The Professional Association of Teachers has been debating the role of Saturday morning children’s television in corrupting the nation’s youth. Their daughter, Jill Fletcher, is an actress and comedienne.Anthony Hayward. From the people who dreamt up the idea of replacing the word “fail” with the concept of “deferred success” comes another wacky idea. In 1949, the summer production was broadcast on BBC television for six consecutive weeks as The Saturday Night Attraction, with the then unknown Harry Secombe as Fletcher’s second comedian.Fletcher’s career was revived in the 1970s when he performed his “Odd Odes” in the light-weight consumer series That’s Life! The couple, who returned every year to St Martin-in- the-Fields in London to renew their marriage vows, moved to St Peter Port, Guernsey, in the mid-1980s.

Mixed Doubles (1956-57) featured them as a married couple, with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray – another show-business pair – playing their neighbours in south London.But, as variety lost its attraction, there were fewer radio and television opportunities. For 27 years after the war, the couple staged their own pantomimes – written by Astell, who played principal boy while Fletcher acted the dame – and a seasonal show, Summer Masquerade, at the theatre on Sandown Pier, on the Isle of Wight. They also appeared on television in episodes of the sketch show Kaleidoscope (1949) and their own BBC sketch special Cyril’s Saga (1957), written by Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin. Switching to ITV, they starred in The Cyril Fletcher Show (1959), a six- part series of comedy sketches scripted by Johnny Speight.Monkhouse and Goodwin also wrote a radio sitcom for Astell and Fletcher. The couple married the following year.After the war, they both wrote and starred in the film comedy A Piece of Cake (1948). Although BBC television closed during the Second World War, its radio service continued and, while recording a show for Henry Hall’s Guest Night in 1940, Astell met Cyril Fletcher, who had made a name for himself on television performing his “Odd Odes” and had a similar background to her in variety. She subsequently acted alongside Gordon Harker and Binnie Hale in This is the Life (1933), Henry Kendall in Great Stuff (1933), A Wife or Two (1934) and The Man I Want (1934), Jack Hulbert in Jack of All Trades (1936), Jack Livesey and Dinah Sheridan in Behind Your Back (1937) and Will Fyffe in The Mind of Mr Reeder (1939).Most of the two dozen films she appeared in were made before she found success on the small screen.

Four years later, she made her West End acting d?t in John Galsworthy’s Escape, at the Ambassadors Theatre. Her first film appearance was in the comedy A Tight Corner (1932), starring Frank Pettingell, a Liverpool-born actor renowned for playing good-humoured North Countrymen. During hundreds of nightly half-hour broadcasts, she also played Alice in television’s first pantomime, Dick Whittington (1932).
Astell, who had taken part in Baird’s tests at his cramped studio in Long Acre over the previous three years, became a regular performer before the cameras when the BBC launched the world’s first regular television service in 1936, with studios at Alexandra Palace and a definition of at least 240 lines.Born in London in 1912, Astell trained as a dancer and first sang on BBC radio at the age of 12. On 22 August 1932, when the BBC began its “30-line” transmission with Baird’s equipment, speeches by the great and the good were followed by a programme of light entertainment that included Astell singing and dancing in Studio BB, the dance-band studio three floors below Broadcasting House, in Portland Place. Betty Julia Astell, actress and singer: born London 23 May 1912; married 1941 Cyril Fletcher (died 2005; one daughter); died St Martin, Guernsey 27 July 2005.

During the early days of television, Betty Astell was one of those whose face flickered on the screen as the pioneering John Logie Baird conducted experiments in the new medium. A gifted cellist, she is a Chamber Music Associate at Dartington International Summer School and performs throughout the UK and Europe.Steve Voce. He worked occasionally with St?ane Grappelli and deputised for his brother Joe in Harry Parry’s Sextet.Recalled into the Merchant Navy, he was torpedoed in 1944 as his ship approached the Anzio beach-head He returned to England through Algiers. In May that year he was at home to form his Spirits of Rhythm, a group including the saxophonist Jimmy Skidmore, Joe and Clare Deniz. The band recorded for Decca with Frank featured on a notable version of “Soft Winds” and played at the “Jazz Jamboree of 1944″ alongside Glenn Miller and the Band of the AEF.

Another Hawaiian group formed to play at the Cocoanut Grove was soon broken up and the three brothers came together to form the Hermanos Deniz Cuban Rhythm band. While the group stayed together for many years, Frank continued to freelance and had lots of radio work with the Skyrockets, Nat Temple and other leaders. He toured England with Hoagy Carmichael.Deniz led his own bands and broadcast regularly throughout the Sixties and Seventies. He had a long residency at the Talk of the Town and he and his brother Joe played entr’acte music for the musical Ipi Tombi for five years during the Seventies.Frank Deniz bought a second home in Spain in 1980 and spent half of each year there until returning to London in the late Nineties.His daughter Clare continues the family tradition. In the same year first Joe and then Frank joined the band led by the singer-dancer Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, to play rhythm guitar.