Do It Yourself
1957 saw the emergence of a program that was to be the bane of
British husbands for years to come. No longer could they lie in
bed reading the Sunday Pictorial; they were expected to be dashing
around the house putting shelves up with a minimal loss of
blood.
The culprit was Barry Bucknell, and his long-running program Do
It Yourself taught men everything they never wanted to know
about doing jobs around the home.
From the first edition - a festive show in which Bucknell
demonstrated how to make a stand for a Christmas tree as well as
giving some tips on tree lights - his popularity soared to the
point where he received more mail than anybody else on British
television, up to 35,000 letters a week (He needed to employ ten
secretaries).
Yet Bucknell only really became a television celebrity because
of his wife. A former engineer in the car industry, he had done a
few radio talks on housing and education, but it was his wife
Betty, noted for her cookery programs on radio, who made the break
into television.
Bucknell casually chatted to her producer about the
possibilities of doing some sort of practical program but thought
no more about it; then out of the blue he got a call from the BBC
to appear on the afternoon series About The Home - and Do
It Yourself duly followed.
"The show was very much a one-man effort", said
Bucknell. "I used to build all the shelves, tables, whatever
we were using on the program, in the basement of my own house and
transport them en bloc to the studio. Even the rehearsals
used to take place in my basement. The early editions were live,
and I was dependent on the floor manager to ensure that things
like screws were close at hand. The whole show could fall apart
without a few screws, and it didn't look very good if I had to
search around for them. And it wasted valuable
air-time".
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