IN a smoke-filled Hongkong dance hall a young British Army lieutenant was persuaded to sing a number with the band. He got enthusiastic applause, and resolved then to take up a new career as a “pop” singer.

Now, two years later, the lieutenant, Gary Marshal, is established on the British popular music scene. On Wednesday, he sings with the Ted Heath Orchestra in Granada’s Bandstand. He has reached an objective.

After Sandhurst, and winning his commission, he was posted to Hongkong. There, after his military duties, he wanted something to do with his spare time, so he applied for an announcing job with the English language commercial radio station – and got it.

“They took me on as a board announcer, doing 14 hours a week of news and disc jockeying in the evenings,” said Marshal. “After a few months I was not only a board announcer, I was a bored announcer.”

The other English language station, the non-commercial Radio Hongkong, offered him more work, so he switched stations. He then found time to write two newspaper columns a week — a short story and a record review feature.

He courted and married an American girl born in China. “We now have a year-old son, Jamie, who — I swear — was born with a real cool haircut. He loves music and already looks like an out-of-work tenor sax player,” said Marshal.

How did he find the time for soldiering, married life, radio work and newspaper writing? His explanation: “I am a ‘night person’ and don’t like going to bed early.”

Marshal left the Army in August, 1958, at the end of his five-year term. A month later, a friend took him along to an agent. The agent looked up, noted his good looks, and said: “Bernard Delfont’s Sunday Night at the Prince Of Wales … The Frankie Howerd Show.”

Marshal, astounded, said “Fine.” And that was how he found himself playing a “wide boy” in a sketch with Frankie Howerd on ITV.

“After the show I dashed home and asked my wife ‘How was I?’ She said ‘I blinked and missed you!’” said Gary.

Later, he acted in TV commercials. “One of them was made at the Guards depot, Pirbright, where I found myself wearing a steel helmet, a pack on my back, and all the gear I hadn’t worn in years,” he said.

He went into cabaret, where he insisted on using his own drummer and pianist. “The extra expenditure was worth it,” he says. ITV talent spotters saw him and, as a result, he appeared in a number of shows. He also landed a recording contract.

Singing in front of the Ted Heath Orchestra in Bandstand is for Gary Marshal the realisation of a long-standing ambition. It was always his favourite band and, two years ago, hearing that Ted Heath was looking for a male singer, he took him a recording.

He said I was as good as any he’d heard, but there was a technical fault in my voice.” said Marshal. “He told me to come back when I had got rid of this fault. But I never found time to re-apply. Now, at last, I am to sing with him.”

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STRIKING effects and fresh techniques making possible new strides forward in the art of puppetry are promised in Four Feather Falls, a series about a Wild West town of that name Granada presents next Thursday. Each 15-minute show is shot in the same way as a feature film, using elaborate sets and location shooting.

An electronic device — which I am told has never been used before in puppetry — ensures that the puppets’ lips are synchronised with the voices (of Kenneth Connor, Denise Bryer, Nicholas Parsons, David Graham and singer Michael Holliday).

The puppets’ wires are so thin (1/5000th of an inch [about 0.005mm – Ed]) as to be invisible on the TV screen. The sets at the studios of AP Films in Slough, Bucks, where the series was created, include a 30ft by 15ft [about 9×4.6m] prairie with trees, rocks and scrubland, and a main street of Four Feather Falls with a sheriff’s office, a saloon, a livery stable, stores and sidewalks.

The big man of Four Feather Falls is Sheriff Tex Tucker. Tex has a simple and effective formula for dealing villains: “Git outer town and don’t ever come back.” He is helped by his horse, Rocky; his talking dog, Dusty; and his magic guns, which he will be demonstrating in the first programme on Thursday.

It is a formidable crime busting combination; life is far from peaceful, but Tex’s methods are so successful that he never has to kill a bad man, not even such desperadoes as Pedro the Bandit, Fernando and Big Ben.

Even the Injuns are friendly, up to and including Chief Kalamakooya and his little son Makooya. As for the townspeople – they are strictly in the “hearts of gold” category; notably Martha Jones, who sells candy and goods in the general store, Grandpa Twink and little Jake.

Magic abounds in Four Feather Falls – thanks to Chief Kalamakooya, who rewards Tex for saving the life of Makooya with some inside information on Indian magic. And, moving behind and above the scenes, there is a good deal of real-life “magic” of the technical kind. At an empty hotel ballroom in Slough — to the not-so-wild West of London — the creators of the series, Gerry Anderson and Arthur Provis, started making their films with just £500 [about £9,500 in today’s money, allowing for inflation] and a lot of faith.

