Michael Elwyn talks about appearing in Joe Orton's Loot

I once went to an event in Leicester to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's play Loot. It doesn't feel like it, but it was almost 10 years ago.

In the post I wrote about the event, I described meeting Braham Murray and Michael Elwyn there. They had, respectively, directed and appeared in a Manchester production of Loot that established its reputation after its first staging in London had been a failure.

I recently found this video of Michael Elwyn, which may well have been recorded that day – we were all given the badge he is wearing. In it he talks about meeting Orton and his experience of appearing in the play.

High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Volume II by Shaun Knapp

In Leicester this afternoon, I called in at the launch of Shaun Knapp's book High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Vol II.

As the publisher's website says: 

High Flying Around Volume II continues the remarkable story of Leicester’s 1960s arts and music scene via the people who were there. Their memories and reminiscences bring back to life the buildings long since demolished, the groups who packed out the venues and the people who filled the halls and clubs.

Find out how some of the biggest names in music performed in some of Leicester’s smallest and long-lost venues, revisit the 1969 free festival, and discover the incredible stories of Leicester band Gypsy and the 1960s creatives. Discover the importance of the college and university circuit, the arts lab, the city’s underground music, folk and poetry scenes and the music that influenced Leicester playwright Joe Orton.

Leicester women tell their stories about life in the city during the 1960s, while singer/songwriter Ryan Dunn explains how the decade influences his songwriting and fashion.

Dipping into it, I find plenty of new bands to research and the odd anecdote I might share here.

And, yes, my home town gets at least one mention:

The first time we played in Market Harborough was at a place called the Embi Club, on St Mary's Road. The building had a great doorway, which was the entrance, then you went to the back building through a small yard. That was where the club was. The club itself was long and it looked like a few rooms had been knocked into one. It was a very busy venue. Jethro Tull had played there as did Edwin Starr. I later learned the site had been an old cinema. the Oriental, which opened in 1921. The interior decor consisted of Egyptian mummies Chinese dragons, palm trees and pyramids.

The main building had, I think, gone by the time I moved here – the length of it ran behind what is now the House of Art tattoo studio and probably a couple of other vanished buildings – but the exotic domed entrance on St Mary's Road lasted through the Seventies.

King Charles III once appeared in a Joe Orton play

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I knew that Prince Charles, as he then was, acted in revues when he was a student at Cambridge, but I discovered only recently he also appeared in a Joe Orton play.

Over to the Trinity College website and a page about his acting career there:

Dr Parry also cast the Prince as the padre in Joe Orton’s play [The] Erpingham Camp, originally written for television in 1966 and set in a holiday camp where the campers rebel over the strictures of the manager.

The performance was well reviewed. Student-turned theatre critic Valerie Grosvenor Myer wrote of a "pleasantly poised portrayal" by the Prince in The Guardian:

"His voice is not strong, but it is very clear, and is face is mobile: his look of shrinking pain when one of the characters used a four-letter word was extremely funny. 

"And there was a certain piquancy in the future supreme head of the Church of England taking part in a ritual where this institution is shown as pretty effete … it’s not every festival which offers the spectacle of the heir to the throne getting a custard pie full in his face."

There's a Wikipedia page on The Erpingham Camp, which was broadcast on ITV in June 1966.

Rising Damp: Rigsby burning love wood outside Miss Jones's hut

This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon.

“I’ve given Rigsby some love wood. He’s going to burn it outside Ruth’s hut.” 

“Will it work?” 

“I shouldn’t think so. It came off the wardrobe.”

I’ve chosen Charisma because it displays what was unique about Rising Damp. Here is a Seventies situation comedy with something interesting to say about race.

Running to four series and broadcast between 1974 and 1978, Rising Damp dealt with the seedy landlord Rigsby (played by the incomparable Leonard Rossiter) and his tenants. Though other characters came and went, the core cast was only four.

Alongside Rossiter, there was Frances de la Tour as the lovelorn university administrator Miss Jones, Richard Beckinsale as the innocent medical student Alan, and Don Warrington as the black student Philip.

What Rising Damp did that was different is bring out how racism can have envy at its heart. Because Philip is everything Rigsby wants to be: cultured, urbane and successful with women. In particular, while Rigsby ineffectually lusts after Miss Jones, she only has eyes for Philip.

