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These sad, evocative ruins are all that's left of the great Britannia Music Hall in Glasgow. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:33 | |
They feel like the relics of a vanished civilisation, | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
mysterious and incomprehensible to us now. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:45 | |
The Britannia was built in 1857 at the height of the British music hall boom | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
and this stage has hosted performances by some of music hall's greatest names. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:59 | |
Dan Leno, The King's Jester, | 0:01:01 | 0:01:03 | |
described as the funniest man on Earth. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
Marie Lloyd, the queen of the halls, notorious for her innuendo | 0:01:07 | 0:01:11 | |
but adored for songs that found laughter in the adversities of working-class life. | 0:01:11 | 0:01:17 | |
And a 16-year-old Stan Laurel, | 0:01:17 | 0:01:19 | |
who made an audience laugh for the first time in this room. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:24 | |
In Victorian Britain, the music hall was ubiquitous. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:28 | |
Every town, every suburb had its version of this space. | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
The period of their heyday was a time of colossal upheaval in British society, | 0:01:34 | 0:01:39 | |
and the halls were an authentic, creative response to this rapidly-changing world. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:44 | |
A hilarious, absurdist, mocking commentary on the life and times of the people in song and laughter. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:54 | |
Mass entertainment has been my family business for generations, | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
and I want to trace its evolution back to its earliest roots. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:04 | |
I'll be visiting the venues, | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
the warm, bright, welcoming spaces that grew out of our pub culture. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:10 | |
Pothouses that became grand palaces, | 0:02:10 | 0:02:13 | |
where even the King came | 0:02:13 | 0:02:15 | |
for a good night out. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
I'll be rediscovering the performers and their songs... | 0:02:17 | 0:02:20 | |
# Champagne Charlie is my name... # | 0:02:20 | 0:02:24 | |
..and trying to decipher some Victorian innuendo. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:27 | |
# Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow... # | 0:02:27 | 0:02:31 | |
I just think they must have been absolutely wonderful, and I really wish I could have met some of them. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:37 | |
They sound absolutely great. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:38 | |
I'll be singing the odd verse myself. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:41 | |
# If it wasn't for the houses in between. # | 0:02:41 | 0:02:46 | |
And finding out just who frequented the halls. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:50 | |
A jaunty angle or about there? | 0:02:50 | 0:02:52 | |
Look at that! Absolutely fantastic. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
So let's have a look at the story of this wonderful institution. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:02 | |
Its stars, its audiences, the politics behind it, | 0:03:02 | 0:03:05 | |
and just why it tells us so much about the entertainment we enjoy today. | 0:03:05 | 0:03:10 | |
Somewhere in this street, about 100 years ago, my grandparents, | 0:03:40 | 0:03:43 | |
Olga and Isaac, began a new life in two rented rooms above a shoe shop. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:49 | |
They were Jewish refugees from the Ukraine, and settled here in the East End of London - | 0:03:51 | 0:03:56 | |
at that time, indisputably the greatest city on Earth. | 0:03:56 | 0:04:00 | |
Isaac died young and it fell to my Uncle Lou to support the whole family. | 0:04:02 | 0:04:07 | |
He developed an act, dancing the charleston on a tabletop, | 0:04:07 | 0:04:11 | |
and his career in entertainment began. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:14 | |
There must have been hundreds of stories just like his. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:19 | |
A little talent, carefully nurtured, could offer a route out of poverty. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:23 | |
When my Uncle Lou was dancing professionally in the 1930s, he was part of the variety business, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:30 | |
the same business where later I learned my trade as an agent, | 0:04:30 | 0:04:34 | |
and it really was a business. | 0:04:34 | 0:04:36 | |
The slick, well-oiled variety industry had its earliest roots in the music halls, | 0:04:39 | 0:04:45 | |
a largely working-class affair where the main aims were to escape | 0:04:45 | 0:04:49 | |
the harsh conditions of urban life by having a laugh and having a drink. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:54 | |
This great enterprise we call the music hall was born in these London streets | 0:04:54 | 0:04:59 | |
100 years before my Uncle Lou first danced on his tabletop. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:04 | |
Music hall grew out of many different forms of entertainment | 0:05:04 | 0:05:08 | |
popular in the 1830s, | 0:05:08 | 0:05:09 | |
like the pleasure gardens | 0:05:09 | 0:05:11 | |
where Britain's increasingly urban population | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
enjoyed a taste of the countryside | 0:05:13 | 0:05:16 | |
with refreshments and genteel diversions. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:18 | |
The pleasure gardens behind the Eagle Tavern in the City Road | 0:05:20 | 0:05:24 | |
hosted wrestling matches and circus acts | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
but also boasted a grand concert room. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:30 | |
There's still an Eagle pub on the site today, | 0:05:30 | 0:05:33 | |
celebrated in the nursery rhyme Pop Goes The Weasel. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
The Eagle was later described as the father and mother, | 0:05:38 | 0:05:41 | |
the dry and the wetness of the music hall. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:45 | |
Writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet sets the scene. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:49 | |
So let's assume that you and I decided we were going to The Eagle for the evening. | 0:05:49 | 0:05:54 | |
I've never been, you're a regular. Tell me what I'm going to see. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:58 | |
-All kinds of stuff really. -Right. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:00 | |
Entertainers who purport to be from all over the world. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:04 | |
Probably from down the road, but you never know. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:06 | |
The Giraffe Girl with the extended neck, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
-Quang Seely, the young Chinese positionist. -A positionist? | 0:06:09 | 0:06:14 | |
A positionist, a contortionist of some kind who would bend his body into remarkable surprising shapes. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:19 | |
Mr Leach, the dwarf equestrian who would jump around on the back | 0:06:19 | 0:06:23 | |
of a horse and who would impersonate figures of the period | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
while sitting on the back of his horse. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:29 | |
-Comedians? -Well, singers really. Comic songsters. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:34 | |
Older forms of entertainment are dying away or in some ways being policed out of existence. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:40 | |
Things like cockfighting. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:42 | |
The Eagle was certainly famous enough to come to the attention of Charles Dickens, | 0:06:42 | 0:06:48 | |
and if I could read you a quick reference from Sketches by Boz, | 0:06:48 | 0:06:51 | |
"Never was anything half so splendid. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
"There was an orchestra for the singers and everybody was eating and drinking as comfortably as possible. | 0:06:55 | 0:07:01 | |
"Just before the concert commenced, | 0:07:01 | 0:07:03 | |
"Mr Samuel Wilkins ordered two glasses of rum and water | 0:07:03 | 0:07:07 | |
"and two slices of lemon, together with a pint of sherry wine for the ladies | 0:07:07 | 0:07:12 | |
"and some sweet caraway seed biscuits." | 0:07:12 | 0:07:14 | |
Sounds really good, that, doesn't it? | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
So this wasn't a really rough crowd, this wasn't the dregs of society. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:21 | |
No, no, no. There's a lot of mahogany. | 0:07:21 | 0:07:24 | |
The quality of the panelling is emphasised. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
Dickens talks about the plate glass here, and that was a big attraction, too. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
It had swinging plate glass doors and they were something that people who came here remarked upon. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:37 | |
It was by no means a dive. It was somewhere very luxurious. | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
What were the audiences like? Who were they? | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
This area around here is relatively well-to-do. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:47 | |
If you look at Booth's poverty map of London, | 0:07:47 | 0:07:49 | |
there are some wealthy people living around here. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:52 | |
So the catchment area was quite respectable? | 0:07:52 | 0:07:54 | |
