This is the story of how millions of Britons
lost themselves in the world of ballroom
and found their dancing feet.
It's 1932, at the Cafe De Paris, London, and the joint is jumping!
# Happy Feet I've got those Happy Feet!
# Give them a low-down beat
# And they begin dancing... #
It's the golden era of dancing,
the time between the two World Wars, when Britain went ballroom barmy.
Millions went dancing, where graceful movement was everything.
But it was also edgy and radical,
a world of real sexual tension,
as we grappled with the Waltz, the Tango,
and each other.
Ballroom dancing was the country's favourite pastime,
when we learnt the steps and polished the moves.
What was it about ballroom that we all enjoyed so much?
And why did we turn our backs on what I consider to be
the greatest dance form of them all?
'This is the Tower Ballroom, in Blackpool,
'a sacred place for any dancer.
'It's the grandest and most beautiful ballroom in Britain.
'I've judged Strictly Come Dancing here
'and I've also glided across its hallowed floor many, many times.'
You know, as soon as you walk into this place,
there's somehow a fantastic atmosphere about it.
And, standing here on this floor,
you know, you can't help but think as a dancer,
how many people have danced here?
How many great dances, how many love affairs have begun,
when boy meets girl, on this dance floor?
It is just the most iconic dance hall of all.
It is just fantastic.
When I started in ballroom,
a night of Foxtrot or Tango was still the biggest thrill
you could get for five bob.
It was an amazing time - dancing was even on the telly.
But the old hands said I'd missed its greatest era,
when ballroom was truly magical.
At the Tower Ballroom these days,
it's a much more sedate affair.
'For me, ballroom was an escape route,
'from manual labour to a world of glamour.
'But I do have a confession.'
Now, I've always loved ballroom,
but when I first started, it wasn't just for the dancing.
'Dance teachers used to tell me
'that ballroom would be great for my posture and my self confidence.
'Well, I don't know about that,'
but I tell you, my strike rate with the girls went right up.
'And I wasn't alone - the dance hall was a chance to hold someone close,
'in a perfectly innocent setting.'
I love all this.
But, you know, my favourite was the "Excuse Me".
When you could go up to some chap, tap him on the shoulder
and dance with his partner.
Now, if your luck was in,
when the music finished, you got a kiss on the cheek.
Oh, when I was a young man...
Oh, joy of joys!
What I would imagine is, when you were growing up as a teenager,
there wasn't that many opportunities to meet boys as there is now.
So, I suppose the ballroom was the place to do it.
It was, it was. And lots of "Excuse Me's". Yeah.
And we used to have fun doing that. Yeah.
SHE LAUGHS
You know, if we got our eye on somebody... Right! "Excuse me!"
Because we used to turn it round to a Ladies' Excuse Me
as well as a Man's Excuse Me. Of course, yes. So it was brill.
So if there was some young chap you fancied having a dance with,
you'd be out there. Absolutely! Go for it, girl!
THEY LAUGH
It was brill!
The music was very romantic.
The lighting, the atmosphere, all lent itself to romance.
It's hard to appreciate
the emotional appeal
of a dance orchestra
playing romantic tunes
whilst you're holding somebody
in your arms and dancing together.
It was a great meeting place,
because, I think, the happiness,
the music and the open space,
the bright lights and the open space
were conducive to people meeting under happy circumstances
and I call it escapism and I think that's what it was.
'One of my oldest dancing pals is Lyndon Wainwright
'and when ballroom was booming, he was in the thick of it.'
There you are, it's Saturday night.
You've got your best gear on. Yes. Right? Out you go, it's lovely.
What was the feeling like as you walked into those ballrooms?
Oh, they were opulent... Yeah.
..by comparison with your home surroundings.
There was the gilt paint and the subdued lighting, and...
tables like this with fancy cloths on. Right, yeah.
No expense was spared in making this place look and feel fantastic.
That's right. And they were all the same.
Looks all innocent now,
but, once upon a time, dancing was a hotbed of hormones and romance.
And don't forget - most of our parents met in a ballroom.
SCREAMING
# Hello, everybody There's music in the air
# Hello, everybody You'll find it everywhere
# So just dance away your troubles
# And your cares Will fade like bubbles
# Hello! Hello, everybody! #
We might get our thrills in other ways now,
but there was a time when ballroom was imbued
with more than a whiff of revolution,
helping to collapse social boundaries
and giving people like me a chance to dance.
There's much more to the story of British ballroom
than gentle tea dances, or even Strictly.
It's about cracks in the class system, sexual intrigue
and about a time when Britain found its feet on the dance floor.
Modern ballroom's story begins at end of the 19th century.
In those days, it was the privileged few,
the aristocrats, the rich and royalty,
who were tripping the light fantastic in grand locations.
Frankly, the working classes didn't get much of a look-in.
You've got private dances, county balls, society balls
by property-owning aristocrats in the country,
but also in London, the Portman Rooms, the Savoy and Ritz Hotels.
