POOH BROU-HA-HA

Today is a Big Day for Winnie-the-Pooh as the Bear of Very Little Brain celebrates reaching the grand old age of 86!

And Pooh's birthday is, for me, an annual reminder of the origins of my writing career which began on 13 October 1976 when BBC Radio 4 broadcast, Three Cheers for Pooh, a programme by me markng the fact that, on the following day (the BBC’s scheduling was out by twenty-four hours!), Pooh was to celebrate his then fiftieth birthday…

The half-hour feature was presented by my very dear and very good friend, Peter Bull with another very dear and very good friend, Antony Miall, singing and playing at the piano Veteran radio actor, Norman Shelley, recreated his famous radio role as Pooh Bear (as well as playing Piglet, Eeyore and All The Others) and the whole confection was whipped into shape by the highly distinguished drama producer (later Head of Radio Drama) John Tydeman.

The Radio Times were kind enough to give me a small feature article on the programme page. "Why are grown men still fascinated by A A Milne's creations?" the heading asked. "Brian Sibley explains..."


At the time I was working for a merchant bank in the City of London and arriving at the office on the morning on which The Radio Times was published, I had a call to report to the office of my boss, Mr Brookes.

There he sat, the magazine open on the desk in front of him. He always employed a dry, satiric tone, but today it was drier and more satiric than usual. "Tell, Mr Sibley," he enquired, "Why would the BBC in their corporate wisdom ask you to explain the deeper mysteries and global significance of Winnie-the-Pooh?"

I felt very small - smaller, in fact, than Rabbit's friend-and-relation, Smallest-of-All (known as S of A); and, worse, the joy I had experienced on opening The Radio Times on the railway station platform that morning and finding my name was suddenly tossed aside as meaningless...

I mumbled a half-apologetic response and hurried back to work...  Within a couple of months, however, I had another programme on Radio 4 - this time about Alice in Wonderland - which I co-presented with Tony Miall, and our third programme together (on Peter Pan) followed shortly afterwards...

Frankly, it no longer mattered what Mr Brookes thought, because - at long last - I had discovered what I wanted to do with my career!

The intervening years have taken their toll: Peter Bull, Tony Miall and Norman Shelley are, sadly, no longer with us and John Tydeman and I are older, greyer - and weightier!


But I got to use the title Three Cheers for Pooh once more when, years afterwards, I published my book on the life of 'The Best Ber in All the World'.

And, as for Pooh himself, he goes stomping along through the 100 Aker Wood, humming a hum to himself and wondering what it means to be 86 and whether he’ll feel any different and how many pots of honey it might take to properly celebrate being it…

And you can celebrate Pooh's birthday by listening to that original 1976 broadcast...

Just click on the arrow and enjoy!

    

[Images: Pooh sketches by E H Shepard]

Parts of this post first appeared on this blog in 2006

WHAT'S GNU WITH YOU?

It is often described as one of Hollywood's greatest turkeys and the film that almost destroyed 20th Century Fox, but my teenage memories of Doctor Dolittle are still rose-tinted.

As a youngster who had grown up reading (and loving) the original Hugh Lofting books with their extraordinary – often surreal – adventures and the wonderful menagerie that comprised Doctor John Dolittle's family: Polynesia the parrot, Jip the dog, Gub-Gub the pig, Che-Che the monkey, Dab-Dab the duck (and housekeeper) and Too-Too the owl, who acts as the Doctor's accountant.

When the film came out in 1967, the critics generally panned it, especially carping about the fact that it was almost three-hours long; but what did I care? As a budding gay (who adored musical extravaganzas) I was perfectly happy to spend however many hours it ran in company with (to quote one of the lyrics) 'my friend the Doctor'!

I had the soundtrack LP and knew the songs by heart: I could do – and still can, if it comes to that (and, yes I know, it needn't come to that!) – a particularly spirited rendition of Dicky Attenborough's number (on being confronted by the Pushmi-Pullyu), 'I've Never Seen Anything Like it in My Life'.

I also knew someone in it: my friend, the wonderful Peter Bull, who played Samantha Eggar's father, General Bellows (that's Ray Aghayan's design for his costume, left). As result, I heard all the goss about how difficult Rex Harrison was and how he and the animals shared a mutual, undying hatred for one another with them biting and kicking him at every opportunity, sharing their fleas with him and, frequently, peeing on him!

However, there were a lot of things that I didn't know that I have only just discovered thanks to Mark Harris' book Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood in which he charts the troubled history of, among other movies, the phenomenally over-budgeted flop that was Doctor Dolittle.

I discovered that when a misbehaving Harrison was sacked for a week, Christopher Plummer was given the role and was paid a non-returnable $87,500 for not playing the role until Harrison pleaded his way back onto the film. In contrast, Peter Bull got his role after Fox had passed on Donald Pleasence and Robert Morley who both wanted some $60 and $50k respectively, whereas Peter did the job for a mere $11k!!

I also found out that Alan Jay (My Fair Lady) Lerner had been originally touted as lyricist and that, later, when Leslie Bricusse had been engaged to write the score, the ever-tricksy Harrison decided that he wasn't being given numbers worthy of an Oscar-winning Professor Higgins. As a result, the star insisted that Fox contract British musical comedy duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swann (famous for their At the Drop of a Hat shows and recordings) to write some songs for him – although none of them ended up in the film.

One of Flanders and Swann's offerings was a song for Dolittle to sing when the natives of the floating Sea-Star Island want to make him their monarch:

Lash me to an eagle,

I won't be regal.

Lock me in an attic

I shall still be most emphatic that 

I wont be,

I can't be,

I daren't be,

I shan't be a king!

And another thing: I couldn't bear being called 'Rex'!

The idea of F&S writing the score was not so wide of the mark when one considers how many great animal songs they penned for themselves and others: 'The Hippopotamus Song' ("Mud, mud, glorious mud"), 'The Rhinoceros', 'The Armadillo' and this one performed–– not by Michael and Donald, but by....

...The Muppets!