a · b · c · d · e · f · g · h · i · j · k · l · m · n · o · p · q · r · s · t · u · v · w · x · y · z · home

A DAVID PARADINE PRODUCTION
"It's a marvellous picture, isn't it?"

From a humble blah blah blah, David Paradine Frost had, by the late '60s, risen to international media ubiquity as the public figurehead of satire (albeit on other people's ideas) and that other staple of '60s telly, Hard-Hitting Chat. Where to now for the boy from Beccles? Well, he'd always fancied himself as a bit of a media mogul - how about a media empire? That sort of power would set him up above the Grades! David Paradine Ltd. was founded in 1966, shortly before Frosty set up the entirely separate consortium to win the LWT franchise, both of which he would try and run with the inevitable on-off lack of a firm hand on the tiller as his on-screen commitments continually got in the way. Still, he helped organise some rather good comedy shows for his colleagues - At Last the 1948 Show, No That's Me Over Here! and The Ronnie Barker Playhouse among others.

Paradine Pictures was not yet active when Frost sent writers John Cleese and Graham Chapman to Ibiza to write the first draft of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, a political satire devised and largely financed by Frost himself, which mutated behind his back into a kind of satire on Frost's own career when it was revived with the involvement of reluctant lifesaver Peter Cook. Cook played the charisma-free titular character who gladhands, works rooms, and slinks his way up the greasy poll from opinion pollster to dictator of Britain. It was good, but no-one watched it. The first David Paradine Production proper to roll off the conveyor was a tad more modest - "Ronnie Barker's least finest hour" (Clive James), the cod-silent saucy postcard mini-romp Futtock's End. Still, onwards and upwards. .

In his producion endeavours, as in his showbiz career, Frost liked to have several less-than-splendid irons in the fire at once, possibly for insurance purposes. So in 1972, while Paradine's Charley One-Eye, a violent and bizarre western which brought together Richard 'Shaft' Roundtree, Roy 'Invaders' Thinnes and Nigel 'Howard's Way' Davenport, was unleashed on the American market to little interest, the second Cleese-Chapman offering, Rentadick, was allowed to bomb over in the UK. Knocking Rimmer's satirical inclinations firmly on the head, this was out-and-out farce, with the plot mixing the story of a hapless 'tec (Richard Beckinsale) spying on an adulterous Richard Briers, and getting mixed up in a Japanese plot to steal a deadly new nerve gas from Donald Sinden's chemical plant. The usual high quota of stars, all no doubt personally cajoled into this mess by Frostie himself, duly lined up to take part in frankly offensive scenes such as the one where Ronald Fraser's racist major tries to drown Derek Griffiths by filling the cab of his removals lorry with petrol. When an opening theme rendition of "A Policeman's Lot" by Dave Dee and the Kings' Singers is the high point of your film, perhaps it's time to have a look elsewhere for projects.

And so he did. In keeping with Frost's peripatetic lifestyle - weekly trans-Atlantic flights, international TV specials, rubbing shoulders with the crowned heads of Europe (if that's possible) - the Paradine brand extended its reach to America, with Dynasty - not Aaron Spelling's, but James Michener's mammoth pioneer epic - and to Australia, mainly with down-under versions of popular British comedy shows like Dick Emery and Dave Allen, and The Tea Ladies, a William G Stewart sitcom about parliamentary charwomen featuring the future Pam Willis off Neighbours. You certainly couldn't accuse Paradine of over-specialization, here.

The Man Himself, of course, continued to maintain a heavyweight New Alan Whicker presence on the small screen by means of showpiece political interviews with Wilson, Nixon, Kissinger, The Shah and, er, the Bee Gees, also hosting "marathon drone-ins" (Clive James) such as North Sea Oil satellite debate Are We Really Going to Be Rich? for Yorkshire TV. Meanwhile, on the big screen the strange, chaotic mix of subject and style continued unabated. Worthy blues legend biopic Leadbelly came in 1976, alongside The Slipper and the Rose, a sub-Disney Cinderella musical in which director Bryan Forbes managed not to cast his wife, though to make up for it he did cast himself, his daughter Emma, and his dog.

The eighties saw the temporary decline of cinema as a cultural force, and indeed much the same could be said of Dave at this point. After worthy but run of the mill TV biopics of Patty Hearst and birth control crusader Margaret Sanger, Frost put Paradine Productions on the back-burner while he played with his new toy - the TV-AM franchise - which he and his pals promptly dropped down the stairs and broke, making his stewardship of LWT seem Grade material by comparison. An Ultra Quiz wilderness period followed, with the Paradine name only cropping up behind poor Spitting Image specials packaged for American consumption, and of course The Spectacular World of Guinness Records.

Now Frost can eke out his dotage on BBC1 on Sunday mornings, but still Paradine comes back for more - reports suggest no-one who saw The Strategic Humour Initiative, a foolhardy attempt to recapture TW3 with Jimmy Carr and Punt and Dennis, will remember it in a hurry. The silver screen must still hold its allure, however, as at the time of writing a new film with the Paradine stamp has just gone into production, a drama promising to "break the boundaries of cinema". It's provisionally called, rather brilliantly, Ssshhh..., which is the sort of kitsch attention-seeking title dodgy films used to have in the late '60s, so there's a sort of return to roots here. Who knows, this may, finally, be the film that puts Paradine Productions on the map.

a · b · c · d · e · f · g · h · i · j · k · l · m · n · o · p · q · r · s · t · u · v · w · x · y · z · home