And Philip, with all his talk of being the son of a chief and having ten wives, plays up to every ridiculous belief Rigsby has about Africa, because he has worked out that impresses Rigbsy all the more.

This is in danger of making Rising Damp sound worthier than it was. What it was above all was funny, both in its in-character one-liners and its plotting. It’s one of those shows where you can see what’s going to happen in advance, yet it’s still funny when it does happen.

And the cast was so good that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in those four central roles. By the end of its run, we may have liked Rigsby no more, but we understood him better and wanted his unlikely romance with Miss Jones to have a happy ending.

The Banana Box

Let’s begin with the writer. Eric Chappell was an auditor with the East Midlands Electricity Board in Hinckley with ambitions to be a novelist, yet his manuscripts never interested publishers. Then one day he thought he would try his luck writing a play – they were, after all, shorter – and the result was impressive enough to get him an agent.

He then concentrated on writing 30-minute television plays, until one was accepted and made by Harlech TV. It was a comedy-drama starring Henry McGee, but was broadcast only in Wales.

It was Chappell’s second stage play The Banana Box that both launched his writing career and led to Rising Damp. In fact, the early episodes from its first series, like Charisma, are largely taken from the play.

The play was first given a rehearsed reading at Hampstead Theatre Club in November 1970, and then a full staging at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in May 1971. The Phoenix was the scene of many of my teenage experiences of theatre, and I suspect Chappell being a Leicestershire writer encouraged them to put on the play.

None of the four leads we know from Rising Damp were yet in place, but Rigsby (or Rooksby, as he was called in The Banana Box) was played by a name familiar from television: Wilfrid Brambell from Steptoe and Son.

The play was popular with audiences and departed on a regional tour. By the time it arrived back at the Hampstead Theatre Club in May 1973, three of the four central cast members of Rising Damp – Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour and Don Warrington – were in place. Alan was played, not by Richard Beckinsale, but by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann.

The Banana Box’s short run in the West End wasn’t a huge success, but by then the play had been noticed by Yorkshire Television, who sensed that it would make a good sitcom. So Chappell was commissioned to write a pilot episode, which was screened in a series of six comedy pilots in September 1974.

From this came a commission for a series of six episodes, and this was shown in December 1974 and January 1975. Rising Damp was launched.

The cast

Leonard Rossiter was quite arguably the greatest British actor of his generation. The public got to know him through situation comedies – Rising Damp and then the Fall of Rise of Reginald Perrin – but in the theatre world it was his performance in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui that made his name.

He was also a successful screen actor, and still has a talent for turning up in films where you don’t expect him, from Oliver! to King Rat. He was a particular favourite of Stanley Kubrick, which is why you will find him in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon.

It’s a measure of his standing that last year the Guardian marked the 40th anniversary of his death with a major feature. That death came in his dressing room during a performance of Joe Orton’s Loot. I am so glad that I saw him in the play a few weeks before.

It has to be admitted that Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult to work with: he was a perfectionist and expected high standards from those around him. When I met the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Orton’s death, he said Rossiter was a wonderful man.

I mentioned his reputation, saying that he would turn up at the first rehearsal of a play word perfect and expect other actors to be too. Murray bristled a little and asked: “What’s wrong with that?” If you were a director, you would see things that way too.

Frances de la Tour was to become a major stage actress and has not always appreciated the fame that Rising Damp brought her. If you are playing Hamlet in a matinee, you don’t appreciate a party of children going “Ooh, Miss Jones!” when you walk on. At least I managed to restrain myself when I saw her play the lead in Shaw's Saint Joan.

She has won a Tony Award and three Olivier Awards – there is a good Observer interview with her by Lyn Gardner.

Leonard Rossiter was 57 when he died: Richard Beckinsale was only 31 when he suffered a fatal heart attack in March 1979. 

Two years before he died, Beckinsale was the subject of This is Your Life, and Rossiter paid him this tribute:

“There are plenty of people who can be quite funny other than Richard, but I just want to say two things about him. One is that he has a unique talent and I use the word very specifically – he has a unique comedy talent. He is the most generous person – not in financial terms – do let me finish – not in financial terms, but he is one of the most generous people in spirit I have ever met and I am delighted to have worked with him.”

