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. 

Divine Comedy: I've Been to a Marvellous Party

Neil Hannon, with added BPM, does Noel Coward in this track from the 1998 triple album Twentieth-Century Blues: The Songs of Noël Coward, which featured many big British musical names of the days. It was masterminded by Neil Tennant, and the profits went to AIDS charities.

Coward wrote the song, under the title I Went to a Marvellous Party, for his Broadway revue, Set to Music, which opened in January 1939. It was performed by Beatrice Lillie, who introduced London audiences to it in June of that year.

Most of the words are recited in clipped, Cowardly tones, but where Hannon copies a trick from The Master and sings a line or phrase - as in "scampering past" here - for some reason it's intensely moving.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Peter Wyngarde and James Bolam in Noel Coward's Present Laughter (1964)

Noel Coward wrote Present Laughter in 1939, and it was in rehearsal when war was declared. As a result it wasn't performed until 1942. Many thanks to Classic British Telly for posting this Granada adaptation of it (if only by mistake) from 1964. There are lots more good things on that YouTube channel.

It was shown as the first in a season of four of The Master's plays - A Choice of Coward. There are a fair number of fluffed lines, so it was either shown live or recorded under time pressure.

Yes, the acting is theatrical, but then it has to be. This is Coward satirising the theatre and satirising himself - he even starts to do so in his short prologue to camera.

Peter Wyngarde is convincing in the lead role, and James Bolam - 1964 was also the year The Likely Lads began - is an an eccentric young playwright. His appearance is surely based on that of Leicester's leading existentialist, Colin Wilson.

If you want a good read, try the Wikipedia entry for Peter Wyngarde,

Noël Coward first observed the upper classes in Rutland

Oliver Soden, in his Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward, relates how The Master first observed the upper classes as a young house guest at Hambleton Hall in Rutland.

There, he says, Eva Astley Cooper, who fancied herself as "a kind of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands", had established an artistic salon, and it was this that the young Coward was invited to join:

Later in the war the Hall became a military hospital, and not until the 1920s would Hamilton start to welcome its more distinguished guests, by which time Noël would visit as one of London theatres brighter stars. 

For now he was an awkward teenager recently discharged from a sanatorium and hosted in the spirit of doing a friend a favour. Ever adaptable, he could perform the role of country-house gentleman as easily as he could the cockney page boy or the adolescent muse to a bohemian painter, and he spent much of his time out of doors at Mrs Astley Cooper's maternal insistence that he breathe the clean air (hunting ruled supreme). 

He delighted at the new luxuries, and was perhaps set to entertain the guests amid the mesh of cigarette holders and the clink of champagne saucers. He was able to drink in a way of life both foreign and fascinating, scrutinising the English upper classes on their home turf, in all their tweets and traditions 

One characteristic of his country-house plays, for which Hambleton was an early model, is his ability to exist affectionately and easily within his onstage world while simultaneously commenting on it from the outside. 

It was as if he had opened the front of the hall on hinges like a doll's house to see the goings on behind from, the servant's bedrooms in the attic to the steamy kitchen beneath, and, between the two, the corridors of spare bedrooms, fires lit in each, in which guests would sleep beneath luxurious linen and, who knows, perhaps pad from one to the other in the dead of night.

In his play The Young Idea (1920), he would describe the English hunting country, where “immorality is conducted by rules and regulations”.

I particularly like it when Soden writes:

Mrs Astley Cooper, now aged sixty-one, lived at Hambleton Hall, a grand Victorian pile built on the centre of the Hambleton Peninsula, overlooking Rutland Water.

This suggests he has no more time than Lord Bonkers for the Rutland Water truthers, who insist that it did not exist until the 1970s.

The latest connections from our Trivia Desk

These just in.

In her London Review of Books review of Barbra Streisand's memoir My Name is Barbra, Malin Hay records:

By the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’).

Did he really dress like that? When Fischer burst on to the international scene aged 15, he dressed like any other American teenager of the Fifties and wore a T-shirt. A few years later, he agreed to fly over to record a programme for the BBC because he had calculated that the schedule would allow him enough time to be measured for a Savile Row suit.

Certainly, he was well turned out for his world championship match against Boris Spassky - there was no sign of a deranged pilot then.

******

At the start of his biography of Noel Coward, Oliver Soden writes:

Violet Coward doted on her son. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, disarmingly bright, and he showed signs of being musical, reaching tiny fingers up to the piano in the parlour of the Cowards' semi-detached house, known as "Helmsdale", at 5 Waldegrave Road in Teddington.

Violet and her husband, Arthur, had befriended the local celebrity Robert [actually Richard] "R. D." Blackmore, bestselling author of Lorna Doone, and he agreed to become godfather to their child, sending a carriage drawn by a white pony to trundle the boy, resplendent in his Victorian skirts, around the streets of the prosperous Middlesex suburb.

But this was not Noel: it was his older brother Russell Arthur Blackmore Coward, who died, aged six, the year before Noel was born.

Because I think I already knew about Neil Diamond and Bobby Fischer being classmates of Barbra Streisand, R.D. Blackmore being the godfather of Noel Coward's brother is our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Later. As well as correcting my and Oliver Soden's errors, Richard James tells me that R.D. Blackmore and Noel Coward's father were both chess players.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Brief Encounter, Kind Hearts and Coronets: Two outstanding podcasts on two outstanding films

Search for a list of the 10 best British films and there's a good chance that both Brief Encounter and Kind Hearts and Coronets will feature in it. In the Empire Online list from a couple of months ago, for instance, they figure at 5 and 7 respectively.

So it's good that in recent days I have come across outstanding podcasts about both.

The Cine-Files, like all the best podcasts, has two presenters. And what is so good about their edition on Brief Encounter is that one of them, Steve Morris, is already convinced of its greatness, while the other, John Rocha, very much remains to be convinced.

By the end of it, I think Morris will have convinced every listener that David Lean's direction, Noel Coward's dialogue and Celia Johnson's acting add up to something quite extraordinary. And I, at least, came away wondering if the hero of the film isn't Johnson's husband Fred.

If you want a little more on Brief Encounter, then try the episode of the BBC's Free Thinking on Why we Need Weepies. Like Cine-Files, it entertains the terrible possibility that Johnson may not be the first woman Trevor Howard has picked up at Milford Junction.

The Comfort Blanket podcast bills itself as:

"talking about the films, TV shows, books or music which people go to again and again to feel safe, happy and welcome."

But there's nothing comfortable about the latest edition, where Naomi Alderman brings along Kind Hearts and Coronets for discussion.

This, after all, is a film in which we are invited to take the part of a mass murderer and do so enthusiastically. And we are left wondering whether, after the film closes, Joan Greenwood's Sibella won't prove to be the deadliest character of all.

My only complaint is that no one on the podcast is aware that the journalist who turns up at the end to ask about Louis's memoirs is played by a young Arthur Lowe.

If you want a little more, then try the Soho Bites Podcast episode on the film Monsieur Ripois, which interviews Joan Greenwood's son Jason Morell.