Their team, consisting of Reg Hill (who does the model work and special effects), Jim Marsh, John Read, Sylvia Thamm (who works the robot-like electronic switch panel that synchronises the dialogue), and puppeteers Christine Glanville, Mary Turner and Roger Woodburn, works a long, tough day.

Filming starts at 8.30 in the morning and ends at 6.30. If they get more than four minutes of film “in the can” each day they consider it good going. It takes a week to shoot one episode.

Everybody has to get used to thinking small. They work in a Lilliputan world and all the props have to be specially made — no life-size articles will fit this miniature world.

Here is how the voices are synchronised: the voice “dubbers” speak their lines in a London studio where they are recorded on tape. Then, at the film studios, the tape is played back and linked, via steel strings, to magnets inside the puppets’ heads.

Sylvia Thamm works what they call a “four-channel natterer” so that at the touch of a key-switch any of four characters can be switched into circuit and the lips made to move by the electrical impulses from the sound-tape.

Everything clear? Well, never mind — just put it down to electronic magic.

Sheriff Tex Tucker needs two voices. Nicholas Parsons does the speaking and his songs are handled by Michael Holliday, who has recorded some new numbers for the series, including Phantom Rider, Two Gun Tex and the catchy theme:

“In Four Feather Falls, Four Feather Falls,
There’s always magic in the air.
But anything can happen. Anything at all …”

And it usually does.

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A COUPLE of super-intelligent master sleuths are caught up in a web of international espionage, violence and corruption in The Man in Room 17 which starts on Friday.

The series runs the gamut between comedy thriller and pure adventure. “What it definitely is not,” director-producer Dick Everitt told me. “is neurotic or kinky.”

“The Man” is an immodest ex-Oxford type with a superior IQ whose mind is trained to devour information like a computer. He rose to eminence during the planning of the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day. His name is Oldenshaw.

His partner — a man in his forties — is Dimmock. Dimmock is more direct — Oldenshaw’s red-brick equal. Together they pull the strings which make the undercover world dance.

Answerable only to the Prime Minister, they use their power ruthlessly and are generally accepted as infallible in the held.

Room 17, situated somewhere in Whitehall, is the secret centre of operations for the Department of Special Research. Oldenshaw and Dimmock handle cases which have baffled the security services.

Each case is treated by Oldenshaw as an intellectual problem. It is purely mental deduction that allows the two men to reach their conclusions. But they can also call on a legion of friends on the “old boy” network.

Richard Vernon, who plays the bearded Oldenshaw, told me: “We’re a couple of sparkling English amateurs. Our reasoning powers are almost limitless, and our knowledge is like two halves of a vast reference library ”

Dimmock is played by Michael Aldridge, and another regular in the series will be Willoughby Goddard, as Assistant Commissioner Sir Geoffrey Norton.

Because Oldenshaw and Dimmock are never seen outside Room 17, the series has been made using a split drama technique. One team of actors, writers, directors and designers produced the stories outside the Room, and a second team produced the scenes inside it.

Dick Everitt said: “There arc two distinct ingredients in the series — Room 17 and the world outside. Therefore, the mood has to be different.

“The most effective way to sharpen the contrast between the two was to separate them. The Room is fantasy. It is the remote, analytical centre of operations which exerts its influence on the outside world.

“The action takes place out side the Room, but I think viewers will come to relish the humour in Room 17 as much as the colour outside.

“Men like Oldenshaw and Dimmoek could not exist in real life, but the outside scenes certainly could.”

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WILLIAM JOYCE was brought up as an Irish country boy but by the time of his death at the age of 39 he had become — next to Hitler — the most hated man in World War II.

The grotesque mouthpiece of the Third Reich (as far as England was concerned, he was the only ‘German’ who spoke directly to us), was known as Lord Haw-Haw. His story is told in Monday’s All Our Yesterdays.

Joyce, an insular, home-loving traitor and the voice behind the “Gairmany calling” propaganda broadcasts to Britain, got under the skin of the British nation as few other men have done this century.

At first, no one took him seriously. His peak audience of 6,000,000 regular listeners and 18,000,000 casuals was achieved on pure entertainment value.

The Press urged the British public to listen “for light entertainment.” Another reason why he had an avid following was that radio played a far bigger part in the nation’s life in 1940, with no TV and the blackout keeping people indoors.

But after the Blitzkrieg and the fall of France, people began to take Lord Haw-Haw more seriously.

William Joyce, born in America of Irish-American parents on April 24, 1906, moved to Ireland with his mother and father when he was three. He came to England about 12 years later.

He joined the English Fascist movement under Mosley, but when faced with conflicting loyalties in 1939, went to Germany with his wife Margaret.

When war broke out he found employment as a broadcaster in the English language section of the German propaganda ministry.

In his first broadcast on September 11, 1939, he accused the British of hypocrisy and colonialism and scoffed: “England will fight to the last Frenchman.”

