The Delia Derbyshire of the Electronic Stomach

 

 

 Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:

 

 And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow: 

 

 I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...

 

 To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:

 

 I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:

 

Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.

 

  Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can. 

 What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back. 

 Here's more research:

 

 

* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.

Placeholder Proper

 

 This isn't me saying I'm leaving something as a placeholder and then going on to write a whole post about it accidentally, this will be a placeholder pure and simple, represented by a photograph I took of a bare, beutifully clean, uselessly lit premise that I walked past heading home from seeing Margaret Cabourn-Smith be one of the brilliant things in Spike at the Richmond Theatre. I've more than one actually. I don't even have time to choose the best.

 

 I'm finding more and more of these on my phone – photos of uselessly lit, bare premises passed while walking home after rmidnight. I find them when I get home. I don't always remember taking them. 

 

Méliès' Munchausen's Missing Missing Mirror Routine

 

 First, let's at least celebrate the surprises of Georges Méliès' first flop, including this Cassandran vision of Snorky from The Banana Splits. Best value though is probably given by the manic dragon marionette left over from Méliès' The Witch, four years earlier. At twelve minutes' running time, The Witch was considerably slower-moving than this, but only because something actually happened in it. There's nothing to wait for when you watch someone dream.

 Source

 

 The sad truth is, despite its aesthetic, when it turned up on the Public Domain Review I didn't even recognise 1911's Baron Munchausen's Dream as Méliès' work. It has the feel of a contractual obligation: the spectacle's there but sloppily thrown on, and on and on, the interactions are uninspired – there's only so long one can watch someone pretend to be poked – and Méliès' trademark jump cuts don't seem to be even trying to match any more. Also, the man himself (pictured above), whose amoral charm, spry timing and alpha goatee would have made him the perfect Baron (pictured below, by Gustave Doré)... 

 

Source

 

... is nowhere to be seen. Instead we have a Baron far more ineffective, overweight, and cleanshaven. Actually we have two, which bring's me to the film's strangest omission: Munchausen's dreams are shown emerging from a giant mirror, but use of an actual mirror probably would have been prohibitively expensive, and definitely have reflected the camera and studio, so instead, Méliès constructs the room's reflection as a separate set, and casts a second actor as Munchausen's reflection to imitate the lead's movements exactly, which he does. Without deviation.

 Throughout the entire film. 

 There is no Mirror Routine.

 Georges Méliès – Georges Méliès! – built and populated a studio-sized mirror set in a film about a dream – BARON MUNCHAUSEN'S dream! – and then used it to... just pretend there was a mirror there. In fairness, it's the film's one genuinely effective effect, so maybe the Baron was cast because he was part of a double act, and this was their specialty. Anyway, here it is, but I won't judge you if you don't stick with it.

 

 

 

 Do you know what I mean by the Mirror Routine? I've read that it was already a staple of the music hall when this film came out, but maybe they just meant this illusion, in which case Méliès would indeed have been – so far as I know – the first to film it. But an illusion's not a routine. What I'm thinking of involves the breaking or setting up of that illusion for comic effect, a little like what Charlie Chaplin would do five years later in The Floorwalker...

 

... only there's no fake mirror here, and it's being shot side on, so the illusion wouldn't work for the audience, even if there was. 

 In 1921, the French comedian Max Linder made 7 Years' Bad Luck, in which a hungover toff's staff try to cover up the breaking of his mirror during a canoodle, by electing someone to dress up as his reflection. This is generally considered to be the cinematic début of what I think of as the Mirror – or Missing Mirror – Routine, and it is excellent...

 

 

 In 1924, Leo McCarey directed the even more excellent Sittin' Pretty with Charlie Chase – last seen on this blog man-spreading admirably in Tillie's Punctured Romance - in which, mistaken for a cop, Chase tries to capture a knife-wielding maniac by going undercover as his reflection. The stakes are higher than in 7 years' Bad Luck, but the rules of the game are the same. The routine starts seven minutes in. I'm posting the whole ten minutes though because, frankly, despite its title-heavy opening, I think this might be a perfect comedy. Maybe I should have just blogged about Sittin' Pretty...

