Half a century has passed since the Sunday evening when the Beatles brought the United States to a standstill, but even now Americans old enough to remember that night recall it with pin-sharp clarity. When the Fab Four made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 a record 73 million people tuned in and 45.3 per cent of households with televisions were watching. It was a milestone in popular entertainment.
The Beatles’ sensational performance at Studio 50 on Broadway — later renamed The Ed Sullivan Theater — would not have happened but for the cool showbiz acumen of a largely unheralded figure back in London: the agent Peter Prichard.
Prichard was Sullivan’s eyes and ears in Europe, alerting him to emerging talent. As Beatlemania swept Britain in 1963, Prichard made Sullivan and his producer Bob Precht aware of this extraordinary new cultural phenomenon. A booking was duly made and the Beatles departed for the US — and a tumultuous welcome — early in 1964. There was a moment of panic on both sides of the Atlantic when Sullivan, furious that his rival Jack Paar had stolen a march by screening footage of the group provided by the BBC, cancelled the Beatles slot. However, realising he was missing a potential coup, Sullivan changed his mind and the appearance went ahead.
Prichard was one of Britain’s leading theatrical agents, a well-liked and respected figure who conducted business on a handshake and whose career spanned more than 60 years. He was tall, good looking and always immaculately tailored, stepping from his red E-Type Jaguar to conduct business meetings with a quiet authority. His long-term associate Laurie Mansfield said: “He was scrupulously honest but a great negotiator. He would get the last available pound for his clients.”
Prichard represented such celebrated names in light entertainment as Jimmy Tarbuck, Clive Dunn, Windsor Davies, Max Wall, Clement Freud, Ray Alan and Lord Charles and Bob Monkhouse among many others.
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In 1996 he was instrumental in helping to retrieve two irreplaceable books containing the jokes Monkhouse had accumulated during his years in comedy. They had been stolen from Broadcasting House the previous year and the comedian had offered a £10,000 “no questions asked” reward for their return.
Prichard was contacted by the thief and arranged a meeting at his office, making sure the police were present and ready to make an arrest as soon as the books were handed over. Prichard immediately called Monkhouse to tell him, “Your babies have returned home”.
The agent must have relished the moment because he devoted much of his spare time to working as a special constable. Prichard first went on the beat in 1974 in an effort to get over divorce from his first wife. “I wanted to meet people outside the entertainment business,” he said. He was commended for confronting two burglars, trying to grab their ignition keys as they drove off and being assaulted with an iron bar in the process. He shrugged it off. “What I do is nothing to what the regular policeman does with longer hours and poor pay,” he said.
Peter John Prichard was born in west London in 1932. He worked in an advertising agency and for a legal firm but at 16 joined the agent Hymie Zahl whom he had approached two years earlier while working as a stagehand at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. He ran the front desk, answered the phone and learnt the ropes, and after National Service in the mid-1950s he joined the prestigious agency run by Lew and Leslie Grade.
He stayed for 12 years, promoting performances and tours by artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Bill Haley and the Comets, Mario Lanza, the Beatles and Danny Kaye. He was also given responsibility for looking after American superstars such as Bob Hope, John Wayne, Jack Benny, Ginger Rogers and Bing Crosby when they visited London.
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One particularly memorable occasion was when Haley arrived amid unprecedented hype for the first British tour by a rock’n’roll band in the winter of 1957.
The singer crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth and was taken to London on a train chartered by The Daily Mirror. At Waterloo station thousands of teenagers greeted Haley amid scenes of near hysteria; one newspaper dubbed it “the second battle of Waterloo”. Throughout it all, Prichard remained calm and in control of events.
He worked for a time in the US representing the Dunes and the Sands hotels and casinos in Las Vegas and it was while working in America that he began his 16-year association with Ed Sullivan. Prichard left the Grades to run the Kavanagh’s agency in 1967 when he first represented Monkhouse, Tarbuck and many of the other artists with whom he became closely associated.
For a time in the 1970s Prichard stepped in front of the camera as a judge on the ITV talent show New Faces. By that time he had set up his own agency, which he ran until the age of 65 when he went into partnership with Laurie Mansfield at International Artistes. Prichard was appointed OBE for services to charity work and entertainment in 1992 and was a trustee of the Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund. He had a second home in Florida where he volunteered for the Sheriff’s Office in Lee County.
One of artists he had to bring to Britain and look after during their visits was Mario Lanza, the American tenor and actor. Prichard had to police Lanza’s notorious overeating. “It was tricky for me because he hated eating alone and always insisted that I join him,” Prichard remembered. “I solved this by chewing very slowly so I didn’t over-eat.
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“I always packed two suits for him in case he was so fat when we arrived in London that he couldn’t fasten his trousers for the press conference. He’d put on a larger suit for the photographs.”
Prichard is survived by his second wife Joan. He had no children. He worked almost until the day he died. “The last time I saw him we discussed an offer for Jimmy Tarbuck,” Mansfield said. “He just loved the business.”
Peter Prichard, OBE, showbusiness agent, was born on November 30, 1932. He died on August 30, 2014, aged 81