Peter Brough

Brough and Archie at a BBC microphone. Photo: Ron Moody, via Find A Grave.

Here's a puzzle worth sitting with. Ventriloquism only works if the crowd can't catch your lips moving. So what does a ventriloquist do when the crowd can't see him at all? Peter Brough answered that riddle for the better part of twenty years, on the biggest show on British radio, with a wooden schoolboy named Archie Andrews propped on his knee. Millions of listeners never once doubted the voice was Archie's own.^[4] They couldn't have caught him even if they'd tried. Pull up a chair. This one's a good one.

A boy on the bill with Marie Lloyd

Peter Brough was born February 26, 1916, in Shepherds Bush, London, into a family that already had ventriloquism in its blood. His father, Arthur Brough, worked the halls with a figure named Tim, and in 1922, when Peter was six, Arthur and Tim shared a bill at the Empire Theatre, Croydon, with the biggest name on the card: the Cockney singer Marie Lloyd. Lloyd patted the boy on his sailor's cap, smiled, and told his father, "Why, Arthur, if you're not careful you'll be having another ventriloquist in the family one day."^[1] She was dead within the year. But she called it.

Arthur kept performing into the 1940s. His own figure, Tim, made its last screen appearance in the 1945 film Dead of Night, playing the doll called Hugo across from Michael Redgrave in the segment that invented the modern evil-dummy movie.^[2] Arthur Brough died June 20, 1956, in London.^[3] The Brough name had already worked two generations in this trade before Peter finished making his own half of it.

The teeth came next, and not gently. One night the young Peter collided with his older brother Kenneth, who happened to be carrying a candlestick. The corners of both front teeth got clipped clean off. The dentist looked at the damage and told the family to leave it alone.^[1] Brough always credited that accident with his whole technique: the little inverted V where his teeth used to meet made it easier to talk and whistle without moving his lips.^[1] He spent the rest of his career working an accident nobody planned.

He spent his first few years on the boards using his father's own figures, playing the halls the old way. Then, at twenty-eight, a critic told him exactly what he needed to hear and didn't want to: "Your material is weak and your figures are atrocious and your act is old fashioned."^[4] Most performers would have sulked. Brough went to work instead.

He started with the voice, not the figure. He experimented until he landed on what he called the thin treble of a fourteen-year-old boy, the voice that would eventually carry the biggest show on British radio. Only then did he go looking for a face to put it in. He walked into the workshop of Len Insull, the English maker behind the "Cheeky Boy" figure sold through Ellisons, Gamages, and Davenports, and asked for something new: a drop-jaw figure, in the American style, built around a British boy's voice that already existed.^[4] It took Insull a month and three prototypes. Brough picked the one he liked, and Insull built the finished figure for two hundred fifty pounds, worth roughly $10,000 by the 2005 magazine article's own conversion.^[4] It may have been the only drop-jaw head Insull ever built in a career spent on the seamless leather mouths that were the English style.^[4] Most figures in this trade get carved first and voiced after. Archie Andrews got voiced first and carved to match. That is Peter Brough's whole method, in one sentence.

The biggest show on British radio

Brough's first broadcast with Archie Andrews came in 1943, on the big variety showcase Music Hall. His own pitch for an Archie show got turned down by the BBC, which paired him instead with the impressionist Peter Cavanagh on a program called Two's a Crowd. It did fine. Not great. Fine.^[4]

In 1949 Brough went back to the BBC with a better idea: make Archie's own schooling the whole premise of the show. The pilot aired December 4, 1950, written by Sid Colin and Eric Sykes, with a thirteen-year-old cast member named Julie Andrews singing the musical numbers.^[4] A young Benny Hill came through the cast too, early in his own career.^[5] They called the show Educating Archie, and it became the number one radio show in Britain, winning the Daily Mail's Silver Microphone Award.^[4]

Once a show gets that big, it stops being just a show. Archie's face turned up in comic strips, books, and games. Woolworth's sold a miniature pull-string version of him. A British ice cream company sponsored the Archie Andrews Fan Club, which grew past two hundred thousand members.^[4] Madame Tussauds cast the pair in wax.^[4] Edgar Bergen himself came on as a guest once, though his contract with his own network meant he had to leave Charlie McCarthy at home. Even Bergen couldn't bring his partner onto somebody else's show.^[4]