A poll showed that more than a quarter of the British public had heard him, and that he reached his radio peak 25 years ago this week.

Jonah Barrington, a national newspaper reporter, wrote: “A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen. He speaks English of the haw haw-damit-get-out-of-my-way variety.” A few days later Barrington bestowed on him the title Lord Haw-Haw and it stuck.

By May, 1940, the Germans were themselves using the title Lord Haw-Haw, but his “popularity” was already on the wane.

His last broadcast to Britain, the Commonwealth and America was in April, 1945. With Germany on her knees he described Hitler and Goebbels as “barricaded heroes in Berlin.” His broadcast ended: “You may not hear me for a few months. Heil Hitler and farewell.” He was captured in a wood while trying to escape to a neutral country, convicted of high treason at the Old Bailey and hanged.

The pompous propaganda peddler of the Third Reich was dead.

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YOU could call them the ‘camera commandos’. But don’t call too loudly. The producer might hear and start getting ideas about sending them on a patrol in the Borneo jungle.

That’s how it is with Scene At 6.30. Three interviewers — Mike Scott, Mike Parkinson. Peter Eckersley — between them have had enough adventure in 18 months to make the Three Musketeers look like a trio of retired scoutmasters.

Take Mike Scott. Since the programme began he has faced fire and flood. He has balanced on a plank over a fast running river to interview a woman marooned in her bedroom. He has crouched behind steel plating on an artillery range with shells whizzing past him.

Last summer he took a barge down the Lincolnshire canals to the open sea. A week later he was perched up in a Hastings Bomber making a trip through an Atlantic storm.

A day later he sat astride an elephant telling it elephant jokes. And to cap it all, the next day he floated down less pleasantly odorous reaches of the River Irwell, Salford, in a gondola.

Stratford-upon-Avon and back in half a day to make a film about Shakespeare. Up a misty mountain in the Lake District to talk to a hermit.

It’s all in a day’s work in Scene At 6.30. And it’s all in a hurry. The task master (or is it slave driver?) is producer David Plowright. He’s also what they call an ‘ideas man’. Someone only has to pass his line of vision after having an ordinary short, back and sides, and David has Mike researching into hair styles.

While Mike Scott is facing up to his tasks, be assured that Mike Parkinson is no less busy earning a living in no less suicidal ways. He might be patiently waiting by a hole in a stall for a python to pop out, or tossing about in an open boat off Flamborough Head in rough weather talking about a giant crab.

Mike Parkinson is the man they send down coalmines, or put on a thunder-rock fortress in the North Sea, or haul up into the air on a giant crane. Earlier this year he faced loaded revolvers in the Zanzibar rebellion.

Some months later, he mixed with Isle of Man nationalists who boasted they would fight if ever Lancashire annexed the island.

As a reward for a job well done, producer Plowright made him a tinker and sent him trudging across the Emerald Isle with a caravan.

What the viewer never saw was the time when Mike was on horseback without the caravan and the rein snapped. The horse bolted and our hero galloped across County Kerry as if the ‘little people’ were chasing him.

About the time he was bringing his steed to a halt, Peter Eckersley was taking things peacefully, doing a spot of fishing—up to his neck in the treacherous Solway Firth, seeking a tussle with a 30lb. salmon and reciting Walter Scott for the camera.

Peter is the man who has to grab toothbrushes and catch planes. Last year he covered the late President Kennedy’s tour of Ireland. This year he flew the Atlantic with The Beatles. He likes the giddy heights. If a building is being demolished, where better to stand and describe it than on the huge ball which is knocking it down? What better view of Liverpool than the one obtained from the top girder of the Roman Catholic Cathedral?

His latest trip was the five mile voyage from Ramsey to Panama — that is, the Panama registered pirate radio ship Caroline.

In the night sea he had to climb a rung ladder from a tiny boat bobbing below, with a microphone between his teeth instead of a cutlass. Fortunately, he was recognized and didn’t have to walk the plank.

The people who work on Scene At 6.30 are trained to touch tigers. If there’s a phoenix up a gum tree, one of them will be sent to catch it. If there’s a geni [sic] in a bottle, somebody will crawl in and interview it.

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On Friday Granada’s The Army Game returns. Two regulars, Cpl Springer (Michael Medwin) and Pte (Cupcake) Cook (Norman Rossington) will be missing, but never fear, Snudge will be there. Here, the worthy CSM fills in a few details of the delights of his summer rest and the delights he would have if he could clean up Hut 29

THE garden gate was blancoed a gleaming white. On it, the name of the house — The Last Post — was neatly picked out in khaki paint… I glanced over the hedge. In every flowerbed the plants were drawn up in three ranks, tallest on the right, shortest on the left, and down the far end an elderly willow tree seemed to be trying valiantly to stand to attention.

