This film is one of a very large number of films donated by Armley Industrial Museum in Leeds. The collection covers a wide range of films, with, as might be expected, industrial films predominating. Some of these are intriguing newsreels from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and films from the Soviet Union from just after the 1917 revolution up to the Second World War. The Suit originated from the Burton Film Collection which features factory and promotional films from the tailoring company....

This film is one of a very large number of films donated by Armley Industrial Museum in Leeds. The collection covers a wide range of films, with, as might be expected, industrial films predominating. Some of these are intriguing newsreels from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and films from the Soviet Union from just after the 1917 revolution up to the Second World War. The Suit originated from the Burton Film Collection which features factory and promotional films from the tailoring company. Clearly this film is rather different from these, although Burton may well have viewed it as having advertising value.

 

According to their own website, Burton’s began life as the Cross-Tailoring Company, started up in Chesterfield in 1903 by 18 year old Montague Burton with £100 borrowed from a relative. Montague (original name Meshe David Osinsky) came from a Jewish family in Lithuanian Russia. He moved to Britain at just 15 with the specific intention of starting a business here; not unlike that of Michael Marks, the Polish Jewish immigrant who founded Marks and Spencer in Leeds a couple of decades earlier (Burton married a Sophia Marks).  Having moved to Sheffield he soon moved on again to set up in business at Elmwood Mills, Camp Road, Leeds – visited in 1934 by Mary the Princess Royal. In 1918 Montague and Sophia moved to Harrogate where they became founder members of the orthodox Jewish community. The factory at Hudson Road in Leeds became the largest clothing factory in Europe. After the Second World War, Burton produced a suit for war veterans nicknamed "The Full Monty".

 

Montague Burton was an interesting character, having enlightened views on the treatment of his workers, and becoming knighted in 1931 for his efforts in "furthering industrial relations and international peace." A Zionist who was keen to promote literature and the arts, he played a role in creating the United Nations Association, was a member of the organisation for free speech, PEN, and received a honorary doctorate (DLitt) from the University of Leeds in 1944. (For more on Montague Burton see the excellent website on migration in England Moving Here).

 

This progressiveness has been put to the test at a time when both textile industry and retail have come under heavy criticism for supplying goods that have been produced in countries where the workers have very poor conditions, wages and rights, not to mention child labour. Burton, since 1967 under the Arcadia Group, prides itself on its ethical code of conduct, which although a step in the right direction is still viewed by some as falling short of what it should be: the campaigning group Ethical Consumer, in their Report of September 2008, Let’s Clean up Fashion, give it just the ‘One cheer’, as they do mention work on living wages, but state that they are ‘unconvincing so far’.

 

Having become the ‘largest multiple tailor in the world’, Burtons became almost synonymous with the ubiquitous suit. As the item of respectability and conformity of our age, it is perhaps fitting that the suit was considered a suitable subject for Candid Camera. The ability of the suit to disguise the characteristics of the person wearing it makes it an apt choice for the show’s play on the gap between appearance and reality.

 

It isn’t known whether this film of Candid Camera was ever aired as a definitive list is hard to come by: the BFI catalogue is only partial. The fact that it was still in the hands of Burton suggests that perhaps it wasn’t. It is fairly typical of an episode of Candid Camera. Candid Camera started in the US as a radio programme with the name Candid Microphone in 1947 before it moved to TV the following year, and a British version started on ITV in 1960, fronted by Bob Monkhouse. It was the brainchild of a US serviceman Allen Funt, who found that servicemen would dry up when it came to them recording messages for back home, so he recorded them secretly in rehearsal. 

 

When it started in Britain the extraordinary Jonathan Routh was with it from the beginning, having prior to this presented Candid Microphone on Radio Luxembourg. Included among his pranks here are taking a grand piano for a ride on the Tube, and sending himself through the post to Wandsworth covered in £2-worth of stamps. Jonathan Routh’s antics on Candid Camera continued in this vein. In one episode he swapped roles, persuading a tailor to make a suit for a chimpanzee.  Among other scams were: tourists being coerced into propping up a “leaning” Nelson’s Column; Routh dressing up as a tree and, standing at a bus stop, asking those in the queue, “Does this bus go to Sherwood Forest?”; and sticking his head out of a coal hole and explaining to passers-by that he was looking for Baker Street Underground Station! He was to stay with the show until it came to an end in 1967, and returned again for a couple of years in 1974 – it also ran briefly from November 1967 to January 1968 without Routh.  

 

For Jonathan Routh, who died in 2008 aged 80, this wasn’t just acting for TV, but essentially part of who he was: an original eccentric who spent much of his life making fun out of people and situations, and anything else that took his fancy. A prankster from an early age, according to the Times Obituary, he was expelled from Uppingham School, ‘for putting up a banner in the chapel which read: “Vote Routh, Communist”, while campaigning in a mock election’.  This also relates that he “revived the moribund Footlights Dramatic Society” before being invited to leave Cambridge after 18 months having taken ‘a group of undergraduates off to “measure” Bletchley for a bypass, and then collected signatures condemning the fake proposal.’ The Cambridge Footlights would soon introduce many others – among them Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Eleanor Bron– into television and fame.

 

For some reason Jonathan Routh has become much less well known than any of these: he has yet to have a biography written of him. This is a shame because, apart from anything else, he was very versatile – around the same time he was filming here, in the mid 1960s, he wrote four funny books: The Good Loo Guide: where to go in London (1965), The Guide Porcelain: the loos of Paris (1966), The Better John Guide: where to go in New York (1966) and The Good Cuppa Guide: where to have tea in London (1966). He continued with his publishing and went on to have an itinerant life as an irreverent and successful painter.   He spent the last 28 years in Jamaica with his wife Shelagh, spending his money on 34 local children, who had been abused or abandoned, that he had adopted. The gallery of his friend Jean Chisholm in New York is the best place for further information on Jonathan Routh.

 

Routh was in important respects a forerunner of that other Cambridge alumnus, Sacha Baron Cohen and his various personas, such as Ali G: displaying a real nerve in sending up members of the public, as well as well known figures. It is a humour that exposes how gullible we can all potentially be when told things by people who seem to speak with authority, or who do the most absurd, or incongruous, things with a straight face – something that could be risky too: Routh once received a black eye from the former heavyweight boxer Sid Richardson.  

 

An early candidate for ‘reality TV’, Candid Camera became the inspiration for Game for a Laugh and Beadle’s About. But unlike these latter programmes, the early Candid Camera kept it simple, relying on the brilliance of Jonathan Routh without the gimmicks. Furthermore, it didn’t catch people by appointment; only those unfortunates who just happened to be there. Many episodes can be seen on YouTube, although these seem to be all from the 1970s.  The plethora of comedy on TV over the last 40 years has probably made us all a bit wiser to having our leg pulled, and so the programmes might seem somewhat dated now.  Furthermore, a person’s sense of humour undoubtedly gets shaped by early exposure, so the comedy in this film might not suit everybody – but maybe there is something timeless and universal about exposing our natural naivety.

 

References

 

Candid Camera website

Obituary in the Independent of Jonathan Routh

Obituary in the Times on Jonathan Routh

Moving Here

ethical consumer