They were the centres for the season,
the fashionable upper classes and their balls.
There were a wide range of venues
that the upper classes could dance in before the First World War.
'It may have been the preserve of the well-to-do,
'but ballroom was in the grip of its first craze.'
And one dance ruled.
It was the simplest one of the lot -
and it remains the most popular dance of all -
the Waltz.
The Waltz is the bedrock of so many of the dances that we do today,
but when the first European version of the Waltz
arrived in Regency Britain, there was a moral backlash.
A cutting from The Times shows
just how much the Waltz got pulses racing.
It's hard to believe, but one of their correspondents called it
"an obscene display".
And with that kind of press, the Viennese Waltz could only catch on!
But why was everyone getting so flustered?
And how did we end up with the slow Waltz
that we're so familiar with now?
'Well, that's something professional dancer Erin Boag
'is going to help me demonstrate,
'along with musicologist Derek Scott.'
You know, the thing I found when I danced the Viennese Waltz,
it's the most exhausting of all of them.
Very exhausting. Isn't it? Yeah, very fast, that's why.
People think the Quickstep is the one that we all got tired with,
not for me, it was always the Viennese Waltz,
because it was so, so repetitive. Round and round and round. Yeah.
So, how long would people have danced that for in one go,
back in the day?
At first, these waltzes lasted around six minutes
and then, they grew to be about nine minutes long.
And then, there were warnings if they were ten minutes long,
people would collapse with dizziness and exhaustion.
So, really, the longest ones are nine minutes.
But you got a complete rest once you'd done that.
I think you'd need one after nine minutes.
And, I guess, the Viennese Waltz, originally,
was in Austria and southern Germany.
And was it more for the sort of aristocrats and the country houses,
or was it a dance that everyone did?
That fast one really developed
because of the aristocratic ballrooms,
and then the big, expensive ballrooms
for the wealthy merchants of Vienna.
It developed out of folk dances, the Dreyer, the Laendler.
These were much slower - an example of Laendler rhythm would be this.
Yeah.
And it went one-two-hop! One-two... Yeah.
This was danced outside on the grass, people wore boots. Right.
The ballrooms called for something more refined, you see.
For the aristocracy, parquet flooring was introduced
so that you could do these gliding steps,
which you couldn't do on grass.
And when you listen to it, it does glide along, doesn't it? Yes.
I think that's one of the keys to the Viennese Waltz
is you get that lovely gliding movement.
OK, let me just show you something, Derek, it might surprise you.
There are five points of contact in the hold.
This is one - gentleman's left hand in lady's right.
Now, I'm going to use a handkerchief to go onto the lady's back,
because that's what they used to do back in the day.
Cos the guys all had dirty hands, working-class people.
Oh, no, we can't do that.
So there's contact two.
Now, the lady's upper arm goes on the gentleman's lower, that's three.
Here's four. And all of this was quite fine,
but because of the circling motion of the Viennese Waltz,
if you were too far apart, you couldn't rotate enough.
So, you had to get up close and personal.
And THAT was when the shock horror came in.
Hmmm.
So here we go, we're going to have a little go, a little bit of Viennese Waltz.
We'll do lovely natural turns and see what happens.
Beautiful. What a team.
You, me
and the music.
'Ladies and Gentlemen,'
now, I will show you the dance of the season -
the Waltz, step by step.
Just watch my feet.
The Waltz was simplicity itself,
but the Viennese version was still too fast
and a slower Waltz was developed for British tastes
that allowed everyone to have a go.
People, particularly in working-class dance halls,
were drinking as well as doing the fast Waltz
and this was adding to the problems of giddiness
and falling over on the ballroom floor.
So, there was a necessity to try and slow it down,
but the other thing that happens in the 1890s
is that you have the birth of this really big popular song industry -
Tin Pan Alley, in New York.
And, of course, they want to write Waltz songs.
Well, you can't get many words into a Viennese Waltz, it's so fast.
So they slow it down for songs like My Wild Irish Rose,
After the Ball is Over, that sort of thing. Right.
So, shall we give it a go at the English Waltz, or the slow Waltz.
OK.
'The slow Waltz lent itself to old-fashioned qualities,
'where a man lead, but offered deference to his partner.
'But with its close physical contact,
'there was still a little hint of danger.'
HE CHUCKLES
The slow Waltz was catching on.
Soon, everyone would have the opportunity to join in.
Shopkeepers, librarians, even welders like me could do it.
By the end of the Edwardian era,
the Waltz was slowly working its way
through the social strata of Britain.
'But heads were being turned by new dances from America.
'And leading the charge was a Norfolk man
'who'd originally trained to be an engineer.'
He was one half of the most vibrant dance duo on the planet.
Along with his American wife, Irene,
Vernon Castle turned the world of dance on its head.
Everyone wanted a piece of what the Castles could offer.
They were international trend-setters,
exotic and flamboyant.
