A good news story at last. West Northamptonshire Council has installed a blue plaque outside Stanley Unwin's old bungalow on Long Buckby's High Street, reports BBC News.
Unwin lived there for decades, having worked at at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry during the war along with another hero of the English nonsense tradition. After the war he joined the BBC as a sound recordist, until illness among the cast of a show led him to do his doing his party piece in front of the microphone.
His act involved speaking nonsense in a way that made it sound perfect sense if you weren't listening too closely – or overtroiling your eardroves. You can see him in action in the video above. I did a couple of turns in his style in the last iterations of the Liberal Revue at Lib Dem annual conferences.
Unwin's heyday was the Fifties and Sixties when he appeared on radio, television and in films. After that he was regularly rediscovered by new generations of radio producers and creative directors, and I remember seeing him on Inside Victor Lewis-Smith when he was past eighty.
I've already made one pilgrimage to Long Buckby to photograph the headstone for Unwin and his wife in the village churchyard. I'll have to go back soon to see his blue plaque.
I think it depends on making the intonation fully convincing as speech even if the words aren't.
ReplyDeleteThe epitaph on his grave reads "Reunitey in the heavenly-bode – Deep Joy!". Respect to the parish priest with a sense of humour and of the appropriate who allowed that one through
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