Sparrows Can’t Sing Q&A with Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin

Joan Littlewood directed only one film, Sparrows Can't Sing. It was based on the play Sparrers Can't Sing, which was written by Stephen Lewis (better known later as Blakey off of On the Buses) and staged by her at Stratford East.

Here two cast members, Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin, remember the making of the film and Littlewood's approach in general. Barbara Windsor is in sparkling form.

As I posted this video on Liberal England about 10 years ago, I'm adding another one with Murray Melvin . It's very good, but I'll admit it's here mainly because of the still photo of Joan Littlewood and Stephen Lewis that appears early on.

For another appreciation of Joan Littlweood, try Sheila Hancock.

The rise and fall and (slight) rise of Lionel Bart

By my calculation, this edition of The South Bank Show dates from 1994. As much of my politics come from reading Oliver Twist too young, and as Oliver! is the great British musical. I had to watch it.

And there is much to enjoy, beginning with Lionel Bart's adventures in the new world of pop music with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.

Then there's Oliver!, whose first night was just as triumphant as Bart makes it sound. On to the film, where I note that Mark Lester was still giving the impression that he sang in it. He didn't.

The disaster of Twang!! caused the crash of Bart's career, but maybe the warning signs were there with his musical Blitz!, which Noel Coward claimed was "twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing".

Note the presence of Mark Steyn, who had yet to reinvent himself as a commentator on geopolitics. As I wrote of him in 2008:

Steyn is a good film critic, able to write intelligently about unintelligent films. But the fact that for several years his was the predominant voice on foreign affairs in the British Conservative press was simply bizarre.

If you enjoy this, it gives me the excuse to give another plug for the superlative South Bank Show on the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. 

The long, long apprenticeship of Sir Nigel Hawthorne

Before Yes Minister made him famous in 1980, Nigel Hawthorne served a long apprenticeship in the acting profession. But I had not grasped till recently just how long that apprenticeship had been.

If you click on the arrow above, you will see him in a scene from Going Straight, the short-lived sitcom that followed Norman Stanley Fletcher after his release from the Slade Prison of Porridge.

That scene dates from 1978, but he had a bit part in an episode of Dad's Army as early as 1969. I recall a story that someone had gone to David Croft on Hawthorne's behalf, saying he was a very good actor who was getting many parts and asking if Croft could offer him something. Croft did, though as I recall Hawthorne doesn't really convince as a lorry driver.

But I've now know that Hawthorne's apprenticeship stretched right back to the start of the Fifties, and two of this blog's heroines helped me discover this.

Here's Sheila Hancock writing in The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw:

I was thrilled to be so near London where someone might see me. I was playing quite a good role but whenever I was in danger of getting a laugh, Frank would intervene with, "No, don't laugh – poor soul – she went to the RADA, you know" (pronounced radar by Frank). "No perlease, perlease have some respect."

Nigel Hawthorne and I watched in awe as he jettisoned the script and went off into wild fantasies of his own It was one of Frank's frequent periods in the theatrical wilderness and no one important came near us, but supporting this anguished man gave us a friend for life.

With the help of the British Newspaper Archive I can tell you that this all took place in 1956.

Two years earlier, Hawthorne had been in the supporting cast when Freda Jackson returned to her alma mater, the Theatre Royal, Northampton, to play Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camelias. He was in the repertory company there in 1954 and 1955.

He was acting with the company at the Pavilion Gardens, Buxton, as early as 1951. Hawthorne had first gone on the stage in South Africa in 1950, and was to alternate between Britain and South Africa for a few years without finding much in success in either.

And we have a part for a third heroine of the blog. Because, just as Sheila Hancock does, Hawthorne said he owed his career to Joan Littlewood.

Here's Markland Taylor reviewing Hawthorne's Straight Face, The Autobiography, which was published just after his death, in Variety:

Hawthorne’s luck changed magnificently when he downed six bottles of Guinness before auditioning for a role in a production of Littlewood’s hit

Oh! What a Lovely War planned for a tour of England and Europe, and was cast.

This led to his invaluable relationship with Littlewood and his career blossomed, leading to highly rewarding work on stage, screen and television.

This was in 1964, so Hawthorne still had 16 years to wait before be became famous overnight. This is a story about talent and persistence, but it may ultimately be one about having the right mentor.

How Joan Littlewood changed Sheila Hancock's life

My interest in Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East and obsession with the original London production of Sweeney Todd meet in this video.

And it's all true. Here's R.B. Marriott reviewing the first West End performance of Make Me An Offer for The Stage (24 December 1959): 

Sheila Hancock, who originally made a personal hit in the production, repeats her success, and on the first night stopped the show with her singing of "It's Sort of Romantic". 

Miss Hancock is now unlikely to be in need of work in the theatre, but I hope that her originality, talent and personality will eventually be given far wider scope, not only in "suitable" supporting parts but in leading ones, for which undoubtedly she is equipped. 

