The Double Act E-Book

Andrew Roberts

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 466

Beschreibung

The Double Act has been at the heart of the British entertainment scene for over 150 years: from its start in the music halls, through radio shows such as Hancock's Half Hour playing in virtually every household and on cinema and television, from Carry On films to Withnail and I. Explore the influence of comedy duos on their audience and how their performances evolved over time, the importance of the subtle art of the straight man next to the comic and discover some acts who might have passed you by. This book is a tribute to the comedians who have entertained the public for so long, dedicating their lives to adding a bit of laughter to the mundane everyday. The Double Act will appeal to all lovers of British comedy as it takes them through the golden moments of its history.

Leseprobe

First published 2018

The History Press

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Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

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© Andrew Roberts 2018

The right of Andrew Roberts to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9029 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

1     From the Music Hall to the Idiot’s Lantern

2     Films and the British Double Act

3     Radio: ‘This is the BBC Home Service’

4     ‘With Hilarious Consequences’: The British Television Sitcom Double Act

5     The Double Act in a Fifty-Minute Package: The Filmed Television Show

6     The Subtle Art of the Straight Man

7     Double Acts that Weren’t

8     Two Chaps (With or Without a Piano)

9     The Double Act and Children’s Entertainment

10   Alternative Comedy

11   Dreamers and Escapists

12   Double Act: Single Vision

Introduction

The first double act that I saw starred a short pompous man who wore the sort of round glasses associated with shopkeepers in the later Ealing comedies. ‘Hello boys and girls,’ he exclaimed, full of enthusiasm, only for his panegyric about a recent trip to the zoo to be ruined by a rude interruption from a younger man with the ready smile of a door-to-door salesman. The would-be lecturer was decidedly put out by the intervention of this individual, but it did not prevent him from being in the other’s company on a weekly basis. The second featured a charming yet very formidable middle-aged lady who swore whenever she heard mention of a colour while her twin brother blew raspberries at the name of a food.

The acts in question were, of course, Don Maclean and Peter Glaze on Crackerjack, and Hattie Jacques and Eric Sykes on Sykes,1 each displaying one fundamental essence of comic duo; one could not be envisaged without the presence of the other. Another is the difference in status, nature or appearance, a comic trope that literally harks back millennia. In Aristophanes’ The Frogs Dionysus is superior in status; Xanthius is his slave but yet the latter enters the play riding a donkey while his master is having to walk while (unconvincingly) disguised as Heracles – ‘How’s that for arrogance and being spoiled rotten?’ complains the god.

To prevent this book from approaching the length of War and Peace, the starting point is the late nineteenth century, when the comedy double act was being forged from the influences of music hall and even minstrel shows. The cross-talk and the use of song pervaded well into the twentieth century with the participants often trapped by economic circumstance (Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen) or institutionalisation (those comic duos who used an armed forces scenario). One very common theme is that the straight man represents the forces of English life who bully the shorter, more vulnerable-looking comic for their own good, be he an army NCO, a government official or the forces of business, be they large or small. The act might appear in the guise of a sketch, which itself was the foundation of the situation comedy, while in ‘legitimate theatre’, two best friends would be discovering that a farce is what occurs to you on the worst day of your lives. In a farcical comedy, the laughter so often derives from the audience’s relief that the pragmatists’ trials are not theirs.

The narrative ends in the late 1980s, the last days of Terry and June and when the older Variety tradition, whether screened on television or in a seaside resort that was last repainted when Shane Fenton & The Fentones were in the Hit Parade, was starting to look tired. By that stage the divide between ‘alternative’ and ‘traditional’ was starting to dissolve, but as comedy is apparently about breaking rules,2 we will encounter Lee and Herring, Armstrong and Miller and The Mighty Boosh. This cut-off point is also born of subjectivity. What amuses is inevitably a personal matter and while the thought of engaging in any nostalgia for Baddiel and Skinner with Fantasy Football League and any form of 1990s ‘New Lad nostalgia’3 is appealing to some, others would derive greater entertainment from a 1965 Public Information Film about tyre repair.

On a somewhat more regretful note, the issues of space mean that Hinge and Bracket, Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, Hope and Keen and so many more acts will have to await a further tome. The focus is on pairings that may be reasonably said to be comedic in form and content – although I have included one unintentionally funny action-adventure duo – and this sadly means excluding Stan and Hilda Ogden and Jack and Vera Duckworth. It also means there was no space for Fanny and Johnny Craddock who were a double act of public notoriety if not public renown. Another challenge is possibly that of what may best be described as ‘comedy orthodoxy’; if you want to start a fevered online debate, merely post an opinion and the ensuing rants will frequently last for months. The remake of The Wicker Man (Neil LaBute, 2006) would have enjoyed far more success had it eschewed irate bees attacking Nicolas Cage and set the narrative in a Comedy Club somewhere near Portsmouth.

What this book will explore are the influences on the British comedy double act. Such acts hail from diverse backgrounds but their common denominators are the manner in which they simultaneously perform to each other and the audience without any extraneous effort. On occasions their legacies are of shadow and ephemera, which might be playbills for variety shows with advertisements for the Azena Danse Salon – ‘Sheffield’s most Luxurious Ballroom with the Seaside Atmosphere’ – or an edition of the TV Times which features Reg Varney’s favoured recipe for sponge cake or comedy acts proclaiming that they may be booked via a FLAXman or PRImrose Hill telephone number. A comedy duo could seek to extend the medium of radio, especially when engaged on a quest of the ultimate answer, while television situation comedy represented a bridge between the Variety sketch and drama. In the post-war years it both established a new interpretation of the double act and brought the names of the writers to the fore. The impact of the Cambridge Footlights, the Edinburgh Fringe and ‘alternative comedy’4 will be discussed, as will the impact of cinema. Films so often have the power to ‘function as stories, dreams and shows, and how they become as potent in our imagination as the rooms in which we spent our childhoods’ (Thomson, 2014: 8). To many Britons, this can apply to a pair of out-of-work actors who went on holiday by mistake as it does to a tall bald headmaster who is attempting to mask his growing hysteria as his authority is challenged by a short and unspeakably determined headmistress of another establishment. The latter picture was, of course, The Happiest Days of Your Life (Frank Launder, 1950), and even if Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford were never again teamed on screen, the memories abide of a film comedy that was quite perfect. Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg worked together for only two years; they will forever be Steed and Mrs Peel.

