"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence.
His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented.
Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures.
Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning to Dickens in the shape of David Lean's peerless Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Carol Reed's 1970 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, says Christie, was the first colour adaptation of a Dickens novel.
And we end with some modern Gothic takes of London, including Death Line and From Hell.
A short documentary on the great British film director Carol Reed, focusing on his trilogy of great films of the late 1940s – Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man – and Oliver!, for which he won an Oscar late in his career.
Bobby Henrey, the boy from The Fallen Idol, is still with us and can be heard talking about his experience of making the film on an edition of the Soho Bites podcast.
Before he was a film director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer.
And he never lost his interest in photography. I remember Keith Hamshere, the first boy to play Oliver Twist in Oliver! and later a leading Hollywood stills photographer, saying he learnt to keep out of Kubrick's eyeline if he was on set during one of his films.
If he didn't, Kubrick would notice him and say something like "Is that a new lens? How are you finding it?", the film suddenly forgotten.
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.
This session was recorded in 2012, three years before Ron Moody died. As well as Moody, who played Fagin in the 1968 film of Oliver! having first created the role on stage, it features Kenneth Cranham, who was Noah Claypole, and Mark Lester, who was Oliver himself.
As Kenneth Cranham says, it was Moody's reinvention of Fagin that made the film's worldwide success possible by moving the story away from the medieval antisemitism that Dickens drew upon. I wrote about this aspect of the novel in a book chapter a few years ago - there a short extract in another post on this blog.
But then Dickens long ago lost control of Oliver Twist. Such is the power of the novel that it has entered folklore and, like a folk tale, it now changes with every telling of its story. I wrote more about this in 2015 when Ron Moody died.
I posted a video of the South Bank Show film on the staging of Sweeney Todd a few days ago and have been obsessed with Stephen Sondheim's musical ever since. I didn't see Sweeney in 1980, but I have strong memories of watching that film about that production, with the result that I cannot quite accept anyone but Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock in the lead roles.
Someone has made the video above by pulling out some of the scenes of the finished show from the film, and if you are as obsessed as me you will want to listen to the audio recording of the whole of the closing performance of that first London production.
The closing performance came after four months, and a lot of money was lost. It was an expensive production, including a full orchestra, and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was a huge venue to fill.
Stephen Sondheim was not then, at least in Britain, the acknowledged master of musical theatre that he became. Side by Side by Sondheim had recently been a success in the West End, but it was a revue and had been staged in a theatre less the half the size of Drury Lane. Nor was Sweeney Todd's subject matter calculated to bring the coach parties in.
But it was the lukewarm response of the critics that got most of the blame - you can hear Quilley mention them in his brief speech at the end of the audio recording. And even in the ecstatic response of Michael Billington, you can make out the factors that helped keep the crowds away:
Sweeney Todd is the reversal of everything we traditionally expect of a musical. It has a powerful and gripping story, hardly a single extractable tune, a fierce sense of social justice. Yet, after seeing it on Broadway 18 months ago and now at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, I would call it sensationally effective.
Indeed, burning a boat or two, I would say it is one of the two (My Fair Lady being the other) durable works of popular musical theatre in my lifetime.
Even if that was going it a little, he was a better predictor than most of his colleagues. Sweeney Todd is now accepted as a stone cold classic.
A true story?
In one of his few narrator's incursions into the South Bank Show film, Melvyn Bragg says that the legend of Sweeney Todd is based on a true story that happened in Paris around 1800 and first appeared in print in Britain in 1846.
But The Singing Organ-Grinder has found a version of the legend that sets it in 17th-century Calais. And Charles Dickens assumes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) that his readers will know and smile at stories of people being turned into pies in London:
Tom's evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard country legends as doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis.
So I suspect that Sweeney Todd and his Continental equivalents are urban legends with a long history.
Not the first musical
Searching the British Newspaper Archive, I discovered that Sondheim's was not the first musical about Sweeney Todd to be staged in London. In 1959, a musical called The Demon Barber was staged at the Lyric, Hammersmith.
