A 1959 Monitor feature on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop

I've struck gold with this 1959 report on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East from the BBC arts programme Monitor.

The first comment on YouTube reckons you can spot Pat Phoenix. James Booth, Dudley Sutton, Yootha Joyce, Richard Harris and Glyn Edwards among the company.

I've long been interested in Stratford East's links with ITV sitcoms: half the cast of On the Buses (Stephen Lewis, Bob Grant, Michael Robbins) came from the Theatre Workshop. I didn't know before seeing this that, through Pat Phoenix, it was also linked with Coronation Street.

Joan Littlewood's remarkable career proved there is an audience for challenging theatre beyond the affluent West End. If you enjoyed this film, see my post on The Living Theatre in early 1960s Leicester too.

Cole Palmer's great uncle was a member of Sweet Sensation

This just in from our Trivia Desk...

The black British soul group Sweet Sensation topped the singles chart in 1974 with Sad Sweet Dreamer. One of its member, St Clair Palmer, is the great uncle of Chelsea and England's Cole Palmer.

That's certainly our Trivial Fact of the Day. As far as I can make out, St Clair is second from the right in the front row in the video above.

Later. This story was widely reported this week, but the  Daily Mail had it last year and also revealed that St Clair Palmer later became an actor and appeared in one episode each of Coronation Street and Brookside.

"Ooh, Your Eminence!": A short review of Conclave (2024)

If you enjoyed The Death of Stalin or the television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, you will enjoy Conclave - it's another film about power and hierarchy in a very male organisation. 

In this one, the cardinals meet to choose a new Pope, and politicking, corruption and violence ensue.

Conclave threatens to veer into Judge John Deed country when Ralph Fiennes, as Cardinal Lawrence, turns detective, but stops short of that line.

And Fiennes plays the scene where he is overcome with grief on finding the late Pope's glasses well, but Jean Alexander did it better when she found Stan's in Coronation Street.

I'm not proud of it, but I was often reminded of the finest double entendre in all the Carry On canon.

Continued on next monument: A tribute to Timothy West

Or, to be precise, a tribute to Timothy West and Bradley Hardacre.

There were three seasons of the Channel 4 comedy Brass in the early 1980s. It was written by two Coronation Street veterans, John Stevenson and Julian Roach, in the days when that soap contained some of the funniest writing on British television.

Brass was a parody of everything from Charles Dickens' Hard Times, via novels by the likes of A.J. Cronin and Francis Brett Young to the works of Catherine Cookson, which were everywhere at the time it was made.

An old Guardian article recommending the boxed set sums it up well:

Self-made man and owner of the village mine, mill and munitions factory, Bradley is the head of the Hardacre clan, which comprises his three sons, Bentley (deceased), Austin and Morris; as well as two daughters, Charlotte (passionate about doing good works and, says her father, "innocent to the point of simplicity") and Isabel, whose bedpost is more notch than wood. Then there's his wife, Lady Patience, a wheelchair-user ever since her terrible tambourine accident.

On the other side of the colliery tracks is the Fairchild family. George, its nominal head, worships the ground his employer Bradley treads him into, while his magnificently-cleavaged wife Agnes, so poor-but-proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, rails with fury at all life throws at her. 

They have two sons. One is hardworking Jack, who has inherited his mother's socialist leanings, but is periodically diverted from bringing down capitalism by his secret and exhausting life as Isabel's sex-monkey. ("I love him hopelessly! Passionately! Recklessly! Frequently.") 

The other is poetry-writing Matt, who is determined, once he has made the final payments on the family pencil, to go to Cambridge despite his love for Charlotte H ("Thou are more lovely and more interesting/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May but that's quite another thing") and his good job – "a job wi' a stool!" - at the mine works.

The whole cast of Brass was great - I once saw Morris Hardacre playing Oscar Wilde in Terry Eagleton's Saint Oscar at the Leicester Haymarket - but its undoubted leader was Timothy West as Bradley Hardacre.

Let this tribute to his character serve as a tribute to the actor. Continued on next monument.

The Exorcism: The scariest thing I have ever seen on television

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 10th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon.

What’s the most frightening thing you’ve seen on television? I can remember an episode of Sexton Blake, shown during children’s hour on ITV, in which Tinker, the great detective’s resourceful young assistant was measured for his coffin by a sinister undertaker while he was still alive.