Relatively. One of the things that map reveals | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
is how rich and poor lived cheek by jowl across the city, | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
and so in that audience you've also got the people from relatively poorer classes. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:05 | |
The people who were working in this newly industrialised world | 0:08:05 | 0:08:09 | |
all need something to do on their days off, on the statutory holidays. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
The Factory Act brought this in. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
There's time that you can't spend at work so it means that... | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
-You've got money in your pocket and time off. -Yes. | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
-Enter the music hall, go to the pub. -What are you going to do? -There's nothing else to do. How wonderful. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:27 | |
The 1830s saw the rise of a "10 hour movement", campaigning for a shorter working day, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:34 | |
and a series of Factory Acts ensured manual labourers | 0:08:34 | 0:08:38 | |
were guaranteed some leisure time for the first time in history. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:42 | |
The pub became the centre of community life, | 0:08:44 | 0:08:47 | |
but the working man wanted to do more than just drink when he got there. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:52 | |
In the tap rooms and saloon bars, informal glee clubs | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
began to give the punters an opportunity for a singsong. | 0:08:55 | 0:09:00 | |
These developed into song and supper rooms with professional singers | 0:09:00 | 0:09:04 | |
and proceedings regulated by a chairman. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:08 | |
One such was the cider sellers in Covent Garden, | 0:09:08 | 0:09:12 | |
where one of the world's first one-hit wonders, a newspaper compositor from Glasgow | 0:09:12 | 0:09:16 | |
called WG Ross, sang the grisly Ballad Of Sam Hall. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:22 | |
# My name it is Sam Hall, Samuel Hall... # | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
This is Peter Sellers recreating Ross's performance in 1970. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:32 | |
# My name it is Sam Hall and I hate you, one and all | 0:09:33 | 0:09:39 | |
# You're a crowd of muckers all | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
# Blast your eyes! # | 0:09:42 | 0:09:43 | |
AUDIENCE ROARS | 0:09:43 | 0:09:45 | |
Sam Hall told the story of a murderous chimney sweep | 0:09:47 | 0:09:52 | |
contemplating his situation the night before he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:57 | |
# I killed a man, they say, | 0:09:57 | 0:10:01 | |
# And in Newgate jail I lay, | 0:10:01 | 0:10:05 | |
# And the final debt must pay | 0:10:05 | 0:10:09 | |
# Blast your eyes! # | 0:10:09 | 0:10:11 | |
Ross was a massive hit | 0:10:13 | 0:10:15 | |
and his success was due to something more than the ability to sing. | 0:10:15 | 0:10:19 | |
He developed an act built around the character of Sam Hall, and it was artfully done. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:26 | |
His soot-blackened features, his swaggering despair, | 0:10:26 | 0:10:29 | |
the use he made of simple props like the rough wooden chair, his cutty pipe, | 0:10:29 | 0:10:34 | |
and, above all, his bloodcurdling delivery, | 0:10:34 | 0:10:37 | |
packed the house every night. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:39 | |
# So it's up the rope I go While you bastards down below | 0:10:42 | 0:10:48 | |
# Say, "Sam, we told you so!" | 0:10:48 | 0:10:52 | |
# Blast your eyes! # | 0:10:52 | 0:10:54 | |
Singers like Ross owed their success to their familiar routine, | 0:10:54 | 0:10:59 | |
developing a recognisable persona with catchphrases | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
that the audiences would happily hear again and again. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:06 | |
Another early star was Sam Cowell who was drawing crowds | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
with an act based on the song Villikins And His Dinah, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:14 | |
a similarly morbid tale of a rich man whose daughter drinks a cup of cold poison | 0:11:14 | 0:11:19 | |
when he tries to force her into an arranged marriage. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:23 | |
Cowell was a fixture at a song and supper room called Evans's, | 0:11:24 | 0:11:28 | |
which advertised itself as being for "steady young men who admire a high class of music". | 0:11:28 | 0:11:34 | |
These young men were establishing the idea of a social life, a very modern concept. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:40 | |
The music they loved was also evolving a modern sound and structure, | 0:11:40 | 0:11:44 | |
but its roots were still very traditional. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
I join music hall enthusiasts Michael Kilgarriff and Barry Cryer for a bit of a singsong. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:53 | |
The kind of song really was | 0:11:53 | 0:11:56 | |
I think still very much redolent of the folk song kind of tradition. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:00 | |
For instance, Sam Cowell in 1836, he was singing this one, still well remembered. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:05 | |
# 'Tis of a rich merchant I'm going for to tell | 0:12:05 | 0:12:09 | |
# Who had for a fortune an uncommon nice young girl | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
# Her name it was Dinah, just 16 years old | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
# With a very large fortune in silver and gold | 0:12:16 | 0:12:19 | |
# Sing too-ra-li, oo-ra-li, oo-ra-li-a! # | 0:12:19 | 0:12:22 | |
And again! | 0:12:22 | 0:12:23 | |
# Too-ra-li, oo-ra-li, oo-ra-li-a! # | 0:12:23 | 0:12:26 | |
-Very good. -A very sad end, that song, isn't it? | 0:12:26 | 0:12:30 | |
Yeah, but they loved it. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:32 | |
Songs about suicide were hysterical | 0:12:32 | 0:12:35 | |
because everybody died young, it wasn't a great tragedy. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
-But all the songs told a story. -They told a narrative. They told a through story. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:42 | |
They would choose a form of popular music | 0:12:42 | 0:12:45 | |
that seemed very contemporary for them | 0:12:45 | 0:12:48 | |
so Viennese styles, for example, often influenced some of the earlier songs. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:54 | |
One of Harry Clifton's most famous songs, Pretty Polly Perkins, is clearly a waltz. | 0:12:54 | 0:13:00 | |
# Oh, she was as beautiful as a butterfly, | 0:13:00 | 0:13:05 | |
# And as proud as a Queen | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
# Was pretty little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green... # | 0:13:08 | 0:13:14 | |
Wherever that song went, it would be adapted for another kind of audience. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:20 | |
We tend to think of music hall always with a London focus | 0:13:20 | 0:13:23 | |
but, for example, in Newcastle where they were also very fond of their music hall entertainment, | 0:13:23 | 0:13:28 | |
Polly Perkins became Cushie Butterfield, a very different type of woman. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:33 | |
# Oh, she was a big lass and a bonny lass and she likes her beer | 0:13:33 | 0:13:39 | |
# And I call her Cushie Butterfield and I wish she was here! # | 0:13:39 | 0:13:44 | |
What became very clear to the publicans who ran these early tavern concert rooms | 0:13:44 | 0:13:49 | |
was that offering any kind of entertainment would increase the sales of alcohol. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:54 | |
The comic singers were interspersed with everything from classical recitals to grand opera. | 0:13:56 | 0:14:02 | |
The Eagle even had its own opera company, staging the latest works by Rossini and Bellini. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:09 | |
But there was one area that was forbidden to them. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:14 | |
They were not allowed to stage a play. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:17 | |
Since Charles II, London theatres needed a royal patent | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
to allow them to present legitimate theatre, and the king only handed out two. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:26 | |
In the 1830s, this was the extent of London's Theatreland. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:32 | |
The Royal Opera House here or the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, as it was known in those days, | 0:14:32 | 0:14:37 | |
and just a few yards down the road, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:41 | |
Only in these two theatres could you put on a play. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:45 | |
The management of these two places obviously guarded their monopoly very vigorously. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:50 | |
I think I'd have done the same if I'd been them. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:53 | |
London's smaller theatres had been loudly complaining about this injustice for years. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:59 | |
Staging readings or incomplete plays, | 0:14:59 | 0:15:01 | |
they risked a visit from the police | 0:15:01 | 0:15:03 | |
every time they tried some new ruse to get around the legislation. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:07 | |
Finally, in 1843, the Theatres Act abolished the patent system. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:13 | |
Any theatre could now apply for a dramatic licence, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