This book does not claim to be the definitive guide; it is rather a starting point written by one who owes a debt to the comedians. It is also a tribute to the works of entertainment historians who inspire as much as they inform and divert: John Fisher, Benny Green, Roy Hudd, Andy Medhurst, Eric Midwinter and Roger Wilmut. My sincere thanks go to Patrick Barlow, Kenneth Cope, Barry Cryer, Dick Fiddy, Chris Gidney, Syd Little, Don Maclean, Gary Morecambe and Brian Murphy for their time and patience in enduing my questions.

And it is the public that is the final arbiter, who perceives the chemistry between the two parties or note its absence. They often ignore the importance of the straight man, but while Tony Hancock and Sidney James were never a formal double act, to their audience they were indivisible. It is the audience who can discern the difference between watching a unified theatrical creation – a double act with a single vision – and those born of professional expediency. Perhaps the mark of a truly great comedy duo is the sadness when it dissolves; you feel as though you have lost an aspect of everyday existence. Or, as Eric Morecambe told Ernie Wise: ‘Don’t be long, when you’re not here I get a draught all down one side.’

Bibliography

Thomson, David (2014). Moments That Made the Movies. London: Thames & Hudson.

__________________

1     ‘The Hypnotist’ (1978).

2     Why is this statement so often prefixed to naked abuse towards the disabled, the poor or the generally vulnerable?

3     The Word, the Ford Mondeo, ‘Three Lions’ … it was a drab era.

4     A phrase that now appears almost quaint.

1

From the Music Hall to the Idiot’s Lantern

Historians of live entertainment will forever debate when music hall began to be succeeded by ‘Variety’. The terms seem to have surfaced in the 1880s as the means of listing a diverse bill of entertainments to the audience, while John Fisher argues that ‘music hall flourished from about 1850 and had run its course by the time of the Armistice in 1918, to be replaced by the more streamlined genre of variety’ (2013: 15). But it was within music hall that the origins of the double act as still seen today were forged: the cross-talk, the punctured dignity of the straight man and their duet to conclude the act. Benny Green saw the process of various clubs evolving into the music hall as one of moving from:

Eating and drinking, to eating and drinking to the incidental distraction of a singer or comic, to eating and drinking challenged as the main entertainment by singers and comics, to professional entertainment where food and drink were readily available, to professional entertainment patronised purely for its own sake. (1986: 1)

Its roots date to the eighteenth century when chaps would frequent taverns which eventually established rooms that were devoted to ‘free and easy’ musical evenings. These were popular across the UK, and there is a correlation between their use of a chairman, the calling-up of artists on to the stage and the communal singing and the later halls (Maloney, 2003: 40). The penny-gaff, a form of ad hoc entertainment staged in back rooms or above warehouses, had the organiser of the event shouting the various turns on offer for a most reasonable fee, and when Henry Mayhew visited one such show, he was decidedly unimpressed. The comic singer was:

Received with deafening shouts. Several songs were named by the costers, but the ‘funny gentleman’ merely requested them ‘to hold their jaws’, and putting on a ‘knowing’ look, sang a song, the whole point of which consisted in the mere utterance of some filthy word at the end of each stanza. Nothing, however, could have been more successful. (Mayhew, 1851: 89)

Music hall also has its origin in the supper clubs of the capital city, which attracted the middle and upper classes. They featured professional entertainers, paid 20s per week plus food and drink, who would often battle to impose their personalities over the inebriated diners. ‘Some set a bawdy tone, and as the wine flowed and inhibitions fled, customers would join in to perform the rudest song in their repertoire’ (Major, 2012: 24). The establishment that represents the first purpose-built music hall was the Canterbury Hall in Lambeth, established by Charles Morton, the publican of the Canterbury Tavern, in 1852. He had taken over the venue as manager in 1849 and by 1851 had applied for a music licence, thereby bringing an end to the free and easy amateur sessions that were staged in a room of the original pub. The new, far more elaborate, building marked a definite break with past entertainment traditions as did ‘Ladies’ Thursdays’, which marked a change from the all-male audiences of the supper clubs.

James Ewing Ritchie described the Canterbury in his 1858 book The Night Side of London, writing approvingly of how ‘the majority present are respectable mechanics or small tradesmen with their wives and daughters and sweethearts’. Furthermore, ‘the presence of the ladies has also a beneficial effect; I see no indication of intoxication, and certainly, none of the songs are obscene’ (1858: 70). His experience of the audiences at the older Cyder Cellars club was markedly different. In the 1840s and ’50s it was famed for the standards of its cuisine and the entertainers it attracted (Major, 2012: 29), but during Ritchie’s visit, he found that ‘even the men about town do not go there much’ (1858: 110).1

By the end of the 1870s, there were over 300 halls in London, while outside of the capital many taverns were adapted into new venues. On stage the entertainments might take the form of mocking:

The police, the rent collector, the bailiffs, mothers-in-law, the drunken husband and the shrewish wife, the spendthrift who had gambled away his pay before he got home Friday night – such were the dragons slain by these seedy St Georges. (Leslie, 1978: 48)

The comic songs would typically contain ‘patter’ that formed the main part of the number (Baker, 2014: 187) and Roger Wilmut suggest that one major influence on the early form of the double act during the late nineteenth century was ‘the American “Nigger Minstrel” type of show’ (1985: 53). Dan Emmett’s the Virginia Minstrels were the first of such shows to be seen in the UK, arriving in Liverpool in 1843. ‘The Artistes were Frank Brower as bones; Billy Whitlock, banjoist; Dan Emmett, fiddle and Dick Pelham, tambourine … the tour was a failure. From this crude beginning sprung all the bands of later days’ (Keynote, The Star, 10 November 1885: 10). In that same year Edwin Pearce Christy established the Christy Minstrels with its formula of a line of musicians in ‘blackface’ make-up presided over by ‘Mr Interlocutor’, the authority figure who engaged in cross-talk banter with the two ‘end men’, ‘Mr Bones’ (percussion) and ‘Mr Tambo’ (tambourine).