Irene was a fashion icon -
with her trademarked bobbed hair and short skirts.
The couple worked with an orchestra of black musicians.
Vernon and Irene had met in the States in 1910
and found success in Paris and London,
wowing audiences with the latest American dance crazes.
By 1914, they were a Broadway sensation in New York,
becoming ballroom's first superstars.
And here's what made the Castles so exciting.
They were completely blurring social and racial boundaries.
They took the best of Afro-American music, jazz, ragtime,
and turned it into new dances.
And one spread across the globe like a virus.
The Foxtrot was all elegance and sophistication
with long gliding movement across the dance floor.
Its inventor was an American dancer, Harry Fox, hence its name.
But the Castles claimed they'd seen the moves
being danced by black Americans long before it caught on elsewhere.
Syncopated dance music coming from America,
this is where America takes over from Europe.
Now, there had been these syncopated ragtime tunes around for a while.
A well-known one is The Entertainer, Scott Joplin.
You know, that de-de-de-dah, you just are ahead of the beat there.
But this had very little effect on Britain.
In fact, it was only when there was a big revue in London in late 1912,
Hullo, Ragtime!, that people responded to these dances
and just as with the Waltz, there was moral outrage.
People wanted to ban the song Itchycoo
because they didn't understand what this might mean, you know.
Yeah, I understand it.
Well, I've had an itchycoo on occasions, I must say.
But I do understand that.
But as much as I can appreciate that that Scott Joplin number
could be translated into a Foxtrot,
the dance is actually very smooth now, it's much more flowing.
They smoothed it out, Irene and Vernon Castle.
Interestingly, you know, of course, one is English and one is American.
They premier the Foxtrot in 1914, in New York,
and, by the time the War is over, this dance becomes THE dance,
as you say, that everyone wants to be able to do.
The slow Foxtrot is undoubtedly the backbone to all ballroom dancing
and it makes a very pleasant change to the Quickstep.
Quick, quick
and slow, slow, slow.
In the Foxtrot that we dance today,
you do get moments when you get six quicks on the spin. You do, yeah.
I'll give you an example of a step called The Weave
and we get six quicks.
One, two, three, four, five, six
and then we go back into the slows
and the gliding.
And I think that's what's part of the charm of the Foxtrot
is that you do get these moments where it's just gliding along
and then, you break into these faster moments.
It's lovely.
The tragedy is that Vernon Castle would never see
just how popular the Foxtrot would become.
During World War One he joined the Royal Flying Corps,
serving over the western front
and winning the Croix de Guerre for bravery.
But in 1918, whilst training American pilots,
his plane crash-landed in Texas.
Within days, Vernon Castle was dead.
He was just 30 years old.
After four years of war,
there was no way that Britain was going to stay the same.
There was a relaxation in the class system and more social mobility.
Empowered by their wartime work,
women were loath to return to menial domestic duties.
With more time on their hands and paid holidays,
the workers wanted to dance in grand places too.
There was a gap in the market
and, before long, every town had a Palais De Danse.
Entrepreneurs moved in, building many of the ballrooms
that would later dominate the high street.
And soon, there were plenty of locations
ready to give the pub a run for its money.
Ballroom was changing and, for the working classes,
it was an immersion into a glitzy new world.
The great attraction of the dance hall was the atmosphere,
which was, in many senses, incredibly glamorous.
# 'Twas in a cafe When the lights were low... #
And many of the dance halls did their best
to compete with one another
in terms of lavishness and provide all sorts of facilities.
# Oh, it was many, many years ago
# But still the memory sets My heart aglow... #
At the Palais De Danse, Nottingham, in the centre of the dance floor
was a fountain that could rise to 20 feet
and was illuminated by constantly changing coloured lights.
Some of the dance halls were also themed,
so at Tony's Ballroom, in Birmingham, for example,
there was a Middle Eastern theme.
The dance hall was made out to be a Mosque with prayer mats hanging
and the lounges were given equally exotic names.
The Baghdad and The Alcazar Lounge.
So this atmosphere of glamour was really important
to the appeal of the dance halls.
The ballrooms may have looked the part,
but with almost three quarters of a million men dead in the Great War,
would there be enough people to fill them?
After the War, the political establishment and the press
were almost panicking about the loss of young British men.
And many of them thought, "These women, we've now got a surplus."
The Daily Mail called them "our surplus girls".
And they said, "Where are the husbands going to be?"
Well, in the event, there wasn't a problem,
because, actually, the marriage rate picked up quite sharply
in the '20s and '30s.
Dancing, dance halls, fitted brilliantly into this,
what was seen initially as a problem of marriage,
because we now know from later surveys
that a high proportion of the people who married in the inter-war period
first met their eventual partners at a dance hall. Right.
So, in that sense, in the long run,
dances served what respectable society
thought was an admirable purpose.
# Smile, darn ya, smile!
# You know this old world Is a great world, after all... #
Britain started to enjoy itself.
