that you could do in this signal box and so I kind of put this in my back pocket and thought, 'The day will dawn when you will leave the railway and you will be able to do something with this.'
"Then what happened was that in 1987, I was given my first weekly programme called 'Reflections,' which was an a-la-Parkinson-type interview programme where I interviewed people about how their lives had gone and co-incidentally, one of them that I interviewed was Jimmy Perry.
"I went to see him at the rehearsal rooms in Acton and I saw David Croft across the room, but apart from nodding and saying, 'Good morning', we never spoke to one another. But then in 1993, I think it was, I rang him because I’d got his number as I intended to interview him at some point anyway.
"I rang him at home on a Saturday morning and said, 'You don’t know me, there’s no reason why you should. I’ve got an idea for a situation comedy which I’d like to talk to you about sometime' and he said, 'Talk to me,' so I talked to him for a few minutes on the phone and he said, 'Can you be at my house on Monday morning?'
"Well, when somebody like David Croft tells you to be at his house on a Monday morning, you will walk there on broken glass, or better still, crawl on it. At that time to British television, he had no equal and in terms of quality, he still doesn’t. Anyway, so I went and at the end of the day, he said to me, 'Right, go away and write me a 28-minute script and post it to me,' so I came home that night and I wrote it in about 45/50 minutes.
"I posted it back to him and it caught the evening post and oddly enough, it arrived at him the next morning and at 10 minutes to nine, the phone rang and he was on the phone laughing and he said, 'Well, you can certainly write north country dialogue. I want you back here again today.' So I went back that day and by the Friday, the series had been commissioned, well the pilot had been commissioned. That’s how long it took."
Richard Spendlove: Bringing David Croft Back
When You Rang M' Lord? came to an end in 1993, after five successful years, David Croft, at the age of 70, decided to call time on his brilliant career. Did he intend to write any more sitcoms at some point in the future?
"No, he told me," recalls Richard. "He said, 'I’ve finished, I’m not going to do any more.' Interestingly enough, he took this on and we wrote it between us, though I originally didn’t want anything to do with it really, except pass it to him to get on with and just draw the cash, as it were.
"I wanted him and Jimmy (Perry) to do it, but Jimmy decided he didn’t want to do it, so that left David and I to do it between ourselves, which we did. I came up with a lot of the story, ideas for storylines - of which there are still millions to be told - and we cobbled it together into scripts.
"What he did say, and don’t forget that he was probably the finest exponent of British comedy that BBC television has ever known without any doubt - I think we can say that fairly - and after the end of the first series, he came to me and put his arm around my shoulder and he said, 'Look old love, I shan’t be alive when this finishes. You’ve got another Coronation Street on your hands.'
"Of course the thing is that we did 19 episodes and then John Birt decided that the public didn’t want it anymore. This despite the fact that we were getting audiences in the first series of 11 and 12 million viewers.
"Now, a good situation comedy on BBC television, if such a thing exists, would be very fortunate to get four million, but they wrapped it – they wouldn’t let it come back and in fact, the odd thing about it is, that just about the only country in the world where it’s not been repeated is here.
"I mean, I’m getting royalties from all over the place – Bosnia, New Zealand, Poland. Anyway, when we approached the BBC here and said, 'Why hasn’t it been repeated here?' they said, 'Because nobody wants to see it,' which is probably why copies of it are changing hands on eBay at 80 pounds!"
Suite 101: And of course, a quick glimpse at the positive comments left on YouTube, show that there are a lot of people out there who would welcome its return.
"I know, but they won’t do it – there’s no question of it coming back at all. Absolutely no question. They say it’s not going to happen and don’t write in – forget all about it."
Oh Doctor Beeching!: True to Life
Suite 101: So was the programme based entirely on your own personal experiences?
"Oh, all the storylines that concerned the railway. I mean the coffin one – that came from real life. I mean I can’t remember now – I shall have to look at them again to remember - but if you read David’s book, You Have Been Watching..., you will see that he mentions in there that I have a 100% recollection and he said that I just brought the storylines up one after the other, and I did.
I mean many of them were based on people that I knew, people that I’d worked with. In fact, funnily enough, the night the first one went out, the pilot, it went out on a Sunday and the following Saturday and a guy came on and he came through to me and he said, 'Hello, is that you?' So I said, 'Yes' and he said, 'I saw that programme on Sunday night' and he said, 'I know what signal box that it is and I know the signalman,' and he did. He worked in the next signal box!"
Suite 101: Did even little things like Ralph's inability to stop a train at the platform come from real life?
"They all came from…I mean everybody’s got to learn and you do overplay it a bit. We overplayed a little bit the thing about Ralph, but you’ve got to allow for a little bit of comedic licence.
"In real life, it wasn’t quite as bad as that, but in actual fact, I’m bound to say, and I should say this because it’s worth saying, is that Perry Benson became a very competent train driver and I’m not sure...I think I’m right in saying that when the series finished, I think the Severn Valley Railway invited him to go up there and actually train as a driver.
"He became very competent – he could handle trains very well really, by the time they’d had a week or two doing it. As could Ivor, of course. Dear Ivor (Roberts), who of course died shortly afterwards. They both became very proficient train drivers and particularly Perry."
Richard Spendlove: Active Retirement
Despite taking early retirement at the age of 50, after 35 years of loyal railway service, Richard Spendlove has been far from inactive.
His radio chat show has been called the longest continually-running chat show in British broadcasting history, and his success in coaxing David Croft, one of the greatest comedy minds of all time, out of self-imposed exile, also stands as a remarkable achievement.
Oh Doctor Beeching!: Forgotten Gem
Unfortunately, the 19 episodes of Oh Doctor Beeching! have, for some inexplicable reason, never been repeated in the UK and the show has been forgotten by some, in an age where a more in-your-face style of comedy appears to be the accepted norm. But for fans of a gentler, more family-friendly form of entertainment, this mid-1990s effort comes highly recommended.
The complete first and second series of Oh Doctor Beeching! are available now on DVD.
Adrian Peel - Adrian is an English freelance writer and journalist currently living in Mexico. Over the past eight years, he has had articles, features ...
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