1857 saw Raynor & Pierce’s Christy Minstrels, a variant of the original troupe, making their London debut at the St James’s Theatre. The critic of The Morning Chronicle considered their burlesque dancing as ‘scarcely suited to the latitude of St James’ although he admitted that ‘singing is of a high class, and all the ballads, pathetic and comic, are well rendered’ (29 July 1857: 5). J.W. Raynor returned to the USA in 1860 and the act divided into various troupes (Major, 2012: 179), which remained popular until the end of the Victorian era. One double act in ‘blackface’2 was the Brothers Courtney, with Jack as the comedian and his sibling Will as the straight man; the historian J.S. Bratton contends that it was from the minstrel shows that the music hall, and subsequently Variety, cross-talk act emerged (1981: 138). The pioneering duo was the Dublin-born Joe O’Gorman who formed an act with Joe Tennyson in 1881 (Kilgarriff, 1998: 253) The pair were smartly attired – their bill-matter was ‘The Two Irish Gentlemen’ or ‘The Patter Propagators’ – and in place of the ‘Mr Interlocutor’ routines of the Minstrel Shows, O’Gorman and Tennyson stood centre stage, Joe as the comic, Dave as his foil.

The act broke up with the retirement of Tennyson in 1902. In 1955 the music hall enthusiast W.H. Potter wrote to O’Gorman’s sons Joe and Dave:

I was a boy at the time, and my father took me to see them at the Empire. And what an act. I have never forgotten them. ‘The Two Irish Gentlemen.’ Box Hats, Frock Coats, Spats, sticks, light boots with twinkling feet inside them. They had everything. I saw them whenever they came to Bristol. Their repartee was very humorous and your father Joe, led Tennyson in a dance. He teased and cajoled him. Joe found a small hole in the stage and after a lot of business got Tennyson to stand over it, when a stream of water shot up into his face. They must have been amongst the first with what became known as Simultaneous Dancing and could give points to many such acts today.

By the 1890s a bill might also include The Two Mikes (‘The Inimitable Irish Comedy Purveyors’), Michael Ford and Michael McCarthy, who formed a comedy team in the 1870s. Their antics included a trapeze performance, pretending to bury axes in each other’s heads and a self-penned playlet ‘The Murder of Murphy The Piper’ (London and Provincial Entr’acte, 8 November 1884: 12) and they enjoyed great popularity in the UK and overseas. Fred and Joe, the Brothers Griffith, had a weightlifting routine which involved ‘Sansom’ (dressed as a ‘swell’) emerging from the audience to accept the £500 challenge of his on-stage sibling – ‘the burlesque … is bound to be one of the great attractions of the day’ (Music Hall & Theatre Review, 30 November 1889: 7). Sweeney and Ryland were an American duo who first came to the UK in 1885. Sweeney was the straight man, while the tall, thin Ryland was the comedian, and by the 1890s they were lauded as ‘genuine comedians with the wildest and funniest dialogue, they stand unrivalled. The appearance of vacuous imbecility assumed by the imperturbable Ryland is alone sufficient to convulse a steam-roller apart from his humorous whimsicalities of conversation with clarion-voiced Sweeney’ (Music Hall & Theatre Review, 18 July 1891: 8–10).

In the Edwardian era, one of the most popular double acts was Sam T. Poluski and his brother Will, who played theatres of the Continent, the USA, Australia and South Africa. Sam was the authority figure, referring to his irritating brother as ‘boy’, and their stock in trade was the ‘interrupted act’ and the straight man being trapped into agreement with the comic (Wilmut, 1985: 54–5). One of their routines was a cricketing sketch entitled ‘Flannelled Fools’, which was ‘pronounced by the press and public an instant success’ (London and Provincial Entr’acte, 22 November 1902: 13).

Such duos performed in bills that were markedly different from the pioneer halls of the mid-nineteenth century. Benny Green believed that after the end of the First World War ‘slowly, inch by inch, theatre by theatre, the music hall was fading into the past’ (1986: 276), but its decline had been set in place many years previously. The penny gaff visited by James Ritchie, where the young audience seemed to resolve to ‘as soon as they had the chance, to drink their quarter of gin and to whop their wives’ (1859: 111–16), was already far removed from the Canterbury Hall. In 1885 the London Pavilion became the first such venue with tip-up seats (Barfe, 2013), marking the beginning of the end to the days when a trip to ‘the hall’ was a social occasion, to eat, drink and talk with one’s friends as much as watch the acts.

By the 1890s the chairman had largely vanished from the proceedings; replacing the music hall bill, which might last for over three hours was the ‘twice nightly’ system of fixed Variety bills. The double act was now a part of a more formalised entertainment, often appearing in venues that were intended to create a sense of awe among the audience. The architect Frank Matcham had created an elaborate new Elephant and Castle Theatre on the site of a venue that burned down in 1878, and it was to be the first of over 200 such buildings (Major, 2012: 74). His works ‘combined function and ornate opulence’ although Matcham ‘was considered by gentlemen architects to be not quite comme il faut, too “commercial” to be entirely respectable’ (Aldous, History Today 2002: Vol. 2. Issue 5. May.)

The issue of architectural ‘respectability’ was ironic given that there were those who decried the chains of plush halls, stating that they could not hope to compete with the art and community spirit of earlier days. Walter Besant observed in 1884 how it was ‘a thousand pities that among the “topical” songs, the break-downs and the comic songs, room has never been found for part-songs or for music of a quiet and somewhat better kind’ (2004: 31),3 but by 1912 there was the first Royal Command Performance, possibly the ultimate seal of Establishment approval to the popular entertainment. A 1913 article in The Era decried pleas for ‘the ancient music hall, with its torpor of monotony, its dingy surroundings, its chairman, and even its music. Such eccentric writers seem to ignore the existence of conditions in the old days that paralysed the better impulses of the artiste and degraded his art’ (16 July: 13). Furthermore, one of the axioms of Stoll’s code of management was that ‘the music hall should rise on stepping stones of dead traditions to higher things’.