And in the seaside resorts,
holiday-makers poured in with their best clothes in their suitcases
and pounds in their pockets and headed off to the ballroom.
# ..Time for you and joy To get acquainted... #
There's been dancing in Blackpool
for almost as long as there's been sand on the beach.
And since day one, the Tower Ballroom has attracted dancers
like iron filings to a magnet.
'Blackpool's famous Tower, all five hundred feet of it,
'is the high-spot of Lancashire's favourite pleasure ground.
'Let's get a new slant on the holiday scene.
'Yes, you feel you're really on top of the world.
'How can you be down in the dumps
'when your heart's up in the clouds
'and you can throw away cares to the four winds?'
HE CHUCKLES
"Nice to see you - to see you...nice!"
HE CHUCKLES
Do you know, what gets me is the thought of people,
you know, Lancashire lasses and lads coming here for their week's holiday
and coming up here and seeing this.
I just can't imagine it, it is truly fabulous.
Right from the start, Blackpool's known how to party.
Back then, the resort had huge ballrooms
and thousands of people used to come dancing.
It's no wonder this place became the spiritual home of ballroom.
# They're all coming From near and far
# To learn the steps And here they are
# Eee by Gum, it's champion!
# Here's the Blackpool Walk. #
HE CHUCKLES
It was a new and exciting time -
the 1920s was the equivalent of punk and new wave.
And after the horrors of war and the Western Front,
people wanted to get out and let their hair down.
And dancing became completely radical.
# We're all alone
# No chaperone can get our number
# The world's in slumber
# Let's misbehave! #
As millions were swept off their feet,
moral panic once again hit the nation.
# ..Let's be outrageous Let's misbehave! #
By comparison with the Edwardian dances,
1920s dances seemed a bit less, well, less sedate,
less disciplined, less orderly.
A bit more suggestive, a bit more erotic, frankly, to many people.
# ..Let's misbehave! #
Stories abounded of flappers and bright young things
hooked on cocaine, so they could dance all night.
Nightclubs sprang up all over London,
it seemed that the very social foundations of Britain
were being undermined.
The dance halls were swinging to the sound of the latest music
brought here by touring dance bands from the States.
To some ears, the sound of jazz just wasn't very British.
# ..Let's misbehave! #
There's a moral reaction against the nightclub scene
with which jazz is so inextricably linked.
# ..Let's misbehave! #
Nightclubs were particularly keen on employing
a handful of black musicians to add a sense of exoticism
and authenticity to their music.
And these nightclubs were considered to be incredibly seedy.
They were an indication of a new declining moral standard in Britain
after the First World War.
You've got battalions of bishops and clergymen
and newspaper editors who are lining up to condemn the new dances,
because they viewed it as part of a general moral decline.
Even the politicians were having a go.
The Home Secretary of the time decided swift action was needed.
In the mid 1920s, police raids on nightclubs began.
It was all fertile ground for the headline-writers.
And the dance that was getting all the editorial columns
hot and bothered -
it was the Charleston.
# Charleston! Charleston!
# Made in Carolina
# Some dance, some prance... #
The dance burnt like a bright flame in London in the early 1920s,
but, for some provincial tastes, the Charleston was simply too much.
From Bridlington to Nuneaton,
the good burghers of Britain were saying enough is enough.
# But the Charleston The new Charleston
# That dance is surely a comer!
# Sometime, you'll dance it One time... #
But there'd be no stopping the Charleston.
Nightclub-owner and Dance Teacher Santos Casani's daring routine
on top of a London taxi showed
that this dance wasn't going to respect traditional boundaries.
One of the things that I find fascinating
is whichever new dance came along, there was a sense of outrage
from certain areas of the society that this was a scandal.
It is absolutely true.
A new dance is always viewed with the highest suspicion.
It doesn't matter what it is.
We've seen that the Waltz was viewed as morally suspect.
But as soon as we move onto the syncopated dances,
they, too, come under the scrutiny.
The combination of new music and dances gave journalists a field day.
For some, jazz was a low-type of primitive music
that was the essence of vulgarity,
while others complained of crude gyrations.
For a small minority of critics,
the black American origins of the new dances was of major concern.
And what you find is a lot of the early jazz and dance critics
seem to be obsessed with tracing back the origins of the new dances
and the new music to the jungle, as they put it.
In the Daily Mail, the Charleston was condemned
as being "reminiscent only of negro orgies".
Really? Yes, to some extent, this is the old story
that moral standards are always defined
by middle-aged, middle-class men
who get worried about what young people or women are actually doing.
Despite the scandal,
ballroom continued to find a growing audience.
For most people, it was harmless fun in places that became a second home.
# Love is good for anything That ails you
# Baby, there is nothing Love can't do... #
When I was growing up, I loved the freedom that dancing gave me,
and I let it all hang out here,
at The Rivoli, in South London.