 

 Nine years later, in 1933, Leo McCarey found himself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, which is both generally and fairly considered one of the greatest comedies ever filmed, and just stuck the mirror routine from Sittin' Pretty right in the middle, joke for joke. By this point though, the routine's own familiarity had become one of its ingredient, but this is the version people now know best. And of course it is excellent.

 

 

 I would stop there, if I hadn't on my searches turned up this from Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan. You may have thought there was nothing to add after Duck Soup, but Spike manages it, with an arm through the door. Excellent.

 

 

 Do you know any more? Do you know any earlier? Are they excellent? Let me know in the comments. (Oh, if you're reading this on your phone, there are loads of videos here. I've heard they don't always show on a phone.)

Prefab Spon

 Among the many public information films from the late forties being shown in the corner of the Imperial War Museum in which I had installed myself (see yesterday) was one showing the viewer around one of the prefabricated aluminium "Churchill Villas" being almost literally wheeled out to house returning soldiers. My Dad grew up in one of these.

 

 

 

 This isn't exactly the film I saw, but it uses much of the same footage. What I watched dwelt less on the narrowness of the corrridors and more on the materials used in the bungalow's construction. Common in fact to everything I saw in that corner of the IWM was a note of what things were made of, and how much they cost.

 

 

 "And before you've smoked your third cigarette, the curtains are going up in the living room."

 Another thing I noticed in these films was how thin everybody seemed. Brief shots of shirtless British troops bare-legged in their shorts and boots showed a body type not unfit, but almost uncastable these days. And that's what first reminded me of Spike Milligan.

 

 

 It didn't seem preposterous to me to suppose that it was the constant exposure to these bodies, bodies like his own, that inspired the unflattering scrawniness of his illustrations, and the octagonal-shin-shaming character descriptions of The Goon Show.

 

"HASTILY DRAWN HOLE TO CONCEAL BADLY DRAW BOOTS."

 

 Once reminded of Milligan, more and more of what I saw of this post-war world so badly in need of repair seemed to be reflected in his work. Every bravely heralded, short-term, cost-assessed solution - like the prefabs my Dad grew up in "intended to last ten years" - recalled the face-saving announcements of The Goon Show's Greenslade, or the tags left on the costumes of Q9, or the holes dug and sticks erected to support Spike Milligan's badly drawn feet. 

 

 

 So that was an educational weekend for me. In other notices, as Hallowe'en is fast approaching I thought I'd do little reposts of the Universal Frankenstein essays I wrote earlier this year, so here is what I wrote about 1931's Frankenstein.

DOUBLEPLUSGOON

I bought the LP just so I could own this beautiful Hunt Emerson cover.

 We interrupt this protracted conclusion to Frankenstein Wednesdays - and by "we", I mean "I" - and by "interrupt", I mean "put off" - to notify readers that they have just one day left to listen HERE to a pinnacle of spoofery: 1985 - simultaneously the most accessible and least accessible Goon Show ever recorded. Least accessible, because its employment of 1984 to satirise the BBC (or "Big Brother Corporation") means a third of it is just in-jokes about the broadcasting landscape of 1955*. Most accessible, because the other two thirds contain some of the stongest jokes the show's ever had; idiots just seem funnier in a dystopia, possibly because they're necessary. The Orwellian backdrop also proves a perfect fit for The Goon Show's long-nursed post-Imperial anxieties. A fallen world host to competing and absurdly overrated hiearchies, surreally decorated with disappointing resources; you could draw a line from The Goon Show to Mad Max, with this episode sitting comfortably at the centre. It's the Judge-Dreddiest episode, and the one we quoted in the playground. The chief insipiration for it however was probably the BBC Television adaptation broadcast live a few months earlier, and starring Peter Cushing. I haven't watched it so post it below at this blog's peril, but let's see. There could be anything in it, Ray Ellington singing about "a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store". Anything.

 

"Have you ever thought, in seventy years or so, there'll be nobody alive who could possibly understand this conversation we're having?"

* It's got to be a different Jim Davidson. Right?