-but they would -not -be allowed to sell liquor, | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
and performances would be closely regulated by the Lord Chamberlain. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:23 | |
Without a licence, there were no regulations at all. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:26 | |
Drinking and eating were permitted in the auditorium, | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
and as long as they steered clear of anything that might constitute a play, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:34 | |
no-one much minded what was on the stage. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
The immediate effect of this Act was to divide the sober and respectable audience for theatre | 0:15:37 | 0:15:42 | |
from the more thirsty types who sought their entertainment in the pub tap rooms. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:47 | |
As drink was integral to the success of these venues, | 0:15:47 | 0:15:51 | |
it didn't take them long to choose. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:53 | |
The term "music hall" was first used in 1848, | 0:15:55 | 0:15:58 | |
when The Grapes tavern in Southwark roofed over their coach yard | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
and called it the Surrey Music Hall. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:05 | |
The name struck a chord. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:06 | |
The music may have had its rough edges, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:08 | |
but what had previously been the domain of an elite | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
was available at a price that a working-class audience could afford. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
And it was a runaway success. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:17 | |
In the 1850s, a major building boom got under way. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:23 | |
In ten years, the number of music and dancing licences issued by the London magistrates | 0:16:23 | 0:16:29 | |
increased nearly five times. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:31 | |
And by the middle of the decade, | 0:16:31 | 0:16:33 | |
nearly 300 premises were in business. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
One of these new music halls has survived, | 0:16:36 | 0:16:40 | |
hidden away in an alley in Stepney. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
John Wilton bought the pub The Prince of Denmark in 1850, | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
and built a concert room in the garden behind. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:49 | |
Wilton's was rediscovered and rescued from demolition by John Earl | 0:16:49 | 0:16:53 | |
when he worked for the London County Council planning department in the 1960s. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:58 | |
This type of hall was always behind a pub. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:01 | |
Originally, the first hall behind the building - | 0:17:01 | 0:17:05 | |
it was a little concert room - | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
was just the width of the pub. It went across the present room. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:11 | |
And the publican, Wilton, bought the adjoining houses one by one, | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
until he could use all their back gardens to build the hall we're in now. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:19 | |
So you've very kindly invited me to Wilton's Music Hall in its heyday. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:23 | |
And we come in through the door. What do I see? | 0:17:23 | 0:17:27 | |
You'd come into this room, which is much, much bigger than the pub. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
It must have been wonderfully unexpected, the sheer size of it. | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
And you'd find a room with a flat floor, like a concert hall, | 0:17:34 | 0:17:37 | |
and at one end there would be a concert platform. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:41 | |
There's a chairman sitting at a table with his back to the stage, | 0:17:41 | 0:17:45 | |
and he has a dressing mirror in front of him | 0:17:45 | 0:17:47 | |
so that he can see the acts on the stage, | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
while at the same time being able to address the audience. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:52 | |
In front of him you've got ranks of tables, dining tables. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:57 | |
And then around the hall, beyond the columns, | 0:17:57 | 0:18:00 | |
and forming a horseshoe right the way round, | 0:18:00 | 0:18:03 | |
there would be a promenade in which people didn't sit at all. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:06 | |
Booze was the essential element. That's what kept the place going. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:10 | |
The earlier music halls didn't even charge for admission. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:13 | |
By this time, they were charging a few pence, | 0:18:13 | 0:18:16 | |
but it was pence that you could - you could present a token at the bar. | 0:18:16 | 0:18:20 | |
It was wet money. And you got a drink to that value. That got you started. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:24 | |
So essentially, selling booze was a really profitable business, | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
if it could build this? | 0:18:28 | 0:18:30 | |
-How was it lit? -Magnificently. -Really? | 0:18:30 | 0:18:33 | |
It would be lit by gas, | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
and in the centre would be a giant chandelier - the sun burner. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
It had a huge flue above it, a concentric flue. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
It was one flue inside another. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:44 | |
The outer flue got hot, and sucked air up the middle one. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:48 | |
-So the air was continually changing. -Cos everyone was smoking down there? | 0:18:48 | 0:18:52 | |
Everyone was smoking. Cigars and pipes. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:54 | |
And the blaze of the music hall was a great attraction in itself. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:58 | |
And the warmth - the place was heated. | 0:18:58 | 0:19:00 | |
And for poor people in this area, | 0:19:00 | 0:19:03 | |
walking into a warmed room was really something in itself. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
A beautifully comfortable place. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:08 | |
The entertainment would have started in the early evening, | 0:19:09 | 0:19:13 | |
and stretched to midnight and beyond. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:15 | |
One continuous programme, covering a wide variety of performers. | 0:19:15 | 0:19:19 | |
Musical recitals would have been mixed with novelty acts, jugglers and conjurors. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
But the star turns were always the comic singers. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:28 | |
# Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:31 | |
# 'Ullo John, got a new motor? | 0:19:31 | 0:19:33 | |
# 'Ullo John, got a new motor?... # | 0:19:33 | 0:19:35 | |
-There is -so -much about comedy that's timeless. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:40 | |
What I was doing, even though I was talking about drugs, | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
and politics, and surrealism, and so on and so forth. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
Really, technically speaking, I was the same | 0:19:46 | 0:19:49 | |
as any music hall comedian. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:51 | |
I never actually thought about creating a persona for myself, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:55 | |
but I think I just did it kind of naturally. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
When I started performing at the Comedy Store, | 0:19:58 | 0:20:01 | |
I wore a leather jacket and chinos. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:03 | |
And my hair wasn't that short. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
But very quickly, I started going on stage, and it was matching. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
Cos it was during the kind-of two-tone revival. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
I wore this kind of silk suit that I bought in an Oxfam shop. | 0:20:11 | 0:20:14 | |
And something happened. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:15 | |
I think partly because I'd started making money as a comic, I got fat very quickly! | 0:20:15 | 0:20:19 | |
And the suit got really tight. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:21 | |
# Things can't get a lot better... # | 0:20:21 | 0:20:24 | |
One of the things I was very keen on was that kind of cabaret thing. | 0:20:24 | 0:20:30 | |
And that took place in venues where drink was served. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
# Ah, cheers, thanks a lot! | 0:20:33 | 0:20:35 | |
# Oh, nice one, yeah | 0:20:35 | 0:20:36 | |
# All right, what you having? # | 0:20:36 | 0:20:38 | |
In the music hall... Of course, the music halls were | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
in a way that a variety wasn't, that alcohol was central to the music hall. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
-Central to the economics! -Yeah! | 0:20:45 | 0:20:47 | |
The clubs that grew out of the alternative comedy movement in the 1980s | 0:20:48 | 0:20:53 | |
are the closest thing we have today | 0:20:53 | 0:20:55 | |
to the atmosphere of the original music halls. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
The acts on the stage competed with a very mobile audience, | 0:20:58 | 0:21:02 | |
promenading, eating, drinking | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