HE CHUCKLES
Oh, yes. Thank you.
HE CHUCKLES
This is the place, I tell you.
I've been coming here since I was 16,
so we're talking over 50 years ago.
I used to first come doing a bit of jive - it was like a jiving place.
Used to try and get hold of a nice bit of crumpet
and go through there and have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea.
But latterly, it was one of my regular places for ballroom dancing.
There used to be a little circuit that we used to do -
one night it'd be the Hammersmith Palais,
then, the Tottenham Royal, Orchid Purley, the Lyceum in The Strand
and the Rivoli Ballroom.
So, it was just every night we used go out dancing, and it was great.
And this place, when you look at it, it's not changed.
Nothing has changed.
It's still the same,
and I used to just love the look of the whole place.
It made you want to dance, because it's from an era, somehow,
where you feel you want to do ballroom dancing.
It's just fabulous.
Oh, I can see me now...
young, fit,
hair dark as a raven's wing.
Walk in. "Oh, good evening."
# The echo of a song You used to sing... #
Oh, you're taller than I thought.
Oh, yes, you move so well...
HE CHUCKLES
# ..Was one long summer's day While you were there... #
But the more I got into ballroom,
the more I realised it was driven by a set of rules.
And much of this was down to one man.
Look what we've got here.
It's the doyen of strict tempo dancing.
Victor Silvester And His Orchestra. Here we go.
Oh!
MUSIC: "You're Dancing On My Heart"
This was Victor Silvester's theme song
and prior to it just starting, he would say his iconic words.
And here they are -
"Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow."
Victor Silvester was a World Ballroom Champion
for whom the rules meant everything.
And what he was witnessing on the dance floor appalled him.
It seemed that everyone was doing their own thing
and that dancing was going to the dogs.
And, in 1920, 200 dance teachers gathered in London
to work out what their next step would be.
It was now a time for action.
The dance profession decided that there needed to be some kind of order
in response to this new seeming chaos or "artistic bolshevism",
as one dance teacher put it.
Over several years, strict rules governing ballroom were introduced.
There'd be a musical solution, too.
Later, as a bandleader,
Victor brought in the discipline of strict tempo -
clear criteria which even dictated
how many bars per minute there should be.
Victor Silvester came along and he was the man
that tamed it all and brought in strict tempo.
And it was consistent.
If it was consistent,
then the dancer could dance to it.
Victor Silvester grooms the music
to be able to be used
and I mean used - used to dance by everybody that felt like dancing.
He had to bring regularity into it
because your dancing today would not exist
if it weren't for Victor Silvester.
'And now for a demonstration of dancing,
'arranged by those famous exponents from the Empress Rooms, Kensington,
'Phyllis Haylor, former World Champion, and Charles Scrimshaw.'
With the music and dance now sorted,
there'd be a syllabus for dance teachers.
The English style of ballroom was born.
'But for your special benefit,
'they're pretending they're just ordinary folk,
'making just ordinary mistakes like this wrong position of the arm.'
There was an emphasis on gracefulness and a decorum,
so the wild, jerking movements of the new dances were tamed.
You must use your heels when you go forward, Teddy.
Slide your foot forward on the heel.
And Freda, don't turn your toes like that, keep them in.
Keep your feet quite straight.
Will you try that now?
This was an attempt clearly
to remove all suggestions of impropriety
and sort of uncontrolled primitiveness.
'Two of the party have just come back from America,
'so here's a swing step, hot from Harlem.
'But it's rather too hot for English ballroom,
'so let's try a swing step that's a little quieter.
'Good.'
That looks rather nice, shall we all try it?
Strict tempo was hugely popular,
but some musicians felt it made the sound clinical and predictable.
Others, such as singer Barbara Jay,
who performed in the dance halls of the '50s,
welcomed the discipline.
It made me sing in time.
It was very good and we used to sing what we call 'on the beat'.
We never used to pull a song around like people do now.
Used to sing accordingly to the arrangement and in tempo,
because that was the tempo for the dancers.
And if the tempo wasn't right,
I assure you the dancers used to come up
and complain bitterly to the bandleader.
"That Foxtrot was too fast..." and "That Waltz was too slow."
So he used to get that.
I find it rather dull, really, you know,
I think, in the main, it's pretty dull,
because the priority is not the music any more.
The priority is the tempo.
It's not played badly, it's played beautifully, often,
and, indeed, sung sometimes.
But often the vocalists are,
in fact, abandoned on strict tempo dance music, often instrumental.
And when we've played for dances
with sort of very dyed-in-the-wool dancers,
they sometimes say, "Oh, we wish you didn't have any vocals."
They don't like the vocals,
they just want the music to be played
at exactly the right tempo, so that they can whoosh around
doing the slow Foxtrot or the Quickstep at the right tempo.
75 million records, Victor Silvester sold.
Really? You know.
As you say, all in strict dance tempo,
and immediately recognisable.