After the end of the First World War, Variety suffered from the popularity of intimate revue, with its acts appearing within the context of a show with a finale – ‘the word “revue” almost ousted “variety” in the lexicon of the halls’ (Bevan, 1952: 45). Talking pictures and wireless made further inroads into the genre’s traditional audience base in the 1930s. It was also during this decade that Variety saw a plethora of double acts. They were an established aspect of the bill of a show, either opening or taking the second spot (Midwinter, 1979: 167). A speciality act, often one with a dance routine, would open the show, followed by the ‘second spot’ comic who would typically perform a twelve-minute routine before a backcloth covered with advertisements. Tommy Trinder remembered that in the 1930s it might ‘depict a street scene. There would be an airship with McDougall’s self-raising flour painted on the side; a bus siding extolling the virtues of Ted’s Night Powder; and an old man with a sandwich board urging you to eat at Barney’s’ (quoted in Pilton, 1976: 38). Both parties within the double act would have to move around the stage; if they occupied a fixed spot that happened to be in front of a particular advertisement, the business concerned would refuse to pay for the space. The first half of the bill would culminate with the second-billed attraction. After the interval the bill would work towards the headliner, who was frequently a comic act.

One reason for the popularity of the cross-talk comedians may have been that the audiences were becoming more acclimatised to rapid speech patterns via exposure to US cultural influences in Variety. Bud Flanagan reflected that in the 1910s:

American acts had been coming over to play the Halls for some time now, and they fascinated me with their new style and approach to the public and especially by their way of talking. They were always rehearsing, either polishing up old bits or trying out new bits of business. They brought a novel style of singing to a new type of song … British artists soon cottoned on and before time there was a spate of imitators of American-style acts. (1961: 24–5)

And so, a Variety bill of the 1920s or ’30s might feature Will Collinson and Alfie Dean, ‘The Argumentative Comedians’, where the irate straight man was nearly a foot and half taller than the impish comic; or Dave and Joe O’Gorman – ‘a pair of genuine fun makers’ (The Stage, 15 April 1937: 3). One act of this era who abides in the folk memory is Murray and Mooney (Harry Church and Harry Goodchild) for routines that they did not originate but certainly became associated with – Murray would be interrupted by Mooney with ‘I say, I say, I say!’ to receive the humourless response, ‘I do not wish to know that – kindly leave the stage!’

The duo had met in 1909 and, after disbanding the act during the First World War, resumed in 1920. Wilmut is palpably un-keen on their legacy – ‘awful jokes delivered at high speed’ (1985: 56) – while Midwinter saw Murray and Mooney as ‘the classic double act’ who were ‘the guardians of a tight and restricted format’ (1979: 167).4 The inherent problem with any act that applies a strict formula is the risk of ossification – in later life, Jimmy Jewel of Jewel and Warriss reflected that ‘we were a bit like dinosaurs. We couldn’t adapt or alter our image as Morecambe and Wise did’ (1982: 148). But the critic who caught their routines of Murray and Mooney at the Chelsea Palace in 1935 reported that they ‘caused so much mirth as to interfere with their business’ (The Stage, 31 October: 3). Their names are now virtually forgotten but even in the twenty-first century Howard Moon would forever wish to inform Vince Noir to ‘kindly leave the stage’ – but would never dare to do so.

Bud and Ches

Bud in raccoon coat and old straw hat, his high lamenting cantor’s wail soaring to the back of the gallery, and Ches, dapper and deadpan, emphasising the words in a mellow croak. (Dixon, The Guardian, 30 December 1972: 10).

The act who will forever be associated with interwar Variety is Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen. Bud was born Chaim Reuben Weintrop, his parents having emigrated to London from Poland. They intended to relocate to the USA, but in Hamburg, a crooked shipping agent had taken virtually all their savings for a £2 10s ticket to New York only to provide a 7s 6d passage to England (Flanagan, 1961: 18–19). Before teaming with Allen, Flanagan had temporarily relocated to the States to try his luck on the Vaudeville circuit, had worked as a taxi driver and, as was evident from beneath the genial tones of his memoirs, possessed a sense of unceasing drive and self-belief. He derived his stage name from an anti-Semitic Irish sergeant major whom Weintrop had encountered during the First World War: ‘I shall use your name on stage, you horrible bastard’ (1961: 72).

Flanagan had first met Chesney Allen, then an officer in the Royal West Kent Regiment, in a café during the war but the two would not form a double act until 1926. The straight man hailed from Brighton, where his father was a master builder, and before entering show business he was articled to a solicitor. But in 1910 Allen gave up a future of provincial middle-class sobriety – mowing the lawn at the weekends, attending the Rotary Club during the week – to become an actor. When he first worked with Flanagan in Here’s To You, a revue headed by Florrie Forde, Allen was also manager to the Australian singer.

Flanagan and Allen were professionally associated with Forde until early 1931, and it was an appearance at the Argyle in Birkenhead, supporting D.J. Clarke, that consolidated their fame. Nine months later, the producers Val Parnell and George Black established ‘Crazy Week’ at the London Palladium in November 1931, with a bill consisting of Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold, and Billy Caryll and Hilda Mundy. ‘These periodical little outbursts of irresponsibility cannot fail to give a fillip to variety in general,’ said The Stage (24 December 1931: 3). Flanagan and Allen were included in the bill of ‘Crazy Month’ in 1932 – the term ‘Crazy Gang’ would not be employed until 1937 – and they would come to be regarded as first among equals within the group.

A staple of Bud and Ches’ routines was the latter correcting the former’s malapropisms; the cross-talk delivered with speed and clarity. John Fisher makes the argument that such humour was relevant when so many members of London’s immigrant community would have struggled with the new language (2013: 64). Across the Atlantic, Lou Costello similarly battled with the nuances and mysteries of the English language, but his innocents had the misfortune to be guided by the ever-unsupportive Bud.

The straight man of Abbott and Costello was one of the finest in Vaudeville and burlesque, but whether the routine was ‘Who’s On First’ or ‘Loafing’, his characters were ever-poised to mock, deride and exploit the comic. His approach was sharp and aggressive – the archetypal ‘huckster’ – while the softly spoken Ches is tolerant and even complicit of his eccentric partner’s foibles. At the end of their routines, Flanagan would mock his partner – ‘I would be thanking the audience, and Bud would be pulling my hair and saying, “Just a wig you know”’ (quoted in Dixon, 1972: 10), but they were ultimately friends in a troubled world. It was in those moments when they concluded their routines with ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Underneath the Arches’ that their stage personae coalesced. Bud had never known better days but was hopeful that they might still be attainable; Ches had the manners of a white-collar professional now down on his luck but never deprived of his dignity.

Gert and Daisy

Fisher contends that ‘the variety stage knew few women with the attack and ruthlessness essential to the comedian to break down the inhibitions into uncontrollable laughter’ (2013: 245). However, Midwinter notes that female double acts led much of music hall and Variety – in the last years of the nineteenth century, there were the Sisters Levey, the Sisters Cuthbert, and the Richmond Sisters (1979: 166–67). By the 1920s there were Ethel Revenell and Gracie West, the former standing about 6ft 2ins and the latter at barely 4ft 6ins. Their careers began in the concert party circuit before they devised routines centred on ‘The Long and The Short of It – Two Cockney Comedy Kids’. In Scotland, one of the most famous double acts was the Houston Sisters: ‘In the days of varieties’ last flowering, there were several famous sister acts, among them the Dolly Sisters, the Trix Sisters and the Duncan Sisters but none endeared themselves to the public throughout the country as much as the Houston Sisters’ (Marriott, The Stage, 4 August 1966: 8).

Renee Houston was the comedienne of the pair, her sibling Billie the straight woman who always dressed as a boy; their double act lasted from 1920 to 1936, when illness forced Billie’s retirement (Hudd with Hindin, 1998: 85). Renee’s solo career as a great character actress continued until the mid-1970s, even creating a believable character of one Agatha Spanner in the appalling Carry On At Your Convenience (Gerald Thomas, 1971). Their on-stage characters were so convincing that they were sent toys by their fans and the world that they evoked was one that was self-contained and convincing to the audience:

The power of personal presences seems especially high after a further meeting with the Houston Sisters, whose charm and humour remain so thoroughly unexplained. Perhaps there is no reason why any frigid theory of comedy should be out to their precious and intimate quarrellings, the fragmentary burlesque of their elders, and the extramural asides which appear to take us so deeply into the home life of Billie and Renee. (The Guardian, 5 November 1929: 14).

Another female double act who bridged the gap between Variety and character acting were Elsie and Doris Waters. Their creations Gert and Daisy will forever be associated with Britons of a certain age with Ministry of Information (MOI) shorts about the best ways to prepare Wotton pie. In fact, their career began in the aftermath of the First World War, and if you paid a visit to Bournemouth during the summer of 1976, you had the opportunity to see Freddie Starr at the Winter Gardens … or the Waters sisters at the Pavilion. At first sight, Gert and Daisy did not seem to belong in the same timeframe as Elton John and Kiki Dee singing ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’; they are an act that is very difficult to envisage in colour, let alone in the same time frame as the Vauxhall Cavalier and The Sweeney. But by that time, ‘Gert and Daisy’ had entered popular consciousness to the extent that they were also the nicknames for Reggie and Ronnie Kray, although it was probably wiser not to inform the brothers of this fact.

Elsie and Doris had both studied at the Guildhall School of Music and formed a polished cabaret routine comprising musical numbers interlinked with patter. The act attracted critics’ note, and the Waters became full-time entertainers in the following year. Their intimate approach seemed better suited to cabaret and radio; Elsie later reflected that ‘we were heard by Parlophone when we were broadcasting from Birmingham. The company thought our voices were suitable for recordings and so we made six records, which seemed to be doing all right’ (quoted in Dixon, The Guardian, 13 September 1972: 9). After disc number five, the duo believed they had exhausted their musical material and so they devised a character sketch. The Waters had attended a fashionable wedding when they overheard the proceedings being discussed by two Cockney girls, who inspired the first Gert and Daisy routine. The subsequent disc was a vast success, and its impact surprised the duo, who were unaware that it had received considerable airplay on the radio. They were performing their standard act at a restaurant in Holborn when a guest requested ‘The Wedding Sketch’, prompting costumes improvised from a hat turned back to front and a silk handkerchief (Lelliott, The Age, 30 August 1952: 7).

Gert (Elsie) and Daisy (Doris) would come to define the careers of the Waters for the next forty-five years. Their off-stage lives were as far removed from Stratford and Leyton as William Hay, the Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, was from his fraudulent schoolmaster. The sisters favoured Norman Hartnell gowns and resided in a villa in Sussex, but there was no hint of caricature with their creations. The travails with Daisy’s idle husband Bert and Elsie’s equally unseen fiancé and their termagant neighbour Old Mother Butler were delivered in laconic East End tones that are still far removed from the current Dick-Van-Dyke-meets-Sid-James drama-school patois for soap-opera villainy. Certain EastEnders characters would have been quite at home as music hall grotesques, but the Waters reflected that ‘cockneys don’t shout unless they’re selling something – they just say what they think in a nice quiet way’ (quoted in Wilmut, 1985: 148). The Waters sisters did employ scriptwriters over the course of their career, but they were more than capable of devising their own material, unlike many male comics of this period. Neither of them was the straight woman per se, but Elsie, who was the principal writer, often allotted the lion’s share of the material to Doris, who was the more ebullient performer of the two. They also possessed a remarkable facility for improvisation (Banks and Swift, 1988: 58).

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Gert and Daisy were frequent guests on radio concert parties and Variety bills. In 1956 their radio comedy Floggits began, written by Terry Nation, John Junkin and Dave Freeman with a supporting cast that included Ron Moody, Ronnie Barker and Anthony Newley. Doris died in 1978, Elsie in 1990 and they continued to perform live into the late 1970s. Their act never transferred to television, although in later life they believed ‘if the BBC had any sense we could have been the original Coronation Street-style show’ (Dixon 1972: 10). The heirs to Gert and Daisy are both Ena Sharples and her cronies in the snug of the Rovers Return, fulminating about the evils of 1960s life over port and lemon and The Liver Birds (BBC, 1969–79), especially with its finest duo of Nerys Hughes as Sandra and Polly James as Beryl in the 1971 to 1976 period.

The Comedy Playhouse pilot for Carla Lane’s creation was not universally well received. Stanley Reynolds became positively splenetic: ‘I wish someone would take it and limp to a mercy killing’ and ‘rooted in the endearing faith that any regional accent will somehow resuscitate a limp joke’ were merely two of his observations (The Guardian, 15 April 1969: 8). But at its best, The Liver Birds was more about the characters than any self-consciously ‘Scouse Humour’ with Carla Lane creating a partnership in which neither the genteel Sandra or the more outgoing Beryl was the straight woman. Nor would they have endured the treatment meted out to Olive in On The Buses and perhaps the main limitation was the characters’ ages. The Liver Birds were meant to be in their 20s, and as the series progressed, it became harder for the actresses to play such characters. Gert and Daisy were forever aged about 45 and always completely believable. Their feature films, their wireless appearances and their MOI shorts reflect a lost world the sisters created the Waters are both of and transcend their era.

Variety after the Second World War

With almost any form of entertainment, the signs of its time passing are not always apparent. Sometimes the age of a film is demonstrated in those seemingly insignificant details; the moment in Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) where a police car extends a trafficator arm to make a left turn or the steam locomotive in A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964). By the end of the Second World War, Variety had been fighting the picture houses and wireless for the loyalties of the audiences for more than two decades. In 1945 Flanagan and Allen were still presiding over the bill at the Victoria Palace but it was to be one of the straight man’s last outings as a full-time entertainer. Years of ill health had caught up with Chesney Allen, and at the age of 51, he was forced to retire from the stage on medical advice (Flanagan, 1961: 181).

Many of the traditional Variety acts were now well into their middle age at the very least, and although television was not yet a factor – the BBC service would not resume until 1946 – the medium would overtake radio in popularity by 1958. The Variety Artists’ Federation, which had been formed in 1906, still had over 6,000 paid-up members in 1951, but fourteen years later this number dwindled to a little over 1,100 (The Guardian, 21 November 1966: 3) and the organisation would merge with Equity in 1966. At the end of the 1950s rants such as Jimmy Wheeler’s claims that ‘Variety is utterly, irreplaceably dead’ (quoted in Carthew, The Daily Herald, 14 March 1959: 2) were commonplace in the media and by 1960, the capital had just four Variety halls that were still functioning (Double, 2012: 70). The Crazy Gang made their farewell performance from the Victoria Palace on 19 May 1962 and by this time even Bud Flanagan was aware of how his stage attire now appeared to a younger audience – ‘tastes have changed so much in popular entertainment’ – that he wore a lounge suit rather than his traditional costume (TV Times, 20–26 May 1962: 3).

One of the double acts to emerge via the twilight of the Variety circuit after the Second World War was Kenneth Earle and Malcolm Vaughan, ‘a highly experienced witty inventive comic’ and ‘an excellent straight man and superb tenor’ (Hudd with Hindin, 1998: 50). They teamed in 1954, and their eighteen-year career demonstrates how an act could adapt to a changed landscape: solo records from Vaughan, who was probably one of the best British crooners of his era; guest appearances on television; six seasons at the Jersey Watersplash holiday resort. As a further indication of the changing times at the tail end of Variety, in 1957 Earle and Vaughan were the support acts on Bill Haley’s first British tour, together with the bandleader Vic Lewis and the pipe player Desmond Lane.5 The surviving venues in which young double acts such as Earle and Vaughan performed were increasingly entering Archie Rice territory, and in 1962 Tony Hancock wrote in his sadly unpublished memoirs how:

It is sad to think that most of the theatres where I used to die have since died themselves. The obvious thing to blame is television but I think the trouble with variety goes deeper than that. There is a strain of suicide in the murder. Whenever I go back to the halls, I am appalled by the defeatist spirit surrounding the managements, the deadly take-it-or-leave-it approach to artists and audience alike. (Quoted in Fisher 2008: 234)

The only consolation – and it was an exceedingly cold one – was that during this same period many cinemas were also closing. In the early 1960s, the 1920s picture house and the late Victorian music hall were both easy prey for the property speculator arriving in his Jaguar Mk X to oversee the destruction of the capital’s landscape. When the Metropolitan in the Edgware Road finally closed its doors in 1963 the writer Norman Shrapnel reflected on how remote it seemed from the post-war concrete office blocks and how the stars who had returned for this last night were ‘light years distant!’ from Lenny Bruce:

We were back in the world of George Robey, George Formby, Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd and Little Tich. Most of the audience looked like grandparents, yet there were a surprising number of young people, too, and they seemed fascinated. (Shrapnel, The Guardian, 13 April 1963: 4)

The act who did provide a bridge between the gas-lit music hall and the charcoal suited business executive were Eric and Ernie, of whom we will hear more in the final chapter. For the ambitious performer, one alternative to the Variety theatres was pantomime, playing the Brokers’ Men to the latest pop sensation, a development of the late 1950s that was regarded as either great or deplorable by those in the profession (Frow, 1985: 182). There was the holiday-camp circuit and the option of ‘clubland’, which provided ‘a good source of income for refugees from the collapsed theatre circuits’ (Double, 2012: 207). In 1862 the Club and Institute Union (CIU) was established by Rev. Henry Solly and an initial ban on alcohol was lifted in the 1870s, a move that proved very profitable for many clubs, as the income from beer would comfortably exceed their rent. By the 1950s Richard Hoggart noted:

There seems to be a great shadow-world of semi-professional entertainers, men and women who make a comfortable addition to their normal wages by regularly performing at club concerts, moving from club to club in the city as they become known, and if they are particularly good, building up a circuit in the industrial towns for thirty miles. (1957: 178–79)