You can watch that episode of This is Your Life online, and the episode of the radio programme Great Lives about him is worth a listen too.

Don Warrington was not long out of drama college when he appeared in Rising Damp, and he accepted Leonard Rossiter as a mentor – a relationship that Rossiter rather enjoyed. He has been an actor ever since, his career encompassing an acclaimed Lear and a recurring role as the police commissioner in Death in Paradise.

As to the racial politics of Rising Damp, this is what Warrington told the Telegraph in 2022:

“A lot of black people still say to me that their parents would call them down from their bedrooms whenever it was on, because of the way it showed a black man on TV who was not being put down or abused.”

Was Philip the son of a chief?

One question remains. In The Banana Box and in the film that was made of Rising Damp, it is revealed that Philip has never been to Africa in his life but comes from Croydon.

This revelation was never made in the television version, so if you want him to be, then Philip can be the son of a chief.

But the odds are that the Croydon story is right, in which case Philip based his view of Africa on much the same sources that Rigsby had. Oh the ironies of empire, race and immigration.

"In a very real sense Leonard Rossiter is with us here today"

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There's something about appearing in a successful situation comedy that makes an actor immortal. Leonard Rossiter is still a living presence to those who remember The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin or Rising Damp, yet it's now 40 years since he died.

But he was far more than a sitcom actor, as the Guardian's superb survey of his career makes clear. He was a peerless stage actor and, because the best directors recognised his worth, he has a habit of turning up in films where you don't expect to see him.

I saw Rossiter in his final stage role as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, though I've forgotten how long before his death this was.

Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult, but I suspect that, as the Guardian article suggests, this was because he was a perfectionist about his own performance and expected no less from those around him.

When I talked to the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death, he said Rossiter had been a wonderful man. (Murray directed a Manchester production of Loot that created new interest in the play after it had bombed on its first appearance in the West End.)

I mentioned Rossiter's difficult reputation, saying something like: "He turned up for the first rehearsal word perfect and expected everyone else to be too." Murray, ever the director, bristled and asked: "What's wrong with that?"

Oh, and my title here is based on something the vicar said from the pulpit when Reggie Perrin was obliged to attend his own memorial service.

In which I scoop Channel 5's documentary on Leonard Rossiter

Channel 5 recently screened a superior documentary on the career of Leonard Rossiter - you can watch it on its catch-up service My5.

If features a few clips from what it bills as a "never seen before interview" with Rossiter. Except that readers of this blog may well have seen the interview before, because I linked to it last year. Maybe that's how the documentary's researchers found it?

In that post I suggested Rossiter had a talent for turning up in films where you don't expect to find him, and the video above - from a 1967 Michael Caine thriller - is another example. There's even a little bit of Eric Portman in the middle as a bonus.

The documentary does not shy away from Rossiter's reputation for being a perfectionist and thus difficult to work with. But I suppose that depends on who you were.

I got talking with the theatre director Braham Murray at a Leicester event marking the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death. Murray had rescued the reputation of Orton's play Loot with a production in Manchester after it had flopped in the West End.

He mentioned Rossiter for some reason and said what a wonderful man he was. I referred to his reputation, saying something like: "They say he turned up word perfect on the first day and expected everyone else to be too."

At which Murray, always the director, bristled slightly and demanded: "And what's wrong with that?"

Six of the Best 861

"Fawlty Towers was, above all, an ensemble piece about isolation. It was a portrait of rage and frustration, an exploration of the impotence that results when the world as we wish it to be is so agonisingly at odds with the world as it is. It was the Brexit mindset incubating in the shabby surroundings of a down-at-heel hotel that had seen far better days." Britain's favourite sit come explains Brexit, says Alex Clark.

The disordered thinking that lies behind the way Brexit has paralysed the British political system is laid bare by Koen Smets.

Stephen Gibbons, Cong Peng and Cheng Keat Tang on the value that a canal view adds to a house.

What the Butler Saw, Joe Orton’s savage satire on rape, is as relevant now as it was in 1969, argues Emma Parker.

Natural England is calling on the public to donate to their campaign to raise money to purchase and restore one hectare of land on the edge of Stiperstones National Nature Reserve.