You hear them on the radio, you know that's Victor Silvester.
But, you know, you wouldn't want to listen to that now, would you?
You know, it served its purpose and he was clearly,
you know, he was the man, but to musicians, it's a terrible sound.
The English style had restrained some of the excesses
that had crept into ballroom,
but could it cope with the most sensual dance of the lot?
The Tango.
It was hot, it was spicy, it was passionate.
The big question was, could European sensibility adjust itself
to this Gaucho-driven dance of passion?
Oh, I've gone all hot under the collar.
# One starry night
# In an old southern town... #
The Tango had its roots in the street music of Argentina.
# ..Though with the dawn... #
A more sedate version swept across Europe,
but it still incurred the wrath of the Catholic church.
Later, in the '30s, a little zest was added,
giving the dance a new flavour.
# ..Whispering I'll come back some day. #
When the dance first became popular it was quite a smooth dance,
it didn't have all this staccato and sharpness about it.
Just before the War, a German came along, called Freddie Camp,
who danced here in Blackpool
and brought this sharp, staccato flavour to it
and the place went mad.
I can understand why, because, you know,
if you think of a famous Tango like La Cumpanista, you know.
Those spiky chords.
So, you get a step like The Link,
which is only two steps, but it shows now...
Now, prior to Freddie Camp, you'd get a sort of smoothness about it.
Suddenly, here comes Freddie, full of vim and vigour, and he'll go...
Whoopa! And the whole thing became much sharper and crisper.
And... Shumba!
HE HUMS
'Freddie Camp changed the Tango for ever.
'After decades of toning dances down for British tastes,
'here were the Brits, with a bit help from a German,
'putting the oomph back into ballroom.'
Whoopa!
# Adios muchachos Companeros de mi vida... #
The other characteristic of the Tango
is that we dance it with slightly flexed knees,
there's no rise and fall whatsoever.
And the story goes that they used to wear these leather chaps
and when they were on the horse all day, this leather used to get stiff.
And when they got off their horse,
their legs were slightly bent because of these leather chaps.
They used to smell, you know, and deodorant wasn't around.
So the ladies then put a rose in their mouth
and turned their head to the left.
Which, of course, would have been slightly perfumed
away from the bad smell.
# Everybody dance!
# Why don't you try to Foxtrot Your troubles away? #
With the core dances now making up the English style,
the Waltz, Foxtrot, Quickstep and Tango,
Britain was ready to export its take on dancing all over the globe.
And with the rules now in place,
everyone wanted to learn how to dance properly.
# ..But if you're bashful Let the music say it for you
# Dance... #
But how to spread the message became a major challenge
for Britain's new ballroom establishment.
# ..Up on your toes... #
By the 1930s,
ballroom competitions were all the rage for the committed dancer.
But keeping the rest of the population in line was no easy task.
# ..Dance, dance, dance, dance! #
If you were struggling,
there was always an army of attendants on hand to help out.
They would be penned off in a corner of the dance hall
and you could hire them for one or two dances
or often for the whole evening.
These dancing partners inevitably attracted suspicion
and the rumours were rife
that they were offering more than just a dancing partnership.
'Teaching people to dance has always been a challenge
'and, back in ballroom's heyday,
'dance schools were in the front-line of the battle
'to get people to move properly.
'The rules were in place, they just needed to be enforced.'
Cha-cha-cha...
'And in every dance class across the country,
'no step was spared in making sure they were performed correctly.'
Last one...
'So, it's time to set a 1930s challenge
'for these youngsters in a dance school near Garstang, in Lancashire.'
Excellent, well done.
That's not a seven, I'll tell you.
That's a ten from Len, well done!
THEY LAUGH
Thank you.
Right foot, everybody, ready, go.
One, two, three, cha-cha-cha.
Now, this may seem comical to us now,
but back in the '20s and '30s,
this instruction manual was cutting edge.
And it was produced by the Maestro himself - Victor Silvester.
He showed the steps for every dance,
from The Charleston right through to the slow Foxtrot,
and everything in between.
Now, the question is -
can these young people follow the master's footsteps?
Thank you very much.
Who's the boy ? Me.
The reverse turn.
Left, right, left.
No, no.
One, two, three.
Thank God I wasn't born in the '20s or '30s,
because I'd have a terrible job with this.
Cutting edge? I'd cut me throat.
One, two, three, four, five.
A little bit big in the step, wasn't it?
Arrampah! Yump-bum-bum!
Step three is step forward and across,
slightly to right with left foot.
I've got to work this out.
Step forward with the left foot, turning to the left.
I've done that.
One, two, three, four, five.
I always like a man with epaulettes.
All of you now, I want you all to try it.
Come up here, we're all going to do it. Six steps.
Tango! Ready.
And a-ra-tah-tah!
A-ra-tah!
What Victor Silvester had done is created order.
He's given precise steps and a technique that people could follow.
But, in doing so, I think the common man had lost the feel for dancing.
