Farewell to David Kernan (1928-2023)

The Guardian has an obituary of the actor David Kernan, who died on Boxing Day:

Kernan had been asked by Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth to put together a revue for their Stables theatre in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, and, bowled over by Sondheim’s music and lyrics, he had the idea of creating a show of his songs that had not previously been performed live in Britain.

After consulting Sondheim, Kernan sought help from the broadcaster Ned Sherrin, producer of the 60s satirical TV series That Was the Week That Was, in which Kernan had performed topical songs. 

They recruited Millicent Martin, who had also appeared on the programme, and Julia McKenzie, and in 1975 staged The Sondheim Songbook, with numbers from shows such as West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company and Follies, some written jointly with other composers.

With a new title, Side by Side by Sondheim (suggested by McKenzie), the show was produced by Cameron Mackintosh in the West End the following year, at the Mermaid theatre, then Wyndham’s, and then at the Garrick, where it ran for 806 performances, continuing with other artists until 1978. 

Kernan, Sherrin, Martin and McKenzie left the London production in 1977 to take the show to Broadway, with special dispensation from the US actors’ union, Equity. All four earned Tony award nominations, before again giving way to others.

Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times: “Mr Kernan is all charm and polish, with a gleaming wit, and, like his well-matched women, displays a great sense of fun, and, occasionally, a feel for dreamily poetic passion.”

You can hear Kernan's cool, English take on Sondheim in the video above.

I'm particularly sorry to hear of Kernan's death, because he was the star of the very first play I was taken to. He played Buttons in Cinderella, the Watford Palace pantomime for Christmas 1966.

As I once blogged about that evening:

I can remember his last scene, singing a song called “I’m Going Away” because his friend Cinderella was marrying Prince Charming. How we loved him!

Click on the link to that post and you'll see that Glyn Worsnip, William Simons and Peter Cleall were also in the cast.

David Kernan: Sorry-Grateful

The star was David Kernan as Buttons, who had already appeared in Zulu on television in That Was the Week That Was. He was later to become even more famous in Ned Sherrin’s Side by Side by Sondheim. 

I can remember his last scene, singing a song called “I’m Going Away” because his friend Cinderella was marrying Prince Charming. How we loved him!

I wrote that after acquiring the programme for Cinderella at the Watford Palace, which I was taken to see in January 1967.

Since then I have done a bit of research and discovered that it was Kernan who devised Side by Side by Sondheim. Ned Sherrin produced its first staging and acted as the narrator.

I thought this very cool, very English take on Sondheim's Sorry-Grateful must come from a television version of that show.

In fact it comes from an Andre Previn programme on Sondheim made for American television in 1977. And this song (which comes from Company) did not feature in Side by Side by Sondheim.

Let's end with the profile of David Kernan from my pantomime programme.

Three encounters with Glyn Worsnip

Finding a book or piece of ephemera you wanted used to take hard work and lots of luck. Now you just go to eBay.

Sure enough, when I got it into my head to get a copy of the programme for the first pantomime I was taken to – Cinderella at the Watford Palace – it took seconds to find a copy for sale online.

It arrived today, so I can tell you that my first trip to the theatre took place between Boxing Day 1966 and 21 January 1967, so I would have been six years old.

Cinderella, it turns out, was directed by Giles Havergal, who later became famous as director of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre.

The star was David Kernan as Buttons, who had already appeared in Zulu and on television in That Was the Week That Was. He was later to become even more famous in Ned Sherrin’s Side by Side by Sondheim.

I can remember his last scene, singing a song called “I’m Going Away” because his friend Cinderella was marrying Prince Charming. How we loved him!

The Brokers’ Men turn out to have been pretty remarkable too. There was Peter Cleall, soon to be Eric Duffy in the television sit come Please Sir!, and William Simons. He was a child star through the 1950s and is now best known as Alf Ventriss in Heartbeat.

I can even remember one of their jokes more than half a century on:

There were three budgies in a cage. One on the top perch, one on the middle perch and one on the bottom perch. Which budgie owned the cage. 

I don’t know that. Which budgie owned the cage? 

The one on the bottom perch, because the other two were on higher perches.

I must see if I can get it into Lord Bonkers one day.

There is another name on the programme that was once famous. As I remember from the days before I threw my first copy of this programme away (I must have been going through a phase). One of the Ugly Sisters was played by Glyn Worsnip.

In the 1970s, Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life, an odd but successful combination of consumer journalism and light entertainment, was one of the BBC’s most popular programmes. We all moan about Rantzen now, but I remember rather enjoying That's Life at the time and it sometimes featured a topical song from Jake Thackray or Victoria Wood.

Glyn Wornsip was one of two young men in good suits (Kieran Prendiville was the other) who presented the show alongside her.

Move on to the summer of 1978 when I was about to go to university. My mother and I won BBC East’s quiz Joint Account, a show that is so obscure it is not on the BBC Genome site.

In the part of Market Harborough where I lived in those days, and where my mother still lives, you see, people receive East Anglian television and not Midlands.

We did a sort of audition at the BBC in Northampton and then won a heat and the final at the BBC studios in Norwich. It was a general knowledge quiz and I did a specialist round on cricket.

And the quizmaster? Glyn Worsnip.

Move on another six years to my first Liberal Party Assembly, Bournemouth 1984, and Worsnip was there as part of the BBC team.

I said hello and mentioned that I had met him when filming Joint Account in Norwich, but he did not seem keen to be reminded of his days scrabbling around doing minor TV quiz shows now he was a serious political reporter. It’s known in the literature as David Dimbleby Syndrome.

There is a sad postscript to these reminiscences. As Worsnip's Independent obituary (which finds room to mention Joint Account) recorded:

In 1986, he began to show symptoms of the brain disease cerebellar ataxia. His speech became slurred and walking difficult. He was working for BBC radio, presenting the news review Stop Press, Pick of the Week and schools programmes, as well as becoming host of a new series, The Press Gang. His behaviour led people to think he was drunk and, shortly before Christmas 1987, he was sacked from Stop Press after listeners' complaints. 

When cerebellar ataxia was diagnosed, Worsnip was encouraged by his colleagues to "come out'' and the result was A Lone Voice, broadcast on Radio 4 in March 1988. The response from listeners was overwhelming. "I heard from old school, college and university chums I had not seen in 30 years," Worsnip wrote in his autobiography, Up the Down Escalator (1990). "I heard from a mass of disabled people, offering solidarity.'' 

But there was no cure. In his one of his last programmes, for Horizon, he reported on illnesses such as his affecting the brain.

I heard that 1988 broadcast and it was immensely moving. Glyn Worsnip died in 1996.