Mabel Constanduros: Comedy Legend
My (great-great) Aunt Mabel Constanduros
By Jack Shillito
A forgotten comedy star, rediscovered.
This article is based on the podcast My Aunt Mabel - a series that takes a deep dive into the life of Mabel Constanduros, one of the most creative and pioneering forces in British entertainment for over three decades.
The narrative biographical podcast reveals a funny, fascinating figure who helped define comedy and entertainment while living through huge social change in the twentieth century.
You can listen to the podcast right here:
This is the story of a single mother who went from ordinary housewife in 1925 to one of the UK's most beloved comedians.
And has since been forgotten by history.
In the summer of 2021 during lockdown, or one of the many lockdowns, I did some digging into my family past.
I was looking into the Tillings family, ancestors on my paternal grandmother’s side. An enterprising Thomas Tilling and two of his sons owned and operated London’s largest independent horse-bus business in the Victorian age before motorised transport and nationalisation came along. (The company was famous enough that ‘Thomas Tilling’ became cockney rhyming slang for ‘one shilling’.)
As I was looking into other family connections, I came across a Mabel Constanduros - an interesting name that I hadn’t heard of and didn’t recognise.
Before marrying a certain Athanasius Constanduros, Mabel was a Tilling.
A colourised image of a Tilling horse-bus
I’ve always loved history. I studied it through school and university. I regularly read, listen to, and watch history-related topics, so passing the time in lockdown looking at my own family didn’t feel like a particularly nerdy or odd thing to do.
I had no idea who Mabel was, or what she did with her life, until I discovered she was my great-grandmother’s sister. My great granny was still alive in the first four years of my life, and I remember visiting her.
Mabel was my great-great aunt.
Much to my surprise, it turns out that Mabel was also:
A trailblazing female broadcaster and comedian for three decades on BBC radio from 1926
A creative pioneer of the new medium of radio
A writer, broadcaster, actor and novelist
Mabel’s status and longevity in the business has led her to be called the ‘Mother of the BBC’.
In short, she was an absolute legend and yet we’ve never heard of her. Why?
If I didn't know she existed or that I’m related to her, I’d put good money on betting that you and very few others had heard of her, what she was about and what she achieved. Unless you happen to be Stephen Fry - he was a fan of Mabel’s and mentions her in passing in his book, The Fry Chronicles.
The BBC turns 100 this year (October 18th, 2022). Major shifts in media and entertainment, of which Mabel was part, were taking place a century ago - many parallels of which ring true with today’s world, as you’ll see.
Getting A Foot In The Door
On a mizzly, drizzly morning nearly 100 years ago in February, 1925, Mabel Constanduros found herself walking up and down the Thames Embankment, nervously agonising over a decision that would change her life forever.
After performing at an amateur concert one day, someone approached Mabel and said she ought to try broadcasting - whatever that meant. Bear in mind we’re talking about the very early days of radio so terms we take for granted today, like broadcast, were only just popping up on the public’s radar.
Mabel knew nothing about the new craze of ‘listening in’ - probably a bit like telling someone creative these days that they might consider producing virtual reality content - and she hadn’t listened to a radio broadcast. Yet her name was put forward and she was invited to attend the BBC’s headquarters at Savoy Hill for a 10am audition.
The BBC’s Savoy Hill Building directly behind Cleopatra’s needle
Pacing alongside the Thames on that February morning, doubt started to set in and Mabel began to wish she hadn’t bothered going.
‘I was an amateur,’ she says in her autobiography, ‘I knew nothing about this broadcasting business. I should only be a failure and go through half an hour of nervous terror for nothing.’
Her family were none the wiser about her upcoming audition, so who would know she had lost courage at the last moment and thrown in the towel?
And yet Mabel possessed an inner fighting spirit and a conviction that she was a good writer and performer. She lived by the principle that, as she says, “I must carry out any undertaking to which I have set my hand.”
As Big Ben struck ten o’clock, Mabel directed her nervous energy to a door in Savoy Hill and walked in.
In the words of Jen Purcell, author of the book about Mabel, Mother of the BBC, ‘Mabel Constanduros was a pioneer of British sitcom and soap opera and was incredibly important to the evolution of these genres, yet few remember her and even fewer have considered her life and her impact on British culture.’
Mabel was one of the first British radio comedians and a beloved star of the BBC, best known as the creator and performer of the comic Cockney family, the Bugginses. Once a national treasure, writer and performer, Mabel has been forgotten, like so many pioneering women.
Until very recently women have been regarded as contributing less to the comedy genre, which could explain the reluctance to give Mabel her true recognition. The men who were prominent in early radio comedy and drama are well known; the women are far less so.
John Reith, the BBC’s General Manager, and later its first Director-General and the critics of the day damned women with faint praise, which meant that their ideas and abilities were never discussed in print by critics with the seriousness that men’s were, and so scholars have lost sight of them.
The BBC’s John Reith
Despite all that, Mabel had a profound understanding of the medium of radio, and her accessible style endured from the broadcast of her first short radio play, Devoted Elsie, in 1926.
Jen Purcell says that Mabel’s emphasis on the everyday and the family had far-reaching impacts on the shape of sitcom and soap opera in Britain, as they’re two popular lenses through which the nation sees itself.
Jen notes that Mabel was an unstinting supporter of actors and writers trying to carve out a career on the BBC. One actor specifically credited Mabel with helping her break into radio, remembering that ‘Mabel was extremely helpful; she talked to me and showed me some of the outstanding points that, left to myself, I doubt if I should have learnt for years.’
