Jimmy Clitheroe

After hearing a Clitheroe clip on the original broadcast on Radio 2 of Barry Took's Laughter in the Air I was really keen to hear more, but having heard a few on 7 I now have to say that a little goes a long way. But this may be related to the fact I never heard the programme on the radio so don't have a nostalgiac well to draw from in this instance - though I do vaguely remember a TV version called, I think, Just Jimmy.

It was good to hear the Mark Radcliffe programme and to learn that whatever sadnesses there were in his life he came alive when performing - that certainly comes across.

Incidentally, in the extract on Laughter in the Air, reproduced in the book, after some bit of cheeky repartee Jimmy uses the phrase "I'm all there with me cough drops." Does this refer to some forgotten comic's catchphrase?

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It's amazing how long Sing Something Simple persisted - into the new millennium and onwards until the death of Cliff Adams, in fact. Makes you wonder whether the change in Radio 2 came about less by conscious effort than natural wastage.

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Nicholas Parsons' autobiography has a fuller and more rounded account of his time with Haynes than he tends to give in interviews. It's affectionate but not blind to his faults.

Mention ought to be made in this thread of Johnny Speight who created the tramp character for Haynes.

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There was also some uncredited Speight material in last Sunday's The Comediennes (Betty Marsden) - a sort of broad parody of Brideshead Revisited-type stories which featured in a stage revue.

You can find stuff about the origins of the tramp character on the Arthur Haynes wikipedia page. There are also echoes in Pinter's The Caretaker in the character of Davies who constantly reinvents his identity and background in order to survive, so presumably it was something in the air (though Speight's creation predates it).

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Re my comment above that an interest in tramp characters was in the air at the time of Johnny Speight's creation for Arthur Haynes, Michael Billington's State of the Nation, an overview of postwar British theatre, has some pertinent points. He's talking about sixties drama but presumably the ground was already shifting by the late fifties.

Billington writes that "dramatists were obsessed with the negative aspects of material advance: in particular the spread of consumerist conformism, the erosion of individual identity, the threat of a prevailing blandness."

Some playwrights "looked to history for expamples of principled opposition [but] another group of dramatists was obsessively concerned with a very different form of social resistance to prevailing values: that provided by dossers, derelicts and drop-outs."

So you could see Speight's tramp character for Arthur Haynes and, indeed, Galton and Simpson's Wild Man of the Woods episode for Hancock as arising from the same social circumstances as Pinter's The Caretaker and other plays of the time.

One further thought: as Johnny Speight always credited Shaw with opening his eyes to a wider world, could it be that coming across Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's father in Pygmalion, was a factor in the creation of the Haynes tramp for Arthur Haynes? Doolittle is a dustman, not a vagrant, but like the Haynes character he has an answer for everything and is unfazed by mixing with his social superiors.

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Just before we return to the ostensible topic, have to mention that Meet the Wife is referenced in the John Lennon song Good Morning, Good Morning from Sergeant Pepper: "Everyone you see is full of life, / It's time for tea and Meet the Wife."

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In case anyone is at a loose end in London, Tony Haygarth (familiar from various sitcoms and much else) is currently playing Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion at the Old Vic in London, directed by Peter Hall. He even looks a little like Arthur Haynes; now if anyone wanted to revive those tramp sketches ...

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As some readers will know, Freddie Frinton has achieved an unexpected kind of immortality in Germany in the sketch Dinner for One (which can be viewed on a certain well-known website), which is regularly shown there on New Year's Eve.

This is similarly off-topic but I just thought I'd share it and cast the net of this thread (not, I admit, the most precise metaphor) a little wider: I've just been rereading Frank Muir's autobiography and he had to get a hernia seen to while in the RAF. He hung a notice above his hospital bed with the words:

Does my hernia
Concern ya?

until the matron asked him to take it down.

This amused me. I'm not certain why.

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Ah, Denny Willis, admired by Ronnie Corbett. There is a feature film called Save a Little Sunshine (1938) with Willis, Pat Kirkwood and, looking incredibly and almost unrecognisably young, Tommy Trinder and Max Wall. Not much of a film, though agreeable enough, except for a tiny segment which appears to be part of a variety sketch. That two minutes or so is the purest gold and a very good reason for the existence of the website mentioned earlier though I don't think the clip is on it.

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Ah. My mistake. I do remember Ronnie Corbett enthusing about one of the Willises - I assume the father. An obit by nostalgiameister Dennis Gifford for the son can be found here:

findarticles.com/p/a...

What's interesting is that it notes a shortened version of the famed foxhunting routine by the dad can be found in the film I referred to - this is probably the section with Trinder and Wall (again, so young - really quite disconcertingly so) which stuck in my mind though I can't swear to it, having only seen it once about fifteen years ago in the good old days when the Museum of London used to show films in the evenings - ah, many a happy hour have I spent there. Often in the company of about fifteen other people - which explains why they don't run those evenings anymore.

Anyway, talking of the good old days I also found a site with pics plus music of the Good Old Days version of the routine by the son (think it's a different version from the one on a certain well-known tubular website):

www.geocities.com/co...

But that isn't the end of the story, oh dear me no. I was going to say there's a film short featuring a not dissimilar item by Jack Buchanan as an extra on my DVD copy of The Bandwagon (Astaire, not Askey) but according to a well-known website with encyclopedic aspirations it is in fact the same routine, originally performed by Buchanan in the Charlot Revue of 1925 - so that's where Denny (or was it Dave? I'm confused now) got it from. Unless it was a music hall staple before that.

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I'd hardly say RP for the mother.

I have often wondered about the grandfather - an example of tokenism? One handy show to cover Northern AND North of the Border .. . Though making him fond of a pint doesn't exactly help on the stereotyping front ...

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Renee Houston? Ah, that would explain a lot. In BBC 7 terms she'll be remembered as one of the mainstays, NPI, of The Petticoat Line, but my strongest memory is of her comic performance as the sentimental and cunning Sara Monday in Alec Guinness's own screen adaptation (directd by Ronald Neame) of Joyce Carey's great novel about an artist The Horse's Mouth.

Though it does make it odder that Jimmy picked up nothing when two Scottish accents were going on at him day after day ...

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Looked through various online definitions of the phrase - quite a variety of them too. Perhaps the one which best fits comes from a " real" (ie an actual book in my library) slang dictionary ed. Jonathan Green - a "card" or a "character" - though I saw this expanded in one online definiton (from Eric Partridge's book and he is, or was, the slang ubermeister) "a quick courter or 'love' maker." So those definitions tie in with yours - smart and witty (with the power to seduce or persuade as a result).

But why "cough drop"? I can only think it's related to the soothing effect of the medication - so maybe it's just another way of saying "honeyed words."

And in tomorrow's post, David Crystal puts Alfie's syntax under the microscope. ("BBC 7 Messageboards: educating for life.")

www.davidcrystal.com

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Or could it mean "sharp" (as in "Get in the knife box, you're too sharp to live") so Jimmy is congratulating himself on the cleverness of his patter, the idea of sharpness suggested by the possibly acidic taste of cough drops rather than their emollient effect? To be honest, I'm struggling here. The phrase "I'm all there with my..." interests me too. The young (very young) Eric Morecambe used to do a song called "I'm not all there."

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Yes, and cough drops were, I think, mentioned in that script - an extract was reproduced in Barry Took's Laughter in the Air book so it was probably one of the extracts used in the radio series. (Hey, I'm all there with my essentially useless knowledge forestalling more productive activity.)

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Be assured it's not about adopting a new, concise style but more a reaction to having to endure my first real work day after a civilised summer which allowed ample time for lesiure pursuits such as this. (Or is this board my real occupation? Discuss.)

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I'm torn between the wish not to encourage you and the desire to reprise that old joke which begins: For all the good they did me I might as well ...