Jon Hotten gets lyrical about cricket's county championship: "Men born in the 1600s understood what a county match was and this season the first players born in the 2000s will play in it. That's a span of five centuries, and to play in the Championship, or simply to watch it, somehow joins you to this thread of time."

Leonie Orton on her brother Joe

One of the great things about the 2017 events to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Joe Orton was the prominence given to his sister Leonie.

I can recommend her memoirs, which have the splendidly Ortonesque title I Had It In Me.

Note the photo on the front of the book's jacket, which looks like a lost Smiths' sleeve.

Six of the Best 735

Arron Banks, the self-styled ‘bad boy’ who bankrolled the Leave campaign appears to have exaggerated his wealth. So, ask Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell, how did he pay for his Brexit spree?

David Boyle on the way monopolies no longer seem to concern us: "I'm not sure why the forces of Liberalism worldwide should have abandoned their most important economic doctrine."

"I have been speaking and writing about misogyny in Tower Hamlets for a long time – now feels like the right time to put something more comprehensive on the record," says Rachael Saunders.

"I really wish it was clearer that I am just one among many of the ‘unseen’ and smart people, who get these programmes onscreen." Mary Beard reminds us who really makes a television documentary.

Tristin Hopper on Up Against It, the film script Joe Orton wrote for the Beatles. Commissioned at the band’s height, it featured the Fab Four assassinating a female PM, sparking a brutal civil war and engaging in group sex.

Clare Wadd searches South London for a scene painted by Camille Pissarro 146 years ago.

Six of the Best 716

"There is no doubt in my mind that Brexit will leave the country poorer, and sadder, and it will hurt the vulnerable among us the most. As I see the thinkpieces and columns start to trickle out about how we must rally behind Corbyn even if we oppose Brexit, I find myself surer than ever: I will not vote purple just because it’s half red." Katie has seen through Jeremy Corbyn.

Dan Atkinson takes us back to the summer of 1975 when retired generals were drilling their private armies in case, as they saw it, they were needed to restore public order.

Samira Ahmed on the way Britain feels about Joe Orton: "The house on the Saffron Lane estate is gone. Joe’s sister Leonie told me she’d pleaded with the council to keep just that one house. The replacement bungalow has a tiny shabby blue plaque easy to miss and almost too high to read. As I look at it I think with frustration of the lucrative tourist industry around Paul McCartney’s National Trust owned council house in Liverpool. I wonder why the councillors of Leicester didn’t see that too?"

Kevin Keegan is something of a forgotten figure, but Barney Ronay shows that he blazed the trail for today's football multi-millionaires.

Brass Eye's satire holds up 20 years on, argues Tom Gatti.

"Garner’s novel doesn’t learn from history or its landscapes, it becomes such history and landscapes." Adam Scovell celebrates the 50th birthday of Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service.

Michael Elwyn, Corin Redgrave and The Newcomers

Talking about Joe Orton last Saturday, Michael Elwyn recounted how he had appeared in the 1960s BBC soap opera The Newcomers.

When he threw it up to join a touring theatre company, Auntie was horrified. Two dozen scripts with his character in them had been written. The solution turned out to be to cast Corin Redgrave as his twin brother and carry on as if nothing had happened.

When I spoke to Elwyn afterwards, he told me he had given Judy Geeson her first screen kiss in the programme.

He also kindly suggested that I was too young to remember The Newcomers. But I do remember it, if only from its last days. It ran from 1965 to 1969.

Only a very few episodes survive, but you can read some memories of the show on Britmovie.

If you look at Wikipedia or the IMDB, you will find no mention of Elwyn or Redgrave. But the BBC Genome site allows me to be exact.

Michael Elwyn appeared in seven episodes of The Newcomers at the end of 1965. Corin Redgrave then appeared in a further nineteen.

There is something wonderful about the idea of a Redgrave appearing in a soap.

You can hear John Barry's theme to The Newcomers above, but I cannot claim it gives me any tingles of memory,but it does sound splendidly Sixties,

Celebrating 50 years of Joe Orton's Loot in Leicester

I spent today at the New Walk museum and art gallery in Leicester for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's play Loot.

The play had first gone on a provincial tour with an extraordinary cast - Kenneth Williams, Duncan Mcrae, Ian McShane, Geraldine McEwan - but had not pleased its audiences and been beset by constant rewrites in an attempt to put things right.

