New BBC1 Sunday Evening Sitcom

We've been watching the new BBC1 sitcom, 'Hold The Sunset.' It fills the slot vacated by 'Still Open All Hours.' It stars John Cleese and Alison Steadman. They play a couple who are 'just good friends' and he's keen to marry her so they can sell up and move abroad to the sun. But just when she decides to take him up on his offer and they crack open the champaign, there is a knock at the door and her 50-year-old son arrives, having left his wife. This character is played by Jason Watkins, and once he appears he more or less steals the show. He's regressed to his childhood and has a temper tantrum when he learns that his mother gave away his precious collection of comics to a charity shop. Compared to the recently ended 'Still Open All Hours,' it's far more subtle and doesn't rely on a studio audience to point up the comedy. It isn't 'laugh out loud' funny and the characterisation is very detailed, not relying on stereotype which the David Jason vehicle relies heavily on. It's more than 40 years since Cleese wrote and performed in 'Fawlty Towers,' so it something of a surprise to find that this new comedy is totally different in style to that famous series. We will have to wait and see how the rest of the series develops and how it does as regards ratings, but all the signs are that it's good real potential and will be worth sticking with over the next couple of Sunday evenings. At least the BBC is trying hard to come up with new sitcoms. This has been the slot, over the years, which has been taken up by a succession of sitcoms, from 'Bread' to 'Keeping Up Appearances' so we will wait and see how it fares.

Listening to Radio Four- Part 2

Not only is there all manner of drama productions on Radio Four, but an amazing array of comedy shows and panel games. I think the main advantage over television with radio is that you can be doing other things while it is on, such as having a bath, lying in bed or driving a car, doing the washing-up, ironing your clothes or eating your dinner. Television requires a certain amount of concentration to get the best out of it, although people do also surf the internet or use their mobiles whilst watching television, such as Tweeting or using Facebook, but generally, radio does have the advantage. I love shows such as 'Just A Minute' which has been running for around 50 years. It's such a simple idea (for those who don't know the show it involves panel members talking on a subject given by the chairman, Nicholas Parsons, and they have to speak for 60 seconds without hesitating, repetition or deviation and the others on the panel have to spot these mistakes. It must be quite difficult. Over the years the panelists have included Kenneth Williams, Derek Nimmo, Tim Rice, Julian Clary,  Shelia Hancock, Stephen Fry and a host of others. Sometimes the panelists get quite heated, but generally, the shows go smoothly. Nicholas Parsons, which is well over 90, has been the chairman for all those years. I don't actually think 'chairman' is the right chose of word for what he does, he has to keep the panelists in order. Not an easy job. I reckon I've been listening to it on and off since it began, but I can remember it starting sometime in the mid-1960's when I was living at home at Malting Farm. It's always entertaining and amusing.

Frank Muir and Denis Norden were contestants on a panel game called 'My Word.' It ran for years on Radio Four, and probably on the Home Service as it was before it was re-branded in the 1960's. This show was about words (well, the title was imaginative!) At the end of the programme both these contestants had to tell a story, using a well-know phrase or saying, which was given them by the compere. This saying had to be part of the 'punch-line' or closing sentence of the story. When it ended, the contestant who had the longest applause from the studio audience won. I just loved this show. I've always had a love of words, and these two men, who were major scriptwriters, working on BBC radio comedy shows such as 'Take It From Here' which starred Jimmy Edwards, Dick Bentley, and June Whitfield. It was a sketch show, best remembered for 'The Glums' section, with Dick Bentley as the dimwitted Ron Glum, June Whitfield as his ever-so-patient girlfriend Eth and Jimmy Edwards as Ron's father. Frank Muir became  Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC and then Head of Comedy at London Weekend Television and Denis Norden introduced the long-running television show 'It'll Be Alright On The Night' which consisted of clips of out-takes and bloopers from television shows and films. I think the best way to describe their comedy would be 'droll' and probably not appreciated by today's audiences as being somewhat tame. Perhaps so, but they had a wit and originality which is missing from today's entertainment, which seems dead-set on being quite offensive (don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with a lot of modern comedy, but so much is just out-and-out offensive and crude. A double entendre is one thing, but being crude is another. Using bad language to get is laugh is just cheap. We don't appear to have any boundaries today, anything goes, which is a shame. Muir and Norden then went on to be involved in 'My Music' which used the format of 'My Word' but using music as the theme. Steve Race was the compere of that show.