A pompous introduction to the programme of "The Demon Barber," at the Lyric, Hammersmith, states that this new musical has roots which "reach to 'The Beggar's Opera', the music hall, and D'Oyley (sic) Carte". Be that as it may, the result is a feeble adaptation as a musical of the Sweeney Todd story, the blood and thunder gone and replaced by burlesque which flies wide of its mark.
It seems no one else much liked it either, as a member of cast recalls:
My first theatre job in London was in 1959 at the Lyric Hammersmith. I was Jonas Fogg the madhouse keeper (who else?) in Donald Cotton and Brian Burke’s The Demon Barber. It was quite an elaborate little musical about Sweeney Todd which Stephen Sondheim had never heard of. Sondheim didn’t know of this version when he composed the 1979 musical/opera Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
It closed on Christmas Eve after 14 performances. Not very long after, this exquisite theatre was demolished at a time when borough councils felt it was their duty to continue the work of Reichsmarschall Goering in the destruction of London. They brought a new ferocity to the task, and many of London’s theatres that had survived the Blitz were gleefully pulverised by the advocates of Progress.
The Lyric was cynically reconstituted, but it was never the same.
The writer is Barry Humphries. At least the swift demise of The Demon Barber left him free to appear in Oliver! the following July.
Don't worry. I'll have found a new rabbit hole soon.
Twelve years old Dennis Mallard, who appears very briefly in the new Harry Secombe film "Davy," thought his film career was not developing fast enough.
He ran away from home on Monday night, aiming to get to a film studio.
While his family thought he was asleep in bed, he was trudging through the cold night wearing only jeans, shirt and blazer, to Dartford, six miles from his home, 119, Milton Road, Gravesend.
There he hid in the back of a lorry which took him to London.
He stowed away on another lorry and found himself in Ealing.
Then the glamour of finding the limelight the hard way wore a bit thin and he became frightened.
He went to a church for help and a clergyman informed the police.
But that was not the end of Dennis Mallard.
I can't find any mention of him having appeared in Davy, which was one of the long tail of inferior Ealing comedies and designed as a star vehicle for Harry Secombe.
But I have found a page that has him making an uncredited appearance in a Children's Film Foundation production, One Wish Too Many, as early as 1956.
And the British Film Foundation has him making a similarly unacknowledged appearance in The Violent Playground later in 1958. As this film's premiere was in March 1958, it must (as Flashbak suggests) have been filmed in 1957, before the boy ran away to Ealing.
So it looks as though young Dennis Mallard was already appearing in films by the time he ran away, but as nothing more than an extra.
Researching him is difficult because he does not have an IMDb entry, so I was pleased to find that the British Film Institute has a page for the 1959 BBC adaption of Great Expectations, which lists him as having played Pip, along with the slightly older Colin Spaull and much older Dinsdale Landen.
Yet a clip of the young Pip encountering Magwich in the churchyard from this serial looks nothing like the photo of Dennis Mallard in the local newspaper report that sent me down this rabbit hole. And, sure enough, IMDb has a photo of the encounter, with the boy playing Pip named as Colin Spaull. As this scene is as young as Pip gets in the book, what did Dennis Mallard do?
The answer is on BBC Genome, where he is billed as playing Pip Gargery. Over to Dickens, and the scene thee a sadder and wiser adult Pip returns to the forge, only to find that Biddy, who he has resolved to marry, has wed Joe Gargery:
There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as ever, though a little grey, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner with Joe’s leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was – I again!
"We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap," said Joe, delighted, when I took another stool by the child’s side (but I did not rumple his hair), "and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and we think he do."
And if you think Dennis was too old to play this part, he's not. Because Nostalgia Central helpfully tells us:
One major narrative change has Joe Gargery’s proposed marriage to his housekeeper Biddy taking place before Pip goes to London (this revelation occurs much later in the novel and is the last nail in the coffin of Pip’s disillusionment as he was planning to marry Biddy himself).
Let's cut to the chase. Here's a report from the Kent Evening Post for 27 June 1975:
Few people meeting the quiet and unassuming Dennis Mallard at his Leysdown china shop would ever dream of his past. For the man who compared last night's Evening Post search-for-a- star show was once a star of stage and screen himself.
Dennis. now married and a father of three living in Poplar Avenue, Gravesend, started his carcer at the age of five.
