This Is Your Life: Johanna Harris

Photographs of Johanna Harris This Is Your Life

Peterborough Evening Telegraph article: Johanna Harris This Is Your Life

Peterborough Evening Telegraph 2 January 1956

'Telegraph' Teleview

This Is Your Life could scarcely have had a more deserving subject than Mrs Harris of the Red Cross. The programme is handled with commendable tact by Eamonn Andrews. But no matter how carefully managed this programme is in practice, it is based on a bad principle, and leaves me for one with an uncomfortable feeling.

As with "Ask Pickles" and "Is this your Problem" it seeks to turn real people's lives into light entertainment.

Perhaps we may yet see, as a contrast to so much gushing about people who are too good to be true, a subject with a few faults and failings and a few candid critics?

Leicester Evening Mail article: Johanna Harris This Is Your Life

Leicester Evening Mail 4 January 1956

BETWEEN THE LINES

EAMONN ANDREWS

THAT small but explosive section of the BBC Television devoted to the programme This Is Your Life - Up to a monthly feature - are right on the tips of their toes.

As from now the programme will be appearing fortnightly.

It will take a lot of scheming and dreaming to find people in the first place and in the second to get them in unsuspecting mind to the theatre.

DID YOU SEE THIS WEEK'S PROGRAMME? IF YOU DID YOU'LL APPRECIATE THE SECRET I'M GOING TO TELL YOU NOW - ONE OF THE BEST KEPT SECRETS OF TELEVISION.

It illustrates just how much scheming can in fact go into the final moments of the weeks of preparation - getting the subject within range of the cameras and microphones.

This week our subject was an ordinary housewife from Sidcup, Kent, Mrs Joanna Harris - but to my mind an extraordinary person for all that.

Mrs Harris, who was born in Windau, Latvia, and married in Omsk, Russia, finally made her home in England in 1932.

Since then, and during the war, she has devoted her time, her talents and her gift for languages to the British Red Cross.

As a voluntary worker she has been prepared at any time to leave her home and escort a patient to or from anywhere in Europe.

Broken leg

THIS preparedness gave us the opportunity we needed to get Mrs Harris to the theatre where she was to be greeted by her husband, he son, friends flown in from Copenhagen and Stockholm, as well as those living in this country, and by her two brothers, Theo and Sasha, from Frankfurt, whom she had seen only once in the past 20 years.

You can see how important it was to get her to that theatre. And this is where the secret comes in - something we could never have achieved but for the help of the Red Cross Society itself.

Mrs Harris was asked to meet a train arriving from Brockenhurst in Hampshire at Waterloo on Sunday morning.

She was told that on board that train would be a Swedish girl who had broken her leg, who spoke no English and who was on her way to Stockholm.

Mrs Harris - as she has done on countless other occasions - agreed to look after the patient in London and next day escort her to Sweden.

In plaster

The patient arrived to schedule, her right leg in plaster and moving with the aid of crutches.

They spoke Swedish together and Mrs Harris took her to a hotel, tucked her into bed for an afternoon nap and told her everything would be all right for the journey.

But the patient had one request. It was, she said, her first visit to London and she had been given two tickets for a television show called This Is Your Life. Would Mrs Harris take her later to the Television Theatre?

"Wouldn't it be much nicer, my dear," said Mrs Harris in her best Swedish, "to look at the programme on the set in the lounge downstairs and not go out at all?"

The patient protested that this would be a great opportunity lost. Mrs Harris promised.

That was why later on in the TV Theatre you may have seen me speak to a young woman with a plaster cast on her right leg and who looked helplessly at her companion, waiting for the explanation to me, "She speaks no English."

I apologised and spoke to her companion instead, whose astonishment was obvious when I said:

"Mrs Johanna Harris - This is YOUR Life."

And so the programme went on.

Identified

ALL this, however, is only part of the secret. Here is the rest of it.

The patient who arrived at Waterloo had not come from Brockenhurst but had boarded the train at Surbiton. The plaster had been put on her leg only that morning - a leg, I need hardly add, that was never broken.

Although the young woman was, in fact, Swedish, she has been living in this country for seven years and speaks perfect English.

She is 26-year-old Mrs Gunilla Rix (nee Casparason), who lives with her husband and two young children, Paul and Michael, at Chiswick. Her husband is, in fact, the commercial artist Aubrey Rix.

One word

I ASKED Mrs Harris if at any stage she had been suspicious of the genuineness of her patient.

She told me that once she felt that perhaps this young girl knew a little more English than she was admitting to, but that was all.

Then I tackled Gunilla on the same subject and asked her if she remembered where she might have slipped up.

"I do perfectly. At the hotel Mrs Harris ordered some orange juice for me. 'Small or big?' asked the waitress, and before I could stop myself I answered 'big.'"

"I tried to explain it by saying I had picked up a few words on my visit here."

"You are the best actress I have ever met," chipped in Mrs Harris, as her patient hobbled away to have the weight of plaster removed from her leg.

Forgiven

IT WAS THEN, some ten minutes or so after the programme, that I asked Mrs Harris if she had forgiven us all the deception we had practised on her, and she gave an answer that was somehow typical of this gentle, cheerful soul to whom we had just paid tribute: "Fancy not forgiving for seeing my two brothers again."

There was one precaution we took which we didn't have to use. If, when we invited Mrs Harris to come on the stage, she had said she couldn't leave her "patient," a man sitting next to her would have said: "I am a doctor. I will look after her for you."

The "doctor" was the show's scriptwriter, Gale Pedrick, who was in the theatre not only to watch his first programme for 1956 but his first programme as a freelance writer.

After eight years as the first and senior Script Supervisor of the Corporation, he is now free to write where and what he likes.

He's bound to have a busy future and, of course, he long ago found a touch of success.

John Bull Magazine article: Johanna Harris This Is Your Life

John Bull Magazine 28 April 1956

I nurse TV's biggest secret

by Eamonn Andrews as told to Wilfred Greatorex

An even more elaborate plan was laid to get Mrs Johanna Harris, the Red Cross nurse, into the studio for her life.

It was arranged that an English-speaking Swedish girl should become Mrs Harris's patient.

A doctor encased her leg in plaster, and the Red Cross instructed Mrs Harris to take her to a London hotel before escorting her to Sweden.

In the hotel, the girl played up to her brief and said she would like to see This Is Your Life.

When Mrs Harris suggested that they might watch it on the television set in the hotel lounge, her patient replied that she had tickets for the show and wanted to see it broadcast.

There was almost a slip up when the girl, who was supposed to speak no English, promptly answered a waiter who asked if she wanted a large or small orange juice.

Mrs Harris seemed satisfied when her charge explained that she had learned a little English. As soon as the programme was over, the girl had her plaster removed.