Sunday, 27 July 2014
Monday, 14 July 2014
RETIRING PERSONALITY
Not really RETIRING, of course – I've never earned enough money to get myself a decent pension! So I'll just have to keep on working till the ink runs dry...
Monday, 7 July 2014
ANY OLD BRIAN?
Back in 1972, my 23-year-old younger self put on a 'One-Man Show'as a fund-raiser for Christ Church, Chislehurst., aided and abetted by my best friend, Ash, and the church organist on the pianoforte...
On the bill were monologues, songs, sketches and skits and featured my then extensive repertoire of vocal impersonations advertised as being subject to change "as the fancy takes me or the voice leaves me"!
The programme had cover-art (I use the word 'art' loosely) featuring some of those whose voices I borrowed. One or two of the caricatures owe something to the work of artists I hugely admired – among them Hirschfeld and Trog – others were (as Bert says in Mary Poppins) "all me own work from me own memory..."
I wonder how many of my subjects you can identify, although you probably have to have been born in Britain and been around in the '60s and '70s to get them all...
Feel free to guess – and I'll reveal the answers later...
On the bill were monologues, songs, sketches and skits and featured my then extensive repertoire of vocal impersonations advertised as being subject to change "as the fancy takes me or the voice leaves me"!
The programme had cover-art (I use the word 'art' loosely) featuring some of those whose voices I borrowed. One or two of the caricatures owe something to the work of artists I hugely admired – among them Hirschfeld and Trog – others were (as Bert says in Mary Poppins) "all me own work from me own memory..."
I wonder how many of my subjects you can identify, although you probably have to have been born in Britain and been around in the '60s and '70s to get them all...
Feel free to guess – and I'll reveal the answers later...
Friday, 4 July 2014
STUFF AND NONSENSE
There's another reason for celebrating today – 4 July – apart from its being American Independence Day and that's because 152 years ago an Oxford mathematic don, the Reverend C L Dodgson, took the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church on a boating trip on the river Isis and wove a story to entertain his young passengers that featured the middle daughter, Alice Liddell, and was eventually written up as Alice's Adventures Underground...
...and was later refined into that classic of nonsense we now know as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 by Dodgson under the pen-name, Lewis Carroll...
To mark this occasion, it seemed to me that a song might be called for – well, two songs actually – so here's an extract from my second-ever radio programme for the BBC, The Tune's My Own Invention about the music written by various composers down the years as settings for the songs in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There...
The programme, first broadcast over thirty-five years ago in 1978, was written with my good friend the late Antony Miall and, between us, we provided all the character voices –– with the exception of Alice who was played by Miss Eva Haddon!
In this sequence Tony, as well playing the piano, speaks, sings and weeps for the doleful Mock Turtle while I growl away as the Gryphon.
Won't you come and join the dance...?
Won't you come and join the dance...?
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