He went to stage school at Upton Park till he was 11 when he landed his first mal part in a BBC production of Great Expectations.
After numerous theatre and TV appearances in plays and adverts he landed his own ITV show in which Una Stubbs (remember her as the screen daughter of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part) was a dancer.
That was all in the days of early commercial TV – and before Dennis’ 16th birthday.
"Then I for some reason felt I'd had enough of showbusiness and decided to try and make some money instead.
"I thought being a market trader was next best thing and began selling china."
He still keeps his hand in however by doing occasional compering slots and has accepted an invitation to be MC at all the talent competition evenings.
I've not so far found any trace of his ITV series or of an ITV adaption of A Christmas Carol starring Stephen Murray as Scrooge in which he is said to have appeared. But the upturn in his career does seem to have happened soon after he ran away to Ealing.
And there is one thing we know he was doing in 1960: he was in the first performance of Oliver! as a workhouse boy and member of Fagin's gang. Because his name is on the credits for the original cast recording.
SERGEANT: Today the professor is here to talk to us about Keats. I bet none of you ignorant bastards even knows what a Keat is.
Today, with the rise of podcasts, there's no excuse for such ignorance. Here are three good podcast episodes on 19th-century literature.
The first line of John Mullan's book The Artful Dickens asks: "What is so good about Dickens's novels?" This is just the sort of question that modern literary theory disapproves of, but they are wonderfully good. In an interview on the National Centre for Writing podcast, Mullan emphasises that Charles Dickens was not just an inventor of eccentric characters but also an endlessly innovative technician.
A recent edition of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time dealt with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I am another of those men who haven't read it, actually, but the way this podcast explains its place in American culture and history makes me want to.
Dickens: A Brain on Fire! has a great edition on Oliver Twist. Emily Bell reminds us what an astonishing book it is - far from the genteel Sunday afternoon entertainment it is sometimes in danger of becoming. Someone said that Oliver himself needed a song in the second half of Lionel Bart's Oliver! so he can tell us how he's feeling, and that's true of the novel too.
Finally, here's a tribute to Timothy West and a reminder that Dickens wrote the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
Happy 90th birthday to the incredible Timothy West. I spent the best part of a year writing a book with Tim and his generosity knows no bounds. He can act a bit too. Here he is in full flow as Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times.
When I published a book chapter on Charles Dickens and antisemitism a couple of years ago, I managed to slip in the expression 'well-behaved orphans'. But it turns out that the original Well-Behaved Orphan wasn't Oliver Twist but his benefactor, Mr Brownlow.
Mr Brownlow's name and character generally believed to be derived from John Brownlow, the director of the Foundling Hospital, which was dedicated to looking after abandoned and unwanted children. Dickens, a regular visitor to the hospital, knew Brownlow well.
Dickens scholar Robert Alan Colby argues that "in naming Oliver's benefactor Mr Brownlow, Dickens seems to have been paying a tribute to one of the most dedicated social servants of his age".
The Foundling Hospital mentioned here is the one in Bloomsbury founded by Thomas Coram in 1739.
And, fascinatingly there is more about Mr Brownlow:
In 1831, seven years before Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, John Brownlow had written a novel about an orphan called Hans Sloane - a Tale, which has a plot broadly similar to Dickens's later work. Several critics have suggested that Dickens took aspects of the basic plot of his novel from Brownlow's earlier work, so the name may have been a tribute for two reasons.
Look up John Brownlow and you soon find Roy Sloan's History Hamper blog:
John Brownlow was the most famous and esteemed servant of the Foundling Hospital in the more than two centuries of its existence, from the opening of its doors in 1741 to final closure in 1954. He was himself a foundling. The son of Mary Goodacre, he was admitted on 9 August 1800 at the age of three months and given his new name and a number, 18,607.
Like all of the foundlings, he spent his early years with a foster family (that of Mary Skinner of Hadlow, Kent) before being returned to the Hospital. In 1814, instead of leaving to be apprenticed to an employer, he was taken into the Secretary’s office as a clerk, an arrangement that was formalised in 1817. This was possibly an acknowledgement of his exceptional ability, although the formal register says ‘Invalided 18 June 1817’.
