Life's a Cavalcade

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In our latest edition of Advantage Magazine, former STV children’s star Glen Michael (95), is encouraging people to call Age Scotland’s friendship line if they are feeling lonely and shares how thoughtful neighbours helped brighten up his day.

I: I was really, probably, very, very slightly less sorry than you are, you know, about it coming to an end! It was one of those things called progress. Losing the show still rankles. When I ask if he's enjoying retirement he answers: "Well, not really. Because I was forced to stop." Michael seems wistful about what could have been, and his inner landscape is hard to map in that respect. "I often wonder what I would've done if I had stayed there [London]. But I've had such a fantastic life in Scotland, I would never regret it; it's been wonderful. Meeting all these people." Now Glen has decided it’s time that Paladin goes to a new home, a caring one he hopes, as this iconic piece of TV history will be going up for auction for Children in Need. Glen, who delighted generations of children with his show which ran for more than 26 years. said: “I know what it’s like to be lonely.I: Oh no! The trouble with it is including things like the phone service and so on, I want to talk to somebody and eventually I get somebody who's, perhaps English isn't their first language. Glen explained: “A few weeks ago Tam had done a smashing piece in his Record column on me, Arthur Montford and Archie MacPherson, and how we were the heroes of his childhood. Paladin was always being rude to me and I was always the fall guy at his expense. That was the whole idea of the character. I: Oh yeah. It ran for twenty-seven years. It's a silly question - were you sad when it had to come to an end? I: Yes. I was wondering, the reason why I asked the question was, you are talking to your audience on radio and the only gateway is the mike.

Age Scotland’s Big Survey found that two thirds (66 per cent) of people in their 70s received offers of help from neighbours last year, rising to three quarters (74 per cent) among those in their 80s. From Tuesday 1 May 1962 he was given his own nine-week record programme on the Scottish Home Service, That Reminds Me, in which, according to his producer Ben Lyons, he would "look at some of the more recent news, dip into vintage newspaper reports, add his own lighthearted comments, and illustrate the combined result with some records". [1] He scripted the programme himself. [2] R: That's difficult. You get so many. Probably the thing when I was quietly told by Sandy Ross that probably the time was coming when I would have to give up doing the show because you do realise your age and I think I was well into my sixties and I couldn't understand what he was talking about! As far as I was concerned, I was still twenty-five and I think that was probably one of the disastrous effects that hit me suddenly - I've got to change my life! It was a life-changing situation, yeah.

As long as Paladin goes to a good home and does some good for children that’s fine, but it felt really funny saying goodbye to him today as he’s been part of our family for so many years”, said Glen. But one ray of hope in a difficult year has been the way that communities have come together to help those who were more vulnerable or on their own. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my daughter Yonnie carried him down our front steps carefully wrapped in a blanket”. R: I found that everybody was very professional, I thought, in those days! Everybody seemed to know their job. If you wanted anything, you got it alright. There were no problems at all. I found the Directors and, I think, the staff, I mean there was one chap, a Lighting Director called Hugh, Hugh McLeod?

I: As far as Programme Controllers go, you seem to have had a wonderful passage with each one of them, quietly but firmly approving of what you're doing and let you get on with it. Despite still being recognised in the street, the STV star said that anyone could find themselves feeling alone behind closed doors. He took part in many radio and television shows. He took part in Scotland's Rikki Fulton Show from the Glasgow Alhambra. She said ‘my god I used to watch you when I was five.’ It made my day and made me feel very old I must admit.Missed opportunities - if you want to call them that - there may have been, but Michael is a Scottish showbusiness legend. He remembers BBC DJ Ken Bruce telling him so, too. "Scotland's been very good to me. The people of Scotland have been very good to me," he says, recalling how the plan to support Milroy in Paisley was only meant to last five weeks. R: I think so, yeah. I still see them today and they are all grey-haired, little, old people and they say, "I used to watch you when I was five!" which makes me feel terrible because I'm still nineteen, well, turn it the other way round, ninety-one! R: Yes, that's right. It always annoys me because Paul O' Grady says he's the first one to have a dog on the desk and he bloody wasn't! R: I think it wasn't parochial. It wasn't, originally we, people laughed at me because I wanted to introduce this lamp. Paladin the Lamp. People said, "Well, what are you going to do with a lamp?!" And I thought, 'Well, why not have an old oil lamp?' And I'd thought about actually Aladdin's Lamp, that was the idea and it feels, and still do today, they meet me and they say, "The talking lamp!" But it wasn't the talking lamp, it was the genie inside it that I wanted to get, and I never got round to saying that that's what it was! And I let people think that it was a talking lamp but my idea was that inside that lamp was a person and he started off as a Highlander and I used to talk like that into the thing and you know what I mean?! I thought, 'This is not right!' So, I gradually worked it out that no, it shouldn't be that, it should be a Glasgow, somebody identifiable so it became a wee fellow who talked like [unintelligible Glaswegian!] and so I had visions of this wee fellow inside the lamp doing all the talking and being cheeky to me and that seemed to catch on! Although broadcast in the STV region, Cavalcade also aired periodically in the neighbouring Grampian Television region during the 1970s and 1980s. In its early years, the show was also carried in southern England by Southern Television (1966-67) and Westward Television (1967-69), allowing Michael to broadcast to his native Devon.

But does he still wonder sometimes? "Yeah … I do," he smiles, "but I don't regret it. There's no way I regret it. I've made so many friends here. You can never …" He trails off. Paladin talked to him a bit, also saying, ‘Come on now wake up’, and then Cavalcade’s theme tune played. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to be told he’d responded and was doing just fine. R: There were so many really! Yeah, there were so many. There's not really any that I think, no, I can't really think of an, they were all sort of humorous. Life was humorous when you worked for STV. I think there was a great humour ran through the Company and I think that's why people worked so well. R: I've got a big photograph on the wall in my room at home - a huge one like that - on which you're sitting at a table with about twenty others when we won in 1975 and we won the best ITV programme for that year and they're all sitting there and it's great to see you sitting there now! Almost half (46 per cent) of people aged 50 and over received offers of help from their neighbours, 19 per cent from other local people, and 18 per cent from community groups. Older people living alone were most likely to say they appreciated offers of help.

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I have actually sat in the chair many a time and suddenly realised for no reason at all that I was crying. In the early days Paladin was hired for 10/- a week by the props department at STV to appear on the show. After quite some time I said to them one day – “Why on earth don’t you just buy him, which they did. R: I genuinely, every time I did the show I genuinely enjoyed doing the show. I didn't, I've never believed in trying to put an act on in front of the camera because I think you're wasting your time to do that, for good, bad or indifferent. If people like you, they like you. I mean one of the personalities that they used to have in STV I thought, in my day, were people like John Toye who was an absolutely wonderful Presenter! He had a wonderful charisma about him. Everybody didn't like him personally but that was one of those things that people didn't, but as a performer in front of the camera, beautiful! Absolutely beautiful. Clem Ashby again was a very good voice over for all the different things that he did and he was very, very popular so there were identifiable people in STV in my early days which, Bill Tennent was another who did a tremendous amount of work on Here and Now, another programme. John Grierson with his Wonderful World programmes. There was such a variety of things in the early days of STV which were magical, I thought!