Newsletter November 2005

Meaty bits: Together, Sandie and Cornish, a former Top Of The Pops designer, were to turn the emerging light entertainment girlie show format on its head. "Back then, the Sunday supplements were the must-read bits of the newspaper – they were where all the meaty bits were," she said.

The finished series had a quirky travelogue feel, very much in the spirit of the novel travel journalism pioneered by Alan Whicker: "Yes, I love Whicker’s World, so I suppose I would have been influenced by that too," Sandie has since confirmed.

Each week Sandie would introduce a show built loosely around a theme such as transport, love and sex, or the Continent. Her choice of material was frequently what she now describes as "off the wall". In Sandcastle In The Air, Sandie’s surprisingly energetic workout of 19th Nervous Breakdown was juxtaposed incongruously alongside sixties rival Cilla Black’s You Are My World and a Hans Christian Anderson medley. History neglects to relate what that week’s guest, Paul Jones, made of it all.

A typical supplement comprised seven or eight numbers or medleys that ran the whole gamut of Stones standards (Satisfaction, Route 66, Nervous Breakdown), Mediterranean loungecore (Quando, Quando), flirtatious duets (Homeward Bound and Without Her) and the inevitable reprise of familiar Sandie Shaw chart territory (Girl Don’t Come and ‘Remind Me).

Sandie’s choice of guests was no less eclectic than her material: Alan Price and Paul Jones were perhaps predictable enough; but Harry Nilsson – shouldn’t he have been hanging out at an Apple Corp ‘happening’ in Saville Row – and Toni Renis?

Visual impact: Sandie's initial impact on her audience during her appearances on ATV's Ready Steady Go seemed to come as much from her presentation by the RSG cameramen as from her voice. But the image of a barefoot waif – ideal for a three-minute pop song – was hardly the stuff of a 25-minute TV show. At times shy and awkward, Sandie was remarkably static as a performer and rarely strayed far from where she first planted her two bare pedal extremities. The problem was how to present her.

Static or not, solo performers – with the possible exceptions of Tom Jones and Elvis – rarely have the presence to fill a television screen, and so the Supplements would rely on a troupe of male dancers. But choreographer Gary Cockrell's dancers were no mere screenfiller; true, they weaved Sandie into their routines – at one point she appeared to be balanced atop a human pyramid – but with their handlebar moustaches, Mr Freedom t-shirts and bewildering array of personas – clowns one week, juggling garage mechanics the next – Cockrell's unique and occasionally surreal take on the chorusboy lineup hinted at the possibility of a BOAC airlink with New York's Greenwich Village, or even a collision between Village People and DV8.

With the dancers came the sets; minimalist platforms for Sandie to strut along, together with bleached-out lighting that would not look out of place today in Heal's, so avant garde was Jeff Bank's vision for his then-wife's soundstage. The massive blowups of Sandie in trademark model pose, dwarfing the male guests and beating Shrimpton at her own game, left the viewer in no doubt that this was Sandie's show. It was high-camp arthouse at its best.

It would be easy to overlook just how groundbreaking this presentation of Sandie in fact was. At a time when models had emerged from their aural purdah of the 1950s and were treading the boards of celebrity, Sandie not only proved that she could cut it as a model – her face was the ideal carrier for myriad looks and images and had the symmetry to withstand the harsh scrutiny of a macro lens - she served up sound and wit too.

The Supplements featured an extraordinary amount of film. No doubt playing on the sandy shore pun, Sandie was filmed in various daliesque – and even Freudian – poses and settings: she was served a martini by a liveried flunky; she rode a white horse by the sea; but best of all was when she committed the ultimate motoring sacrilege and hammered her white Lamborghini Miura across that same Welsh beach – the Manobier missile range for the trivia fans out there.

Because the show was shot on film, the director was unconstrained by the traditional television 4:3 aspect, which for today's viewer of the surviving Supplements means that they work surprisingly well in widescreen format. And shooting to film means that the programmes have retained a grainy character and detail that would have been lost forever on videotape, although Sandie herself never made the much-presaged leap to celluloid and the big screen – Fellini and Walt Disney were apparently two of the directors turned down by Eve Taylor.

Relentless schedule: The recording schedule for the series was relentless. Sandie had daily band calls for six weeks; ever the perfectionist in the studio, she was at the BBC in Wood Lane each weekend to retake any fluffed tracks or lines. Each show comprised just shy of a typical pop album's worth of material, coming on top of Sandie's other live commitments, the inevitable single release and . . . recording the further 12 studio tracks found on this album.

Most of the arrangements for the Sandie Shaw Supplement were probably scribbled out by Kenny in his local pub or back at his house in Ealing. Whatever the location, his work on the show featured his trademark brass sound, as well as more subtle arrangements on Harry Nilsson's Without Her or By Myself. Although the latter two tracks only survive in a samizdat audio format – Sandie Shaw kremlinologists among her fans are forever demanding their release – Woodman's at times Earl van Dyke-edged sound sits in its full context on Quicksand where he and Sandie let rip with a medley of Day Tripper/Ticket To Ride.

As Vicky Wickham observed, the difference in sound between the album and the TV series performances was no accident. Because most people were listening to the show through black and white Murphy or PYE television sets with a single speaker – there was no Dolby broadcasting – the BBC's engineers produced a sound that was heavy on percussion and bass, a sound that would sit comfortably within the limitations of the day.