One such semi-professional was Ken Dodd, then a merchant who in the evenings might find himself on the same bill as a police Superintendent who was also a singer. Clubs would also run coach trips to the seaside or even charter special trains, while the opening of Rotherham’s Greasbrough Variety Club in 1961 marked a stage toward more professionalism in the presentation and artist booking. The club had seating capacity for 600, and its bills included Bob Monkhouse and even Johnnie Ray; by 1965 the committee was making a bid to hire Sammy Davis Jr. It was all far removed ‘from the days when the “Sunday night entertainment” was an amateur comedian who performed for a pound or two with beer’ (The Guardian, 15 January 1965: 6). Two years later Jimmy Corrigan opened the Batley Variety Club, which cost £100,000, had the capacity for 1,500 guests and whose early attractions included Val Doonican, The Bachelors and Jayne Mansfield (The Stage, 12 January 1967: 6).

Some acts loathed working on the club circuit, Jimmy Jewel referring to them as ‘terrible bloody places where there was no space for production sketches’ and the material ‘dreadful stuff … short, sharp gags with a laugh in every line. We split the act up and never stayed too long’ (1982: 144–45). October 1967 saw the introduction of the breathalyser, a development which was viewed with some alarm by the licensed trade.6 Louis Barfe considers that the end to the golden years of clubland began in 1968 when the Gaming Act dictated that there had to be a separation between gambling and entertainment (2013). It was the licence of the former that often subsidised the latter. By 1978 the Batley Variety Club had been transformed into a disco with the less than enticing name of ‘Crumpet’ while Eric Midwinter was of the opinion that:

The club circuit seems to prefer the harder hitting, less ceremonial quick-fire stand-up comedian, and there are now no more than three or four double acts which the ordinary citizen could name, as opposed to a dozen or twenty back in the ’forties. (1979: 70)

It is a compelling argument, although one could make the equal claim that the double act had evolved into a television sitcom format – q.v. – and that of the ‘three or four’ names, Cannon and Ball, Little and Large, were continuing the formula of the Variety double act via the working men’s club. They came to national prominence; at their summit the star attraction might be Cliff Richard, where chicken in a basket cost £1.05 and where the backing musicians ‘often had to enter the stage from kitchens slippery with cooking oil’ (Turner, 2008: 264).

Worse still were those venues with club secretaries who made Colin Crompton in The Wheeltappers’ and Shunters’ Social Club7 look like James Mason and the depressing spectacle of Diana Dors being paid in cash to perform patter numbers before beer-sodden audiences who requested that she remove her clothes.8 At least many of the supporting acts could have hailed from the early days of music hall and Neil Anderson’s The Dirty Stop Out’s Guide to Working Men’s Clubs pays tribute to Shag Connor’s Carrot Crunchers (‘Country Comedy Musical Act’)9 and Crick’s Canine Wonders (‘Featuring a boxing match with dogs’).10 Another, and frankly unmissable-sounding, attraction might be Madame Charmaine (‘The world’s greatest clairvoyant hen’).11

Syd Little (Cyril Mead) and Eddie Large (Edward McGinnis) met when Syd, clad in his best Teddy Boy regalia, was playing the guitar in a club – ‘I was a one-man karaoke machine!’ – only to encounter heckles from Mr McGinnis. The musician eventually invited this loud party on to the stage, and the two formed an act. They turned professional in 1962: ‘One of our earliest routines was Bobby Vee’s “Rubber Ball”; I’d play, and Eddie would bounce around the stage to the refrain “bouncy bouncy”.’ They adopted the name ‘Little and Large’, and after a televisual diversion on to Crackerjack (‘that didn’t really suit us; we did not want to be typed as “children’s entertainers”’) their mainstream career began in 1977 with The Little and Large Show on Thames Television.

The show transferred to the BBC in 1978 and ran for another thirteen years. It was at its strongest, not during the sketches, but with the act’s routines in which the large, ebullient comic plagues Syd as he attempts to complete a song. Little states in a 1978 interview that ‘we are nothing like Morecambe and Wise … We are great admirers of theirs, but our act is totally different’ (quoted in McGarry, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 12 October: 16). Ernie was a self-assured character, forever writing his plays, grovelling at the guest star or issuing orders to Eric, but with Little and Large the fact that the straight man did not speak for the first ten minutes was quite deliberate; the joke was as much Little’s increasingly disgruntled expression as Eddie’s succession of impersonations. Each serves as the best audience for the other – the diligent musician and the show-off – and footage from The Wheeltappers shows how effective this on-stage relationship could be as Syd valiantly tries to complete at least one verse of ‘Till There Was You’.

Little and Large’s near contemporaries were Tommy Cannon (Thomas Derbyshire) and Bobby Ball (Robert Harper), who began as a musical duo (‘The Harper Brothers’) before forging a comic double act. Their dynamic was centred on the unbreakable bond between two old friends, even if the straight man’s image is now of flashy self-confidence and, again, The Wheeltappers provides an illustration of how effective the formula was. Bernard Manning announces Cannon as a crooner, and he arrives on stage with a convincing version of ‘Summertime’, and when Ball, in the guise of his one-time workbench mate, begins calling out his name, some audience members take him for a real heckler. London Weekend Television gave them their first TV vehicle in 1979. They are still touring to this day, proof that a double act cannot be manufactured – in Cannon’s words, ‘we weren’t two separate acts who met up in a club one night and were thrown together’ (quoted in The Stage, 30 August 1979: 16).

A second route to sustaining a career was in the seaside resorts. In 1934 J.B. Priestley described Blackpool as ‘this huge mad place, with its miles and miles of promenades, its three piers, its gigantic dance-halls, its variety shows’, and how its visitors were conveyed by ‘seventy special trains a day’. Compared with the wonders of the Lancashire resort, Brighton, Margate and Yarmouth were ‘merely playing at being popular seaside resorts’ (1968: 265–66).

