With little of interest to watch on any of Greek’s multiple television channel’s or at least little we want to watch we’ve been going through old tapes recorded many years ago and these last two evenings have been watching “Turns”, Jimmy Perry’s reminiscences of Music Hall and Variety with rare archive film clips. Nostalgia is all very well but Music Hall and Variety had come to the end of their time and had to die. Some of the acts would today get no further than the stage door, in particular some of the comedians, and there were acts that would have given the elf and safety fascists the screaming habdabs. (On my spell check there is a word – lablab – what can that mean? Curious. Must look it up.) For example an adagio act that included walking up an A frame possibly about twelve feet to the top, the man beneath doing the climbing while his partner was standing on her head on his head, both of them with their arms outstretched. Up they went and down again. No safety wires. Then there was a quite amazing juggling act by three men who kept it up at terrific speed, one of them playing clown, walking through the flying Indian clubs (can one still call them Indian clubs?). Now would elf and safety allow that today? Golly gosh! They weren’t even wearing safety helmets. Any moment one of them could have been hit by a flying club and laid out unconscious if not suffering something worse. It was interesting to watch acts like Wilson Keppel and Betty again, I hadn’t realised their sand dancing act was quite as intricate as it was, and Little Titch with his elongated feet, another act that would give elf and safety a nervous breakdown.. A lot of the acts were from the thirties so you couldn’t really call them Music Hall which, unlike Variety killed by television, isn’t quite dead, there still being the Players in London (is there still?) and a number of artistes performing in pubs and various venues. When not gainfully employed in the theatre, like “Cats” for example Chris played any number of gigs and had a truly varied repertoire of numbers: Gilbert The Filbert, for which I wrote him an extra verse (see my autobiography No Official Umbrella available on Amazon) George Leybourne’s Oh The Fairies, In The Twi Twi Twilight, Oh That Gorgonzola Cheese, She Pushed Me Into The Parlour, Anchored, Put On Your Ta-Ta Little Girlie, Paree, etcetera. He discovered a number called Why Don’t We Nationalise The Ladies which he performed only once in Hackney where it was roundly hissed and, after she show, the pair of us were confronted by and verbally brutalised by a bunch of Diesel Dykes incensed at this disparagement as they saw it of the fair sex. In vain did we argue it was all part of Music Hall history and only a piece of fun. They weren’t having it – no way. We managed to eventually escape intact but, as I said, it was not performed again. With the passing of time what was acceptable to one generation is not acceptable to the next and you do have to be careful about what you perform I suppose. When I was at JMU in Virginia I was playing in The Fantasticks in which there is a number about rape. We, the cast, suggested to Tom, the director, that in view of two rapes that had taken place recently in the town, the number be cut but he wouldn’t hear of it. When it came up you could literally feel the audience freeze every night and it took a long while to get them warmed up again. An interesting footnote, well interesting to us, I see in my spell check (I thought I had misspelt Leybourne) that there is a Claiborne. Who or what was Claiborne I wonder? Maybe he was a lablab! And the interest is that Leybourne was called that once amongst other mutilations of his name, like Gayborini. Don’t know how the typesetter came up with that one but George must have been a bit put out at least. I know how he felt because my own very simple name is constantly misspelt but ti na kanoume? What can we do?