and having a good time amongst themselves. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
This is the Banana Comedy Club in Balham, South London, | 0:21:08 | 0:21:12 | |
where I met a professor of stand-up comedy. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:15 | |
Imagine explaining Eric Morecambe to somebody who's never seen him. | 0:21:15 | 0:21:19 | |
It's all in the looks, the connection with the audience. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
The further back you go, the harder it is to get what they were doing. | 0:21:23 | 0:21:27 | |
And you get to early performers like WG Ross, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
and it's so tantalising. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:32 | |
You have the accounts. You have photos and, in some cases, drawings. | 0:21:32 | 0:21:35 | |
You have music. But we can't know what they were actually like. What we do know | 0:21:35 | 0:21:39 | |
is that they must have been very gripping, magnetic performers. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
The success of these performers seems to have relied | 0:21:43 | 0:21:47 | |
on getting a balance between the singing and the patter. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:50 | |
Any form of popular entertainment which is defined by the effect you have on the audience... | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
anything you can do to involve them is good. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:56 | |
If they join in with the chorus, that's brilliant. | 0:21:56 | 0:21:59 | |
If they go away singing your song, they're advertising your wares, for future shows. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
In a way, music hall is the ancestor of both pop music | 0:22:05 | 0:22:08 | |
and stand-up comedy. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
And there were some that veered more towards the songs. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
The songs were important, and people would sing along while they performed them. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:17 | |
For others, it was about the comedy. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:19 | |
But essentially, they started with comic songs, character songs. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:23 | |
And they would develop a little bit of patter in between. | 0:22:23 | 0:22:26 | |
It's a bit like what happened in the folk clubs in the '70s | 0:22:26 | 0:22:29 | |
with people like Billy Connolly, and Mike Harding, and Jasper Carrott, | 0:22:29 | 0:22:33 | |
in that they started as singers, | 0:22:33 | 0:22:34 | |
and then gradually the talking, the funnies, between the songs, | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
became more important. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:39 | |
It's a particular kind of performance, where what you're trying to do | 0:22:39 | 0:22:43 | |
is grab hold of an audience. You're playing straight out to them. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:46 | |
And if you don't do it properly, you know, you're going to come unstuck. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:50 | |
Because in the music hall, if you read accounts of audience behaviour, they didn't sit there politely. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:55 | |
Some audiences were less polite than others, though. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:03 | |
# I belong to Glasgow | 0:23:03 | 0:23:07 | |
# Dear old Glasgow town... # | 0:23:07 | 0:23:09 | |
The Glasgow Britannia | 0:23:09 | 0:23:11 | |
was one of the city's most popular halls in its Victorian heyday. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
But it closed in 1938, and quietly began to fall apart. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:20 | |
# But when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday | 0:23:20 | 0:23:25 | |
# Glasgow belongs to me... # | 0:23:25 | 0:23:28 | |
In London, the acts may have been booed and hissed from time to time, | 0:23:30 | 0:23:34 | |
but a Glasgow audience | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
showed its appreciation in a more tangible form. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
Leading the efforts to bring this venerable old hall back to life is Judith Bowers. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:45 | |
I mean, they always talk about a Glasgow audience | 0:23:45 | 0:23:48 | |
as being the toughest audience. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:50 | |
And in fact, they actually say, in Glasgow, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:52 | |
they left no turn un-stoned! | 0:23:52 | 0:23:54 | |
You know. And it's absolutely true. They were wild. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
They were really the people that lived and worked in this area. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
The poorest of the poor, working in factories, the mills, the shipyards. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:05 | |
And they were coming in here to blow off steam. | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
One third of the audience were boys aged between 9 and 13. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:12 | |
What were they doing there? | 0:24:12 | 0:24:14 | |
Well, they would come in here for their sport, really. | 0:24:14 | 0:24:17 | |
And they sat in the front of the balcony, | 0:24:17 | 0:24:19 | |
against the proscenium arch there. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
And in that area, they left graffiti, | 0:24:22 | 0:24:24 | |
carved into the woodwork at the front. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:26 | |
And we've found things like lots of marbles, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:28 | |
bits of penny whistle, bits of tin whistle. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
And we think the reason they liked the front of the balcony | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
is because it over-hung the apron in front of the stage. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:37 | |
And from there, they could wee over the edge | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
and hit the comic on the apron. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:41 | |
And of course, the boys that couldn't get into the front of the balcony | 0:24:41 | 0:24:45 | |
would position themselves around the back. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:47 | |
And from there, they could throw horse manure. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:49 | |
You could shove it in your pockets before coming in, | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
and keep your hands warm. Cos it generates its own heat. | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
The ladies allegedly used to bring in their own ammunition, | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
which was also free and readily available. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:00 | |
And that was the fish heads and fish guts from the fish market. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
So to survive, the artists themselves - | 0:25:03 | 0:25:06 | |
-it was a battle for survival on the stage. -It was. You had to be good. | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
So, in amongst the debris when you came here, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:11 | |
you found all kinds of clues. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:14 | |
We identify where people sat in the building | 0:25:14 | 0:25:16 | |
through what they've left behind. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:18 | |
We've got a few little buttons here. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:21 | |
-These are fly buttons? -These are fly buttons, yeah. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
So people were either having a pee, or doing something... | 0:25:24 | 0:25:27 | |
Or doing something naughty. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:29 | |
And judging by the fact these were all found along with a business card | 0:25:29 | 0:25:33 | |
for Dr Temple, "for diseases peculiar to men" | 0:25:33 | 0:25:37 | |
I'll leave you to make your own mind up! | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
The connection between theatres and prostitution was an ancient one, | 0:25:39 | 0:25:43 | |
and the music halls were particularly popular | 0:25:43 | 0:25:47 | |
with a better class of predatory young men, known as mashers, on the hunt for prostitutes. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:52 | |
Rather half-hearted efforts were made to curb the trade, | 0:25:52 | 0:25:56 | |
but it thrived nonetheless. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:58 | |
The mashers. Tell us who the mashers were. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:00 | |
-Well, they were more your toffs, you know. -The toffs did come? | 0:26:00 | 0:26:05 | |
Yeah, the toffs did come here to slum it. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
Were the mashers coming for the entertainment, | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
or for the prostitutes? | 0:26:10 | 0:26:11 | |
Both. Bit of both, I think. | 0:26:11 | 0:26:13 | |
-Prostitutes would ply their wares in and around, inside. -Yeah. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:16 | |
-Then where would they complete the transaction, as it were? -Probably where they were. | 0:26:16 | 0:26:20 | |
There was plenty of distraction going on for the rest of the audience. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:24 | |
And there were 1,500 people shoved in this small space. So, you know - | 0:26:24 | 0:26:28 | |
you could probably get away with a lot up there and nobody would notice. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
And don't forget the fact that smoking | 0:26:32 | 0:26:34 | |
was notoriously bad in this building. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:36 | |
The smoke was so thick the audience complained they couldn't see the act on stage. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:40 | |
# But when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday, | 0:26:40 | 0:26:44 | |
# Glasgow belongs to me! # | 0:26:44 | 0:26:48 | |
A visit to the Glasgow Britannia was probably | 0:26:50 | 0:26:52 | |
as disreputable an experience as a music hall could provide. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:56 | |
The Victorian reformers deplored the failure of the halls | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
to achieve their great objective to improve the lower orders. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:05 | |
"We were told," moaned one newspaper, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:09 | |
"that many people who now spend the hours of the night | 0:27:09 | 0:27:12 | |
"in dissolute indulgence at the public houses | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
"would in time be weaned from their evil doings." | 0:27:15 | 0:27:18 | |
"Those who attended the halls," complained another, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:23 | |
"were like the biblical sinners | 0:27:23 | 0:27:25 | |
"who would rather be drowned than get up and walk into the ark." | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
But though it seemed an impossible goal, | 0:27:31 | 0:27:33 | |
respectability WAS coming to the music hall. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:36 | |
In Victorian times, this narrow lane just south of the River Thames | 0:27:39 | 0:27:44 | |
was a marshy neighbourhood of slum housing, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:47 | |
criss-crossed by railway lines leading in to the new Waterloo Station. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
Right here, under these Eurostar rail tracks, is the site | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
of probably the most important building in the whole of our story - | 0:27:57 | 0:28:01 | |
the Canterbury Music Hall. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:02 | |
In 1849, The Canterbury was a modest pub with a skittle alley. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:09 | |
It changed hands that year, and its new owner | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
immediately set about an ambitious programme of improvements. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:16 | |
The word "impresario" was the Italian word to describe people who managed opera companies. | 0:28:16 | 0:28:23 | |
But about this time, the meaning broadened to include anybody | 0:28:23 | 0:28:26 | |
who invested in the music hall or in show business. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:29 | |
The word perfectly describes the man who built the Canterbury, | 0:28:29 | 0:28:33 | |
Charles Morton. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:35 | |
It was Morton who grasped the potential of the halls like no-one else. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:41 | |
He had seen the runaway business being done in the East End, | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
but he instinctively recognised the need to package this phenomenon for a wider audience. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:49 | |
He wanted to cleanse music hall of its unsavoury reputation, | 0:28:50 | 0:28:53 | |
and make it safe for the middle classes. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
To begin with, he seemed to be following a well-worn path. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:01 | |
This area was not obviously any more appealing | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
than the East End slums. | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
But Morton gained a London-wide reputation for the Canterbury | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
by paying top rates to attract | 0:29:10 | 0:29:12 | |
the very best vocal and comic talents to his hall | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
in the unlikely setting of Lambeth Marsh. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:18 | |
It worked. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:20 | |
The location was close enough to the West End | 0:29:20 | 0:29:24 | |
to draw in new audiences. | 0:29:24 | 0:29:25 | |
And once you were inside The Canterbury, | 0:29:27 | 0:29:29 | |
you knew you were in a different kind of establishment. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
Morton didn't stint on the decoration. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:35 | |
It was a full-blown visual feast, | 0:29:35 | 0:29:37 | |
with all the lavish ornamentation | 0:29:37 | 0:29:40 | |
we've come to associate with the Victorians. | 0:29:40 | 0:29:42 | |
Rather more functional, but equally impressive, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:51 | |
are the store rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum in West London. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:54 | |
Cathy, what are you pulling out for us from these treasures? | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
This is our earliest box on the Canterbury Music Hall. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:06 | |
Morton's great enterprise, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:07 | |
which really kicked everything off because he did so well. | 0:30:07 | 0:30:11 | |
And everybody else wanted to imitate him. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:14 | |
-The great man himself. -Look at those whiskers! | 0:30:14 | 0:30:17 | |
He's got a kind face, hasn't he? | 0:30:17 | 0:30:19 | |
"Respectfully yours." | 0:30:19 | 0:30:21 | |
He began to see the value in a little bit of respectability. | 0:30:21 | 0:30:26 | |
Oh, yes, absolutely, because they weren't very respectable places. | 0:30:26 | 0:30:29 | |
But the very innovative thing that Morton did | 0:30:29 | 0:30:32 | |
was to have evenings for women because he realised that women were excluded. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:37 | |
It certainly worked. So from Ladies' Thursdays, | 0:30:37 | 0:30:42 | |
there were then two ladies evenings until ladies could be there | 0:30:42 | 0:30:45 | |
all the time, as is absolutely right and proper. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:48 | |
-With greater respectability came greater profitability. -Yes. | 0:30:48 | 0:30:52 | |
And the other thing he did was to have an art gallery there. | 0:30:52 | 0:30:55 | |
I mean, how respectable are we becoming now? | 0:30:55 | 0:30:58 | |
Morton actually had his own collection of paintings | 0:30:58 | 0:31:03 | |
-by ancient and modern masters. -Were they ancient and modern masters? | 0:31:03 | 0:31:07 | |
-Anybody we've heard of? -No, they were. Gainsborough. Hogarth. -Wow! | 0:31:07 | 0:31:12 | |
Whoever bought this programme has annotated it with comments. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
-"Good idea," it says. -The Culprit. | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
-And this one says "ugly, especially..." -The women. -"Especially the women." -Yes. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:25 | |
Morton's idea of picture galleries wasn't tokenism. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:30 | |
-They were a genuine attraction. -Absolutely. | 0:31:30 | 0:31:32 | |
Of course, this is only 30 years after the National Gallery opened in London as well. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:37 | |
So Morton is being very grandiose in having his own gallery. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:42 | |
And on the back you will see the Royal Academy over the Water, Canterbury Hall, Westminster Road. | 0:31:42 | 0:31:49 | |
"Suppers, etc, until 12 o'clock." Oh, we've got the menu here. | 0:31:49 | 0:31:54 | |
That's wonderful. "The one shilling supper." | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
What have we got for dinner tonight, lads? | 0:31:57 | 0:31:59 | |
Cold roast beef, boiled fowl and bacon, haricot mutton, kidneys. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:04 | |
Boiled cod and egg sauce. Eugh! It must have been a heck of a kitchen they were running. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:09 | |
What treasure are we going to find underneath here? What's this? | 0:32:09 | 0:32:13 | |
-Canterbury Hall. Verdi opera, Macbeth, every evening. -Yes. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:17 | |
-You see, improving. -Nice and bloodthirsty, though! | 0:32:17 | 0:32:20 | |
-What's this? July 1st, can you read that? 18... -59. -1859, yes. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:27 | |
"Not the least remarkable sign of the spread of a taste for music in England | 0:32:27 | 0:32:31 | |
"is to be found in the rapid growth of music halls for the people." | 0:32:31 | 0:32:35 | |
-Here we are, this is a whole... -"Sprung from the concerts at supper taverns, | 0:32:35 | 0:32:40 | |
"the music halls have provided a purer class of entertainment | 0:32:40 | 0:32:43 | |
"which are nightly resorted to by mechanics and their wives | 0:32:43 | 0:32:47 | |
"and by the middle classes, | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
"who find provided for them the most excellent programmes | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
"with artists fully competent to do justice to them." | 0:32:53 | 0:32:56 | |
Morton was making a fortune and his next step was to move into the West End. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:05 | |
The Oxford Music Hall, a larger and grander version of the Canterbury, | 0:33:07 | 0:33:10 | |
opened here on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in 1861. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:16 | |
Morton's successful business model was quickly copied by others. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:23 | |
This is Weston's in Holborn, operating on very similar lines. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:27 | |
Morton's practice of paying premium rates for the top performers | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
saw them start to earn sizeable salaries | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
and we begin to see the birth of a modern star system. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
One of the first to benefit from this development was George Leybourne, | 0:33:39 | 0:33:44 | |
better known today by the name of his most famous song, | 0:33:44 | 0:33:47 | |
Champagne Charlie. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:49 | |
Chris Beeching has written a biography of George | 0:33:50 | 0:33:52 | |
and also performs a one-man Leybourne tribute act | 0:33:52 | 0:33:55 | |
which includes a more authentic version of the great man's nose. | 0:33:55 | 0:34:00 | |
When he was put under contract with the Canterbury, | 0:34:00 | 0:34:04 | |
George could actually earn £120 a week. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:07 | |
The people in the gallery he was playing to, | 0:34:07 | 0:34:09 | |
-they were earning £20 a year. -A year! | 0:34:09 | 0:34:13 | |
The mainstay of Leybourne's act was the satirical portrayal of the upper-class young man about town, | 0:34:14 | 0:34:19 | |
frequently seen slumming it in the audience at the music hall. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:23 | |
# As you may suppose When you look at my clothes | 0:34:26 | 0:34:30 | |
# I'm prince of all nautical swells | 0:34:30 | 0:34:32 | |
# And the fellas I meet... # | 0:34:32 | 0:34:35 | |
They were known colloquially as dudes, mashers and toffs, | 0:34:35 | 0:34:38 | |
or most commonly, swells. | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
# The fellas look upon me with a jealous eye | 0:34:41 | 0:34:45 | |
# The ladies all adore me as they saunter by | 0:34:45 | 0:34:49 | |
# They titter and they blush Then after me they rush | 0:34:49 | 0:34:53 | |
# For heaviest of heavy seaside swells am I. # | 0:34:53 | 0:34:57 | |
I think he latched onto the upper-class chappies. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:03 | |
-These Piccadilly weepers, right. -Is that what they're called? | 0:35:03 | 0:35:08 | |
They're called Piccadilly weepers and this is a Piccadilly window. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
-Wonderful. -Yes. Marvellous. | 0:35:14 | 0:35:16 | |
These had become awfully popular, tremendously popular. | 0:35:16 | 0:35:20 | |
Decked out in a full set of Piccadilly weepers, | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
it was Champagne Charlie that launched Leybourne into the big-time. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:30 | |
-Did he write Champagne Charlie? -Yes, he wrote the words. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:33 | |
He was quite clever at playing a naughty double game on songs. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:37 | |
There's the PRFG game. It's private rooms for gentlemen, | 0:35:37 | 0:35:43 | |
which were the rooms hired by the hour. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:46 | |
# The thing I most excel in is the PRFG game | 0:35:46 | 0:35:51 | |
# A noise all night, in bed all day | 0:35:52 | 0:35:57 | |
# And swimming in champagne | 0:35:57 | 0:36:01 | |
# For Champagne Charlie is my name | 0:36:01 | 0:36:05 | |
# Champagne Charlie is my name... # | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
'He had wonderful long legs as well. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:15 | |
'Women fainted at his legs, the length of his legs. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:20 | |
'Great charisma.' | 0:36:20 | 0:36:21 | |
# Champagne Charlie is my name | 0:36:21 | 0:36:24 | |
# Good for any game at night, boys | 0:36:24 | 0:36:29 | |
# Come and join me... # | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
According to the song lyric, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:33 | |
Moet was Charlie's favourite brand of bubbly. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
And Leybourne was rumoured to be paid by the firm to push their wares | 0:36:36 | 0:36:40 | |
and live a champagne lifestyle offstage as well. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
A rivalry developed with another comic singer | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
known as The Great Vance, who promoted Clicquot in similar terms. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:51 | |
-What we have here is the birth of celebrity endorsement. -Exactly. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:58 | |
-And a brand war. We've got Clicquot versus Moet. -Yes. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:02 | |
-Vance versus Leybourne. -Yes. Yes. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:04 | |
Now, you're going to have the unenviable task of turning me into a toff. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:08 | |
If I bend this, I'm sure you'll be able to iron it flat afterwards. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:14 | |
-I have a man that sees to that. -Oh, really? Of course you do. -My agent. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
-Of course. Of course. Put the cravat on. -Is that Victorian Velcro? -Very Victorian! | 0:37:18 | 0:37:23 | |
-There we are, Michael. -There we go. Hope it fits. Nice material. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:27 | |
-Yes, very nice. -I had a sofa like this. A three-piece suite, actually. | 0:37:27 | 0:37:30 | |
-Really? How lovely. A frock coat. -Frock coat. | 0:37:30 | 0:37:34 | |
-This is what the toffs wore, is it? -Yes. -I like this. -It looks splendid. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
-And here is your crowning glory, the hat. -A jaunty angle? Or about there? What do you think? | 0:37:37 | 0:37:44 | |
Look at this. The heaviest of swells. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:47 | |
Fantastic! Look at that. Absolutely fantastic. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:50 | |
Leybourne became a particular target of the highbrow press, | 0:37:56 | 0:38:00 | |
who deplored the direction the music halls were taking. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:03 | |
"A man appears on the platform dressed in outlandish clothes | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
"and ornamented with whiskers of ferocious length and hideous hue, | 0:38:06 | 0:38:11 | |
"who proceeds to sing verse after verse of pointless twaddle," | 0:38:11 | 0:38:15 | |
wrote one reviewer. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:17 | |
"The female performers were even more maddening," he added. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:21 | |
# Mother told me that I should | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
# Do my utmost to be good. # | 0:38:24 | 0:38:28 | |
Mother's Advice was typical of the mildly suggestive material | 0:38:28 | 0:38:32 | |
that played on Victorian fears of moral turpitude. | 0:38:32 | 0:38:36 | |
# Mother said whate'er you do | 0:38:36 | 0:38:41 | |
# Don't let boys climb trees with you | 0:38:41 | 0:38:45 | |
# I'm glad I took my mother's advice | 0:38:45 | 0:38:50 | |
# Mother's advice, mother's advice | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
# They don't climb trees with me Oh, no | 0:38:54 | 0:39:00 | |
# They help me up and wait below. # | 0:39:00 | 0:39:04 | |
But the most successful women performers developed a very sophisticated humour, | 0:39:08 | 0:39:13 | |
based on the day-to-day preoccupations of their audience. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:16 | |
Drink, marriage, money worries, the seaside holiday, the lodger. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:20 | |
And that great concern in Victorian Britain, their social status. | 0:39:20 | 0:39:25 | |
Bessie Bellwood, one of the most rumbustious of all the music hall styles. | 0:39:26 | 0:39:31 | |
She had a song called What Cheer 'Ria | 0:39:31 | 0:39:34 | |
and the idea was that she had a vegetable stall and she'd had a particularly good week | 0:39:34 | 0:39:38 | |
so she decides to treat herself in the music hall. | 0:39:38 | 0:39:42 | |
Instead of going up into the gallery with her chums, | 0:39:42 | 0:39:45 | |
she splashes out on a seat in the stalls right by the chairman. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:49 | |
It has a very lengthy verse where she explains who she is, | 0:39:49 | 0:39:53 | |
sets the narrative in motion. | 0:39:53 | 0:39:55 | |
# I am a girl what's doing very well in the vegetable line | 0:39:55 | 0:39:59 | |
# And as I'd saved a bob or two I thought I'd cut to shine. # | 0:39:59 | 0:40:04 | |
And then she explains that she goes and buys some toggery, | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
these here the very clothes that you see, | 0:40:08 | 0:40:10 | |
and with a shilling that she's got from selling her vegetables, | 0:40:10 | 0:40:15 | |
she decides to go and sit in the stalls of the music hall. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:19 | |
And of course her chums see her and they give her the rouse, | 0:40:19 | 0:40:25 | |
something like this. | 0:40:25 | 0:40:27 | |
# What cheer, 'Ria! 'Ria's on the job | 0:40:27 | 0:40:30 | |
# What cheer, 'Ria! Did you speculate a bob? | 0:40:30 | 0:40:33 | |
# 'Ria, she's a toff And she looks immensikoff | 0:40:33 | 0:40:36 | |
# And they all shouted What cheer, 'Ria! # | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
Her friends now decide they're going to play some tricks. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:44 | |
So they throw an orange down, which lands in some beer, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:50 | |
it shoots up, goes over her dress. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
She ends up rushing out. | 0:40:53 | 0:40:54 | |
A man with a false leg stuck his leg out | 0:40:54 | 0:40:58 | |
and she tripped over the false leg so lands smack on her face. Total ignominy. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:02 | |
So she explains in some spoken patter to this song that they went and fetched the chucker out. | 0:41:02 | 0:41:09 | |
And he said, "Come on, 'Ria, you've been kicking up a pretty fuss. | 0:41:09 | 0:41:13 | |
"Come on outside." I said, "Shan't, shan't, shan't!" | 0:41:13 | 0:41:17 | |
Almost like a Barbara Windsor moment. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:20 | |