When I was at Mander College in Bedford in the late 1960's, a friend of mine on the course came to visit me at home and introduced me to 'The Goon Show.' His father had recorded the original broadcasts on to reel-to-reel tape (actually illegal, but never mind. I think everyone did this at one time or other.) and he had transferred these recordings onto the then newly-introduced format of tape cassette. I was able to listen to some of them and was immediately hooked. I just loved the surreal humour of those episodes, probably first broadcast in the 1950's. The characters, played by Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan (who also wrote most of the scripts, along with Eric Sykes.) really captivated me and I have been a fan ever since. I have been a fan of Spike Milligan ever since. He's been called 'The Grandfather of Alternative Comedy' and influenced the Monty Python style of comedy.

I got hooked on the crazy comedy of another radio show called 'I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again', which had John Cleese, Bill Oddie, Graham Garden, Jo Kendal and co in it. This ran from the early 1960's into the 1970's and some of the performers went on to write such shows as 'Fawlty Towers' and from 'The Goodies' on BBC television. They began their careers at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and performed in'The Footlights' revues. I recorded a lot of these shows onto audio cassette and replayed them endlessly until the tapes wore out. Cassettes might be the latest technology in the 1960's, but they weren't very reliable. The tape was extremely thin and often got twisted inside the horrible little plastic cases. The longer the running time, the thinner the tape and as a result, the more likely they were to cause problems. I had a Philips cassette player, which must have been one of the first cassette players on the market.

We've now got digital radio. I won a rather smart Roberts radio, courtesy of Classic FM. It was around 11-12 years ago. It sits near our bed. We listen to Radio 4 Extra on it. They broadcast what I can best call 'back catalogue' or 'archive' material on the channel. It was originally called Radio Seven. I'm not sure why it was re-branded as Radio 4 Extra. Perhaps because most of what it broadcasts originated on Radio 4. They have old episodes of such shows as 'Round The Horne', 'The Goons', 'The Navy Lark' as well as crime series such as 'Sherlock Holmes' (there are quite a few radio versions of the stories, going back several decades.) As well as the occasional documentary and play. It seems to run on a 12-hour cycle, which means it can run 24 hours a day. 'Desert Island Discs' is played on Sunday evenings at 9.15. As this is a series which has been going since around 1942 it could run almost indefinitely. Also, other comedy shows which are on earlier in the week on Radio 4, such as 'Just A Minute' and 'I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue.'

Working In Theatre- Part 7

After "A Voyage Round My Father" the next show was a pantomime, just in time for Christmas 1970. There is something about panto which I don't particularly like. It's all corny and rather stupid. I know it's 'traditional' but I much prefer my theatre to be a little more imaginative. Everyone  seems to  not care that they know the story, no more so than the classic pantomime plots of Cinderella, Aladdin, Jack and The Bean Stalk etc etc. This one was 'Dick Whittington.' There was one difference with this one, the roles of Jack and Alice  were played more realistically with Dick played by a man and  Alice Fitzwarren played by a girl and not the more traditional roles of  Principal Boy and Girl, although it did have a Dame, the cook, played traditionally by a man, in this case an actor called Bill Stewart. Also, at the end, it didn't have Alice marrying Dick, for some reason, a sort of almost feminist slant, but it didn't really work for some reason. It doesn't make sense if the hero doesn't marry the heroine. It was almost like a musical in that it had a completely original score with some very good lyrics, unlike most pantos that have pop songs sprinked freely amongst the plot, as well as a rather unhealthy mix of soap stars and television 'names.' Also, strange variety acts that are put in, basically just to fill up the running time and having not a great deal to do with the plot of the show.  I suppose the stars draw in the audience and I imagine this will be a lot of children's first experience of live theatre. Maybe it will be their only experience of theatre all year. Possibly most adults, unfortunately. Also, it's the one show that the theatre manager can make a good deal of money from ticket sales and help to prop up ailing productions during the rest of the year. Although I might not be a lover of pantomime, I did love working on them, as the atmosphere backstage was always very good. Hard work, though, as there would be a lot of scene changes, a great deal of hauling on ropes to 'fly' out clothes and generally enormous flats to be moved around the stage.

