Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [77]
It’s the old Albergo Universo, and our lesbian javelin-throwing manager with her fifty-six-inch chest. Can we visit her for a drink after the show? Yes. Have we any free seats? Yes, how many does she want? Seventy-three. She settles for six.
Friday March 1st. We sit in the stalls, watching the amateurs rehearsing for the finals. They are being ‘produced’ by Major Murray Leslie, Royal Army Service Corps, an ideal corps to produce theatricals. A short dark singer is going through ‘Just a song at twilight’. We all know the joke about the short man who looks as though he’s been hit by a lift: well, this is the bloke, he’s been hit by one from above and another one coming up underneath. He has a good voice, but looks like a semi-straightened-out Quasimodo, and worse, he has ape-like arms. Major Leslie suggests that when the song reaches the climax he raises his arms gradually; they look like two anti-aircraft guns being raised to fire. But there you are. He finishes his song with arms raised. Major Leslie RASC waits a while and says, “No, no, don’t keep them up there.”
A woeful series of acts follows. The blond guardsman who. recited Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. For this Major Leslie also suggested the use of the arms, but this time they were raised alternately on ‘certain words’.
I wandered lonely as a cloud (right arm up)
That floats on high o’er vales and hills (left arm up)
When all at once I saw a crowd (right leg up?)
– and so on. Comes the night, and the hopefuls go through their paces. They get what we would call sympathetic applause, i.e. bugger all. We stand in the wings watching, and keeping an eye out for ‘Ow do lads, ee bai gum.’ The interval, and the judging goes on. Stan Bradbury ‘entertains’ at the piano. Why I don’t know. A very amiable man, well-loved in the music profession, but an entertainer, no. All the while he played, the audience thought he was the warm-up pianist for a forthcoming singer who never materialized. Now, a last-minute change! The Polish Ballet are playing up and are to go on before us; the girls are beautiful, the boys more so; it’s a stunning dance company with the full orchestra conducted by Raymond Agoult.
“And now,” it’s the announcer Philip Slessor announcing an announcement, “from the Central Pool of Artists, the Bill Hall —”
Before he could get the words out there was a roar from the crowd. We can do no wrong, a smash hit again. The encores keep Gracie Fields trapped in the wings. We take five curtain calls, and then the orchestra plays ‘Sally’. On come Gracie, and by the great wave of applause one realizes that none of them have ever heard her Royal Palace NAAFI Naples singing sessions. But disaster lurks for poor Gracie: Gunner Secombe is now poised on the spotlight. He has been told to put the Red Jelly in for when she sings ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’. Secombe is myopic: he walks into walls, over cliffs and under streamrollers and in recent years crashed into walls in horse-drawn coaches. In the dark he juggles with the jellies; Miss Fields goes rapturously into ‘Red Sails’ only to turn green.
“You’re going mouldy, Gracie,” shouts a wag. The audience dissolves into tears. Gracie handles it well.
“Sum wun up there don’t like me,” she says. Secombe realizes the error and soon Miss Fields is a bright purple, yellow and then orange. Finally someone brings him down with a rugby tackle and before he can do any more damage, he’s carried out screaming, shaving and farting.
During our act, we have been spotted by an impresario in the Judges’ Box who sends us a note promising untold riches in the future.
The note that promised us work in England (original in the British Museum)
After the show we are all presented to Miss Fields. “Ow do lads,” she says. “Ee, I could do with a nice cup o’ tea.” She says she “looved our act and would we like a nice cup o’ tea?”
Captain Reg O’List wants us to have dinner with him again. He treats Us to a horse-drawn — “Mean bugger won’t pay for a taxi,” says Hall — again it’s spaghetti and wine, and again he