The major seaside towns were also subject to a post-war decline; albeit at a slower rate, with a sixteen- to eighteen-week booking representing a professional lifeline for many a performer. Louis Barfe points out that as recently as the 1980s, ‘away from the television and the clubs, the best performers were guaranteed bookings in the highly successful summer shows that each major seaside town offered’ (2013). By the 1960s visitors were increasingly likely to arrive by car instead of by train or coach, and in 1965 the Butlin empire reported its first loss (Ferry, 2009: 62), as the happy campers began to tire of the quasi-National Service atmosphere.

The impact of television inevitably began to shape the entertainments, and in the 1970s a holidaymaker would be able to see a stage version of George and Mildred or Nearest and Dearest. The medium also affected the audience in their reaction to live entertainment. Double points out that the concept of ‘The Fourth Wall’ was largely alien to Variety audiences, even with sketch comedy (2012: 130), but entertainers were now encountering patrons who had little or no memory of regular outings to Variety halls, and so they would view the acts as via the small screen. Mike Winters remarked in 1978 how people would attend summer shows and frequently ‘just stare. It’s very unsettling, and you have to chip the wall down’ (quoted in Doncaster, Daily Mirror, 26 July 1978: 15).

By the 1960s the entertainments and publicity officers of major resorts were often engaged in booking conferences (Walton, 2000: 186) when they were not arranging PR for an extremely eclectic entertainment bill. Stanley Reynolds observed of Blackpool in 1963 that ‘most of the shows derive from their television counterparts of the past year; the main difference being that they are live, go on longer, and we have to pay to get in … oddly enough, the BBC’s TWTWTW has not had the impact we might have expected’.12 The emphasis with the pier-end shows was not on modern jazz, square-bottomed ties and quips about Reginald Maudling but a show where ‘there is always some man who puts on lingerie’ (The Guardian, 27 July 1963: 5).13 It was further along the coast in Morecambe that the unimpressed Mr Reynolds found ‘the missing dimension necessary for real music hall’ with a performance in the Winter Gardens of Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss.

At first, it seems rather dismissive to consider Jewel and Warriss in the twilight of their career as a double act, one that John Fisher considered to be ‘raucous yet brilliant’ (2013: 462). They were cousins who formed an act in 1934 and enjoyed their major period of success in the late 1940s with their radio show Up the Pole (1947–52). The partnership broke up in 1966, Jewel noting that they were never comfortable on television where they lacked the ease of Morecambe and Wise (Jewel, 1982: 148). The surviving recordings of Jewel and Warriss reveal an act with the brisk manner of two travelling salesman planning their day’s patter at a seaside boarding house – possibly one that is presided over by Meg with her limited array of breakfasts. Michael Billington argues that in The Birthday Party, ‘the lonely lodger, the ravenous landlady, the quiescent husband; these figures, eventually to become Stanley, Meg and Petey sound like figures in a Donald McGill seaside postcard … if the play had been tried out at seaside rep in Bournemouth or Torquay, I bet audiences would have loved it’ (2009: 131). He also proposes that one template for Goldberg and McCann might well have been Jewel and Warriss and they might have indeed rubbed shoulders with a young actor named David Baron:14 ‘Ben Warriss, sleek and sharp-suited, with patent-leather hair, was always the bullying straight man, Jimmy Jewel, nervously apprehensive was the comic fall guy. Their act was a classic study in domination and submission’ (2009: 132).

A third route was, of course, television itself; although for a while some older entertainers decried ‘the idiot’s lantern’, it had thoroughly absorbed many of Variety’s tropes. This did not just apply to Sunday Night At The London Palladium but also to a seemingly endless parade of ‘Seaside Specials’ and the format of television comedies which, as Dick Fiddy remarks, ‘up until the early 1960s often seemed to end with an elongated sketch’.15 If the best British situation comedies focused on the life behind the bright lights, these were the shows that brought the best of live entertainment to your front parlour (Briggs, 1995: 210). Some comics followed Tony Hancock and made a transition into situation comedy: Double Cross (BBC, 1956) starred Jewel and Warriss as two MI5 officers whose doppelgangers were a Variety act; Francie (Jack Milroy) and Josie (Rikki Fulton), Glasgow’s most ambitious Teddy Boys, had commenced as a sketch in the 1958 review Five Past Eight.

Milroy was a comedian who enjoyed vast popularity in pantomime and who staged shows at Aberdeen’s Tivoli Theatre. Fulton was a character actor of immense versatility, and on the BBC’s Show Band Show he served as the mid-Atlantic toned compere in addition to taking part in self-penned sketches. The act transferred to television with The Adventures of Francie and Josie (Scottish Television 1962–65) and the series was broadcast across the north of England. Josie (a Ted of intellectual pretensions), was forever ordering Francie – who had none – to ‘dry up’, using words that sounded impressive.

Others adopted the roles of quiz show hosts, smiling with a Colgate grin at the human traffic as they failed to win 10s–worth of nylon stockings (1950s) or an Austin Mini Metro City (1980s). This was not a position that encouraged the formation of a double act but lurking in the memory is a duo of sorts that could be seen in the pages of the TV Times and your local theatre: Hughie Greene and Monica Rose. The former was London born with a Canadian passport and accent, and was the genial compere of ITV’s Double Your Money (Associated-Rediffusion, 1955–68); the latter was a contestant on the show in 1964 who became a hostess for the next three years.

There was also an influx of acts that had primarily attained their fame via the small screen and were now embraced by a medium that would previously have liked to see them deported to the Antarctic regions. Benny Hill made a return to the halls in the wake of his first shows for BBC Television, and there was also the opportunity to see a provincial bill containing a live version of What’s My Line (BBC, 1951–63). The cult of personality had already begun, with audiences paying their 3s 9d to learn if Gilbert Harding really was as irate as he appeared on the screen. In 1966, by which time Variety had already entered the history books, you might have felt the inexplicable urge to book tickets to see Hughie Green (as ‘Baron Batman’) and Monica Rose in the pantomime Babes in The Wood.

Fame on the small screen did not always translate into live fame. Mike and Bernie Winters arguably made their breakthrough on television as the resident comic relief on The Six-Five Special