Having come to the radio in her mid-forties, many of the BBC staffers and actors with whom she worked were closer to her son’s age, and in her interactions with colleagues, she chose to perform the role of Mother of the BBC.
Mabel developed a maternal image with BBC employees, producers and executives in order to gain commissions for herself and others, and to cultivate respect and loyalty. Jen believes that Mabel’s role in developing entertainment on the BBC and the ways in which she cultivated her career make her the Mother of the BBC.
The OG Creator
One of the reasons for Mabel’s string of achievements in radio is almost certainly the sheer volume of her output.
Not only did she have original and hilarious ideas, she had lots of them, and recognized the importance of producing huge amounts of material in order to succeed.
Speak to a modern day ‘creator’ - be it on YouTube or TikTok - and they’ll tell you the same. They need entertaining, relatable content but they also need to churn it out at a relentless pace to succeed online, to build an audience and earn a living.
Mabel pointed out that, ‘broadcasting is different from any other kind of performance in that you have to constantly supply fresh material’ - compared to, say, writing or performing the same music hall act which you can run again and again. Fortunately, Mabel was able to constantly supply fresh material which gave her an advantage over more established comedians of the period.
Mabel looking suave
In her autobiography, Mabel describes the nerve wracking circumstances of her first broadcast; she performed ‘at ten o’clock at night, and before [her] a well-known philanthropic lady [gave] a talk.’ She couldn’t imagine ‘a worse prelude for a comedy broadcast’. She wasn’t given a rehearsal and no one even told her how near to the microphone to stand..!
Whether it was before or after Mabel first took to broadcasting, a card was handed to all comedians before recording their first broadcast. It read:
‘No gags on Scotsmen, Welshmen, Clergymen, Drink or Medical matters. Do not sneeze into the microphone!’
A Difficult Personal Life
Mabel had much success in her career, not least with her inventive Buggins Family broadcasts, but her personal life was tragic, with a broken marriage, the sudden death of one of her infant sons, and a possible miscarriage or stillborn which meant that of 3 children only one survived into adulthood.
Mabel was born in 1880 into the Tilling family - a very comfortable middle class London family. Her father, Richard Tilling (my great-great grandfather) was the managing director of a successful bus company built up by his father, Thomas Tilling. When Mabel was born, the business would’ve been horse-drawn buses and cabs, headquartered in Peckham. As the 20th century rolled on, the business gradually shifted from horse-drawn to motorised transport.
The Tilling bus company was based in Peckham and became the largest supplier of horsepower in London
As a child, Mabel was educated at Mary Datchelor School in Camberwell and thought little of the finishing school, as she said in her autobiography. She considered that ‘the fees were extremely high, the standard of education was incredibly low. I said so and was not popular’. After this, her father offered to pay for her to have a university education at Cambridge’s Girton College but her mother wanted her to stay at home.
Clearly, from an early age, Mabel wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.
There’s also a small moment of reflection later in life on her parent’s refusal to consider her request to go to a Dramatic School:
‘My parents decided that my wish to go on the stage was only a craze – so many girls had it, but forgot all about it when the Right Man came along. Did they ever reflect how much less likely one would be to say “Yes” to the wrong man if one had work in which one was passionately interested?’
Why her husband-to-be Athanasius Constanduros was ‘the wrong man’ isn’t completely clear but we’ll get into that shortly.
Despite an otherwise ‘pleasant life’ Mabel enjoyed with her parents of ‘wonderful holidays twice a year’ and no ‘worry about money’, she thought her life was too ‘sheltered’, as she wrote, and that she had been led to believe that being married was all that was needed for a woman to ‘live happily ever after’.
Mabel and her ‘beloved sister Norah’ married the Constanduros brothers in 1907 when Mabel was 27. They ‘lived side by side in Sutton’, a suburb on the Surrey side of London. Athanasius, or Ath, was an insurance broker who continued to live in Sutton until his death in July 1937.
Albina, Mabel’s housekeeper, came to work for the Constanduroses when their son Michael was about six and they were still living together in Sutton.
‘Bina, my housekeeper, must certainly have a chapter to herself,’ Mabel wrote in her autobiography, ‘because without her I could not have a home’.
As Mabel later wrote:
‘She had not been in the house a week before I knew what a treasure had been sent to me. She is a beautiful cook, can sew and wash, mend a wireless set or a burnt fuse, make clothes, trim hats, and turn her hand to anything. We have lived together now for more than twenty-four years in great contentment and understanding. She has nursed me with skill and kindness through many illnesses. There is no difficulty that she cannot surmount, no task that she will not tackle; you never see her out of temper or in a muddle.’
Just on a side note, my Dad remembers as a boy going to see an old lady called Bina but was none the wiser as to who she was and what relation, if any, she was.
It’s not clear exactly when Mabel moved from her home with Ath - there’s no evidence of a divorce - but there is the briefest of references to desperately sad circumstances that may have contributed to their separation.
Indeed, as Mabel writes:
‘I had a little boy, Mabel says, called Tony to whom I was entirely devoted, and he died when he was four years old. Even today I cannot write about it. Michael was my third and only surviving child, and I daresay I was an over-anxious mother.’
The grief of this loss is palpable even now.
In a brief biographical piece about Mabel, radio critic and personal friend Collie Knox revealed this “deep sorrow… that sadness that has made her so golden hearted a woman.”
Mabel told Knox that “it was deep grief.. I was stunned. I shall never forget that feeling. How I hated the sunshine. It seemed to mock me… and the world seemed full of little girls and boys - strong, vigorous little boys - of four years old.”