The moral of the song really is, well, know your place. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:23 | |
She had no place being downstairs. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:25 | |
Even if you've got the money, you don't belong there. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
Bessie Bellwood began her career as a rabbit skinner | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
working in The Cup near Waterloo Station. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:35 | |
This seems to have been an ideal preparation for life on the music hall stage. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:40 | |
She reacted aggressively to insults, real or imagined. | 0:41:41 | 0:41:45 | |
Once, she was arrested in the Tottenham Court Road | 0:41:45 | 0:41:48 | |
for knocking flat a cab man who she felt had slighted her gentleman friend. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:52 | |
Her most notorious talent, though, was for dealing with hecklers. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:56 | |
Jerome K Jerome describes seeing her in action. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:01 | |
"At the end, she gathered herself together for one supreme effort | 0:42:01 | 0:42:05 | |
"and hurled at him an insult so bitter with scorn | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
"that strongmen drew and held their breath while it passed over them, | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
"and women hid their faces and shivered. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
"Then she folded her arms and stood silent | 0:42:16 | 0:42:18 | |
"and the house, from floor-to-ceiling, rose and cheered her | 0:42:18 | 0:42:22 | |
"until there was no more breath left in its lungs." | 0:42:22 | 0:42:25 | |
-She must have been a hell of a performer. -She sounds brilliant. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:28 | |
-A woman after your own heart. -Big-time! Yeah, absolutely. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:32 | |
When you are in a comedy club and they're all drunk | 0:42:32 | 0:42:34 | |
and shouting abuse at you, as a woman, | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
what comes back to you is previous occurrences | 0:42:37 | 0:42:40 | |
where that's happened to you | 0:42:40 | 0:42:42 | |
and you were helpless and you couldn't do anything. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:45 | |
So that anger sort of wells up again, a bit, and you sort of think, | 0:42:45 | 0:42:49 | |
"How dare they?" | 0:42:49 | 0:42:50 | |
But here I am now, I've got the chance to answer them back. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:53 | |
I'm sure you think you've had it tough with some audiences today, | 0:42:53 | 0:42:57 | |
but you've had the advantage of technology. | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
In the days of the music hall, no microphone and the whole place was one light. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:06 | |
-They could see them all. -Is it good to be able to see the heckler? | 0:43:06 | 0:43:10 | |
Well, it's good to the extent that if you can see them, | 0:43:10 | 0:43:13 | |
you can pick on some physical attribute they've got. | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
-Or lack of attribute. -Or lack of attributes, that's right. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:19 | |
Erm, on the other hand, as a performer, it's not great generally. | 0:43:19 | 0:43:24 | |
I prefer to not see the audience because when you can see them, | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
they somehow become more sort of human to you | 0:43:28 | 0:43:32 | |
and you actually want to be able to be nasty to them | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
if they're nasty to you. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:36 | |
I find it quite hard if you can see them. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
And every comedian that I know lives in fear of being destroyed by a heckler. | 0:43:40 | 0:43:46 | |
The thing about audiences is as a group I think they're not a kind group of people. | 0:43:46 | 0:43:52 | |
If you start to falter or look like you're struggling, | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
they don't buoy you up with their love. They want to kill you. | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
So, you know, once you're struggling, | 0:43:59 | 0:44:02 | |
you're really in trouble because then, the room drops away, | 0:44:02 | 0:44:06 | |
the atmosphere changes and you can see them all sitting there, | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
you know, saying, "What are you going to do about it? | 0:44:09 | 0:44:13 | |
"Come on, dance, monkey, dance." | 0:44:13 | 0:44:17 | |
Reading the accounts of the time, it seems to me that the women who succeeded | 0:44:17 | 0:44:21 | |
became known as seriocomics. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
In other words, their songs, their patter, | 0:44:25 | 0:44:28 | |
was drawn from life experience. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:30 | |
I think that's the difference between men and women, in some ways, | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
not just in comedy, but generally. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
I think women use their own personal experience much more. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:41 | |
They're much more cooperative with each other, they talk about their troubles, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:46 | |
whereas men feel that they can't tell everyone. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
So men will sort of tend to talk about more objective, external things in their life | 0:44:50 | 0:44:56 | |
whereas women will use their own personal experience, | 0:44:56 | 0:45:00 | |
either they've been let down by a bloke or their marriage has gone wrong. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:04 | |
I just think that's a natural way for women to communicate | 0:45:04 | 0:45:08 | |
so the push must have been so much harder to make for them | 0:45:08 | 0:45:13 | |
and I think they must have been absolutely wonderful | 0:45:13 | 0:45:15 | |
and I just really wish I could have met some of them, they sound absolutely great. | 0:45:15 | 0:45:20 | |
In 1861, the year that Morton built the Oxford, | 0:45:23 | 0:45:27 | |
the magnificent Alhambra opened its doors. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
# Give my regards to Leicester Square... # | 0:45:31 | 0:45:36 | |
It stood on the site now occupied | 0:45:36 | 0:45:38 | |
by the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:42 | |
Seriocomic singers were not the only female attractions here. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
In keeping with its enthusiasm for opera and picture galleries, | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
the music hall was about to come to the rescue of another great cultural institution. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:56 | |
I met John Earl again on the site where the Alhambra had stood. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:02 | |
One of the most exciting things about this period, | 0:46:02 | 0:46:05 | |
to me at least, | 0:46:05 | 0:46:07 | |
is the fact that music halls became the home of the ballet. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
Any music hall that was large enough to have a stage | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
would mount ballets of some sort, and at the Alhambra, | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
they were particularly spectacular. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
-The ballet had been pretty well ditched by the Royal Opera House... -Really? -..and Her Majesty's. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:24 | |
This is not the elite ballet for the upper classes. | 0:46:24 | 0:46:28 | |
It was called, at the time, "ballet for the million", | 0:46:28 | 0:46:31 | |
and I think that's a very good description. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
And ballet for the million meant lovely legs. | 0:46:39 | 0:46:43 | |
Most of the ballets that were performed at this sort of music hall are now forgotten | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
because they were ephemeral, but that doesn't mean they were rubbish. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
-I've put a cutting in here. This is an illustration... -That is gorgeous. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:57 | |
It's a huge set, for one thing, and a very expert set, too. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
We had some of the best scene painters in the world in London. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:03 | |
-We still do. -We still do, yes. It's the sheer size of that set. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:08 | |
-Huge, huge production. -And the number of people on the stage. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:11 | |
The music hall had kept the ballet alive. | 0:47:11 | 0:47:13 | |
When the Russian Ballet arrived, they were astonished to find a ballet audience in London. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:18 | |
The music hall seemed able to absorb and adapt any form of entertainment | 0:47:21 | 0:47:25 | |
and produce their own unique version for mass consumption. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:29 | |
In the 1870s, they even became something of a political debating chamber. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:35 | |
The popularity of the music halls at all levels of Victorian society | 0:47:35 | 0:47:40 | |
meant that they offered a real barometer of national opinion | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
on the important matters of the day. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:45 | |
The tone of the halls was conservative, | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
with a small C and a large C. | 0:47:48 | 0:47:50 | |
They were working-class Tories, like me. | 0:47:50 | 0:47:54 | |