It was almost as though you had to learn a regimented routine
which, for me, isn't what dancing's all about.
Britain may have been bitten by the dance bug,
but ballroom was in a state of flux.
It's summed up by this place, the fabulous Cafe De Paris,
in London's West End.
'By the mid '30s, ballroom,
'the dance that the masses had taken to their hearts,
'appeared to be divided.'
While the working classes packed out huge dance halls,
and had a right old knees-up,
the well-to-do tucked into their lobster in surroundings like this
and danced the night away.
Smart hotels and restaurants latched on to the idea
that diners would pay a premium for high-end surroundings
and quality music from the nation's best dance bands.
Geraldo, Henry Hall, Bert Ambrose.
They all became household names.
But there were hundreds more belting out the tunes.
They seemed to create a sort of magic atmosphere,
the records from the '30s, of elegance,
and it's something different. It's got a very particular style to it.
The marvellous atmosphere that it creates straight away
and, of course, it had to create an atmosphere straight away.
People needed to hear a few bars of music
and they needed to be whisked onto the dance floor.
# Shall we dance Or keep on moping
# Shall we dance and walk on air? #
But it very quickly became so much more than that.
It became clever music, with wonderful arrangements
and the very best musicians playing in the bands at the time.
The most fantastic jazz solos,
the most fantastic smooth, elegant sounds all mixed together
into a sort of British dance band sound.
Every hotel, every restaurant,
as well as the ballrooms, needed musicians.
It was a field day for musicians.
# ..Dance whenever you can! #
That would have been the time to be a musician.
Because, apart from anything else, it was fun.
They were well paid, well looked after,
and they were playing music that was fun to play.
And, in a way, the music is sort of leading the dance, isn't it?
There's something being generated on the band stand
that people want to dance to.
Live music is absolutely brilliant!
I mean, once an orchestra plays, it just gets in your blood.
'The National Programme from London.'
Now, you're going to hear the first performance
of the new BBC Dance Orchestra, directed by Henry Hall.
# It's just the time For dancing... #
Soon, every living room was echoing to the sound of ballroom.
The bands had huge followings.
Jack Hilton, for example, in 1929,
he travelled over 63,000 miles on tour,
he gave over 700 performances
and his records sold at the rate of about seven per minute,
so he's hugely successful.
Roy Fox led one of the most popular bands of the '30s.
Mary Lee was just out of school when she won a competition
and joined them as a singer.
There was about 20, 25 musicians and Roy Fox,
immaculately dressed in beautiful tails,
all playing gorgeous music, you know.
I thought to myself, "I've died and gone to heaven."
# Cos it's been so long
# Since I held you tight
# When we said goodnight
# It's been so long
# Honey, can't you see What you've done to me... #
It was really brilliant. And these boys knew what they were doing.
You went on and you knew you were working
for the best musicians in the world.
And you couldn't else but be good.
It was a happy, happy time.
# ..It was so nice... #
For three golden years, Mary fitted right in with the boys in the band.
They were lovely, but then, I think I was terribly lucky,
because the band boys could be, you know, rough and ready
and, you know, I won't go any further.
But I remember Roy Fox telling them,
he said, "Now, she's just turned 14.
"I don't want any swearing,
"I don't want any untoward gags or what have you.
"Leave her be.
"Let her grow up alongside you and don't tell her any mucky jokes.
"Please don't."
And that's the way we went along.
Mary was paid the princely sum of £5 a week
and with the boys, she played the dance halls
and the swanky West End restaurants,
rubbing shoulders with society's smart set.
It was nice people.
People who had what we would say roughly, a bob or two.
And the ladies were nicely dressed.
We used to sit on the band stand and the boys would pick out
who were the nicest-looking lasses, and all that.
Who had the nicest legs and all that.
We had all that kind of fun.
But, oh, I used to, I used to, oh, die to get down and dance with them
but I couldn't, I wasn't allowed to.
While the dinner dance scene thrived, over in the dance halls,
people were tiring of the rules -
they wanted to experiment.
'And now, we're taking you over to The Locarno, Streatham,
'to learn something of the latest dances.
'Here's one you can all dance and it's sweeping the country.
'The Palais Glide.'
Having a partner was no longer as important
and novelty dances became popular.
'What better than the Palais Glide for making everyone pally?
'Where The Palais Glide originated, we don't know.
'Some say the Midlands, but its popularity is tremendous.'
It wasn't so much revolution as a curious form of evolution.
It was ballroom,
but for those who'd worked hard to establish the rules,
well, it just didn't feel right.
# It's your blooming birthday
# Let's wake up all the town
# So knees-up, knees-up Don't get the breeze-up
# Knees-up, Mother Brown. #
And just when it seemed that the masses were becoming frustrated
with traditional ballroom,
the darkest of times gave it a new lease of life.
During the Second World War, dancing was incredibly popular.