Michael became the be-all-and-end-all of Mabel’s existence. He was born in 1917, in the latter stages of the First World War, by which time Mabel was thirty-seven.
We don’t know much about Mabel’s husband, Ath - mostly because Mabel writes very little about him in her autobiography.
When Ath died in 1937, Mabel’s full statement to the press was, “Naturally in a case like this, one feels that it will be an ordeal, but the possibility of loss of work for others has convinced me that I shall be doing the right thing if I put the profession before my private feelings.”
So, at least on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like she was exactly in a state of grief or mourning.
Ath and those in the SADC (the Sutton Amateur Dramatic Club) of which Mabel and Ath were a part, may have found it difficult to accept that a middle-aged, middle-class wife and mother chose to forge a career beyond the home, ultimately eclipsing her husband both financially and publicly. In the mid-1930s, married middle-aged women were leaving the workforce, not entering it.
Mabel’s nephew, Denis, whom she co-created many shows and series with, felt there could not be two more incompatible personalities: Mabel the life of the party and Ath ‘the latter-day Mr Pooter.’
Hugh Bonneville starred as Mr Pooter in BBC4’s 2007 version of The Diary of a Nobody
Mr Pooter, just so you have the reference, was a fictional character in the comic novel The Diary of a Nobody from 1892. Pooter was a middle-aged and middle-class clerk in the City of London. Apart from taking himself very seriously, he was an extreme example of self-importance, with the unhappy result that he was much snubbed by those he considered beneath him.
So, for Mabel’s part, there was perhaps no love lost and she began to live her own life.
There’s quite a bit of educated guesswork around Mabel’s private life and it’s safe to say there’d be a whole lot more scrutiny into her life if she was in a similar position today as she was then. At the time, though, she somehow manages to avoid controversy.
We’re Going to Hollywood
In December 1936, Mabel’s friend and fellow actress, Grizelda Hervey, asked her to go to Hollywood with her.
If you have the money, a trip to California now might not seem like a big deal - it takes about ten and a half hours to fly there from London. But in 1936, the trip itself was part of the experience.
Mabel and Grizelda travelled first to New York on the ocean liner, SS Normandie, which would have taken at least five days. They then had three days of sightseeing in New York, and then they had a three day train ride across the US - from New York to Chicago where they then caught a connecting train that took them to Los Angeles. So, if you thought 10-ish hours was long, try 8 days (minus the three day stopover in New York).
SS Normandie cruising across the ocean
I love Mabel’s descriptions of the US in those days. She decided the best adjective to describe New York was ‘superlative’. Here she is on the city that never sleeps:
‘The traffic is faster and fiercer, the lights are brighter and cruder, the buildings are larger and higher than in any other city in the world, I suppose. Certainly, one feels there that one is living in a film or stage set.’
‘New York’s railway stations are astonishing places - like cathedrals. The city keeps its trains underground and to get to them you go downstairs to a screaming, smoke-filled inferno with several enormous snorting locomotives, apparently champing to be off on their different journeys.’
I began to grow accustomed to being whizzed up in elevators to the tenth, eleventh and even twenty-second floors of buildings; to the friendliness of the shop assistants who invited each other to come and listen to our ‘English accent’; to the wonder of being able to turn on a radio set in one’s taxicab; to the fact that America is not so much a nation as a collection of people of all nations.’
That final point is pretty profound.
When Mabel finally reached Los Angeles just before Christmas, she fell in love with the place:
‘Beverley Hills must be one of the prettiest suburbs in the world. Dignified avenues of palm trees border the quiet roads. Little houses, each one different to its neighbour and all of a dazzling whiteness, line the avenues. I never saw anyone go in or out of the attractive dwellings, nobody ever seemed to sit in their inviting verandas, nobody walked on the sidewalks, nobody walked at all. Everybody, even one’s gardener, had a car.’
Not so different from today - at least the final observations. I don’t think anyone would describe LA’s roads as being ‘quiet’ these days.
Here are some more of Mabel’s enjoyable observations of LA:
’Malibu Beach, seen from the road which approaches it, looks rather like Shoreham in Sussex.
Although the house we had was only intended for a summer weekend place, there was every comfort one could ask and a great many that one would not dream of expecting in a similar house in England.
Americans appear to be a very hard working people. We had two newspapers delivered on Christmas Day.Bread was sold in cellophane wrappers, and if you wanted you could have it already sliced
In Beverley Hills, the household shopping was all done in markets; every kind of food is sold at different counters under one common roofAmericans eat so much starch. It is quite the custom for cornbread, biscuits and cookies of every kind to be served hot with hot meat.’
During her trip, Mabel was entertained by some of the biggest stars of the day, including Errol Flynn, P.G. Wodehouse and Shirley Temple.
Such was Mabel’s fame at this time, she even featured on a set of cigarette cards produced by the Wills Tobacco Company, alongside the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward.
Mabel, bottom right, featured on a set of cigarette cards with fellow stars
After two months, Mabel begrudgingly left her friends in LA to make the long journey back home as her son, Michael, was convalescing in Austria ahead of returning to the UK for an operation for appendicitis.
As Mabel returned sooner than planned for Michael, given that’s where her devotion lay, maybe Michael’s health concerns distracted her from an ailing, separated husband.
A Professional Woman
In 1924, John Reith, the BBC’s General Manager, and later its first Director-General, said:
‘Most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them. Wireless is a good thing, but it may be shared by all alike, for the same outlay, and to the same extent …The genius and the fool, the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously…there is no first and third class.’
Being ‘shared by all alike’ rings true for TV, streaming, YouTube and so on. Switch out ‘wireless’ for ‘YouTube’ and it’s not so different - though I’m not sure YouTube execs would opt for describing their viewers as fools.
For Mabel’s part, she helped to evolve radio from an amateur adventure into a professional, respected and popular medium.
Val Gielgud, head of Radio Drama at the BBC, recognised the importance of comedy and noted in 1932 that:
‘Miss Constanduros [...] proved that it is perfectly possible to write humour indigenous to the microphone, but so far no one has emulated [her] in the field of the Broadcast Play. This field of Broadcast Comedy lies practically virgin before all aspirants to honours in writing plays for broadcasting.’
The BBC’s Val Gielgud
By 1925 Mabel was 45 years old, a wife, and mother of 8-year-old Michael when her professional life began.
Her first featured broadcast appears in records for May 1st of that year, just three months since she first braved the audition at the BBC. She says:
‘I was offered my first solo broadcast in the spring of 1925. I went to see Kenneth Wright, who said they were prepared to pay me two guineas for a five minute’s broadcast, provided that the material was original and that the B.B.C. would not have to pay any copyright for it [...] soon after this my friend K.H. Wright sent for me again and told me that he thought I was not being paid enough and that they proposed to raise my fee to three guineas. A few weeks later still they sent for me again and told me they proposed to make me a star (which meant five guineas).’
According to the website, Mislaid Comedy Heroes, Mabel has the status of being the first comic to be paid the handsome sum of five guineas a show by the BBC.
To give you a rough idea of what that money equates to today, two guineas is around £43 - or three days wages for a skilled tradesman at the time. Not bad to get the same amount of pay for a five minute broadcast.
Five guineas is an even greater difference - the equivalent of 15 days work for a skilled tradesman at the time.
‘A Day in the Country’ by Mabel followed on 18 July, with Mabel being named as an individual performer/entertainer.
The first record of a ‘comedy sketch by Mabel Constanduros’ is dated September 14th 1925. She must have impressed because by the following year she signed her first contract as a writer on 19 January 1926 - when a fee of ten guineas was agreed for the play ‘Devoted Elsie’.
Billed as a ‘radio comedy’, it was broadcast in February of that year with Mabel as the eponymous Elsie, working in the kitchen with the cook, where, ‘to help pass the time away whilst hard at work, they discuss with vital interest Mr. ’Arold. Elsie’s admiration of Mr. ’Arold is beyond description.’
To listen to the podcast about the life and times of Mabel Constanduros, hit the play button below:
Mabel forged a particular kind of freedom for herself during a period that gave unprecedented opportunities to middle-class women in the interwar years. Having found her voice(s), she was clearly a hard bargainer, a determined professional, an engaging, generous friend and affectionate employer.
As a writer and entertainer she has a remarkable grasp of the new medium of radio:
‘Here is a new kind of entertainment immensely important because it is within reach of everybody, which needs a special technique in writing. It would seem a better policy to encourage authors who understand it to write new radio material, which should be acted by people who understand radio.’
There are all sorts of thought leaders, trend spotters and thinkers in the media industry today, but how’s that for a bit of industry insight 100 years ago about the way the (media) world is going?
In an article in the 1933 BBC Yearbook about the need to recruit new talent for Variety, the list of essential attributes of worthy candidates was very much male-oriented:
He is thoroughly trained in microphone work. He can work with or without an audience
He takes the trouble to prepare special material, and renew his material.
He is instinctively aware of BBC standards and gives us the type of material suited for our mixed audience.
Eventually he appears on the stage or screen as a BBC ‘Star’ and, if he is a good artist, does indirect propaganda for us.
No surprise then that Mabel felt compelled to strenuously defend her position as a professional both in her correspondence with the BBC and with the public.
When Mabel learned her solo writing was not compensated as much as when she partnered with men, she understandably complained:
‘I still think I am being paid too little,’ she wrote, ‘A musical show is much more trouble to write than a straight one and I don’t see why, when Denis (her nephew) and I separately get 1 guinea an hour for what we write and Howard Agg and I get sometimes more why I alone should be paid less. I am the most experienced writer of the three with 18 years of writing for the air - as much, possibly, as any author writing. And nobody has kept up this standard, I believe, for so long.’
As Gilli Bush-Bailey, who has written about Mabel Constanduros and is a former actress and Professor Emerita at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, says, at that time it must have been odd for the men at the receiving end of these letters to have such demands made by a woman.
And Mabel wasn’t alone - the idea of a more equal society was coming to the fore as just a few years before, in 1928, fifteen million women gained the right to vote on equal terms with men.
Women campaigning for the right to vote which was won in 1928
While it might seem like a long time ago, the drive for equality was gathering momentum and Mabel was right in the mix.
As a performer of her own material, Mabel argued for the right to perform outside the BBC, claiming copyright for the commercial exploitation of her most enduring character creation, Grandma Buggins.
Just a reminder that this is the 1920s and 30s we’re talking about, not a couple of years or decades ago. Mabel had the commercial nouse to exploit her work beyond the confines of the BBC.
Mabel and her nephew, Denis, were a successful writing partnership, creating a popular radio series, The English Family Robinson, and later having a play Acacia Avenue (1943) running in the West End, which was later adapted as 29 Acacia Avenue for release as a film.