By 1955 a profile called Brough Britain's highest-paid radio star, with Archie "the perfect foil" who never worked for nothing.^[6] The bit got taken further than anyone expected: British tax authorities once mailed Archie Andrews his own income tax form. Brough had to write in and sort it out. They never sent the dummy another one.^[6]

The King took Archie's head off

Starting at Christmas 1948, Brough and Archie were invited to entertain the Royal Family every year at the staff Christmas party at Windsor Castle.^[1] After the first show, King George VI wanted to show Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose how the trick worked, so he lifted Archie up and took his head clean off. As the King put it back on, Archie had the line ready: "Sir, I'm the only fellow you have ever beheaded in your reign."^[1]

Princess Elizabeth was twenty-two that Christmas. She would be queen in four years. A wooden schoolboy got the joke off before anyone else in the room had time to think about it.

Archie goes missing

In the mid-1950s the BBC built the Holme Moss transmitter to finally bring television north, and Brough was booked to appear on the launch show. On the train up, Archie disappeared.^[4] It made front-page news. Brough put up a reward of ten thousand pounds.^[4] He did the launch show without his partner, and a few days later a note turned up: "Archie can be found at Kings Cross Station Lost Property Office." Brough went straight there and found Archie waiting, all in one piece.^[4] Nobody ever found out who took him. In his own autobiography, years later, Brough asked the question himself: "Who was he, the original thief or soft hearted accomplice?"^[4]

One fan floated a theory at the time: that Brough staged the whole disappearance himself, because he wasn't ready to let a television camera catch whether his lip control held up the way it always had on the radio.^[4] Maybe. Maybe not. I like a mystery Brough himself never bothered to solve on paper. Whoever wrote that note, they understood the act better than most critics did.

Rules of the trade

Brough wrote his autobiography, Educating Archie, in 1955, with a foreword by the ventriloquist Fred Russell and twenty-three illustrations.^[7] It reads less like a memoir and more like a rulebook, because the man couldn't help himself. A sample:

On the day job: "If you want to become a ventriloquist when you grow up, well and good. But you must have two strings to your bow. You must never be wholly dependent on the chance vagaries of show business."^[1]

On practice: he kept a triple-sided mirror in a room at home, and insisted it had nothing to do with vanity. "With whatever feelings of satisfaction you first face a three-sided mirror, the reflections of yourself at odd angles soon dispel any nonsense of personal vanity."^[1]

On borrowed figures: "Any ventriloquist will testify that appearing with a borrowed dummy is unsatisfactory and even confusing... It is rather like asking Yehudi Menuhin to give a recital at the Albert Hall with another man's violin."^[1]

On judging a performer: "You can generally judge a true top-of-the-bill performer by the way he or she treats the smaller fry. The size of a man's name on the advertising outside the theater is not always the best guide to the largeness of his heart inside."^[1]

On writing your own material: "An artist is as good as his material... the only way, the best way, is to write it yourself."^[1] On the audience: "Mass audiences are the most sensitive audiences in the world. They're quick to sense that you're trying to trick them, and they won't stand for it."^[1]

And on retirement, from a man who would end up retiring at forty-five: "Retirement is the one word the real pro just does not know."^[1] He wrote that in 1955. He meant it right up until 1961.

Not everyone applauded

Not every review was kind, and the family doesn't need me to pretend otherwise. In 1956, while the television version of Educating Archie was on the air, national critics went after Brough's mechanized figure directly, calling it, in one writer's words, an expensive way of dodging the argument over whether his lip control was really as good as his rivals'.^[8] Fellow British vent and columnist John Bouchier came to his defense in print, and the case he made is worth keeping: "We other British ventriloquists owe as much to Peter and Archie for making ventriloquism a popular form of entertainment in this country as the Americans do to Edgar Bergen... Our art might have died with the old masters of the Music Halls, Prince and Coram, had it not been for Peter Brough and Archie Andrews."^[8]

Two years later, when the show tried television a second time (this run co-written by a young Marty Feldman^[5]), a fellow British vent writing in Bouchier's own column was not nearly so kind: "This is the second attempt to bring this young rascal to life on the screen. I regret to say this, but if you were thinking of buying a set to watch this show, don't. You get a better picture of him on radio."^[9] Twelve hundred pounds spent rebuilding Archie's head a few months earlier hadn't fixed whatever the camera saw that the microphone never had to answer for.^[9]

Brough took the hits and kept working. In late 1956, right in the middle of the bad press, he told Bouchier plainly that he intended to put Archie back on television in the new year.^[10] Radio made him a name nobody could see. Television asked him to prove it on camera, and the reviews split right down the middle. Both things can be true about the same act.

