A Comedian Dies (2 page)

‘Best thing, probably. I still see the girls at weekends. Sometimes. Work and . . . er . . . things permitting.'

‘Glad to see you and Frances are still together anyway.'

‘Yes. Oh . . . er, yes.' Frances' hand found Charles'. He could feel it trembling with a suppressed giggle.

The lights began to dim and the noise from the pit grew louder. Walter leaned forward and hissed, ‘See you in the interval for a drink, eh? And maybe after the show we could go out for a meal or something . . .?' Charles remembered from their previous acquaintance that Walter suffered from the television man's terror of being alone, the need to surround himself with people, to buy company with interminable expense account drinks, to extend every convivial evening as long as possible.

He didn't take up the hint about a meal afterwards, but commented on the chances of an interval drink. ‘Likely to be tea, isn't it? Bars won't be open for a matinée, will they?'

‘Oh no, they won't.' Walter Proud leaned back in his seat. ‘No.' He sounded deeply disappointed and Charles identified the smell that he had been conscious of since his conversation with the producer began. Neat gin.

The curtain of the Winter Gardens, Hunstanton, went up to reveal These Foolish Things. They turned out to be a dance group of four boys and four girls.

In fact, they were not just a dance group, but the latest in a long line of dance groups, all of which had been started by a choreographer called Chuck Sheba (known in the business as the Queen of Sheba). The first group he created was called The Young Things, who enjoyed reasonable success in television, cabaret and stage shows, until personnel changes and internal dissensions led to their disbanding and reforming as Some of Those Things and A Thing or Two. This process of binary fission continued so that these new amoeboid groups split again: Some of Those Things became The Thing-Songs and The Best Thing. These Foolish Things, the group in Hunstanton, were born from the break-up of The Best Thing. But they retained the three trademarks which distinguished all Chuck Sheba's groups – namely, they all bought their smiles from the same shop, they all mimed to taped singing, and they all did the same dance. This dance consisted of kicking a bit, pointing quite a bit, turning round a lot and gyrating the hips a great deal.

And that was the dance to which the crumbling audience in the Winter Gardens, Hunstanton, was treated. On this particular occasion it was done to music called
Do the Shuffle
, but that didn't make any difference.

The overamplified sound died as the eight dancers froze into a human fan. The lights were doused and the audience, against the odds, proved they were still alive by lurching into asthmatic applause. They then clutched their prescriptions in anticipation of the wonders of Karamba and Judy.

Karamba should have been billed as – and in fact made quite a scene with the local Entertainments Officer because he wasn't billed as – Karamba, THE INTERNATIONAL ILLUSIONIST, and Judy. He appeared in a greening tailcoat and top hat and, with the help of Judy (an escaped traffic warden in darned fishnet tights), he ‘amazed the audience until they could no longer trust the evidence of their own senses'. The audience seemed in greater danger of losing the evidence of their senses in sleep than anything else. The tricks which Karamba performed were all right in their way (for people who like seeing coins disappearing into glasses of water, billiard balls passing through sheets of cardboard and strings of bunting being produced from escaped traffic warden's ears), but they were accompanied by patter of such stultifying banality that sleep was the only refuge. Everything Karamba said was delivered in the same relentless monotone, regardless of meaning or audience reaction. If he was truly, as his publicity claimed, the INTERNATIONAL illusionist, it must have been by virtue of his ability to be dull in many languages. His finale, a long-drawn-out illusion which apparently involved the burning of a five-pound note reluctantly donated by a member of the audience, received the most diluted of applause.

Charles strained in the darkness to read what delights would follow, but his effort was unnecessary as the next act introduced itself.

The curtain rose on a lady in a long pale blue dress, cut high at the waist so as to push her bosom up into a mold like a soap dish. She was not over-endowed and her bosom was spread thin like a birthday cake run out of icing. The woman's face was the sort that went out with ration books, dating back to the days when wives were called Rita and Valerie, and everyone looked like Vera Lynn. Her modern flowing hair style seemed only to heighten the anachronism.

‘Good afternoon, everybody,' she trilled, ‘my name is Vita Maureen and I would like to sing for you a little bundle of songs, some of your old favourites, some right up to date, accompanied of course, by – on the piano – Norman del Rosa.'

A tubby gentleman in a red smoking jacket and an auburn wig twenty years younger than his face looked up from the keyboard to acknowledge his applause. Since there was none, he returned busily to his piano. He played flashy chords loudly, without any music in front of him.

Vita Maureen continued. ‘And first, in holiday mood, what could be more apt than that lovely number
On a Wonderful Day Like Today
. . .'

As the wind which blew uninterrupted from the Urals vented itself against the exterior of the Winter Gardens, Charles could think of quite a few tunes more apt, but Vita Maureen was not to be daunted, and burgeoned into song.

It soon became apparent that she was one of those rare creatures who have gone out of fashion in popular music – a straight soprano. Not for her the transatlantic vowels and broken rhythms of pop. She sang everything like a teenager taking an Associated Board music exam. Every note was right and the interpretation was unsullied by the elaborations of pace and understanding. Everything she sang sounded the same. Her finale,
Bring On the Clowns,
was indistinguishable from
My Secret Love,
which preceded it. She was frozen like a defunct insect in the amber of musical comedy.

The warm applause of her superannuated audience suggested that they wanted to get back into the amber too.

The act which followed the lovely Vita Maureen and Norman del Rosa came from the opposite end of the musical spectrum. First, there was a longish delay, filled with thumps and muffled curses from on-stage, and then the curtain rose to reveal a pop group called Mixed Bathing.

Mixed Bathing was obviously a group in search of an image, which had tried to cover all its options by dressing each member in a different style. The lead guitarist/vocalist affected electric green satin trousers and a silver lamé string vest. The rhythm guitarist wore a striped blazer and white flannels. The keyboard player had on a black leotard and top hat, while the drummer wore a complete army combat kit.

Musically they suffered in the same way and again had tried to deal with the problem by playing a very wide pop repertoire, in the hope that some of it must inevitably suit their styles. And to ensure that it should all sound indistinguishable anyway, they played at very high volume.

The array of electrical equipment on-stage explained the long delay before the group's appearance. They were walled in by banks of speakers and amplifiers. When they launched into their first number,
Under the Moon of Love,
those painted panes of glass in the Winter Gardens' dome hitherto undisturbed by the wind, joined their fellows in a cacophony of rattling. The waves of sound fluttered the old-age pensioners like sweet wrappers in a windy playground. It was a relief to most of the senses when Mixed Bathing reached their final earth-shaking chord and the curtain fell.

It next rose to reveal Lennie Barber manhandling a small cart onto the stage. He was having difficulty in doing this, first because his hands were encumbered by giant mittens and, second, because one of the cart's wheels had been caught by some offstage obstruction. He gave a sharp tug and it lurched on. A rattle of laughter came from the geriatric audience, uncertain whether or not this was part of the act.

It was a shock for Charles to see Lennie Barber. He was unmistakably the one who had starred in
Short Back and Sides
on the radio and
The Barber and Pole Show
on television, but the familiar contours of his face had shrunk with age. The cheeks, puffed out with affront in a thousand publicity photographs, now hung slack, and deep furrows scored the old laugh lines round his mouth into a mask-like parody. But the greatest surprise was the hair. The old sleek outline of black, raked back from a parting, had now fluffed out into an aureole of springy white. It was only the lack of Brylcreem and the passage of time that had made the change, but perversely it gave the impression that the old Lennie Barber was dressed up, disguised as an old man for a comedy sketch.

His costume also seemed wrong. Gone was the trademark of the white coat from Barber and Pole's famous Barbershop Sketch; in its place the comedian wore a short red jacket over red and white striped waistcoat and trousers. On his head was a small red bowler hat. He looked like an old print of a comedian from a vanished age.

The mittens added to the incongruity. They did not fit the style of the rest of his costume and their great size suggested that they hid some terrible swelling or deformity.

Barber's material was also strange. He started on a sentimental note with a little song about being The Simple Pieman. The chorus was quite catchy.

Don't ask me why, man,

It's just that I'm an

Ordinary Simple Pieman.

When he came out of the song, he changed gear abruptly. He was no longer recreating an old music hall act; he was modem, sharp, even slick. It was a great change from the old days. In the shows with Wilkie Pole he had been robust, optimistic, slightly self-important, always ready to put down his gormless partner. But now he had tried to break out of the old mould and find a style of his own. Charles regretted the change; he knew he shouldn't, but he would have liked a wallow in nostalgia.

However, the comedian's opening patter echoed Charles' mood, so it was not without appeal.

‘Hello, how are you all doing out there? Comfy? Right. I tell you, those seats out there are unbelievably comfy. Old girl we had in earlier in the year found them so comfy she stayed in her seat for a fortnight.' A pause. ‘Mind you, she was dead.'

Charles and Frances seemed to be the only members of the audience who laughed at that one. For the rest it was too near the truth.

‘Matter of fact,' Barber continued, ‘we get a lot of dead people coming to this show. Well, I
assume
that's why nobody laughs.'

‘Talking of death, did you hear about the Irishman who tried to commit suicide by jumping off the top of the Empire State Building? He missed the ground.'

The preoccupation with death was not going down well with the audience. The act was dying on its feet. Lennie Barber changed gear. ‘Actually, the place I'm staying here in Hunstanton, the landlady's a real character. First day I arrived I said, are the sheets clean? She said, yes, I washed them only this morning. If you don't believe me, feel them – they're still damp.'

From then on he was into the familiar territory of
Your Favourite Seaside Landlady Jokes.
The audience, which, like all audiences, felt more comfortable with jokes they had heard before, began to respond. The restraint remained, but there were a good few wheezy chuckles.

Charles found it strange. At the start Lennie Barber had had something, a certain attack, in spite of the audience apathy. But he had gone into the seaside landlady routine with resignation, performing on automatic pilot. Though the audience preferred this Identikit comedy, Charles, as a performer, could recognize that the comedian had opted out. His comic potential was being diluted to nothing. Just as age looked like a disguise on the real Lennie Barber, so did this undistinguished style of performing. In fact, to call it a style was a misnomer; it was lack of style that made it so colourless. But through the drabness of the performance, Charles could still feel the power coming across the footlights.

Lennie Barber's modest ovation was followed by the return of These Foolish Things to do their dance again. This time they were miming to
When You Need Me,
though only an expert would have noticed. However, there was a more significant change. One of the unalterable precepts of the great Chuck Sheba was that all dance groups should comprise an equal number of boys and girls. And, whereas in the opening routine there had been four of each, there were now four boys and only three girls. The seven of them continued with their smiles screwed in as if nothing had happened, but one couldn't help noticing. Charles found it rather funny. Four men would stand in wait; three girls would cavort across the stage and launch themselves into their arms; three men would twirl round with their burdens; and the fourth would also twirl round, trying to look as if he had a girl in his arms too.

The absence of one of the girls was made the more obvious to Charles by the fact that the missing one was the prettiest. All of them had a kind of lacquered, manufactured beauty, but she had looked more authentically beautiful than the others. Long bouncy blonde hair, sweet childish face, trim figure. Charles had found his eyes constantly on her during the opening number and now she wasn't there, he felt cheated. Still, she didn't come back and, at the end of the dance, the group spread out in another depleted fan, the curtain fell to a rattle of applause and the lights came up for the interval.

Walter Proud was leading the four of them to the bar in the hopeless quest of an interval drink, when he stopped and greeted a stocky man with a small bald head. ‘Dickie.'

‘Oh hello, Walter.' The man called Dickie spoke without enthusiasm. He didn't remove from his mouth the cigar at the end of which two inches of ash hung precariously.