Writing with Denis, Mabel was sure to make it clear that she was the senior and more experienced writer in the partnership, and she expected recognition of that fact as seen in a letter dated 2 September 1937:
Dear Mr Hamilton Marr
If you consult your files you will find that you paid me fifteen pounds – or guineas – for both my Conversations in the Train. It was my nephew, Denis, who got twelve pounds. I am quite willing to accept the same fee as I had before for this one.
Good for her.
Mabel celebrated the freedom that radio gave her to be ‘whatever character you choose, since your appearance can neither help nor hinder’. However, she warns that the ‘microphone is merciless, though, to affectation and insincerity. The moment you cease to mean what you say, listeners will find you out.’
The American Octopus
In 1929, the Director of Outside Broadcasting, Gerald Cock, sounded the alarm about increasing American influence in British entertainment.
He worried over what he called the ‘trans-Atlantic octopus’ with its tendencies towards merger and acquisitions of music publishing, record labels, and film studios. I mean, that could’ve been written in an article within the past few days - nearly 100 years ago and yet it still holds true today.
And there’s more - the fear was that American entertainment conglomerates might contract quality British artists and thereby ‘severely limit our programme material, signalling the end of the BBC as an independent organisation and the advent of competitive and American-influenced broadcasting.’
There were concerns that American artists and programmes might eventually swamp Britain’s distinctive cultural character if left unchecked.
That fear of America snapping up British talent or the BBC not being able to compete against American media companies is just as alive and well today.
The debate around how UK media companies - hello Channel 4 - compete against America is literally happening as I type.
Screenshot from a www.theguardian.com article published 01/09/2022 on the issue of Channel 4’s potential privatisation
It’s quite strange to read that this unease and alarm has been hanging around for nearly a century now.
In a bid to prevent the loss of talent or shows, the BBC threatened artists who wished to broadcast elsewhere, and implied to Mabel that should she sell Buggins material for broadcast on Continental stations, they would no longer be interested in future material.
Incensed by this - I think, understandably - Mabel shot a letter back to them to say she had to constantly produce new material for the BBC that could be rarely recycled:
‘That material could be used for a year on the Halls but I have to scrap it once it is broadcast. Only by being this extravagant have I kept my place as one of your best-liked comedians… Would you prefer that I write new stuff for commercial broadcasting rather than use up material that you have had and finished with?’
She went on to chastise the BBC for threatening her and reminded them of her long-term loyalty to the institution, as well as the fact she could make more money elsewhere - again, not at all dissimilar to today’s world where talent loyal to the BBC eventually get snapped up by a higher paying commercial operation.
In Mabel’s case, the BBC didn’t press the matter further, and the Bugginses remained on the BBC and were also heard on Radio Normandie.
Not On The Halls
In the late 1920s, the music hall circuit was still more lucrative than radio. Mabel’s peer, Helena Millais, left broadcasting to pursue fame in the music halls and it all but killed her career on the BBC.
Mabel’s longevity is due to both her loyalty to the BBC and the popularity of her family-oriented and radio-centric sketches. Mabel also capitalised on her radio-made celebrity by diversifying into areas beyond broadcasting.
She tried her hand in music halls and despite admitting she was terrified she must have done something right as she was offered a twelve week tour and contract.
‘I was engaged to top the bill at the Coliseum in a few weeks’ time,’ Mabel wrote later, ‘and I felt no triumph at all. I was just terror-stricken. This was a job of which I knew nothing.’
Clearly, Mabel had an endless supply of ideas. Not just for different shows, but ideas within shows - somehow she had to come up with 250 plot lines for the Bugginses.
Even if Mabel was ultra keen on working in music halls, which she wasn’t, her own mother was against the very idea of them and Mabel was brought up believing that going to a music hall was almost on par with getting drunk or stealing money. So not exactly a ringing endorsement.
And it wasn’t just ideas for Mabel herself either - as Gilli Bush-Bailey says, her output was on several levels of productivity.
The Buggins Family
The creation of the Buggins family represented a significant milestone for radio as it was the first radio family on either UK or American radio, beating the first American radio family, the Goldbergs, by four years.
In 1939, the BBC’s director of Variety, John Watt, recognised that Mabel’s ‘creation of the Buggins family was a historic achievement’.
According to Tim Crook, a media expert and Head of Radio at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the Bugginses were ‘the forerunner of virtually every soap and sitcom family that’s ever been’.
How about that?
The Buggins Family (aka ‘The Bugginses’) was Mabel’s most enduring creation.
Mabel appearing as her character Grandma Buggins
There were over 250 Buggins episodes broadcast between 1928 and 1948. The most characters she ever played in one broadcast was seven - she developed this style of performance because ‘being several people at once enabled me to do sketches’.
This was amazingly innovative - today we’re used to voice actors playing several characters in the same show, if not in the same scene, but in the 1920s this was unheard of.
Mabel decided to take this approach as it was ‘more entertaining than monologues’ - Mabel had written and performed her own comedic monologues earlier in her broadcasting career.
There is some disagreement amongst researchers as to which was the prototype BBC radio soap. Some think it began with The Bugginses, others cite The Huggetts, which was also created by Mabel. So either way, Mabel led the way with the soap opera.
As Jen Purcell says, Mabel was responsible for both bringing soap opera from the US and basically created the sitcom.
The terms "situational comedy" or "sitcom" were not commonly used until the 1950s. Although The Bugginses are described as sketches they are more like what we would now call a sitcom.
A sketch explores a comic moment where a sitcom tells a much bigger comic story. The complexity of The Buggins Family goes beyond the normal framework of sketch writing, so Mabel basically wrote the forerunner of the ‘domestic sitcom’ with the ‘husband, wife and kids’, which has spawned so many permutations ever since, such as The Royle Family or, as Jen discovered, the BBC One family sitcom, Outnumbered, which has surprisingly similar skits.
Given the ample evidence of Mabel pioneering the sitcom before it was a thing, it’s odd that she’s vanished from history. The BBC’s Val Gielgud himself thought highly of Mabel, especially when it came to sitcom.
War Work On The Kitchen Front
The Buggins were so popular in the 1930s that Mabel’s character Grandma Buggins was used to broadcast recipes during the food shortages of the Second World War.
As Jen Purcell details in her book, on September 1st, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland and two days before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Mabel reached out to the directors of both BBC Drama and Variety offering her services if war broke out.
Her campaign to continue writing and performing in aid of the war effort resulted in the publication of four novels, several speaking tours for government ministries, a handful of stage tours, a successful West End play and over 270 wartime appearances on the BBC, far exceeding other well-known wartime personalities.
The Buggins family was conscripted for official war work on the popular Kitchen Front programme.
“How well I recall dear Mabel Constanduros every morning with her tips… Nobody dared breathe aloud when she was on and I scribbled notes down,” one woman from Potters Bar remembered about Mabel’s Kitchen Front role.
Initial scripts indicate that Grandma or the mother, Emily Buggins, simply read through a recipe once or twice, but by June 1942, Mabel had evolved her sketches so that Grandma gave out recipes line by line after which Emily repeated them.
Emily also anticipated listeners’ questions by stopping Grandma now and again to inquire about a particular ingredient’s availability or to ask for clarification.
Mabel’s efforts on the Kitchen Front was important war work that showed Mabel’s commitment to the war effort, and it also ensured her continued relevance on radio and strengthened her celebrity.
Soaps And Sitcoms
As Jen Purcell says, dramatising the day-to-day domestic life and relationships have become the foundation of both soaps and sitcoms.
Mabel was a trailblazer in the development of two genres that have shaped how the nation imagines itself.
No matter which series has the greater claim to being the prototype, there’s little doubt that the modern soap opera is based on Mabel’s work.
That said, historians of both sitcom and soap opera tend to point to American programming as the templates for these genres in Britain. But British sitcom was not transplanted from America; it was a home grown invention, starting with the Buggins Family in 1925.
Wikipedia’s entry on radio comedy in Britain notes that ‘a number of British radio comedies achieved considerable renown in the second half of the 20th century.’ No mention of the Buggins or that of anything in the first half of the century.
You probably shouldn’t rely exclusively on Wikipedia for your historical insights but it’s worth referencing it to show how popular sources have got the history of radio comedy wrong.
According to Wikipedia, radio comedy began in the United States in 1930, and did not begin in the United Kingdom until a generation later, with such popular 1950s shows as The Goon Show and Hancock's Half Hour.’
Whoever put that entry in was out by about 25 years.
Fascinated by Mabel Constanduros? Listen to the My Aunt Mabel podcast, an enjoyable and informative biographical series. Click on the play button below and give it a go:
The Glums, a five minute comedy sketch which appeared in 1953, featured working-class characterisations and situations that were strikingly similar to the Buggins sketches yet The Glums are considered a ‘watershed in the representation of the sitcom family.’
The difference with The Glums was that the male perspective took hold: in The Glums the female parts rarely spoke or were relegated to noises 'off-unintelligible shout’. The show ushered in the usual British family sitcom dynamic in which women act as the backdrop with the focus being on the men.
Throughout Mabel’s Buggins work - both on radio and in print - men were often relegated to the periphery. Conversations between her female protagonists rarely failed the Bechdel-Wallace test, which provides a simple guide to gender equality in cultural forms.
To pass the test, a text must have:
At least two female characters
Who talk to each other
About something other than a man
Sounds simple but in a database of 9,329 movies that have been analysed, 5,285 (just over 56%) pass all three tests.
In lead acting roles, as writers and creators, and in leadership positions, women remain underrepresented across multiple media.
Women have exercised and continue to exercise immense, if often unrecognised, influence on the BBC.
The early days of the BBC ‘burst with women’, as Jen Purcell says. The names of Hermione Gingold, Helena Millais, Elsie and Doris Waters, Nellie Wallace, Tessie O’Shea, Gladys Young, Francis Kilpatrick, and Helen Pryde represent just a fraction of the women who were well known to and beloved by audiences in the 1920s and 30s whose work and influence have yet to be written into the history of the BBC.
Mabel’s invention of the first radio family was a critical moment in the history of British broadcasting entertainment.
Her emphasis on the humour of the everyday rhythms of home and relationships are influential in the evolution of both sitcom and soap opera.
Mabel was also able to use her vocal ability to ‘show’ her characters. The closest British performer we have to her style today is probably Catherine Tate, who’s ‘Nan’ character isn’t so different from Grandma Buggins.
Catherine Tate appears as her ‘Nan’ character
Filson Young, a journalist and radio critic in the early 1930s, found himself shocked by the depths Grandma would sink. He felt Mabel had created such despicable characters that the listener derived a grim satisfaction when catastrophe befell the family. He wrote:
‘Whatever [the reason for his laughter] there is undoubtedly humour in it,’ he said, ‘But it is humour of an essentially unlovely and ill-natured kind, springing not from the well of love in our hearts but from the well of bitterness.’
Similar tension has been worked into the best sitcoms ever since.
A Novel Approach
In 1928, Mabel and her performing and writing partner, Michael Hogan, penned a novel called The Bugginses, about the famous radio family and then Mabel went on to write three more Buggins-related novels without Hogan in the late 1930s.
The Bugginses book
The novels Mabel wrote were examples of her desire to extend the reach of her radio works and her name beyond the radio in ways that were pretty unique for the period.
The Buggins novels amplified the audience’s desire for more interaction, both with the radio family and Mabel’s other works, strengthening Mabel’s celebrity and increasing the popularity of her radio family.
We take such attempts to expand both the audience and audience’s interest across different mediums for granted these days. A book might be adapted into film and then re-adapted as a TV or streaming series, for example.
Ninety years ago, this was really innovative from Mabel as few BBC performers or writers developed such a diverse variety of media at the time.
English Family Robinson
As you know, Mabel spent some time in late 1936 hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite of the day. It was while there that she was inspired by a family drama, or what we’d call a soap opera today.
The result of Mabel discovering the concept in the US was her series, English Family Robinson, created with her nephew Denis.
And later, Gielgud believed that, in the UK at least, the ‘family drama’ (ie, soap opera) began with The English Family Robinson:
It was with the English Family Robinson in 1938 that this type of programme-item was introduced by Mabel and Denis Constanduros, almost immediately establishing a clamant demand, which was met in turn by Front-line Family, by Mrs. Dale, and by The Archers.
However, it’s not exactly praise. While Gielgud identified Mabel as being the UK’s soap opera trailblazer, he did it in a critical way because it was an American genre - ie, a bad thing - that Mabel had brought over to the UK after having spent time in Hollywood.
It was a series that, according to Mabel, could have been titled ‘Anybody’s Family’ and became the template for British soap opera in the 1940s.
English Family Robinson was one of the first attempts to dramatise the everyday on the BBC and it was a huge success for Mabel and Denis.
Radio Times sold it as ‘Their weekly adventures will be those that may have happened to thousands of listeners and their families during the week… though nothing sensational is likely to happen to them, you will probably soon feel that you know them as well as you know anybody you meet in the shops, at the golf club, or in the morning on the 8:45.’ - just like modern day soaps.
As well as creating Kitchen Front shows with the Bugginses during the Second World War, Mabel and Denis also adapted English Family Robinson for wartime.
And Mabel came within a whisker of being immortalised forever as a pioneer of soap opera. Jen Purcell says it “could have been [Mabel’s] ticket to fame because [...] the history of soap opera in Britain goes from the Robinsons to the Dales - Mrs Dale’s Diary. I think she could have been part of that history and she got written out of it.”
During the war, Mabel and Denis also decided to diversify English Family Robinson into another medium - theatre.
A tiny image of the 29 Acacia Avenue film poster
The play they co-created was Acacia Avenue which had a run of over 200 shows through 1943 - 1944.
In February 1944, Mabel and Denis sold the film rights to Sydney Box, a British film producer and screenwriter, with the film adaptation becoming 29 Acacia Avenue - not to be confused with Eric Wimp, aka the one and only Bananaman, who lived at 29 Acacia Road. The road name has since become a byword for suburban life.
I’m A Celebrity
A 1932 Radio Times article declared Constanduros one of the most popular wireless celebrities.
Mabel wrote:
‘My success as a broadcaster was a never failing source of surprise and pleasure to me, but it made me anxious. It is one thing to capture the fancy of the public but quite another thing to be able to keep it.’
When the BBC made Constanduros a star in 1925, she also gained celebrity status as her voice became increasingly well known to audiences across the UK.
In her autobiography, Mabel remembered how early on in her career, fans ‘crowded round the car… waving and shouting at Michael Hogan and herself, and once, the two were crushed by a crowd of fans and the police had to be called in to help.’
Constanduros recalled receiving letters of appreciation or ‘my applause by post’, as she called it, which offered praise such as “Your turn last night was immense,” and “Thank you for your clever and intensely amusing impersonations,” and “I never laughed so heartily in my life”.
Soon the letters became more personal. As well as the letters of praise, Mabel received requests from people hoping she would help them break into radio, photos of men interested in marriage and numerous ‘begging letters’ from people with hard luck stories, to whom she often sent money because she was distressed by their situations.
It wasn’t all roses though - early on in Mabel’s career, she gave her address to an admirer who showed up at her door and over the course of a fearful two hours threatened to strangle her.
That story became part of Mabel’s story of fame and its consequences; told multiple times over the course of her career. (The situation was resolved when the stalker’s taxi driver came to the door insisting on his fare… Or he was asked by Bina, Mabel’s housekeeper, to come and help, depending on the version of the story Mabel told).
And Mabel hoped that the Huggetts film franchise she’d developed might help her launch a successful film career. These hopes are reflected in Denis’s observations of the opening night of the film Holiday Camp in August 1947:
‘Mabel had ordered an enormous Rolls Royce to take us to the cinema. There was an expensive and fashionable crowd. We were sitting in good seats, but not among the cream of the elite; the air was blue with the smoke of flashlights, but they did not flash for us. This, naturally, did not surprise or worry me, but I could feel Mabel seething with thwarted stardom at my side.’
Fiercely protective of her intellectual property and her professional status, Mabel took advantage of the flexibility of the early years of the BBC and built her radio celebrity by experimenting with and developing an understanding of both the medium and her audience.
Film poster for Mabel and Denis’s Here Come The Huggetts
In the creation of a comedic family, Mabel carved out a niche which made her recognisable among a field of already-established radio comics.
The Dawn of TV
When, in 1950, Mabel wrote to EA Harding, a BBC producer, offering more radio plays, she sounded a note of alarm about the power of television:
‘Radio has been my life for twenty-five years. I admit I fear to think we may have to go down before television.’
Harding replied:
‘I don’t for a moment think that sound radio is going down before what is so disgustingly described in America I believe as Video, though if and when - and it is a big if and I think it will be a long when - there is something like national coverage, I am pretty sure that most of the audience for popular drama will want to look as well as listen in.’
This proved prophetic and highlights a theme of new mediums - they tend to be additive rather than cannibalistic. Cinema didn’t kill off theatre, TV didn’t kill off cinema and so on.
In 1953, Mabel played the role of Earthy Mangold on TV in the four part children’s series Worzel Turns Detective (as in Worzel Gummidge, the TV series about a scarecrow that comes to life).
Mabel in the role of Earthy Mangold in the four part children’s TV series Worzel Turns Detective
That sounds like it should have been an enjoyable experience and yet another string to Mabel’s bow - however, she found that she hated the experience.
Just after shooting the series, Mabel complained to the BBC’s Val Gielgud about television - I love this:
‘What a bastard art it is. I do hope it will never oust sound. I don’t see how it can as it is all in the hands of chimney sweeps and the like. I don’t wonder you shook the dust off your feet with joy. How can anybody get results from TV as it is now? Never the same makeup girls or cameramen for rehearsal as for transmission.’
Gielgud responded:
‘I confess I share most of your apprehensions about TV. It is exasperating because if only people would give rather more thought to the problems instead of trying to do too much too quickly and too elaborately, a genuine medium might well emerge. Unfortunately, the TV audience is both voracious and stupid and we have no-one of Reith’s caliber at this end to resist adequately the more moronic type of public demand.’
Strong and insulting words indeed. I wonder if you switched out ‘TV’ for something like metaverse if the same applies?
Some people are fully convinced that an interconnected immersive virtual reality is the next thing, while others scoff at the very idea of it.
You could easily imagine someone writing today:
‘I confess I share most of your apprehensions about the metaverse. It is exasperating because if only people would give rather more thought to the problems instead of trying to do too much too quickly and too elaborately, a genuine medium might well emerge.’
Despite Mabel and Gielgud’s views of TV, by the time of Mabel's death in 1957 the BBC was reimagining the future of broadcasting thanks to the new and exciting ‘tele-set’. Had she lived, it’s possible that Mabel may have made the jump to television, expanding and adapting her career as she had done so successfully for 32 years.
The End
Mabel continued to entertain audiences right up until a heart attack put her in hospital in December 1956.
Directly after her death in February 1957, friends and employees at the BBC considered commemorating her life on radio but the BBC decided against it.
After the huge outpouring of grief and official commemoration in the wake of comedian Tommy Handley’s untimely death in 1949, some worried that the BBC would be obligated to memorialise the death of every radio celebrity.
It seems a bit heartless now, especially as we do, as a society, memorialise public figures who have passed away.
The incredible depth and variety of Mabel’s radio career is shown in Radio Times listings from 1956-57: a light comedic play with Denis, a new production of The Laughing Mirror written with Howard Agg in the 1940s, readings on Morning Story, an acting role in a serious radio play, appearances on Children’s Hour, and numerous Buggins family sketches.
That’s just in one year at the end of her life when she was 76 years old. She was busy right up until the end, to be sure.
Nearly 100 years ago, in 1923, Marion Cole, a student with Elsie Fogerty at Central School of Speech and Drama in London, was at an afternoon Diction Class held at rooms in the Albert Hall. She describes what happened:
‘There was a little woman, married, who struggled with lovely lyrics, which her strangely husky voice just did not suit; but it was clear that she loved poetry and Fogie was always encouraging to her. One day she spoke a charming poem which nobody knew, her whole voice changed. Fogie looked up with her special smile and said “Dear, it’s come! Your breathing – control – everything. Now you are free! You wrote that … Yes – I think you will be able to write too. Bring me something quite different next time, dear, please… I’m so very glad: I knew you could do it”. Next week, “something quite different” was a sparkling cockney sketch, also original, which had us helpless with laughter: but this great little artiste, once in command of her own voice, could reduce us to tears just as easily. Her name was Mabel Constanduros.’
So, now you know that Mabel Constanduros lived from 1880 -1957 and was a prolific writer and actress for radio, film and theatre, specialising in comedy. She was:
A trailblazing female broadcaster and comedian for three decades on BBC radio from 1926
A pioneer of the new medium of radio
A writer, broadcaster, actor and novelist
Creator of the first radio family on either UK or American radio.
She was credited with the creation of both sitcom and soap opera in the UK:
Specialising in comedy, Mabel wrote and performed the earliest sitcom - The Buggins Family, with every family member voiced by Mabel. Probably the first ever sitcom, but never recognised as such, it was the first radio family on either UK or American radio and Constanduros’s most enduring creation
She created the UK’s first soap operas (The English Family Robinson and The Huggetts)
She was a relentless creative. Not only did she have original and hilarious ideas, she had loads of them
When her professional life began, she was 45 years old and a (soon to be separated) wife, and mother of an 8-year-old son. None of this was at all ‘normal’ 100 years ago
Thanks for reading!
If you’d like to listen to the podcast and hear from the experts about Mabel Constanduros’s life and work, you can do so right here: