Alan Taylor
With regards to dwindling audiences, I had the misfortune to work on a circus OB where the acts were mediocre at best, but the director kept insisting on multiple retakes. The audience were getting completely fed up. It’s bad enough watching a crappy act once, but two or three times is beyond the pale, especially if it’s one of those balancing acts where they nearly fall and miraculously recover – every time at exactly the same point in their performance.
The audience dwindled to such an extent that the gaps were becoming too obvious in the back of the shot, so the director had the genius idea to get the floor manager to move the audience around so that the areas behind the cameras were empty, while the seats in shot would be full. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the audience felt that once on their feet, they might as well walk over to the exit and find something more interesting to do for the rest of the evening. The net result was that the gaps in the back of shot were even bigger than they were before the reshuffle and there was nobody else left to fill the empty seats.
Pat Heigham
I remember spending an interesting evening in one of the Ampex suites, with the then top 2” editor – can’t remember who – trying to make something sensible of the BBC pantomime one year. From the TVT, it was so bad with many retakes, and Norman Wisdom was pleading with the audience not to get up and leave. He wasn’t very good and I’ve never had much respect for him after that.
I was matching the sound edits on a TR90 to make the sound somewhere near OK, after the picture edit was done – both cut and splice in those days. The TR90’s were pretty stable as to playback speed – the Nagra syncpluse system was years away, then! But we set everything up with the TIM bleeps.
Can’t remember if it was then all dubbed to a second Ampex or if the mended sound was laid to the original video tape.
… and Audiences in thrall to performers ,,,
Geoff Hawkes
I can’t say that I find Michael McIntyre very funny or entertaining either, nor do I with most, if any of the comedians who perform the one man/woman acts on shows like Live At The Apollo. It’s clear that he and they do have an appeal to their audiences as can be seen from the way they play to “packed houses” to use one of Danny la Rou’s favourite terms to describe his own successes and they seem to be hanging on his every word from the moment he comes dancing across the stage.
Looking back, I found it hard to understand the hold that Ken Dodd had on his audiences either, with a series of what individually were not very funny jokes and one-liners about life in Knotty Ash, delivered with waves of his tickling stick. That was till one time I happened to be working on a show at the Theatre when he was a guest and from my position on the back of the Mole in the well I was able to observe him close hand. His gift, I decided was how he engaged with the audience with looks and gestures and unrelenting patter, the sheer absurdity of which had everyone, including me, laughing along with him. As is well known, he could go on for hours and frequently overran his allotted time, as he did on that occasion, but he loved performing, loved his audiences and they loved him. He came over as a genuinely nice, sincere man.
I felt the same way about Bob Monkhouse too and it was great to hear the tributes that were paid to him in last Thursday’s repeat of a farewell show Bob Monkhouse: The Last Stand on BBC4 that he did in front of some of his fellow comedians, recorded only months before he died in 2003.
Of those still living, Barry Cryer I think is one of the best, with his witty, dead-pan gags. I happened to meet him on the foyer at the Palladium on the night of the tribute show for Bruce Forsyth. I spoke to him briefly to say that I remembered working with him when he was a writer on the Kenny Everett show back in the eighties and he claimed to remember me too, though I think he was being polite. I told him how much I liked his famous parrot joke (I’m sure you know it), for which he thanked me but added that at that moment, his chief concern was to find a toilet! In that regard I was ahead of him, having needed it on arrival myself, one of the less appealing effects of advancing years as I’m sure many of you will agree – and I was pleased to be able to direct him to it…
I expect you have your own favourites among the funny men/women past and present, Victoria Wood probably ranking high on the list,