Two strings to his bow

By 1956 a solo vent act had gone rare enough on Australian radio that hearing a Brough recording made news down under. "Heard a recording of Peter Brough with 'Archie Andrews' on the radio the other night," one listener wrote in. "The first vent act on the air for a long time, here."^[11] The next year, Brough and Archie took the show there in person: a long engagement covering radio, television, and the stage.^[12]

He went out with Ronald Chesney, Archie, and the show's scriptwriter Ronnie Woolf to record a series called Archie in Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, plus a season at the Tivoli Theatre, Sydney, called Calypso Capers. In a letter home to Bouchier, Brough wrote that they'd been made to feel completely at home, with standing invitations to come back and do a season in Melbourne.^[13]

The trip home went by way of Fiji, Honolulu, and San Francisco, and Brough made a stop that mattered to him: a full day at Edgar Bergen's house in Beverly Hills, swimming pool, private theater, Bergen's own two-seater airplane, and a personal tour of the neighborhood's other film-star homes.^[13] Two men who had each built a career on the same impossible trick, comparing notes in Bergen's backyard. Then on to New York, where Brough caught up again with Julie Andrews from the old Educating Archie cast and took in My Fair Lady.^[13] Back in London he restarted Educating Archie, finished a run of Children's Choice programs, and started doing commercial spots for the new ITV network, and kept finding time to run his own office in town on top of it.^[13] When strangers asked him what he thought of Peter Brough, he kept a stock answer ready: "Oh, he must be a nice chap. His interests are the same as mine: ventriloquism and textiles!" By his own account, that line shut people up like a clam.^[13]

He wasn't joking about the textiles. In 1961, at forty-five, Brough stepped back from show business to run the family's textile and clothing business.^[1] He'd been saying for years that a performer needs two strings to his bow. He just went ahead and proved it.

The circle

No radio ventriloquist works alone, even when nobody can see the partner beside him. Here's Brough's world: the family, the maker, the writers, and the ones who came through the show on their way to somewhere else.

Archie, on paper and on the shelf

The comic strip

"Peter Brough Presents His Famous Talking Doll Archie Andrews," complete with the small inset photo of the two of them at top left. The show's format ran just as well on the page.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

Archie Andrews' Christmas Party

A holiday stage show at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Coventry Street, with Ronald Chesney, Tony Hancock, and the rest of the Educating Archie cast on the bill alongside Brough and Archie.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

A week at the Gaumont

November 1951, Southampton: a full week of variety with Brough's name alone above the title, twice nightly. A famous voice on the radio didn't sell itself. He had to show up and do the act, twice a night, in person.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

The Palitoy doll

A fifteen-inch pull-string Archie Andrews, made by Palitoy and sold in British toy shops. The figure sat in Brough's lap on the radio; this version sat on a child's shelf.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Still at the microphone

Brough and Archie, years on, back at a BBC mic with a party hat perched on Archie's head. The partnership outlasted the format it was built for.

Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

The last word on Archie

Brough died June 3, 1999, at eighty-three.^[14] Newsy Vents marked his passing by calling him "the Edgar Bergen of England" and "the country's highest paid entertainer during the 40s and 50s."^[15] Even his own obituary couldn't quite get the story straight on the first pass: a British newspaper had run his death notice years earlier under the wrong date entirely, illustrated with a photograph of a completely different vent, Arthur Worsley. It took his own daughter, Romey Brough, writing in through a neighbor who happened to know her, to correct the record.^[16] Two British ventriloquists, interchangeable to a picture desk. His own family fixed what the press got wrong, which is exactly how it should work.

The original Archie Andrews figure crossed an auction block in 2005 and sold for $44,000.^[1] Not bad for a face built to fit a voice, in a month, by a man who may never have carved another one quite like it. The modern-day stage ventriloquist Valentine Vox counts Brough as one of his own major influences.^[5] The trade remembers its own, even the ones who left it on purpose.

A trade with no lip-reading required and Brough still practiced like someone was watching. That's either devotion or the funniest wasted effort in radio history. Archie never once said thank you.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy