"A SKULL FULL OF MUSH!"

 

A splendid piece of cover-art featuring the work of the illustrator and distinguished fine artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz (b. 1929), made for TV Guide, the US television listings-magazine. 

 

This issue (May 5-11, 1979) features an impressive double-portrait by Schwartz of James Stephens and John Houseman, stars of The Paper Chase, a law-school drama series that was a spin-off from the 1973 movie of the same name and which quickly became one of my favourite American TV shows of the late '70s and early '80s.

 

Always a fan of 'flamboyant' acting, I adored Houseman's towering reprise of his role in the original film: the domineering, curmudgeonly, sharp-tongued law tutor, Prof. Charles W. Kingsfield Jr.  "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of MUSH; you leave thinking like a lawyer."

 

Also, to be perfectly frank, I had more than a bit of crush on Kingsfield's student, James T. Hart, played by the blonde and bespectacled James Stephens––– 

 

And there, I think, I had better stop lest I get tempted into making inappropriate jokes about legal briefs...

THE TRAITORS FINAL (UK, Season 2)

 

"Our doubts are traitors, 

And make us lose the good we oft might win, 

By fearing to attempt."

 

– William Shakespeare 

Measure for Measure 

(Lucio to Isabella, Act I, Scene IV)

 

 

The Final of The Traitors (UK, Season 2): I'm not sure whether I was more depressed by the Traitor's ruthless brutality or the Faithful's sadly misplaced trust. 

 

Brilliant TV, no question... but, ultimately, painful for its savage uncloaking of the worst aspects of human nature.

DAVID SOUL (1943-2004)

 

Goodbye, Hutch! 

 

Ah, dear, sweet David Soul... Here he is, on the left (looking, as ever, cool in black and tan) as we knew and loved him, before he scared the bejesus out of us with Salem's Lot. By his side: trusted fellow crime-fighter, Starsky – co-star in Starsky and Hutch, Paul Michael Glaser, surprisingly hip in a previous year's Christmas jumper.

 

Thus passes another of my boyhood crushes from those innocent days before they'd invented phrases like 'homoerotic tropes'... 

 

Mind you, on Instagram, a couple of years ago, Glaser posted this 'other' photo of himself and his chum from a time gone by; "Everyone needs a Hutch to their Starsky," he wrote – so who knows...

 

NOBLE ENDEAVOUR

A splendid, superbly-crafted finale to the last-ever series of Endeavour: old puzzles solved; loose ends tied-up; smart call-backs summoned; relationships – past and future – understood; a few red-herrings; a clever twist or two; all blended with sweet recollections, fond farewells and a final, magical, meeting of endings and beginnings... Like its magisterial predecessor-successor, Morse, we are left with a maelstrom of unforgettably vivid moments of drama and characterisation that will live long as glistering ingots of TV gold.

GOODBYE, MRS LOVETT AND MRS POTTS

The death of Dame Angela Lansbury is sad news, albeit at the grand old age of 96. Vibrant, elegant, funny, magnetic, impeccably stylish and superbly talented, she was the very epitome of what it means to be a 'Star'. 

On stage, film and television, she created unforgettable characterisations: from the devious maid, Nancy Oliver in Gaslight, her debut role, aged 19, that earned her an Oscar nomination) and Sibyl Vane (The Picture of Dorian Gray) to Mrs. Eleanor Iselin (The Manchurian Candidate, perhaps her finest film roles) and Miss Jane Marple (The Mirror Crack'd); on stage she starred in Jerry Herman's Mame playing Patrick Dennis' wildly unorthodox aunt, an exuberant Mother Rose in Gypsy and the first – and surely the greatest – of the many Mrs Lovetts who have aided and abetted the Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

She gave stand-out supporting roles in dozens of films – musicals, comedies and epics – including The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Court Jester and Samson and Delilah and, years later, created the long-running TV sleuth, Jessica Fletcher. 

For Disney she was both the amateur witch, Eglantine Price, in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the voice of the cosy-comfy Mrs Potts, the talking (and singing) tea-pot in the original animated Beauty and the Beast. 

Angela enjoyed a huge late success when she returned to Broadway and the West End as Madame Arcarti in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and she made (as it turned out) a farewell cameo as the Balloon Woman in the film Mary Poppins Returns.    

I met and interviewed Angela many years ago now for radio series on Disney and the history of cinema and I hugely enjoyed the encounter, finding her charming, witty, smart and, unsurprisingly, razor-sharp. When I was reckless enough to ask whether the Cockney Mrs Lovett had, perhaps, a kinship with Mrs Potts, she looked momentarily aghast and replied very decisively (even severely): "I really don't think Mrs Potts has anything in common with the accomplice to a serial killer!" Happily, she then laughed and we moved on...

I can also testify that Angela Lansbury was the perfect hostess at dispensing the most English tea-and-biscuits I've ever enjoyed in Hollywood!

 

 

After our interview she signed a cinema lobby-card from Bedknobs featuring Miss Price intoning her magical incantation beginning "Treguna Mekoides...".

As you can see, she inscribed the image: "For Brian, I said What? Love, Angela Lansbury". 

The world is very much the poorer for her departure, but our entertainment heritage is hugely the richer for her having passed among us. 

[Photo of Angela Lansbury and BS by Malcolm Prince]

 

YOUNG AT HEART

Farewell to Alan Young (1919-2016) that engaging actor whose many roles on stage, film and television include Wilbur Post, the klutzy owner of a loquacious Palomino horse in one of the wackiest of the goofy '60s TV sitcoms Mister Ed (1961-66) and, later, the voice of Disney's Scrooge McDuck in Mickey's Christmas Carol and numerous TV animations.

Anyone thesp who can share the screen with a talking horse without being totally upstaged and can speak like a stingy Scottish duck is, surely, an actor with genuine talent!

CLEVER ENDEAVOUR

Like Morse and Lewis before it, Endeavour, is full of sly little smarty-pants touches for the eagle-eyed to spot: sometimes clues to solving the mystery, sometimes just little jokes or references worthy of Morse's cross-word obsession.

In the recent Series Three, just out on DVD, the opening episode, Ride, contained a brief shot of a dead student lying on the window seat of his college room...

...in a pose clearly intended to evoke Henry Wallis' 1856 painting, 'The Death of Chatterton', depicting the demise of boy poet, Thomas Chatterton, who, at the age of 17, committed suicide by arsenic poisoning.

MAKING MERRIE!

As you probably know, I am currently grappling with a six-part radio adaptation of T H White's Arthurian romance and like the legends of King Arthur, every generation seems to acquires its own Robin Hood: Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Richard Todd, Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe or their small screen counterparts like Richard Greene (left) who, in ITV's The Adventures of Robin Hood between 1955-1960, started my life-long obsession with men in tights!

With a band of outlaws who included Archie Duncan as Little John, Alexander Guage as Friar Tuck and Bernadette O'Farrell (and later Patricia Driscoll) as Maid Marian and with cameos from such later-film-and-TV-stars as Robert Shaw, Patrick Troughton, Jane Asher, Leo McKern, Joan Sims, Paul Eddington, Harry H Corbett and Wilfred Brambell, Greene swashbuckled his way through 145 episodes of wrong-righting and derring-do.

The theme song was on every kid's lips, mine included...

Those 30-minute black-and-white adventures so fired my imagination (and those of my contemporaries) that Robin Hood became our chief playtime game at primary school which, since I was then living in what was comparative countryside, meant that we played it among the trees, bushes and undergrowth of the un-walled, un-gated school grounds. Those were the days...

I have to admit that I was instrumental in organising these games: devising scenarios and designating roles and it tells you a lot about me that I cast myself not as Robin Hood but as the Sheriff of Nottingham!

With my school mac thrown over my shoulders and buttoned under the chin to form a cloak, I modelled my portrayal on that of Alan Wheatley who played Richard Greene's nemesis with a cold, softly-spoken sneering menace that also had about it, I now realise, more than a touch of theatrical camp!

My prize possessions, aged 6, were my collection of Robin Hood sweet cigarette cards and my first Robin Hood Annual. Although the latter was long ago lost (when my late mother purged my annuals and gave them to a cousin) I can still turn the pages in my mind's-eye.

As for my set of plastic Robin Hood figures collected from packets of Kellogg's cereal (and equally thoughtlessly disposed of), they were so precious that when, a year or two back, a set turned up in a book-dealer's catalogue, I simply had to buy them...

Anyway, all this is but an excuse for me to give you a chance to hear another vintage Sibley radio programme, Robin Hood: Back to the Greenwood. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope on 16 February 1991, the year that two new Robins – Kevin Costner and Patrick Bergin – donned the Lincoln green to make their cinematic debuts.

Contributors to the programme include: Sean Connery, Alan Frank, John Irvin, Richard Lester, Mike McShane, Jeffrey Richards, Patrick Bergin and Richard Todd...

This blog post is, in part, reprinted from an earlier post in November 2006.

DEAD SPIT

Tricky to say for the unwary, the names of Luck and Flaw were once the enfants terribles of British TV shocking, outraging, horrifying and, let's admit it, delighting the nation with their Spitting Image shows, in which scarily life-like celebrity puppets with uncannily sound-alike voices were seen generally behaving badly and taking the p*** out of royalty, politics and popular culture.

The latex caricatures by Roger Law and Peter Fluck (seen left among some of their early creations) soon became a beloved (and in certain quarters loathed and feared) institution that combined the knock-about politically incorrect humour of the Punch and Judy show with a three-dimensional realisation of the kind of savage satire and vitriolic humour popular with the British across several centuries of political cartoonists and social lampoonery from Gilray, Rowlandson and Hogarth to Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe.

To celebrate three decades of Luck and Flaw's irreverent partnership, The Cartoon Museum has an superb new exhibition –– Spitting Image: From Start to Finish...

On show are cartoons, puppets and the superb models that Luck and Flaw created for many leading magazines and journals at the time and featuring Her Maj...

HM's third child, Prince Andrew posed naked as a Playgirl centre-fold and proudly displaying a couple of pounds of Cumberland sausage...

Former Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock as Pinocchio with his wife, Glenys as Jiminy Cricket...

Tennis bad boy, John McEnroe...

US President Reagan and Nancy...

And unquestionably Spitting Image's greatest triumph – the ultimate Maggie Thatcher that out-Maggied and out-Thatched the real thing...

Here's a reminder of what she was like in action – twice over!!

And here, at the opening of the Cartoon Museum exhibition is Steve Nallon who loaned his voice to Mrs T and others...

Also on show is art from Luck and Flaw's amazingly illustrated editions of Treasure Island and A Christmas Carol...

 
And numerous examples of Spitting Image souvenirs that back in the '80s no British home was complete without!

Spitting Image:
From Start to Finnish continues until 
8 June 2014 at...

The Cartoon Museum
35 Little Russell Street
London
WC1A 2HH

Tel: 0207 580 8155

OPENING HOURS:

Monday - Saturday: 10:30-17:30

(including Bank Holidays)

Sunday: 12:00-17:30

LATE OPENINGS (until 8pm):

Thur 15 May, Fri 16 May, Sat 17 May

Thurs 22 May, 29 May, 5 June

Please note the Museum will be closed on Monday 9 June 2014

Check out the SPECIAL EVENTS being held at the Museum during the exhibition

WARNING: Don't miss this great exhibition –– if you do, SHE will know!

All models: © Luck and Flaw Spitting Image Archive © Spitting Image Productions Ltd, Spitting Image Archive.
John McEnroe ‘I’m playing to win’ Model Peter Fluck & Roger Law Photograph by John Lawrence Jones. Radio Times 19 -25 June 1982
© Luck and Flaw Spitting Image Archive
Margaret Thatcher PM
Model Spitting Image workshop. Photograph by John Lawrence Jones.
© Spitting Image Productions Ltd, Spitting Image Archive.
'Thatcher Cutting Up Britain' by Spitting Image Workshop.  Photograph by Spitting Image Workshop.
© Spitting Image Productions Ltd, Spitting Image Archive.
'Her Majesty The Queen' by Spitting Image Workshop.  Photograph by John Lawrence Jones.
© Spitting Image Productions Ltd, Spitting Image Archive.

MILLER IN WONDERLAND

A quick reminder of tomorrow night's illustrated talk by Dr Jonathan Miller, Somewhere in Wonderland devoted to his provocative 1966 TV film version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

First broadcast on BBC television on 28 December 1966, the film went out at 9:05 in the evening because Huw Weldon, then Head of TV Programmes deemed it 'unsuitable for children'! 'Unsuitable' because being an 'adult' treatment of the children's classic, it was thought likely to bore youngsters.

This decision provoked the following cartoon by Giles in the Sunday Express...

"The old folks are at home watching Alice in Wonderland."

Among the starry cast was writer, broadcaster and TV pundit, Malcolm Muggeridge, playing the Gryphon and, writing at the time in the New Statesman, he expressed the following prophetic view:

"Alice might conceivably bore juvenile viewers of all ages, it could not possibly shock them... Alice has long been part of contemporary folklore, and Miller's version, giving it a new, significant twist, necessarily becomes a piece of social history."

And so it did and so it has remained...

The talk, after which Dr Miller will be in conversation with me about the production, has been arranged by The Lewis Carroll Society as the 10th Roger Lancelyn Green Memorial Lecture but is also open to non-members of the Society.

Dr Miller's talk will take place at 6:30 for 7:00 pm at The Art Workers' Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT.

Tickets are £10 (£7.50 for Society members) and late bookers should telephone: 020 7286 0776. UPDATE: The event is now fully booked with a waiting list for cancellations.

ALICE AFORETHOUGHT

It is the most memorable piece of British TV drama from my youth. I loved it then and I love it still: Jonathan Miller's innovative and evocative reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, first broadcast in December 1966.

The famous characters appeared not as their usual feathered, furred and whiskered personae, but as a cavalcade of Victorian figures from belligerent nursemaids, via tedious academics and boring uncles to despotic royalty.

These revisionist portrayals featured a cast of theatrical luminaries, comics and 'sixties icons including: Ralph Richardson, Leo McKern, Wilfred Brambell, John Bird, Finlay Currie and Alan Bennett.

Alice, as played with bored resignation by previously unknown Anne-Marie Mallik, can scarcely have even spent a more testing tea-time than she does here with Peter Cook, Michael Gough and Wilfred Lawson...

As for the climactic trial scene, Wonderland justice has never been so bizarrely interpreted as in this version of events with Alison Leggatt as Queen Victoria-cum-Queen of Hearts and Peter Sellers  as her bumbling, goonish consort...

Scored to the sitar music of Ravi Shankar (jostling on the ears with
military marches, Gilbert & Sullivan and Hymns Ancient &
 Modern) this 72-minute film remains unique in the annals of Alician
adaptation and never more so than in its wistful evocation of Victorian summer days beside the seaside as John Gielgud as the melancholic Mock Turtle and Malcolm Muggeridge as his elderly companion, the Gryphon, dance their own idiosyncratic (but beautifully haunting) take on a Lobster Quadrille...

I have written about the production several times on this blog – one such instance being here, where you will find more pictures and a clip – but my reason for doing so today is to announce that in a month's time, the film's producer and director, Dr Jonathan Miller, will be giving an illustrated talk, Somewhere in Wonderland, to the Lewis Carroll Society, following which I will be engaging the filmmaker in conversation and chairing a Q&A session...



Open to non-Lewis Carroll Society members, Dr Miller's talk will take place at 6:30 for 7:00 pm on Friday 13 September at The Art Workers' Guild , 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT.

Tickets are £10 (£7.50 for Society members) and can be booked in advance at The Lewis Carroll Society website. For further information, telephone: 020 7286 0776.

IN MEMORIAM

Image: Margaret Thatcher (represented by Fluck and Law's puppet from the satirical TV show, Spitting Image TV show) visiting the exhibition, Rude Britannia at London's Tate Britain in 2010. 

© Brian Sibley 

MAKING A MOVE

Today's the day when we finally quit our temporary accommodation (if a year can truly be considered 'temporary') and move ourselves and the last of our stuff back into our old (but now greatly improved) flat.

Let's just hope we don't face any of the nightmares befalling this galaxy of stars that includes several of television's funniest funny men – among them Eric Sykes (who wrote and directed the film) and the much-loved and recently departed Richard Briars...

I hope that gave you a laugh or two and that you'll forgive me for the absence of blogging in the immediate future – at least while chaos and upheaval remain the order of the day!

HUCK AMUCK

When we were packing up for our temporary move, I uncovered this gem – another of those lost treasures of childhood replaced, much later, following a dedicated rummage through the contents of an antique emporium –– aka junk shop!

This Marx bagatelle was a licensed product tied-in with the 1958 Hanna-Barbera TV series, The Huckleberry Hound Show.

The show was truly groundbreaking: its economic look challenging the traditional Disney animation style and it was the first cartoon programme to receive an Emmy.

But the fact that this toy so prominently features Huck's co-star, Yogi Bear, is an indication that The Huckleberry Hound Show was but a precursor to the far more popular The Yogi Bear Show which followed in 1961. Just as the stardom of Disney's Mickey Mouse was eventually eclipsed by Donald Duck, so the Hound was fairy swiftly deposed by the Bear.

Nevertheless, to Huck goes the glory of having introduced the world to a new pantheon of cartoon stars including – in addition to Yogi (and his side-kick, Boo Boo), Pixie and Dixie and Mr Jinks – the likes of Hokey Wolf (and Ding-A-Ling), Quick Draw McGraw, Snagglepuss, The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Johnny Quest, Wally Gator, Magilla Gorilla, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo...

I still vividly remember the week in which The Huckleberry Hound Show debuted on British TV. As a nine-year old lad with an obsessive love of cartoons, I was beside myself with excitement to find that the TV Times contained an article about the show and its creators, William ('Bill') Hanna and Joseph ('Joe') Barbera, and line drawings of the cast of characters.

I spent the next few days copying these characters onto a sketchpad I had been given for my birthday. It was at this moment (rather than after watching all those Disney films I loved to distraction) that I formed the ambition (never realised) to become an animator.

My mother was appalled: wasting good drawing paper was bad enough, it was the waste of time that she really objected to. I should probably have been buckling down to my homework, certainly I was well and truly ticked off: 'You don't seriously think that drawing cartoons is ever going to get you job, do you?'

Well, that was true - it didn't! But I have spent a good many years writing, broadcasting and speaking about the art of animation, so perhaps the time wasn't entirely wasted!

Anyway, here – for nostalgia's sake – are the opening credits to The Huckleberry Hound Show – including the top-and-tailing sequences featuring the show's USA sponsor, Kellogg's (and their trade-mark Cockerel), that us British kids never saw...

As Huck would say in his Southern drawl: 'Be seein' y'all!"

 

"A STAR OF SHINING CHRISTMAS GOLD"

'I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.' 

So says the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge at the conclusion of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

And that intent (one we could all do well to follow) combined with the fact that we are still within the 40 days of Christmas that end at Candlemass on 2 February, are all I need by way of an excuse to post about a book published during Dickens' bi-centennial year in celebration of another landmark event: the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of a TV programme entitled...

The cultural significance of this 55-minute film is revealed in the title of the book by the animator and director, Darrell Van Citters...

Mr Magoo's portrayal of Dickens' 'squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner' proved a ground-breaking production being the first-ever animated Christmas TV special.

Televised by NBC on 18 December 1962, it went to air a full two years before the much-loved Rankin/Bass stop-frame film, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and three years before the perennially-repeated A Charlie Brown Christmas.

It also happens to have been the very first film version of the Carol that I ever saw and – despite having subsequently seen numerous other attempts (good bad and indifferent) at retelling the tale – this one holds a very special place in my affections.

As a young animation buff, I had seen several cartoons featuring the near-sighted Quincy Magoo (spoken for by that talented comic actor, Jim Backus) and enjoyed the blundering buffoonery resulting from his near-sighted view of the world.

I was also very excited by the economic animation style of the UPA (United Productions of America) studio: simple, dynamic lines, bold colours and an energetic 'sixties graphic sensibility (strongly influenced by British cartoonist, Ronald Searle) that was so totally different from the classic Disney-look that I habitually salivated over!

As for the source material, well, I already knew (and was passionately in love with) Dickens story, beginning – though I was unaware of it – what would prove to be a life-long obsession leading to my writing programmes about the Carol, a entire book on the subject and my own stage dramatisations.

Since I was first able to pick up Magoo's interpretation of Scrooge on video, I have watched it every year! 

As a result, can sing (not that you'd necessarily want me to) the delightful Jule Style/Bob Merrill numbers word- (if not note-) perfect!
 
Here's one of those songs...

Darrell Van Citters' superbly researched and written book, now in a new edition to celebrate the film's 50th anniversary, provides a detailed account of how this movie came to be made and filmed in the way that it was: the struggles to find a network, a sponsor (it was eventually Timex watches whose name fronted the transmission) and songwriters with Richard Rogers eventually backing off to make way for Styne and Merrill who were kicking their heels waiting to write Funny Girl.

Citters discusses the uniquely quirky thing about this film: the fact that it is the only Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Present precedes the Ghost of Christmas Past and explains the history behind the inspired solution for selling an audience on the idea of the affable Magoo playing the irascible Scrooge...

The answer?  

Magoo is performing in a Broadway production of A Christmas Carol. So, after a typically accident-filled journey to the theatre, Magoo steps on stage and 'acts' the role of Dickens' miser...

Rather surprisingly perhaps, Magoo manages to get through the show without mishap (at least until the curtain call) although there are occasional entertaining 'sight-gags' along the way, as when the Ghost of Christmas Past says 'You have never sen the like of me before' and Magoo responds: 'I'm not sure I see the like of you now!' prompting the Ghost to comment: You're the one who's too tight with a penny to buy a pair of spectacles!'

Darrell Van Citters' book is jam-packed with behind the scenes facts, photos and art including dozens of backgrounds, layouts, character sketches, cel set-ups and storyboard drawings (among them several sequences dropped or cut from the finished production), profiles of the creative team and the recording artists who spoke and sang their way through this musical Carol.

 

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol comes in a regular trade edition as well as in a handsome slip-cased limited edition...

You can read more about the book, including details of how to order your copy here.

Cartoon characters from other studios would later assay Dickens' classic – among them Mickey Mouse & Co, Bugs Bunny and Friends, the Flintstones and the Jetsons – but none have the emotional range or fidelity to the original text as Magoo's production.

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol was a small but ambitious project that turned out to be an enduring classic. Fifty years on, it remains – in the words of one of the film's lyrics – 'a star of shining Christmas gold'. And now so too is this wonderful book of the film of the book!