Here's Harry ...

 

 

It may be a name which springs less readily to mind these days, but in the 1960s Harry Worth was a major TV comic with a genial, bumbling persona, forever confounding petty officialdom. 

If that suggests a touch of Tony Hancock, however, nohow and contrariwise: Worth had none of Hancock's pomposity or aggression. Like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot he was entirely guileless, an innocent who never seemed out to cause the trouble which invariably happened when he was around. The cause was his circumlocutory way of putting things which would inevitably tie the listener in knots, governed as it was by a logic comprehensible to no one except the mild and agreeable speaker himself. (Arthur Haynes was perhaps more closely linked to Hancock, and has been described as ITV's answer to Hancock, though Haynes's tramp character was several notches down from Hancock's TV persona socially.)

Terry Johnson

 

For those not already aware of the sad news, Terry Johnson, the last surviving member of the Flamingos, died yesterday in Las Vegas at the age of 86 - "performing to the end", Marv Goldberg says. He can be seen above (with guitar) on the cover of Flamingos Serenade, the 1959 album of standards which includes his arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You, the Al Dubin-Harry Warren film song which finally gave the group the crossover success they'd been seeking. 

Terry Johnson was not an original member of the Flamingos but had a vision, when he first saw them perform in October 1956:  "I saw a glow of light around them and I saw myself with them." He auditioned the day after this mystical experience and was invited to join on Christmas Eve. 

Notes on the Finborough production of The Truth About Blayds by A.A. Milne

 

When I wrote about this play's imminent revival at the Finborough Theatre a few weeks ago I hoped for the best but wasn't sure what to expect. Would there be the appropriate balance of seriousness and comedy in the playing? Would contemporary theatregoers take this example of Milne's adult work to their hearts as readily as audiences of a hundred years ago, weaned on his pieces in Punch magazine?

Lloyd Price musical coming to London

 

If you are able to get to London's Royal Festival Hall there will be two performances of a new musical about R&B/rock'n'roll pioneer Lloyd Price on Saturday 11th October.

 Audio of an extensive 2005 interview with Price can be found on Matt the Cat's site here, but for all the undoubted importance of Lawdy Miss Clawdy to the development of rock'n'roll (none of which seems lost on Price himself in that interview) Daniel Wolff's biography of Sam Cooke suggests that the recording was actually part of an ongoing process for Specialty Records owner Art Rupe, and that he'd already been experimenting with accentuating the beat on gospel recordings:

A.A. Milne Part 4 (Sarah Simple)

 

As with A.A. Milne's first novel (of sorts), Lovers in London, the mere fact of this play, Sarah Simple, being available again is welcome news. It's not included in the various collections which still crop up in secondhand bookshops, and I'd been searching for a copy for quite some time. Before the publication of Anne Thwaite's biography of Milne I had only come across a single mention of it, in a history of theatre published in the 1930s.