The Supplements introduced British audiences to a dizzying array of camera angles and techniques. Until the Supplements, most BBC music shows had relied on just two cameras to provide long and close-up headshots. Rostrum cameras occasionally added drama, while Top of the Pops routinely served up the sex-crazed sixties up-the-skirt shot. And if Sandie's face could withstand the unforgiving scrutiny of a close-up fashion shot, why not shoot an entire song in close-up? Mel Cornish did just that on Trains And Boats And Planes. Then frame her in a long shot as she belts out ticket to ride, moving in for a close-up before that angle becomes monotonous. Sixties music shows simply did not move at that pace . . . until now.

High tensions: Unsurprisingly, such high creativity provoked high tensions among the key players. Mel Cornish stared aghast as Sandie hid from Eve Taylor's battles with Jeff Banks for control of Sandie's artistic direction. Eventually, Cornish and Sandie sidestepped debris on the dressing room floor from one Taylor and Banks showdown after another.

And if Sandie had an outfit that in Eve's view didn't have enough 'sparkle', Taylor would scream abuse at Jeff; Sandie for her part resented the control that Banks appeared to exercise over her - 'That was Jeff using me as a bloody clotheshorse,' she would later tell me. Worn down by Taylor's 'arguing dynamic', it is apparent from the Supplements that creatively and emotionally Sandie had outgrown Taylor, just as eventually she would outgrow even Banks.

The show's eclecticism in part explains why the Supplement was not a ratings winner: television audiences in 1968, although quite happy to watch Sandie reprise Puppet On A String on no end of bum variety shows, did not take to Sandie reborn as an arthouse heroine – fame perhaps depends on turning up where an audience expects to find you.

Then there was the scheduling. The rumour at the time was that provided the BBC won the battle for the Saturday night audience, it had no interest in what happened elsewhere. The Supplements were dumped in a graveyard 9:55pm slot, a time when most people put the cat out after watching the news; the final programme went out at 11pm after a three-week break that effectively stripped it of the chance to build an audience.

The press coverage, although highly favourable, nonetheless reflected the confusions of the time. Rather than discuss camera angles or the sources for her inspirations, journalists preferred to focus on Sandie's recent marriage to Jeff Banks, reassuring us along the way that Sandie was 'much nicer now', although still 'nervous'. One hackette plumbed a whole new depth when she helpfully explained -- in case we thought otherwise -- that Sandie didn't actually wear mink around the house as she served up Jeff's tea when he arrived home from a hard day's designing.

Although the Supplements suggest an era of dynamism and opportunity for women -- or at least for celebrity pop singers -- the press coverage for the Supplements reveals that Sandie was as constrained as any working woman: "It was a little troubling," said feminist writer and now lawyer Patricia Ireland of her time as a PanAmerican flight attendant, "that we were hired for our smiles. They said they hired women because they were more maternal; but if you were actually maternal and got pregnant, they would fire you within a heartbeat." As the Supplements went out, the tensions of marriage, motherhood and work that had troubled Patricia Ireland applied in equal measure to Sandie; there was no obvious solution in sight.

The legacy: There were to be no further supplements. Instead, the Sandie Shaw Supplement would rank over the next two decades as an evolutionary dead end. In its quest for rating winners, television retreated to the variety show format, and the Evelyn Taylor signings who turned out to be two of light entertainment's television stalwarts were Val Doonican and Larry Grayson. Incredibly for an era marked by the awakening of sexual politics, television would serve up not the subtle camp undertones of Gary Cockrell's choreography, but Grayson's tired music hall stereotype.

None of this depressing future seemed obvious at the time. As the show aired, Sandie embarked on yet another year that would see her perform as far afield as South America and South Africa. She had a burgeoning fashion market to divert her, and offers of big-money cabaret poured in from casinos in Monte Carlo, Cannes and Beirut, not to mention lucrative private appearances for such luminaries as the Shah of Iran.

Yet within three years, the unstoppable variety trend forced Sandie to showcase her singles on the Golden Shot and perform music hall routines on the Good Old Days. Dropping out of public view in the 1970s at least spared Sandie the ignominy of appearing as a Morecambe and Wise stooge.

The supplements deserved to be preserved for posterity. Sandie had been aware quite how advanced it was, and Bill Cotton had given her the entire series on film. At some point, Sandie took the film to the BBC and asked them to put the film onto videotape for her; the BBC refused, confiscated the film and promptly wiped it. Just two supplements have survived, although the sonic legacy of the remaining four lives on in the form of bootlegged audio recordings that fans pass among themselves free of charge.

The show's format finally came of age with music channels such as MTV. Nowadays we take for granted the then revolutionary intimate sketch format that crossed boundaries such as those between rock and pop or black and white. It is second nature to load an iPod or a minidisc with anything from Andy Williams loungecore to Led Zeppelin, or Britpop through trance. We consume our music with minimal interference at a relentless pace, mixing live performance and archive material along the way. And the interface between music and journalism is now old hat.

All of which leaves just two questions: why were no further supplements made to develop the idea – perhaps a colour supplement – and what has been the supplements’ legacy to music on television today?

"We did not repeat the experience of making The Sandie Shaw Supplement for fear of doing each other permanent damage!" jokes Sandie today. "I decided I had had enough of dressing up and wanted to get back to music, which I did by making the album ‘Reviewing The Situation’.

"Sadly, the director Mel Cornish died soon after of throat cancer. Evie? Well she just carried on business as usual. Later, in the Eighties Jeff went on to mastermind the format of the fashion series ‘The Clothes Show’ for the BBC. I am still in touch with Bill Cotton – his daughter Jane is a very good friend of mine."

And is there a legacy from the series? "I don’t see much evidence in TV programmes nowadays of any influence from the Sandie Shaw Supplement, same old unimaginative formats. But I can see how video promos grew from these ideas of presenting music."

To read some archive newspaper clippings regarding the Sandie Shaw Supplement, please visit this page in the features section of the fans' lounge.