# Dance hall doll Dancing around the floor... #
And it performed a very important function on the home front.
The Government soon realised
just how important dancing was for morale.
'Carry your gas mask, because you'll never know
'where you'll need it.
'Now, at the dance hall in Streatham,
'they grab their partners for the preliminary race,
'and it's on with the gas mask and the dance.'
With the Luftwaffe doing their best to bomb Britain into submission,
people turned to ballroom, in all its forms
and lived every moment as though it were their last.
Home Intelligence reports of the blitzed areas, for example,
found that, in those cities where dancing and dance halls remained open
and continued going during the Blitz,
such as Liverpool and Portsmouth,
morale was much higher than in those areas
where nightlife ground to a halt.
And so, it recommended that dance halls were made repair priorities
and were kept open in the aftermath of the Blitz.
As American GIs hit our shores,
dancing once again became a passport to a meeting with the opposite sex.
'Fraternisation was the order of the day
'and it certainly looks as if everything was going
'according to plan.'
And along with their nylon stockings and fat wallets,
the Yanks brought new music and dances like the jive.
Once again, American influence took ballroom in a whole new direction.
The feel-good factor continued after the War,
but, within a decade, attitudes were changing.
Ballroom was no longer cutting edge.
A new generation voted with their feet.
Dance band music of the '30s, however much we love it,
we have to admit it evokes
the upper crust of society and high society.
It evokes money, wealth, a richness.
And after the War, this just wasn't what people wanted any more,
they wanted a more democratic world.
As a teenager during the war,
Tommy Whittle played saxophone in Lew Stone's Band.
It was style of music soon to go out of fashion.
I think it was skiffle came in, first of all.
You know, a ridiculous sort of music, in my opinion.
And yet, it became terribly popular.
What can you do?
# I dim all the lights
# And I sink in my chair... #
Tommy's wife, Barbara Jay,
played with some of the big bands of the '50s
and saw the golden age of ballroom slowly slipping away.
# ..Fade away in the blue
# And I'm deep in a dream of you. #
They were looking at the new generation coming up, you see.
And they didn't want the dancing that their mothers and fathers went to.
They wanted to have their own kind of music
and this is where the music changed.
There were not so many big bands, there were small groups.
That kind of dancing faded away.
The simplicity of the close hold in the Waltz
and the passion of the Tango
were lost on a new generation who didn't have to be coy any more.
The sexuality of dancing was now there for everyone to see.
With its long list of rules, ballroom appeared to be out of step.
It gained a reputation as being old-fashioned.
Something that old people did.
It was for fuddy-duddies.
In those days, the rock and roll appealed to a different generation,
a more gentle generation at that time liked ballroom dancing.
Dancing went underground a bit.
And it went into the dancing schools,
instead of being in the public halls,
it went into the dancing schools.
Then, television arrived, and that completely changed everything.
People were not going out to dance halls any more,
they were sitting at home watching 'the new box', they called it.
The television.
'This is BBC Television.'
And Victor Silvester, the man who'd brought strict tempo to ballroom,
also appeared out of step with the new dances and crazes.
Well, I don't think that anybody could call the Twist an elegant dance.
What, then, is its attraction?
The answer is rhythm.
Feet six to eight inches apart and twist to the left,
to the right, to the left, to the right, to the left,
to the right.
Right! Twist, two, three, four...
I first fell into ballroom almost by accident.
If it hadn't had been for an ex-girlfriend who invited me along,
I might never have stepped into a world which has captivated me
for the best part of 50 years.
When I first put on my dancing shoes,
ballroom was still popular, but the peak had passed.
It seemed good to me then, so the golden age must have been brilliant.
There was something innocent and warm about ballroom dancing.
That sense of belonging that it gave you,
as well as a degree of self-expression.
It's a loss of something more than just ballroom dancing.
They're packed onto the floor,
because they've all got a common interest.
They all want to listen to the music,
they all want to dance with the best-looking girl in the room.
But the very heart of dancing years ago was to go out and meet people.
It was lovely.
It was lovely. You were hearing good music and, with a wee bit of luck,
you got a wee cuddle and a kiss on the way home.
You know, it was nice.
Ballroom's decline was a slow drift away.
# The sweetest music This side of heaven... #
No-one really noticed as each year the dance halls closed,
only to re-open as bingo halls or nightclubs.
It's hard to imagine that ballroom dancing could ever have been thought of as scandalous,
especially when you see the sort of dancing that's done today.
And yet, it was.
But, for me, there was a romance about ballroom dancing.
There was an innocence.
Boy meets girl, a little bit of flirtation on the ballroom.
And people who still do it, that's what they're tapping into -
this feeling of a romance.
And for me, there's nothing like it
and, if you've not tried it, you don't know what you're missing.
Erin, come on!
# I'm saving the last Waltz for you
# In your arms I'm just longing to be
# Please don't forsake me
# Just let your arms take me
# I'm saving the last Waltz For you. #
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd