Jolson

Read any article mentioning The Black And White Minstrel Show and one of the things that always shocks the author most is that it didn't get cancelled until 1978. In other words a relic from the age of Vaudeville was still being enjoyed by millions in the age of The Sex Pistols and one year before the first hip-hop record charted. Now I'm not going to mourn the disappearance of Dai Francis and Co. from prime time; neither am I going to witter on about PC gone mad and marmalade jars while shouting "You can't even use the word 'gay' properly anymore!" Shows like this began when the received wisdom for the majority was that black people were inferior to white. The portrayal of white men blacked up and cavorting with scantily clad white female dancers has a lascivious whiff of the plantation about it like a bad novel from the Mandingo series. It was offensive and had to stop. End of.

But before consigning it, along with George W Bush and Gary Glitter, to the dustbin of history it's worth looking at how normal blackface minstrelsy used to be. Are you a fan of Fred Astaire? Love the Fred & Ginger films? Then you may or may not want to see this from their 1936 film Swing Time. As you've probably realised, this clip isn't just unsettling as a result of Astaire blacking up; it wouldn't be so bad if Bojangles Of Harlem wasn't one of the most hypnotically wonderful performances in any film musical before or since. A look at the comments accompanying the clip only goes to show how it's not a cut and dried issue. Some make the remark that Fred was playing tribute to one of his greatest influences as a dancer and was blacking up out of respect. Others say that if Hollywood really wanted to pay tribute to Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson they would have given him a decent starring role and not had him playing second fiddle to Shirley Temple.





The fact that Swing Time is now over 70 years old makes it easier to put in the box marked 'harmless' because everyone involved in its production is probably dead. So let's look at something more recent. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and its frontman Viv Stanshall are hipper than hip sixties icons seemingly loved by all. They are featured in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour; then there's Neil Innes's Monty Python connection and when it comes to Stanshall himself we've got the credibility of John Peel (Sir Henry At Rawlinson End) and The Who (Keith Moon's drinking buddy). But most people got to know The Bonzos via Do Not Adjust Your Set, a TV show which (with The 1948 Show) is now seen as John The Baptist to Monty Python's Messiah. And here they are in action. Again the comments go from the 'PC gawn maaaad!' brigade to those a little shocked by what they see. This is something that could never happen today, not just because blackface comedy has disappeared except when done with the most leaden irony but because, for those who don't know, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a children's programme.



I can honestly say that I first heard Look Out There's A Monster Coming on the Bonzo's Gorilla LP years before seeing this and it was definitely one of my favourite songs of theirs. And I'm still wondering whether its detractors could be accused of over-reacting - it's not as if they're wearing swastikas or anything. One final observation: Neil Innes is the only one who hasn't blacked up for this. I wonder if this is his own silent protest or if he just arrived to late for the recording to go into makeup.



All of which brings me to Al Jolson. Hard as it may be to imagine, Jolson was once the biggest singing star on the planet. His 1928 film The Singing Fool (featuring one of the worst songs ever written) was the highest grossing film ever until Gone With The Wind beat it 11 years later. But for the same reason as The Black And White Minstrels and The Bonzos wearing burnt cork you won't see it outside tastefully programmed and contextualised retrospectives or documentaries on the history of racism. Jolson was enormous - adored by the public and hated by everyone in showbiz for his arrogance and ego.



An example of the latter tells us how he came up with his famous catchphrase "You ain't heard nuthin' yet!" Up until after World War I the biggest singing stars in the World were the great opera singers. Jazz had barely made it to Chicago at this point while music hall and vaudeville was not the to the taste of many genteel types who could afford a gramophone. Without doubt the biggest star of all was Enrico Caruso. In 1918 he was playing a benefit concert in New York where he brought the house down. Following him on the bill was this vulgar Jewish vaudevillian minstrel. Did he display due deference and respect to the great Caruso? Not a bit of it - he bellowed his soon to be famous one liner. There was uproar until, good to his word, Jolson blew the great tenor away.



So arrogant, yes, but racist? That's where it gets complicated. It's too easy to argue that he performed in a style that was popular for the time. Bernard Manning was also once hugely popular in Northern clubs but saw I his act and it was bloody inexcusable. Jolson's core American audience was the have nots. He rose to greatness during a time of huge immigration from Europe where millions of impoverished and persecuted foreigners swapped rural penury for urban industrial squalor. Struggling to make sense of their new life and new language the sentimental singing fool, pining for the cotton plantation of old, provided a perfect metaphor for their new lives in the New World. I can think of no better example of this than this from his 1930 film Mammy. To anyone in an early 20th century factory town missing the hills above Naples or the fjords outside Trondheim I doubt that they thought of race and The Klan when they heard him sing:

Let me sing of Dixie's charms

Cotton fields and mammy's arms

And if my song can make you homesick I'm happy

Max Wall

In a week when Bruce Forsyth reaches 80 there's the suggestion of a chilly downside to the celebrations. Because, like him or not, he is one of the last all round entertainers of the variety era. In 1957, when Forsyth was just 30 the late great charlatan John Osbourne wrote this in his preface to 'The Entertainer':

"The music hall is dying, and with it, a significant part of England. Some of the heart of England has gone; something that once belonged to everyone, for this was truly a folk art."

In a sense Osbourne was spot on; television and changing fashions were killing live variety as one by one the old halls - The Metropole, The Hackney Empire, Collins - converted to bingo, cinema, dancing... or were simply left to rot and demolished. But TV, in particular ITV, needed something to fill its schedules. Max Miller, so beloved of John Osbourne and a clear model for Archie Rice, was one of the golden age of variety's last great stars so was an obvious candidate for inclusion in ITV's early schedules. In one short series of 60 minute programmes he used up a lifetime's worth of material and, not long after, retired to his Brighton home to die in 1963. Tommy Trinder ("Yew lucky people!") saw his fame rocket when he became the first compere of Sunday Night At The London Palladium. It took just one lame anti-semitic joke on live television to sink his career and his replacement, a young Bruce Forsyth, went on to... well you know the rest.

Some artistes soldiered on playing cruises, Butlins, what remained of seaside summer shows and occasional TV spots. Others went legit as comedy actors. The famous stage drunk Freddie Frinton is best remembered by people of my age as the star of Meet The Wife, a fair to middling sitcom he made with Thora Hird. Of course, when I say 'people of my age' I'm not including the citizens of Germany, Austria and most of Scandinavia where for some bizarre reason an 18 minute sketch called Dinner For One, filmed by Granada TV in 1963, gets shown every new years eve to a vast loyal audience.

But the fact that Osbourne could write about the death of music hall 50 years ago and Brucie is still presenting a Saturday night BBC show with huge ratings indicates that if music hall has died then at least it's been after a long illness.



12 years after Max Miller's death I turned 16. For this first coming of age I didn't go on an underage drinking binge, I didn't go on a date (the opposite sex was, at this point, oblivious to my charms) and I didn't leave school to start work. Instead I went to the theatre. The show, Aspects Of Max Wall, featured another variety refugee. This was a revelation. Here was an all round entertainer who made upstarts like Bruce Forsyth and Roy Castle look like one trick ponies. A unique comedian, dancer, singer, actor, Wall's career up to this point had witnessed scandal, success, failure and bankruptcy of Archie Rice proportions. By now he was in his late 60s and for two hours gave a master class in how to make a packed theatre double up with laughter while clearly not giving a sod whether they laughed or not. He could go from sophisticated to svelt to utterly grotesque with the blink of an eye but - and this is crucial - he never descended into the mawkish pathos beloved of Norman Wisdoms or the relentlessly cheerful comedy by attrition of Ken Dodd. Someone this funny didn't need to tell you how tickled he was. He just got on with the job of making us laugh and if we didn't like it, well tough.