He was promoted to Treasurer’s Clerk in 1828 and became Secretary, in charge of the day-to-day running of the institution, in 1849. He was with the Hospital almost from cradle to grave, retiring in 1872 just a year before his death in August 1873.
While we're talking about Mr Brownlow, here are a couple of pieces of trivia connected with his appearance on the cinema screen.
First, in David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, Brownlow was played by the actor Henry Stephenson. He was born in 1871, which was the year after Charles Dickens died.
Second, in the BBC 'Ghost Story for Christmas' adaptation of M.R. James's short story Lost Hearts, the evil Mr Abney, who takes in a young orphan boy out of apparent benevolence but really out of a wish to consume his heart in pursuit of eternal life, is played by Joseph O'Conor. And Joseph O'Conor played Mr Brownlow in the 1968 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver.
G.K. Chesterton once said that Dickens' characters would soothe their optimistic creator with something less terrible than the truth. Could it be that Mr Brownlow was guilty of that too?
There's an irony to Kathe Green's musical career. Everyone knows her voice, but her first album - Run the Length of Your Wildness - is notoriously hard to find.
You know her voice because her father Johnny Green composed and conducted the score for the film of Lionel Bart's Oliver! It turned out that Mark Lester, their Oliver Twist, couldn't sing a note and had to be dubbed. Kathe, already in her mid-twenties, showed her father she could produce a convincing voice for him and got the job.
And if you do come across a copy of her rare first album, the critics agree it's not that good a listen.
Strangely scattershot, if fitfully entertaining LP, Run the Length of Your Wildness can't quite make up its mind whether to be pop-folk, Swinging London pop/rock, or middle of the road pop.
In that respect, as well as in its Baroque orchestral arrangements (which verge on the fruity at times), it's reminiscent of another late-'60s record, Dana Gillespie's Foolish Seasons - not surprising, as Wayne Bickerton produced both albums.
You can throw in some similarities to a few other British female vocalists of the time straddling the lines between pop and folk, like Marianne Faithfull and (much more distantly) Judith Durham of the Seekers ...
Green did write or co-write much of the material on Run the Length of Your Wildness, and some of it's above average for this orchestrated British pop-folk-rock genre, particularly 'Primrose Hill' and the slightly Donovan-ish 'Promise of Something New.''
Overall, however, it's a little too mushy, and recommended only to serious fans of this particular niche genre.
But it couldn't be more of its era. The title comes from a poem by Green's friend Richard Harris, and the album sleeve has notes by Peter Sellers, Rex Harrison and Simon Dee.
It's so Sixties, there's a song named for a fashionable part of London. So here's Primrose Hill.
And for proof a boy can sing Where is Love?, try Keith Hamshere from the original London production of Oliver!. He even manages to sound angry about things towards the end.
What a career Barry Humphries had! An avant-garde artist and actor in Fifties Australia, then part of the satire boom in Sixties London and after that best known as the manager of housewife gigastar Dame Edna Everage.
One achievement that may get overlooked in the tributes is that in 1960 he was in the cast of the original production of Oliver! and then went to Broadway with the show. He played Mr Sowerberry the undertaker, and Lionel Bart liked him so much that he wrote this song for him.
If you don't know it, that may be because it's not in Carol Reed's film or on the Broadway cast album.
Humphries was also Ron Moody's understudy in that original production and was later to play Fagin himself in revivals of the show.
I've also learnt a pleasing piece of trivia today. Humphries' widow (his fourth wife - they were married for 33 years) is the actress Elizabeth Spender. She appeared in Terry Gilliam's Brazil and is the daughter of the poet Stephen Spender.
She once suggested that the fiercely intellectual Humphries had married her for her books.
Southern Television, which held the ITV broadcasting licence for the South and South-East of England until the end of 1981, had a reputation in the 1960s for its children's programmes.
Most of these were wiped long ago, including the drama series Mystery Hall, which I think I remember watching in 1967.
But the lost Southern series I really mourn is The Master from 1966, because it was based on a book by T.H. White.
As the blurb on my Puffin edition says:
This is, in some ways, a surprising book to come from the author of The Sword in the Stone and Mistress Masham's Repose, for it is, at first reading, a straightforward thriller.
In fact it's almost a James Bond thriller, in that it involves an evil mastermind bent on world domination. His lair is inside Rockall, a rock in the North Atlantic that Britain claimed two years before The Master was published in 1957. And because it is a children's book he is foiled, not by 007, but by a pair of twins and their dog.
The blurb goes on to suggest that the book
also has the quality of writing and the subtle undertones which made the late T.H. White a superlative story-teller.
The undertones are certainly there, including discussion of the morality of warfare. And the first sentence, enticing and perfectly pitched at its intended audience to be see what a fine writer White is:
It was a blistering day in July, and the swell of the sea was like melted lemonade bottles.
The other evening I discovered a Twitter account dedicated to missing television programmes and run by Sam Czopanser. (I suspect this is a pseudonym as it was the name of a character in a largely lost 1970 science fiction series called The Adventures of Don Quick.) Anyone with an interest in missing TV should follow him.
And in a recent thread Sam included TV Times cuttings on The Master.
There was the full-page feature you can see above, including an overacting John Laurie two years, the two young heroes and the only adult goodie George Baker.
Then there was the cast list from TV Times - the first episode was broadcast on 11 January 1966.
Have a look too at the programme before The Master. Five O'Clock Club featured Alexis Corner, a pioneer of British blues, and an 18-year-old David Essex.
And there was a feature on the making of The Master and on its young stars in particular, which for some reason refuses to appear as large as I would like, so zoom in if you wish.
Adrienne Poster, under the name Adrienne Posta, appeared in films of the 1960s and early 1970s, with Up the Junction being the most notable, and also did a lot of televions and recorded pop singles.
The reference to Paul Guess having already appeared in Oliver! reminded me of Alan Bennett's diary entry, later published in his Writing Home, after auditioning boys for his own play 40 Years On:
Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Guess can't have suffered too badly, as he was in the cast for the play's first night.
Oliver! is the great British musical. I regard that as a statement of fact rather than an opinion.
Legend has it that the opening night audience went wild, but what did the critics make of it?
Well, our old friend J.C. Trewin loved it. Writing for the Birmingham Daily Post on Friday 1 July 1960, the day after Oliver's premiere he confirmed the legend:
"May Dickens forgive me!" said Lionel Bart as he took that surprising thing, an author's call, at the end of Oliver! to-night. He came upon the stage of the New Theatre after the most triumphant reception a musical play, and a British play at that, has had in years.
As for himself:
After the twentieth call we knew what the first-night audience thought. I fancy that Dickensians will forgive Mr. Bart. exclamation mark and all. I repeat, this is not a night for pedantic analysis. You have either to surrender to it or to carp. Personally. I have not found it hard to surrender.
He names the songs from show that he thinks will prove most popular: I'd Do Anything, As Long as He Needs Me and Oom-Papah.
Maybe it's just because of Ron Moody's performance of them in the film, but today I think first of Reviewing the Situation and Pick a Pocket or Two.
Who Will Buy?, with its street cries, is in many ways the most interesting, while the least interesting, Food Glorious Food, was the one BBC Radio played to death for a couple of decades.
And this is what Trewin had to say about the cast:
Fagin is presumably allowed to get away. Something, of course, may happen to him later; but that it not in Mr. Bart's scheme, and we could not wish that much would happen to the old fence as Ron Moody presents him, in a fantastic-grotesque performance that is suited exactly to Oliver! if it is not entirely Dickensian ....
But this is not a time to consider the acting too closely. though such a major part as Georgia Brown's Nancy has full spirit. Keith Hamshere is meltingly Oliver. and a sketch of the undertaker's wife by Sonia Fraser, late of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, would aid any production.
Ron Moody we all know. Georgia Brown is generally acknowledged as being a better Nancy than the film's Shani Wallis, though it's hard not to regret that the money men wouldn't grant Carol Reed's wish to cast Shirley Bassey.
Sonia Fraser had a long career in theatre and was a friend and collaborator of Miriam Margolyes. Keith Hamshere lasted over a year before he grew too tall to play Oliver, then made a couple of films and gave up acting to become one of the leading stills photographers in the film industry.