Williams was a friend of Orton, but it is hard to see how he could ever have made a suitable Inspector Truscott.

Loot was rescued by a new production in Manchester and two veterans of it were in Leicester today. They were its director Braham Murray and cast member Michael Elwyn.

Murray had worked closely with Orton to reshape and rewrite they play and described him as a "shy, sweet man".

The Truscott in that production was Julian Chagrin, and when I chatted to them afterwards they were suitably impressed that I knew he had been one of the tennis players in Blow-Up. (I did not reveal my debt to Nicholas Whyte's enthusiasm for the Double Deckers, which led me to that knowledge.)

Jake Arnott, whose novels I have enjoyed, talked about the background to Loot and in particular the figure of Harold Challenor, the police officer who inspired Truscott.

But the star of the day was Joe Orton's sister. Leonie Orton Barnett. She read from his letters, including one attacking Loot by his creation Edna Welthorpe.

She is about to publish her own story of gaining an education and becoming her brother's champion under the suitably Ortonesque title I Had It In Me.

The cover, featuring a photograph of her as a young woman, looks like a lost Smiths' single. Which is appropriate, as Morrissey is one of many later artists who have acknowledged Joe Orton's influence.

A mention, too, for Bernard Greaves, the co-author of that Liberal classic The Theory and Practice of Community Politics. I did not get a chance to speak to him, but he spoke movingly of the experience of being gay in the era of Loot.

Six of the Best 543

"It seems to me that the Left's narrative about neoliberalism is too naive to overcome it - it understands none of the appeal of its original ideas. It is somewhat vacuous - a fairy tale about nasty people overturning the great and enlightened Keynesian consensus of 1945." David Boyle says it is time for Liberals to read Hayek again.

Jonathan Fryer reviews a new biography of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess.

"[Joe] Orton’s ‘gutter’ was not the brutal and bustling industrial landscape of the North, but the drab monotony of a comfortable city whose council housing reflected its unimaginative mediocrity." Municipal Dreams on the history of Leicester's Saffron Lane Estate.

Morgan Jeffery asks if Doctor Who is in crisis.

"La Shrubsole ... is, in the parlance of the men’s game, quite a “Big Unit”, but light on her feet with an attractive habit of placing herself in the field by skipping from side to side, with her hands extended horizontally, as though dancing to a rendition of 'Nymphs and Shepherds Come Away' only she can hear." Backwatersman bids farewell to the 2015 cricket season and incidentally explains a famous quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A London inheritance climbs the Caledonian Park Clock Tower.

Joe Orton interviewed five months before his death

More about the bard of Leicester's Saffron Lane Estate at Joe Orton Online.

Count Arthur Strong in Leicester

This evening I have been to see Count Arthur Strong at the Little Theatre - the rather superior amateur theatre in Leicester where both Sir Richard Harrison and Joe Orton began their careers. The show was part of the Leicester Comedy Festival.

Count Arthur Strong is a character played by Steve Delaney . He resembles dreadful old comedians like Ted Ray and Tommy Trinder who were still around in my childhood. There is a strong Liverpudlian flavour to the humour, with many punch lines delivered in a style that reminds you of Alexei Sayle or even Bobby Chariot.

Anyway, here is a glimpse of Count Arthur's schtick, though he looked rather more decrepit tonight...



Later. This is a newer clip as the one I chose at the time has disappeared.

Return to the Pork Pie Library

Last May the Leicester Mercury won an award from me for its headline:

Pork pie library may be closing

Now Unmitigated England has visited that library too.

He shares my view that the library - Southfields Library in Leicester -resembles a 1930s London Underground station and gives his memories of working there:

Here I not only rubber-stamped books, but also discovered playwright Joe Orton's old library ticket (with 'default' stamped on it), Len Deighton books and an old man coughing his lungs up in the reading room because he'd been gassed in the First World War. 

I also got to work the wartime siren on the roof for practice alerts (there was a nuclear attack warning device in the cellar), ate a bar of Bournville Chocolate with my morning coffee and read the very first copy of The Sun newspaper. 

All this for £7 a week and the chance to chat up the girl assistants on the evening shift.