Over a decade later I began my own career on the comedy circuit (I'll save that for another time) and a common question amongst comedians and friends was "Who was the funniest comic you ever saw?" Certainly I worked alongside the good, the bad and (far too often) the over-rated but over 30 years on nothing has ever touched the magic of an elderly curmugeon reaching the end of a two hour set and as an afterthought mournfully muttering "I suppose I'd better do the stupid walking bit now, that's what you all came for."

Churchill

In the same way that all first time parents think that they are the first people on Earth to have children (or that all post virginal adolescents think that sex didn't exist before their first coupling) I find myself realising that I am the first person ever to approach the age of 50. Sorry, but if you were born before 1958 you don't count. OK, you do but I'm pretty certain that you were the first person to approach 50 as well.

But this isn't about age (although the subject will no doubt be mentioned here and there), it's about stuff I remember that I want to tidy up in my head before August next year. If for some strange reason you find yourself reading this then Hello. Leave a comment if you want to but be aware that anything insulting will just look like the saliva speckled ravings of a mouth breathing internet crank - Be honest, nearly all online insults do.

I was born in August 1959 which means that on the 29th October 1964 I was 5 and had recently started infants school. Tyssen Primary School was (and, I just checked, is) just off Old Hill Street in Hackney. Back in the early '60s that part of Hackney still had a sufficiently large non Hassidic Jewish community to warrant dividing the hall at lunchtime into Kosher and Christian dinners. Woe betide anyone being found in the wrong section. The dinner ladies, still finding a use for their Waffen SS training of two decades before, all instinctively knew who was Jewish and who wasn't. It mattered to them not a jot that I wanted to sit with my best friends Roger Warren and Gordon Campbell as they grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and plonked me down between David Elishahof and Eric Reubensen.

At assembly that October morning Miss Fisher the headmistress asked us whose birthday it was today. This was not uncommon as birthdays were a big thing at infants school. After a rendition of 'Glad That I Live Am I' or 'When A Knight Won His Spurs' Miss Fisher (all female teachers in 1964 were 'Miss', married or not) would ask us whose birthday it is. A kid would put his hand up and say "Nathan Cohen, Miss". She would then always say "And what do we say to Nathan?" and the assembled infants would chorus "Many happy returns of the day" or, more accurately, "Nehneh hahe redududuh day"

"And how old is Nathan?"

A few kids would mumble uncertainly.

"Six"

"And how many is six?

We would all clap six times as we intoned "wun, doo, free, vor, fife, zix"

But today was different. A muffled silence followed Miss Fisher's initial question so she offered a hint.

"It's not a little boy or girl at this school"

More confusion until an older girl raised her hand.

"Is it Swinsden Jerjill, Miss?"

"Very good! And what do we say to Swinsden Jerjill?"

"Nenneh hahe redududuh day"

Now came the killer.

"And how old is Swinsden Jerjill?"

The same older kid put her hand up.

"Ninety Miss"

"And how many is ninety?"

This may as well have been googolplex because no five year old had ever encountered such an age let alone counted it but we soldiered on...

"wun, doo, free, vor, fife, zix, sen, eight, nye, den, ellen, dwev, thirdeen, fordeen, fivdeen, sistine..."

On and on it went. Bewildered toddlers all over the room were lapsing into primevel grunts well before 'firdy' and by 'sendy' the entire assembly, teachers excepted, was just mumbling "Gneh, gneh gneh..." our hands red raw from clapping each number . Who was this Swinsden Jerjill git? Why was he ninety and why did I have to suffer this impossible mathematical chore as a result? By the mid 80s some of the older kids could see the end was in sight and picked up the pace a little.

"Aidyzix, aidyzen, aidyay, aidynye, NINEDY!"

And that was it. Nothing from Miss Fisher about Our Finest Hour, his wartime record, his speeches. Still less about Gallipoli, Tonypandy or the return to the gold standard in 1924.

The very next thing I heard about Swinsden Jerjill was that he had died. The whole day was given over to his funeral and this meant all childrens TV programmes were cancelled.

The selfish bastard.