Blakey off of On the Buses and radical theatre

In Kibworth the other day, I visited Daker Books and bought a second-hand copy of John Russell Taylor's Anger and After, a book about the British theatre in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

I think the Fifties were a more interesting decade than we now imagine - the centrality of live theatre to the culture being just one reason. 

As Sebastian Millbank pointed out in an article on The Critic, it's noteworthy that the modern left shows no affection for a decade that saw full employment, widespread union membership and rising wages.

When I got Anger and After home, I looked up one minor writer in the index and was directed to a pleasingly chunky passage:

Another improvisation along rather the same lines was Stephen Lewis's Sparrers Can't Sing, a lackadaisical picture of Stepney life revolving round the return from jail after nearly ten years of the paterfamilias to meet again the wife he hit with a poker. There was no plot to speak of, but the characters who wandered in and out, particularly the two old derelicts locked in deadly combat with the National Assistance, made pleasant enough company while they were around and lent a certain colour to the assertion by their ex-electrician's mate creator that "The world as seen through the bottom of a pint pot is much more entertaining than that usually seen through opera glasses, and less distorted." 

The play, after a not very successful transfer to the West End, became the basis of Joan Littlewood's first foray into the cinema; slightly retitled as Sparrows Can't Sing and almost completely reworked by Joan Littlewood and the author, it emerged as the story of a randy young sailor's return from the sea to find his pretty young wife living with a bus driver in a rebuilt East End of towering modern flats, most of the material about the old people, the National Assistance and so on having disappeared somewhere along the way. 

Subsequently Stephen Lewis has written Wagger, a subdued television piece in a very similar style about a crippled cobbler and the tentative beginnings of his romance with a girl who works in the baker's across the road, sat against a background of bitter family bickering.

Stephen Lewis could act as well as write. He appeared at Stratford East and the Royal Court, and his turn as the caretaker of a new block of flats who relishes all the regulations he has to enforce is one of the best things in Sparrows Can't Sing.

Anger and After was written before be became famous as Blakey in On the Buses.

Book Review... Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown

Playing herself at the Borsetshire Fashion Show on The Archers in 1984, she sounded curiously flat and uninvolved, almost as though she couldn’t get to grips with her own character. After the first run-through, the producer, William Smethurst said: “That’s very good, Ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?” replied the princess.

Craig Brown noticed Princess Margaret's ubiquity when researching an earlier book of his. Open the biography of any public figure from the second half of the 20th century and she will be there in the index. Usually you will be directed to an anecdote about her where she appears haughty or rude.

Brown has turned these brief appearances into a study of Margaret. The tale is familiar: the failure to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, the marriage to Lord Snowdon, the years of fun and scandal on Mustique, the decline in her health from too much tobacco  and alcohol, the death a few weeks before that of her mother.

Yet I learnt plenty that was new from Ma'am Darling. Margaret's wish to marry the war hero Townsend alarmed the royal family and court because he was divorced from his first wife. She was persuaded to abandon the idea and him by pressure that went all the way up to threatening to cut her off without a penny. Today's public would be more concerned that Townsend was 16 years older than Margaret, who had been only 13 when they met. After parting from Margaret, he went on to wed an even younger woman.

The happiest time in Margaret's life seems to have been the early years of her marriage to Lord Snowdon, when they were London's most fashionable couple - this was a few years before it began to Swing - and moved in glittering social and artistic circles, But their relationship soon soured, and Snowdon treated her with calculated cruelty.

Later she sought solace in the millionaire's paradise of Mustique with the amusing (Roddy Llewelyn) and the criminal (John Bindon). Then her health began to decline and she was seen about no more. She died in 2002, aged 71.

It was not a happy life, and reading about it strengthened my belief that a strong argument against having a monarchy is the impossible lives members of the Royal Family are forced to live.

Ma'am Darling has no index - I took the story about Margaret's appearance on The Archers, which is in the book, from a Guardian article - but I think I'm right in saying that the book omits the one wholly creditable story I have heard about Margaret.

This time I am quoting BBC News on Joan Littlewood's play Oh! What a Lovely War:

Littlewood gave the show a new political bite, as befitted a nation growing tired of deference. The family of Field Marshal Douglas Haig wanted to stop the show reaching the West End, claiming the portrayal of him was a crude caricature.

But [Victor] Spinetti recalls a useful royal visit when the play was still in Stratford. "One evening Princess Margaret came with Lord Cobbold, who as Lord Chamberlain was also the theatre censor.

"Afterwards Princess Margaret came backstage and said 'Well Miss Littlewood those things should have been said many years ago - don't you agree, Lord Cobbold?' He gave a thin smile and said 'Oh yes ma'am'. And Joan knew that was our permission to go into the West End."