The first dress rehearsal ran for over three hours, which was thought to be far too long, so, unfortunately, quite a lot of material had to be cut, and some of it was good material. I suppose when you have a children's audience it's not a good idea for a show to run too long, and some days we would do three performances, a morning show, a matinee and then an evening performance. A very long and tiring day. So you can see why the running time was best kept to around two and a half hours at most.

The stage at Greenwich is a thrust, and there is no curtain or 'tabs'. Also, absolutely no sort of grid over the stage, so nothing could be flown', so the designer for this panto had to be ingenious to allow scene changes and to allow a fairly wide range of settings. As there was no sort of arrangement for flying, you couldn't have flown cloths for settings as you would have for a pantomime in a traditional proscenium theatre.  The idea that was used was that it had a sort of children's book feel, and the main up-stage area was a sort of toybox, which, at the beginning of the show was closed. It was broken into two, hinged sections, like large doors. Myself and another A.S.M. were to be responsible for opening and closing these 'doors' and we had to time it such that they opened and closed precisely, and particularly when closed, otherwise it would have looked awful. Behind these doors any sort of scene change could be done, with the downstage area being used for some scenes, and then the doors opened for the next scene.

We were both involved in the 'Storm' scene. This was done in U.V. light (ultra-violet) which means that certain bits of scenery, props etc are painted in a substance which reacts to ultra violet light from tubes or bulbs. The scene was when Dick Whittington and his cat are caught in a storm at sea and then shipwrecked on a desert island (or something. Not sure of the exact plot now.) Myself and the other A.S.M. had to operate puppet versions of Dick and the cat, and they end up on a raft or something and this is all done in complete darkness, so you can imagine how difficult it must have been and to cover a scene change. I think this would have been my first experience of puppetry in some form or another.

 Most pantomimes have a 'song sheet,' the bit in the show where one of the principal characters does a song and this song is brought in from the flies and the audience is involved, there's a lot of participation and children are bought on stage and usually one half of the audience sings one line and the other half alternate lines, or something similar and one side wins. I think you get the idea. Well, the pantomime at Greenwich was no different, except that instead of the songsheet being flown in it was painted on a sort of sign board and myself and the other A.S.M had to bring it on stage from the wings. The participation for this section was done by Derek Griffiths and one other character, don't ask me who it was no, as I've forgotten. All went the same each performance for around four weeks until the last night. Instead of us coming on and merely holding the board for the audience to read and sing to, WE were more or less forced to join in, and couldn't leave the stage until we'd done a song and dance across the stage. Our exits into the wings either side of the stage was blocked so we couldn't get off-stage, so we were more or less expected to do something! Such is the atmosphere of doing pantomime.

The next show to come in after Dick Whittington was not the usual play, musical or whatever. It was a month of music hall. The theatre had been rebuilt from what had been a former music hall, so I suppose it was only right that it should hark back to it's origins. On the bill for one week were two famous stars of the past, Elsie and Doris Waters. This intrigued me as my grandmother had piles of old 78 r.p.m records, and some of these had these two on them, doing sketches from around the time of the Second World War. Another 'act' was a drag act called Mrs Shufflewick, actually an actor called Rex Jameson. And the final star was the best as far as I was concerned, the legendary Max Wall. He did most of his iconic act, including him wearing his famous wig, those strange trousers and short jacket which seemed several sizes too small. My involvement was that I was supposed to go on and place his piano stool in place so that he could come on and sit down and then play the piano, if 'play' is the right word, I don't know. Well, rather in the style of the pantomime and the song sheet, all went the same each night, I'd come on from exactly the same side and put the stool in place, and Max Wall would say, in his inimitable way 'where's me st . . .o . . .  o. . . l?'  (I have since discovered that the on-stage character he played, which involved the amazing walk, poorly-fitting suit along with the 'bald' wig, was called Professor Wallofski. Apparently this was, according to John Cleese, the inspiration for The Ministry  of Silly Walks  sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus.) But one night I decided to be different and came on from the OPPOSITE side from normal, and got a round of applause from the audience. So, I can say I've been on stage and performed with the legendary Max Wall.