A bit of research tells me that the Sexton Blake story involving Mr Tapp the undertaker was screened in two parts when I was seven years old. 

Don’t listen to the Haunted Generation mob and their claims for the Seventies: we Boomers had a harder time of it in the Sixties.

If I’m allowed to mention films I saw on television, then the scene in the Bob Hope picture The Cat and the Canary where a hand reaches through the wall behind a bedhead and searches the bed while the occupant sleeps hit me pretty hard. 

Until then I’d assumed that if my back was to the wall then at least I was safe from attack by bogeyman from that direction.

Finding The Exorcism

But if I have to name just one frightening programme then it has to be a television play that I saw when I was 12. For decades, as I waited impatiently for the internet to be invented, I didn’t know even what it had been called.

But then I bought a collection of television criticism by the influential Welsh academic Raymond Williams. I began reading his review of a play by Don Taylor called The Exorcism, and it became clear that this was what had scared me all those years ago.

The Exorcism was broadcast by the BBC on Bonfire Night 1972, as part of a series of seven plays called Dead of Night. Originally there were meant to be eight, but the now-famous The Stone Tape came in at 90 minutes and so did not fit the series format. Only three of the seven survive today and the good news is that The Exorcism, which was the first in the series, is one of them.

You can buy those three plays on a DVD from the British Film Institute. The website there describes The Exorcism well:

The best known and perhaps the most terrifying of the episodes – four wealthy, middle-class friends (Clive Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper and Sylvia Kay) gather for a Christmas dinner in a country cottage only to find that the past will not rest while they feast.

But as I don’t want to have to worry about spoilers here, and as I’m sure you are busy, I suggest you watch The Exorcism on YouTube now while I add some spoiler space. 

You may want to have a stiff drink by you.

Are you OK? I did warn you.

When I discovered The Exorcism was on YouTube it took me a while to pluck up the courage to watch it. When I did, it wasn’t as frightening as the first time and not because I was no longer 12 years old. It was more that I knew what was coming. I found I had remembered for 40 years the wine that turned to blood, the total blackness outside the windows and the news bulletin at the end about a bizarre Christmas tragedy.

My motivation for writing this post was to alert readers to this extraordinary piece of television drama. I don’t want to go on saying “Wasn’t it scary when…?”, but if you want to hear a discussion of the play you’ve just watched, then I recommend an episode of A Very British Horror. One of the participants says The Exorcism is the only thing he has watched in the making of the podcast that has given him a nightmare.

What I shall do is offer some thoughts on the individual television play as an art form, some notes on the cast of The Exorcism and, finally, a look at its fortunes after this first broadcast.

The television play

Watching The Exorcism today, it speaks of the year 1972 in three ways. First, it is an essay in folk horror, in that the rational outsiders encounter something dark and rural and come off second best – it is the cottage that has exorcised its new inhabitants, not they who have exorcised the echoes of past horrors.

Second, it is a piece of popular entertainment that wears its politics on its sleeve: there is a discussion of whether it’s possible to be a rich socialist, and the play gives a very definite answer in the negative. Just ask the police officers who had to turn out on Christmas morning.

There would be questions in the House today, but such overt political content was unremarkable in 1972. The BBC broadcast a series call Play for Today between 1970 and 1984 that, by the end, encompassed more than 300 individual plays, and many shared The Exorcism’s politics. It’s been said that if you watched nothing but Play for Today, you would have forecast a Communist revolution in 1979 rather than Margaret Thatcher’s election victory.

And there is a third way in which The Exorcism speaks of 1972: it is a television play that does not aspire to be a movie. Though television drama’s critical standing today is perhaps higher than it has ever been, it does give the impression that it hankers after the sheen of Hollywood. But when The Exorcism was broadcast, the television play was seen as a discrete art form and it, at least, looked to the theatre at least as much as it looked to the cinema.

Don Taylor himself, in his memoir Days of Vision, described the television studio as:

…an empty space. A prepared canvas ready to paint on; the vacuum of an open mind waiting to be filled. It can offer the landscape of the imagination, ready to be entered, a world inside the head as vivid, often more vivid than the world outside the eyes that the film camera photographs so faithfully. It can offer nothingness, waiting to become something, a world waiting to be created out of the chaos of four characterless walls, a shiny floor, and a grid of lights. It is something waiting to happen, a statement ready to be made. One object or person placed within it makes a quite specific and individual point. Two, and the play begins.

You can hear about Taylor’s approach to television drama from his son, the actor Jon Dryden Taylor, in an edition of the podcast The Box of Delights. It’s worth mentioning that part of what makes The Exorcism such a claustrophobic experience is his use of close ups, and another part is that the play takes place in real time - it follows the verities.

I grasped this difference in approach, when compared to today’s television, through watching the 1961 Granada Television production of John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. When I say it was clear that the aesthetic behind it was that of the theatre rather than the cinema, I don’t mean that Granada had just filmed a stage performance or that the acting was too broad. The cast - Patrick McGoohan, John Thaw, Freda Jackson, Stratford Johns - was far too good for that.

What I mean is that the viewer is aware the performance is taking place in a television studio, and even expects to see the cameras at any moment. You don’t, but you are left wondering if it would matter if you did. Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?

The cast

Of the four actors in The Exorcism, only Edward Petherbridge is still alive. Like the rest of the cast, he appeared on television far more than on film – it is harder to trace people’s stage careers, but all four were considerable theatre actors too.

Petherbridge is best known for playing Lord Peter Wimsey in BBC adaptations of the Dorothy L. Sayers novels. He also appeared in The Ash Tree – one of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. 

Anna Cropper, who is so impressive here, made her career principally in television plays. She was married for a time to William Roache, who has played Ken Barlow in Coronation for 64 years now, making him the world’s longest-serving actor in a continuous role. Their son Linus Roache had a huge reputation as a Shakespearian actor when he was a young man, but his star seemed to fade. He was very impressive in Stephen Poliakoff’s television series Summer of Rockets in 2019. Anna Cropper died in 2007.

Sheila Kay also worked more in television than films, often appearing in situation comedies, and she later trained and practised as a psychotherapist. She died in 2019.

Clive Swift was a mainstay of British television and is the most recognisable face in the cast because of his years opposite Patricia Routledge as Mr Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. He appeared in the first two Ghost Stories for Christmas: The Stalls of Barchester and A Warning to the Curious. The way he carries off those Seventies threads in The Exorcism is greatly to be admired. He too died in 2019.

The afterlife of The Exorcism

The Exorcism was put on as a stage play in London in 1975. Don Taylor, as his son explains in The Box of Delights podcast, was unhappy with changes that had been made to the script and wanted his name taken off the production. His agent, the famous and fearsome Peggy Ramsay, threatened to disown him if this was how he reacted to his first West End opening, so he relented.

Rachel, the part played by Anna Cropper in the original television production, was played on stage by Mary Ure. She had been married to the playwright John Osborne and been in the cast of his groundbreaking Look Back in Anger. But by the early Seventies, her career and health were in decline, but the opening night of The Exorcism was seen as a triumph.

Ure had drunk her share of champagne and then took her prescription medication on top of it. The mix was enough to kill her. Anna Cropper stepped in to play the role, but the press made great fun of the idea that The Exorcism was a cursed play.

Nevertheless, its small cast and gripping story have made it a favourite with amateur theatre companies. But would I want to watch it again?

The three Dickies: More about Malcolm Saville on Children's Hour

We've seen that the third actor to play Malcolm Saville's child character (and my first literary hero) Dickie Morton was tried for murder at the Old Bailey as a young man.

That was Cavan Malone, who was acquitted within minutes by the jury on the grounds of self-defence. He continued acting for some years and played the first bridegroom in Coronation Street - he married Annie Walker's daughter - but was to die in 1982 aged only 45.

But who were the first two actors to play Dickie? 

The second Dickie was a woman. Elaine Macnamara took the part in adaptations of The Gay Dolphin Adventure and Seven White Gates, which were both first broadcast in 1946.

She had started acting in BBC Radio productions the previous year and did so regularly until 1961. As far as I can tell from the cast lists, she always played children - both boys and girls.

Besides a couple of stage appearances in Scotland before the war, that is all I can discover about her.

[Later. Thanks to a reader, I can tell you more about Elaine Macnamara.]

BBC Radio's common practice now, as it seems to have been when radio drama began, is to have boys' parts played by boys. But after the war it was more usual to give such roles to an adult actress.

Why that was the case may be explained by the first boy to play Dickie. 

That was Peter Mullins, who played him in an adaptation of Mystery at Wichend broadcast in October 1943,

The cast list reveals a couple of familiar names. Harry Fowler, the chirpy cockney evacuee in Went the Day Well? and star of Hue and Cry, sounds just right for Tom Ingles. David Morton, however, was played by Charles Hawtrey.

Charles Hawtrey?

Before you decide this dramatisation must have been a sort of Carry On Up the Lone Pine - and Hattie Jacques would have made a wonderful Miss Ballinger - I had better point out that as a young man Hawtrey often played children on the radio and even on film.

In 1943 Peter Mullins was becoming a regular for the BBC, acting in everything from Children’s Hour serials to Marlowe's Edward II.

You can see Mullins in a clip above playing Bruno, a German Jewish refugee boy, in Mr Emmanuel, a 1944 propaganda film. Perhaps he's not helped by the German accent he was obliged to adopt.

As small boys will, Mullins got older, with the results that he played the older brother David Morton in the two 1945 adaptations where Elaine MacNamara played Dickie, He was also Guy Standing when Children’s Hour dramatised Malcolm Saville’s Redshank’s Warning in 1948.

But it was another of his roles that may have led to the BBC to conclude that it was less trouble to cast women as boys. Charles Hawtrey and Peter Mullins also played brothers in the first series of Norman and Henry Bones - Boy Detectives, which was again broadcast as part of  Children's Hour in 1943.

This proved hugely popular and was to run to more than 120 episodes, with the result that Peter Mullins was soon replaced by Patricia Hayes, presumably because he didn't sound like the younger brother any more.

I remember reading about the casting of Billy Barratt in the BBC television drama Responsible Child a few years ago - I raved about his performance at the time,

One of the challenges was that they had to leave it late to find their young lead, because if you cast the perfect 12-year-old six months before filming starts, he may no longer be perfect when he turns up on the first day. 

Peter Mullins went on acting for BBC Radio into the early 1950s, by then playing adult roles in the classics.

There are two Peter Mullins on the IMDb. Peter Mullins (I) has half a dozen credits for children’s roles in the 1940s, including Caravan (1946), which features the future DJ Pete Murray, and another Malcolm Saville story, Trouble at Townsend, from the same year.

He also has a couple of credits as a stage manager for TV plays from 1952. This, surely, is the Peter Mullins who played Dickie Morton.

Peter Mullins (II) on IMDb is an art director and production designer, with credits including Where Eagles Dare and a couple of Pink Panther films. He worked continuously from 1947 (when he was credited as an apprentice) until 2001.

But if you look at his entry carefully, you will see that this Peter Mullins also has a couple of credits as a child actor in the 1940s - for Hue and Cry (1947) and The Boys in Brown (1949).

As it's not such a common name, I'm happy to conclude that Peter Mullins (I) and Peter Mullins (II) are the same person. Which means that the original radio Dickie Morton is still alive at the age of 92.

John Stevenson, Coronation Street and Brass

The television scriptwriter John Stevenson died last week. He was the leading scriptwriter for Coronation Street in the days when, because it was driven by character rather than issues, it was funnier than most situation comedies.

Stevenson also co-wrote the comedy series Brass from the 1980s, which made fun of the A.J. Cronin and Catherine Cookson school of fiction.

An old Guardian article recommending the box set, tells you all you need to know:

Self-made man and owner of the village mine, mill and munitions factory, Bradley is the head of the Hardacre clan, which comprises his three sons, Bentley (deceased), Austin and Morris; as well as two daughters, Charlotte (passionate about doing good works and, says her father, "innocent to the point of simplicity") and Isabel, whose bedpost is more notch than wood. Then there's his wife, Lady Patience, a wheelchair-user ever since her terrible tambourine accident.

On the other side of the colliery tracks is the Fairchild family. George, its nominal head, worships the ground his employer Bradley treads him into, while his magnificently-cleavaged wife Agnes, so poor-but-proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, rails with fury at all life throws at her. 

They have two sons. One is hardworking Jack, who has inherited his mother's socialist leanings, but is periodically diverted from bringing down capitalism by his secret and exhausting life as Isabel's sex-monkey. ("I love him hopelessly! Passionately! Recklessly! Frequently.") 

The other is poetry-writing Matt, who is determined, once he has made the final payments on the family pencil, to go to Cambridge despite his love for Charlotte H ("Thou are more lovely and more interesting/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May but that's quite another thing") and his good job – "a job wi' a stool!" - at the mine works.

In the clip I have chosen above, Bradley Hardacre calls on Agnes Farichild.

The pilot episode of Blackadder will be shown on Thursday

Radio Times makes a big fuss about the never-screened pilot episode of Blackadder, which is being shown by Gold (not a Freeview channel) on Thursday, along with a documentary, at nine in the evening.

It's billed as The Lost Pilot, but in reality it's been knocking about on the internet for years.

A lot is different from the comedy series we know, including the name it was made under: The Black Adder. Rowan Atkinson and Tim McInnerny are there, and so is Baldrick. But he's not played by Tony Robinson.

Talking to Radio Times, Robinson is measured about its quality:

Robinson was delighted – and frustrated – to observe that the pilot has “flashes that are really, really good”. (Indeed, Curtis and Atkinson reused some dialogue in later episodes.) Though he warns viewers scene one is “tedious”, he’s glad Gold has chosen to show it warts and all.

“There’s a desperate attempt to explain the whole concept and like any first scene ever, it gets a blue pencil through it very quickly. It just shows you how inspiration travels – you can start off with something ghastly and then you make the leap, and suddenly you’ve got something interesting.”

And he adds that in those days pilot episodes were allowed not to be perfect:

“Nowadays, a pilot isn't something that allows you to experiment, to throw away the bits that didn't work and beef up the good bits. It’s become something to prove to the commissioning editor how wonderful the whole thing is, and that's a terribly constraining influence.”

I was too old to be part of the generation that worshipped Blackadder: in fact I enjoyed the first series more than was fashionable and found the later ones in danger of being a little too pleased with themselves.

Anyway, there are a couple of interesting faces in the pilot. John Savident - I said John Savident - from A Clockwork Orange and Coronation Street, and Simon Gipps-Kent.

As a child and teen actor Gipps-Kent was everywhere on television in the Seventies, but he kept his boyish image too long and failed to make the transition to adult roles.

He was found dead from a heroin overdose in 1987, aged 28. If it had been shown when it was made in 1982, The Black Adder would have been one of his last screen appearances.

I've found another fan of No Room at the Inn

It can be difficult to keep all your rabbit holes in the air, and it's high time we went back to No Room at the Inn.

This is the film that introduced me to the wonderful actress Freda Jackson. The play on which it is based was in part inspired the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, which was the case that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap. (Those first three links are to labels on this blog, so scroll down for plenty of posts each time.)

I recently came across an article on No Room at the Inn by Meredith Taylor, whose chief interests here are Daniel Birt, the film's director, and Dylan Thomas, who co-wrote the screenplay.

After writing about Birt's previous film, The Three Weird Sisters, he turns to No Room:

A sense of the Gothic also infiltrates No Room at the Inn set in the early months of 1940. We witness atmospheric blitzed streets by the railway bridge next to a rundown house that’s definitely on the wrong side of the tracks: all lorded over by Mrs Agatha Voray (Freda Jackson) doing her damn best not to properly look after three young girl evacuees. 

The children live in squalor and suffer mental and physical abuse under the care of this coarse woman who invites men (local councillors and shopkeepers) for casual sex and bit of cash to bolster her shopping allowance of ration coupons. 

This is good, though Voray is looking after a boy as well as the three girls, and the film is set in motion by her taking in a fourth girl. Indeed, it's Voray's punishment of the boy the precipitates the film's climax.

Taylor continues:

The character of the schoolteacher Judith Drave (Joy Shelton) is remarkable, for we have ... a force for truth-seeking that refuses to be silenced. 

A powerfully written and acted moment occurs when Miss Drave, who has complained about Mrs Voray's behaviour, is asked to give evidence at a town councillors’ meeting. They dislike Ms Drave’s assertive manner. When Mrs.Voray has her right to reply she adopts the manner of a humble woman struggling to do her best during wartime restrictions. 

The schoolteacher sees right through her performance. But the council members (half of whom have flirted with Voray) believe her account of things over the teacher’s. I love Dylan Thomas’s writing here. His social concern is angrily targeted at bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude.

I don't have a copy of the film - it's easy to buy a copy online, but these are significantly shorter than the version Talking Pictures TV has shown more than once. And that is the copy I would want.

It would be interesting if I had that copy to see how much of Joan Temple's original play survived into the screenplay. Often the original source of a film goes unrecognised - the extraordinary atmosphere of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is all there in the original novel by Davis Grubb.

Taylor rightly identifies a Dickensian bringing together of different moods as one of the roots of the film's strange power:

Like The Three Weird Sisters there are fascinating if disconcerting alterations of tone – such as the beautifully written bedtime story scene in the room of the young girl evacuees. 

Norma Bates (yes, not Norman, though the film has its moments of Hitchcockian darkness) who is played by Joan Dowling, re-interprets the Cinderella story in a ripe, savagely Cockney manner. She comforts the children who are desperate to escape the mean house and its mean housekeeper. 

It’s a spellbinding moment of Dylan Thomas poetics: a joyful spin on Cinderella, beautifully shot and executed. And its lyricism is made more poignant by intercutting with Mrs Voray in the pub getting drunk with the sailor father of one of the evacuees. 

You can see that bedtime story scene in the video above.

Taylor is critical of the ending of No Room at the Inn, and I would add that the film's prologue, which involves one of the children being caught shoplifting some years later, just isn't strong enough to sit with the darkness of the rest of the film.

This structure of a present-day prologue followed by the rest of the action taking place as a flashback is taken from the play, but that began with the police arriving to find Mrs Voray dead and the play then showing us what had led up to this.

The censors meant that her death in the film had to have been caused by falling downstairs, but in the play she is smothered, more or less accidentally, in a drunken sleep by one of the children. The girls are trying to get her keys off her so they can rescue the boy, who has been locked in the coal store on a freezing night.

I should add that Taylor avoids this big spoiler, but I am not so considerate when a film is 75 years old.

But we can end in agreement as he praises the two best performances in the film:

Freda Jackson brings a full-blooded intensity to the role of the selfish and uncaring Aggie Voray. She was a sensation in the play and that’s why they made a film version which launched her considerable career on stage and in the cinema. 

Jackson probably became a role model for actors portraying more authentic working class women. I wonder if Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) of Coronation Street was influenced by her?

As for all of the child actors in No Room at the Inn well they’re brilliant -especially Joan Dowling who’s street-wise confidence cannot hide her emotional damage. She deserved a prize but unfortunately the BAFTAs didn’t begin until 1954.

Later. It's worth adding that it easy to find a DVD of the film for sale online - it was even on YouTube for a while. That version runs for about 60 minutes, but the one that has been shown more than once by Talking Pictures TV is significantly longer.

Boy who appeared in radio dramatisation of a Malcolm Saville story was later tried for murder at the Old Bailey

This is not what you expect to find when you do a little gentle research into the BBC Children’s Hour dramatisations of Malcolm Saville’s early Lone Pine books:

Leicester Evening Mail, Monday 2 February 1959

Actor accused of murder

TV MAN'S ALLEGED ADMISSION

WHEN CAVAN JOHN MALONE (22), actor, of TT Beverley Court, Wellesby-road, Chiswick, London, appeared at Acton today, accused of murdering a South African, Det.-Supt. John Manning said that Malone told him, "Yes, I did it." 

After a three-minute appearance Malone was remanded in custody for a week, charged with the murder of Jan Momberg, who was found dead in a sixth-floor flat at Beverley Court.

Nor is this:

Shields Daily News, Wednesday 18 February 1959

MAN’S THROAT CUT BY ACTOR – COURT TOLD

22-YEAR-OLD actor was said by the prosecution at Acton, London, today to have fetched a knife and cut the throat of another man during a “free- for-all in a flat. He then followed it up with three blows with the knife in the man’s back, it was stated.

The proceedings in Acton were the committal hearing, and Malone was sent by it for trial at the Old Bailey. Hanging was still the mandatory sentence for murder.

The Gay Dolphin Adventure on the radio

The Gay Dolphin Adventure, the third of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, was the second to be dramatised by BBC Children's Hour. It went out on the Home Service in six parts in January and February 1946.

A new dramatisation of the book, with a different cast, was broadcast  in October and November 1949. It was again in six parts, but David Schutte says this was a shortened version of the 1946 production.

The first episode of this new dramatisation was billed thus in the Radio Times:

Ever since October 1946 when 'The Gay Dolphin Adventure' was first broadcast children have clamoured to hear it again. It is one of the best of Malcolm Saville's books containing all the ingredients calculated to tickle the palate of children from seven to seventy. 