My search was over. I had found the home of Sergeant-Major Claud Snudge. My knock was answered by the great man himself. “Well?” he barked. Almost without thinking, I snapped my feet together, my shoulders went back, my chest out and my chin in, and I stammered the purpose of my visit.

Slowly the corners of his mouth moved wide apart and he bared his teeth. For a dreadful moment I thought he was going to bite me — until I realised he was only smiling.

“So you’re the bloke what’s come about the interview. Come in, come in.”

He led me through to the lounge, where a pile of suitcases and trunks stood against the wall. “I hope you will excuse the place not being quite tickety-boo,” he said, “but we’ve just come back from holiday.”

Somehow it had never occurred to me that sergeant-majors went on holiday. I told him so. “Ho, yes, indeed, yes,” he said. “Us sergeant-majors probably need it more than anyone else. We don’t get no privacy in our job. All the time we’re being surrounded and clamoured at, not just by soldiers but just as often by people, real people.

“Believe me, it’s nice to get away from the human race once in a while.”

“Where did you go this year?” I asked.

“Blackpool. Marvellous place. A proper haven of peace and tranquillitude. For two whole weeks I did nothing but lie on the sand, soaking in the sunshine and thinking beautiful thoughts.”

“What kind of beautiful thoughts?” I asked.

A dreamy glow came into his eyes. “Lovely, beautiful thoughts, like what I would do to that shower in Hut 29 if I had my way. Jankers and fatigues ain’t good enough for that lot. I’d like to see ’em doing some real fatigues, real fatiguing fatigues that would keep ’em out of mischief for good.

“For instance, imagine Private Bisley being told to sweep down the Great North-road with a toothbrush. Or Bone being ordered to bale out the English Channel with a child’s bucket. Now that’s the kind of threat that’d soon clean up Hut 29. What you might call the Ultimate Detergent.

“But what’s the use of torturing myself?”

He lapsed into a sad, troubled silence. It seemed a shame to disturb him, but I was after the facts.

“I noticed you mentioned only Bone and Bisley. Didn’t you consider methods of correction for the others?”

His face grew sadder. “Cook and Springer? The ones wot got away? Yes, they’re gone, and I’ll never have the pleasure of putting them on the hooks no more. Cook’s uncle died and left him a cake shop, so he bought himself out of the Army. And Corporal Springer wangled himself a posting as military bodyguard to the clerk of the course at Newmarket.” “But surely life will be a lot easier now that Hut 29 is without a leader?”

“They’ve got a leader all right. Captain Pocket has moved Corporal Hoskins into Hut 29.”

Corporal (Flogger) Hoskins is played by Harry Fowler.

Snudge looked so upset I thought I would try to cheer him up. “Well, that should make a nice change,” I said brightly.

Snudge gazed at me in silent pity. When he finally spoke, his voice shook with emotion. “It’s a nice change, all right. Like a plague of Colorado beetles is a nice change from a swarm of locusts. It’s just my luck to get rid of the Army’s Conniving Champion and find myself stuck with the No 1 Contender.”

I clucked sympathetically. “It looks as if you are in for a pretty rough time, then.”

Snudge’s drooping figure snapped erect and his eyes flashed indignantly. “Nonsense! I’ll soon show them who’s the master. It’s all a matter of attitude.”

“Attitude?”

“Yes, if I catch ’em at it they’re going to get chewed.”

“At least you have only three of them to worry about now.” I pointed out.

Evil cunning gleamed from the corners of his eyes. “Yes, and they’re used to working in fours. I can use that. All I need is a real soldier. A proper, heels-togethering, shoulders backing, chest out-ing, chin-inning, neat and tidy, no-idle soldiering soldier. With someone like that in Hut 29, we’d really get somewhere.”

“And where are you going to get such a paragon?”

The dream of hope faded. “T don’t know. I just don’t know. Oh, we’ve got some, you know. I remember seeing one at Aidershot only last year…” His voice trailed off as the treasured memory warmed his mind.

“Lovely sight he was. All knife-edge creases and blanco.” I turned my head tactfully to allow him to wipe away a nostalgic tear that threatened the left wing of his moustache.

“Perhaps they’ll send you one,” I said. I felt I had to say something. “They do send you soldiers from time to time, don’t they?”

He shook his head. “No, not soldiers. Sleeping, talking, eating, walking, living uniforms, yes. Soldiers, no. In fact, we get a new intake arriving the day camp opens.”

“They might send you a good one by mistake.”

“That would not be a mistake, it would be a blooming miracle. And miracles,” said Snudge sadly, as I left him, “don’t happen, not never no more.”

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