Having inadvertently posted a video for the second time this week, I have decided to do it more often. After all, most of my readers now weren't born when I started blogging.
So here are the children of The Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in 1958, performing part of Carl Orff's Music for Children.
Surely this is the soundtrack from a lost folk horror classic? Certainly. it is the most frightening recording I know.
Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
When it comes to ABBA, I realised not long ago that the one I had always though was Benny was Bjorn. And vice versa. If this court case had gone ahead, Lord Bonkers would have got to know them better than I did.
Saturday
I still maintain that my great grandfather was fully justified in his decision to call out the militia to quell the Stilton Riots of 1819, but my sympathies are instinctively with those campaigning to widen the franchise. Why, I sat through Ken Loach’s Peterloo the other day, even though I generally find his stuff Rather Hard Work.
It happens that in the early 1970s that I myself wrote a musical called Peterloo! – I added the exclamation mark having noticed the success of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! some years before.
My show, it has to be admitted, was not a great success, but I was proud of its theme song. Imagine my fury when I travelled to Brighton to attend the Eurovision Song Contest a year or two later, only to find that song had been stolen by a bunch of Swedes. They tried to hide their plagiarism by changing its title to Waterloo, but I was not fooled for a moment.
I consulted my solicitors, but eventually decided not to pursue an action.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
9 July 1968 - Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Alan Bennett Writing Home (1994)
There is at present a good documentary from 2002 on the BBC iPlayer about the opening night of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver!' It includes interviews with the late Ron Moody and Tony Robinson, who was one of Fagin's gang.
I suspect a young Robinson is second from left in the photograph above. Holding the cake is Keith Hamshere, the original Oliver, who want on to become one of the leading stills photographers in the film industry.
I sometimes wonder if my distrust of public institutions comes from reading Oliver Twist at too early an age.
My great aunt and uncle in Wealdstone had a complete set of Dickens. When we visited them after I had seen Oliver! at the cinema, I asked if I could borrow the book. Whether because of the film or the book, the story has been part of my mental furniture ever since.
I am not alone of this. Oliver Twist and its characters are so powerful that the story has become part of our folklore.
This is not to say that it is a perfectly formed novel. As I once wrote of it:
The plot of Oliver Twist is such a mess (there is a late chapter where Dickens tries to tie up all the loose ends and fails) that you have to hack the novel about to adapt it.
The result of this repeated retelling of the story is that Dickens' version has become just one among many.
And Oliver! is a remarkable retelling of the tale - almost a subversion of it.
Whatever the book's virtues - and they are many - it draws upon ancient stereotypes of the Jew as the stealer of Christian children. In the Middle Ages such accusations were often the pretext for pogroms.
Yet above all Oliver! is a Jewish story. Written by Lionel Bart (born Lionel Begleiter), brought to life above all by Ron Moody (born Ronald Moodnick) and featuring wonderful schmaltzy music like Reviewing the Situation.
Fagin was the villain of the original novel (there Bill Sikes becomes almost a sympathetic figure in his final hours), but when Ron Moody danced off arm-in-arm with the Dodger to find new adventures, the story had been rewritten with him as the hero.
So this evening I am mourning Ron Moody and wondering again at the way Dickens' novels remain alive to us so long after they were written.
And, after all, Fagin did feed Oliver far better than the workhouse authorities did.
Last week's Sunday music video got a comment from the artist herself - Janis Ian. Sadly that cannot happen this week because this performance, recorded in 1991, took place only a few weeks before Steve Marriott died.
As some commenters on Youtube note, he looks remarkably well, especially considering his widely publicised problems with drink and drugs. And it is a really good performance.
We have seen Marriott in one of the great sixties groups the Small Faces and later he was to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton.
But Marriott was well known before the Small Faces. He played the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart's Oliver! in the West End - hear him singing Consider Yourself - and then attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. Readers of this blog may recall seeing him in on the drums in Live It Up - other band members here include Heinz and David Hemmings.
Steve Marriott was undoubtedly one of the great talents of sixties British music, but maybe a little bit of the stage-school brat always clung. Or maybe he just feared that it did.
Incidentally, though Marriott cannot leave a comment I did once get one from Peter Asher.