Here is a tale of hidden treasure set against the picturesque background of Rye with its ancient smuggler's inn. Jon and Penny arriving for a fortnight's holiday have no inkling of the excitements in store for them at 'The Gay Dolphin.'

It's traditional for adult readers of the Lone Pine books to complain about ‘those awful twins,’ but as I started reading them at such a young age the twins were naturally the characters I most identified with – Dickie in particular.

With the possible exception of Pat the dog in the Ladybird Key Words reading scheme, he was my first literary hero. And in the 1949 production of The Gay Dolphin Adventure Dickie was played by a boy called Cavan Malone.

Cavan Malone

Born on 25 November 1936, Cavan Malone was the son of Danny Malone, a popular Irish tenor and his wife Hazel, who ran the Corona Stage School in London and was later to run a highly successful talent agency. Not altogether surprisingly with that background, he became a child actor.

His most prominent film role was in the 1947 weepy When the Bough Breaks, where he played a boy who had been adopted as a baby, only to be returned by the courts to his birth mother. As you can see from the clip below, he finds it hard to settle in his new home. (And, yes, that is Bill Owen playing his birth mother's husband.)

Kinematograph Weekly said he gave 'easily the best performance' in what sounds an indifferent film: 'He shows his elders how to deal with "ham".' Other reviews were less complimentary.

Malone also had a small part in Kind Hearts and Coronets as Graham, Sibella's brother, in the scenes from Louis Mazzini's childhood.

He continued to find work as a teenager on both radio and television for the BBC and also on the stage. There are news stories about him appearing at the Old Vic and in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as in a provincial production of Look Back in Anger with Vanessa Redgrave. 

At his trial, the Daily Mirror described him as:

a veteran of hundreds of stage, film and TV appearances though he is only twenty-two, had his first film role at the age of nine. More recently he had a part in the ITV 'William Tell' series.

That sounds an exaggeration, but there was no doubt he, unlike most child stars, had made a successful transition to an adult acting career.

The trial

Malone was accused of murdering a South African salesman, Jan Momberg. The Daily Herald takes up the story:

Momberg forced his way into Mrs Malone's luxury flat in Beverley Court. Wellesley-road. Chiswick. Visiting Mrs. Malone was her friend, Mrs. Bessie Momberg, who had been living apart from her husband. 

Momberg attacked Mrs. Malone. Mrs. Momberg shouted to Cavan: "You've got to help your mother. He will probably kill her."

An eight-inch-long kitchen knife was handed to Cavan, who took it with trembling fingers. He showed the jury how he used it after parrying a blow from Momberg. 

Cavan said: "Momberg drew back and I noticed blood on his throat. I was horrified. I ran towards the lounge, and Momberg came after me. 

"He looked terrifying, and gripped me on the shoulder. 

"I hit him with my right arm to make him let go. but I forgot entirely about the knife and was horrified when I discovered I had then stabbed him." 

And that, together with some strategic blackening of Momberg's character, was enough. The jury took just 13 minutes to find Malone not guilty of both murder and manslaughter.

After acquittal

Cavan Malone went back to acting for a few more years after the trial. He had the distinction of figuring in the first Coronation Street wedding as his character, Gordon Davies, married Joan Walker, the daughter of the formidable landlady of the Rover's Return, Annie Walker.

He did not enjoy a long run in Corrie, as Gordon and Joan settled in Derby after their wedding. If Doris Speed, who played Annie Walker well into her nineties, needed a break. viewers would be told she had gone to stay with her daughter.

In real life Malone married twice, and a post on an old BBC page suggests he had a son called Stephen.

He seems to have given up acting early in the 1960s - his penultimate entry on IMDb is for an uncredited role in 633 Squadron, which was released in 1964.

He became a drummer, playing in jazz bands and with his friend Chris Sandford, who was a fellow Coronation Street actor and briefly a pop star.

The last news story I can find about Malone is from the Western Daily Press of 1 May 1975. He was working for his mother's talent agency and defending a hostess on the wholesome television quiz Mr. and Mrs. after photographs from a nude modelling session she had done a few years before had come to light.

Cavan Malone died of heart failure in 1982 at Richmond upon Thames, aged only 45. I can find no obituary for him nor even where his grave is.

This is not the story I expected to be blogging when I looked up those Children's Hour dramatisations of Malcolm Saville's books. But one thing should be emphasised: 

DICKIE MORTON IS INNOCENT OK.