SUNDAY NIGHT AT the London Palladium most certainly did put me in the Big Time. My face gained widespread public recognition almost overnight. In time it even found its way onto a bubble-gum card, for goodness’ sake.
THIS PARTICULAR CARD IS from A&BC’s ‘Fotostars’ collection of 1961. Here I am alongside Hughie Green and Patrick McGoohan. Please forgive me, but I just have to quote a little of what they say about me on the back. Here goes: ‘Bruce has a wonderful sense of audience participation and has the knack of making everyone feel perfectly at ease, and his clean, rhythmic brand of comedy appeals to all ages.’
How lovely.
A bubble-gum card was the least of the changes I faced in the years after I first walked out on the Palladium stage as host of the biggest show on television. Nothing was ever the same again. Doors that had not merely been closed to me, but locked tight, were suddenly open.
Less than a year earlier I had been thrilled to be offered a five-minute solo spot on the Associated Television show Sunday Night at the Prince of Wales. The next day, a critic writes the following review: ‘I like the look of this new boy with the original appeal. Note the name: George Forsyth.’ George?
Then SNAP! Everything changes.
ONE YEAR ON AND I am presented to Her Majesty the Queen, backstage at the Coliseum Theatre, following The Royal Variety Performance. In the line-up with me are, from right to left, Charlie Drake, Eartha Kitt (whom I remember as being very quiet-spoken and really delightful), the fabulous Spanish dancer Antonio, Pat Boone, and talented comedian Ron Parry. Ron and I worked on many bills together over the years, but never one quite as grand as this!
Within twelve months I have gone from ‘new boy’ George Forsyth to performing in front of the Queen. It still astonishes me.
TWO YEARS AFTER MY first appearance on SNAP I receive an even greater honour: not only am I invited to appear in the 1960 Royal Variety Performance at the Victoria Palace Theatre, I am asked to compère it.
The date of the performance is Monday, 16 May. If you were able to travel back in time from there, only twenty-four hours or so, where would you find me? Sitting in a deserted London Palladium listening to Nat King Cole play songs from his new LP.
As soon as Nat finishes his final big number on the Sunday night and we’ve waved farewell to the audience, I find myself in a taxi heading to late-night rehearsals at the Victoria Palace, wedged between two of the biggest names in the business – Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr, both of whom are appearing in the Royal Variety the following evening. Sammy joined us at the Palladium to enjoy Nat’s performance, then travel with us to the rehearsals. At one point in our journey, Nat turns towards me and says, in his gravelly voice, ‘Bruce, you should do a book show.’ He’s using the American term for a musical, a song-and-dance show. I can tell he’s serious about it. It’s an incredible compliment coming from someone of his stature and ability.
NAT AND SAMMY AT the rehearsals, with Adam Faith.
And here’s me helping Sammy run through his routine. Or am I merely fiddling with a piece of string while he gets on with it? Hard to tell.
A YEAR ON FROM there, the 1961 Royal Variety Performance took place at the Prince of Wales Theatre in November and once again I was invited to compère. One element of that particular show immediately springs to mind, when I think back on it now, and that is a sense of disappointment. I know that sounds strange and it will sound even stranger when I say that the source of the disappointment was Sammy Davis Jr.
Everyone was, of course, thrilled that Sammy had agreed to join us for the second year in a row, but when he announced that he was going to do only one number, we all felt a little deflated. The act he performed, a dance routine with Lionel Blair based around trying on hats in a shop, was, of course, fabulous; it was just that we wanted Sammy to do more, some solo material.
WHILE WE’RE ON THE subject of the Royal Variety, I’m going to stick with it for a couple more performances.
This next sequence is from the Palladium in 1980 and includes a photograph I’ve always loved. Once again it was taken backstage, during the presentation line-up.
Here’s the build-up.
IN THIS CONTACT SHEET you can just about make out the fabulous jazz saxophonist Johnny Dankworth and his wife, singer Cleo Laine, plus Sammy, comedian Arthur Askey, then next to me Broadway star Mary Martin and her son JR – sorry, Larry Hagman.
THE PHOTO I PARTICULARLY like comes here in the sequence. The Queen Mother has obviously spotted someone she’s a fan of, and starts to laugh and wave at him or her, much to everyone else’s clear delight.
I’ve enjoyed looking at this photograph many times over the years, but for the life of me I could never remember who the mystery person next in line was. Well, now I know, having come across a view from a different angle.
Drum roll … Danny Kaye!
FINALLY FOR THE ROYAL Variety Performance, we’ve moved into 1988, the year in which Ronnie Corbett and I compèred together. A double act like that hadn’t been done before and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Ronnie is always a delight to work with.
I BEGAN THIS CHAPTER discussing the contrast between my career before SNAP, and what subsequently happened in my professional life after I had appeared on the show. Well, my work in cabaret is another good example of that seismic shift.
Let’s take a step back in time for a moment, to 1955.
THIS IS THE CABARET world I inhabited then. Glamorous, isn’t it?
I do hope that young couple are looking up, thinking, That’s not how you spell his name. I doubt it somehow. More likely, Who’s he?
As I mentioned previously, before returning to the Windmill in 1956, I spent a couple of years trying to make a name for myself (without an extra e) performing up and down the country in variety theatres and on the cabaret circuit. It was tough going on occasions, certainly, but at the same time I learned a huge amount.
There is a considerable difference between performing in front of rows of seats in a theatre and entertaining in the more intimate cabaret setting. Frankly, give me the rows of seats any time. In the smaller cabaret clubs in which I was appearing during this period, the audience would be seated at individual tables on three sides of you, perhaps still eating and drinking, with the band behind. This creates a very different atmosphere to that in a theatre. People feel more isolated round tables, less a part of a collective experience. That makes it much harder to engage everyone in what you are doing. So you have to learn to adapt.
Then there is the length of your act. When I started out in variety, the first thing I always did on arrival at the venue was to check the running order. Everyone on the bill would have a number listed against their name, indicating exactly the length of their act. Thirty seconds over and you were in trouble. As the first comic, eight minutes was my norm.
The challenge set by cabaret, however, was altogether different. Instead of eight minutes I suddenly had to fill an hour, something I had never done before. Thank goodness for all those days and nights at the Windmill. They provided me with the basis on which I began to build and adapt my act. That’s why I view these cabaret years as an education and a transition. Had I not taken those early cabaret bookings, I would never have been forced to develop sixty minutes of entertainment and, without that, the one-man shows I embarked on from the 1970s onwards, right through to today, might never have happened.
The cabaret scene might have been hard work back then, but it paved the way for me. I am forever grateful to it.
I MENTIONED HOW VITAL the Windmill was in developing my body of material, well, here is a perfect example. I’m obviously working through the golfers’ routine I first developed around 1953 – the amateur, the slogger, etc. With that stance, I can only hope I’ve reached the ‘old man’ section of the act. You can also see just how close the audience could be in cabaret. Very different from a theatre setting.
Some of the clubs in which I performed were awful. Take the Benelux, which you can see opposite, for instance: it’s hardly salubrious, is it? What you were faced with was a mixed bag. Sometimes I would discover that I had been booked into a delightful spot in an unlikely location – Wakefield, for example, had a marvellous club – while on another night, even later in my career when I was better known, the venue might prove unexpectedly challenging. The Golden Garter in Wythenshawe, near Manchester, was one example.
This had originally been a bowling alley, with a very low ceiling. I appeared there on the opening night after its conversion into a cabaret club. That was a lesson learned. Never perform somewhere new until it has been tried and tested. You don’t know what can go wrong. At the Golden Garter it turned out to be the extractor fans. Performing as the clouds of smelly, oily smoke emanating from the kitchen swirled revoltingly just above head height did not make for a bundle of laughs.
There were no such problems at my favourite cabaret venue of all time – The Talk of the Town. Even appearing on a bubble-gum card couldn’t match the thrill of performing at the country’s premier nightclub in London’s Leicester Square. I genuinely did feel I’d made it then. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Talk of the Town was beautiful. It emerged out of the old London Hippodrome following an extensive conversion in 1958. What a concept. Let me quote from the programme produced for the grand opening: ‘The policy of The Talk of the Town is to provide three forms of entertainment under one roof; here patrons may wine and dine satisfyingly, and elegantly dance to the music of famous orchestras, and, in the course of the evening, enjoy the two contrasted stage presentations that form the theatre-entertainment. Whether you are relaxing or celebrating, you can have a complete night at The Talk of the Town from cocktail-time to the small hours.’
The wining and dining by the ‘patrons’ took place at tables around the dance floor, which then, at the appropriate hour, magically raised itself by three feet for the ‘two contrasted stage presentations’. The first of these would be a floor-show – dancing girls, high kicks, dazzling costumes, the works. Then around 11 p.m., the main act appeared, up on the stage and clearly visible to every member of the audience. Truly wonderful.
I MADE MY DEBUT there on 4 May 1964. Here I am backstage on that very night, with the Beverley Sisters who had come along to celebrate their birthdays. All of their birthdays, not just the twins, Babs (on the left) and Teddie (on the right). Yes, Joy, who was three years older, shares the same birthday as her sisters – 5 May.
I tried to schedule a run of performances at The Talk of the Town once a year, at least. I loved playing there as much as I enjoyed appearing at the Palladium. That tells you something.
I felt a great sadness when the venue closed down in 1982. Part of the reason for the closure was certainly because tastes in entertainment naturally change – cabaret slipped out of fashion. That’s not the whole story, however. I believe that the allure of cabaret began to fade because some audience members were becoming too drunk during the shows. This never applied to The Talk of the Town, but it was certainly true for many other venues up and down the country. It doesn’t take many noisy individuals to ruin the evening for everyone else, resulting in cabaret acquiring an unwanted reputation.
I often wonder if this would have been avoided had Robert Nesbitt, the highly successful theatre producer, been able to realize his dream of reproducing the wonder of The Talk of the Town in all the British major cities. That would have been absolutely marvellous, in my opinion. Performers in London could have enjoyed a run at The Talk of the Town, then taken their show on the road, to all those venues of equivalent quality. As it was, some of the clubs we performed in, through to the 1970s, became pretty dreadful.
Unfortunately Robert’s idea was not taken up by Bernard Delfont, one of the founders of The Talk of the Town. If it had been, access to high-quality cabaret in clubs that would never permit drunken behaviour would have been open to many more people, and as an entertainment form it would have remained popular for much longer.
THE TALK OF THE Town’s demise means that Frankie Vaughan and I will for ever jointly hold the record for number of appearances. I can think of no one I would rather share that accolade with.
I worked on bills with Frankie many, many times, first in the early days when he was sitting on the top and I was one of the smaller acts, then later at the Palladium and on television.
This is the two of us together on SNAP in 1961. You will note that we both have our eyes closed. I suspect we were worried that if we kept them open we would be too distracted even to clap!
Frankie and I became good pals. He was a lovely performer and great to work with because, as top of the bill, he would be responsible for the type of audience who turned up. Different entertainers draw different people. With Frankie it was always a very good-natured, enthusiastic family crowd – dads who felt he would be a laugh to have a beer with, and mums and daughters who fancied him. Lucky devil.