The leader of the Conservative Party, Benjamin Disraeli, | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
was enjoying a period of popular support from the working classes | 0:47:58 | 0:48:02 | |
for legislation which restricted the amount of time they could spend at work. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:06 | |
Gladstone's Liberal Party, on the other hand, were distrusted | 0:48:07 | 0:48:11 | |
for trying to restrict the amount of time they could spend in the pub. | 0:48:11 | 0:48:15 | |
The British drinking man hated to be lectured on his refreshments. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:19 | |
Gladstone was seen as a killjoy, and Disraeli became their hero. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:24 | |
Music hall audiences were also fiercely patriotic, | 0:48:24 | 0:48:27 | |
and Disraeli scored again in 1877 | 0:48:27 | 0:48:30 | |
when he took a very strong line on Russian imperialism in the Balkans. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:35 | |
The Russian declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire | 0:48:37 | 0:48:41 | |
became known as the Eastern Crisis, | 0:48:41 | 0:48:44 | |
and polarised public opinion for and against British intervention. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:49 | |
In the library of The Garrick Club, | 0:48:49 | 0:48:51 | |
there is a complete set of the theatrical newspaper The Era, | 0:48:51 | 0:48:55 | |
which widely reported these events. | 0:48:55 | 0:48:58 | |
To the great surprise of the establishment, | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
this debate got an airing on the stage of the music halls. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:04 | |
Historian Michael Diamond has dug out a few cuttings. | 0:49:04 | 0:49:08 | |
In the 1870s, the first great period | 0:49:10 | 0:49:14 | |
of political agitation on the music halls broke out. | 0:49:14 | 0:49:17 | |
Britain must be strong. Disraeli was pro-Turkish, | 0:49:17 | 0:49:20 | |
Gladstone was against the Turks and for the Russians, | 0:49:20 | 0:49:23 | |
and this really whipped up the music halls into a frenzy, | 0:49:23 | 0:49:28 | |
so you got, above all, one of the most famous music hall songs of all, | 0:49:28 | 0:49:33 | |
"We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do, | 0:49:33 | 0:49:35 | |
"we've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money, too." | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
# We don't want to fight But by jingo if we do | 0:49:38 | 0:49:42 | |
# We've got the men We've got the ships | 0:49:42 | 0:49:44 | |
# And got the money too | 0:49:44 | 0:49:46 | |
# We've fought the Bear before | 0:49:46 | 0:49:49 | |
# And while we're Britons true | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
# The Russians shall not have Constantinople. # | 0:49:51 | 0:49:57 | |
The end of that song is a little weak, isn't it?! | 0:49:57 | 0:50:00 | |
It doesn't rhyme, of course, but trying to find a rhyme | 0:50:00 | 0:50:03 | |
for Constantinople is probably a lost cause! | 0:50:03 | 0:50:06 | |
This unleashed a whole succession of songs of this kind | 0:50:06 | 0:50:11 | |
about the Russian bear, the turkey, | 0:50:11 | 0:50:14 | |
the Russian bear wanted to eat the turkey, | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
the British lion stopped the Russian bear from eating the turkey. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:20 | |
Then you've got the French cock | 0:50:20 | 0:50:22 | |
and the Austrian and German eagles thrown in, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:26 | |
and there's a sort of zoological subsection of music hall song | 0:50:26 | 0:50:31 | |
-which was incredibly popular. -But politically driven? | 0:50:31 | 0:50:34 | |
And politically driven, and it's worth remembering that, of course, | 0:50:34 | 0:50:37 | |
a lot of the people who went to music halls didn't have the vote, | 0:50:37 | 0:50:40 | |
and at the next election after this furore, | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
Disraelian Conservatives lost. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
The music halls would've liked to have thought | 0:50:46 | 0:50:48 | |
that the politicians were hanging on their every word. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:51 | |
Actually, the class system in the country didn't mean that they took much notice. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:56 | |
By the 1880s, music halls were part of the very fabric of Victorian life, | 0:50:58 | 0:51:02 | |
and if you lived in urban Britain at this time, | 0:51:02 | 0:51:05 | |
you wouldn't have had to walk very far to visit one. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:08 | |
A Parliamentary report in 1888 noted that London had 50 theatres, | 0:51:08 | 0:51:14 | |
35 concert halls, and 473 music halls. | 0:51:14 | 0:51:18 | |
But there was a risk associated with an evening out at the halls - fire. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:26 | |
Morton suffered more than most. | 0:51:26 | 0:51:28 | |
The Oxford went up in flames in February 1868, | 0:51:28 | 0:51:32 | |
and its replacement met the same fate only four years later. | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
The Alhambra, which he also managed, burnt down in December 1882. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:42 | |
The final straw was the fire at the Theatre Royal in Exeter, | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
in which 190 people died. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:49 | |
Legislation followed, and over 200 halls were closed down | 0:51:49 | 0:51:54 | |
as they failed to obtain the necessary certificate of suitability. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:57 | |
Those that survived underwent profound changes. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:03 | |
The City Varieties in Leeds is undergoing a major restoration at present, | 0:52:04 | 0:52:08 | |
but it's a good place to see how the new building regulations | 0:52:08 | 0:52:12 | |
altered the experience of visiting a music hall. | 0:52:12 | 0:52:15 | |
Dave Wilmore is a theatre historian working on the project. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:20 | |
Oh, wow! | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
Oh, breathtaking. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
If you look at the built record of music halls and theatres | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
in the 19th century, I think the average life of the theatre, | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
the expectancy of it, is about 15 years. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:40 | |
That's either because you want to rebuild it and make it bigger | 0:52:40 | 0:52:43 | |
because it's a commercial success, or, more likely, it burns down, | 0:52:43 | 0:52:47 | |
which just tells you how fantastic it is that this is a survivor. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:50 | |
Originally, it was this flat-floored music hall with tables, loose chairs... | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
-Lots of booze? -Lots of booze, lots of activity. -Bar at the back? | 0:52:54 | 0:52:58 | |
Yeah, probably not even licensed to a capacity. | 0:52:58 | 0:53:01 | |
If people turned up, they'd sell a ticket and let them in. | 0:53:01 | 0:53:04 | |
-No health and safety? -Not really, not at all. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:07 | |
Loose seating was clearly dangerous. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:09 | |
In the event of panic, people run and the loose seats get knocked over. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:13 | |
So you go from a free-for-all | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
to rows of formal seats as we understand the theatre today? | 0:53:16 | 0:53:18 | |
Indeed, and I suppose if you're wearing your commercial hat, | 0:53:18 | 0:53:22 | |
you can probably get more people in | 0:53:22 | 0:53:24 | |
than having a more laissez-faire seating arrangement | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
around little circular tables. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:29 | |
Between 1953 and 1983, this theatre was the home of The Good Old Days, | 0:53:31 | 0:53:37 | |
a series which recreated the atmosphere of the music halls. | 0:53:37 | 0:53:40 | |
It was chaired in a very personal style by Leonard Sachs. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:45 | |
And now, ladies and gentlemen, born in Leeds... | 0:53:45 | 0:53:49 | |
CHEERING | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
..now illustrious London luminary, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:56 | |
Mr Barry Cryer! | 0:53:56 | 0:53:59 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:53:59 | 0:54:02 | |
# My girl's a Yorkshire girl | 0:54:03 | 0:54:07 | |
# Yorkshire through and through... # | 0:54:07 | 0:54:11 | |
This notion of the chairman, | 0:54:11 | 0:54:13 | |
the Leonard Sachs character in The Good Old Days, was that for real? | 0:54:13 | 0:54:17 | |
Absolutely, there was a chairman. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:18 | |
In the early days he was probably the licensee, | 0:54:18 | 0:54:21 | |
and then at some point later, the licensee becomes less important | 0:54:21 | 0:54:26 | |
and at that point I think the chairman starts to become less of a character, | 0:54:26 | 0:54:30 | |
then you start to find that, with the fixing down of the seating, | 0:54:30 | 0:54:34 | |
the whole feeling of the performance changes. | 0:54:34 | 0:54:37 | |
And we have the changing in lighting conditions in the auditorium. | 0:54:37 | 0:54:41 | |
Here, you would've had the transition from gas, in the early days, to electricity, | 0:54:41 | 0:54:46 | |
and you can control electricity much easier than you can gas. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:50 | |
It does allow you to introduce the concept of blackouts in performance. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:56 | |
Almost overnight, the whole atmosphere of the halls changed. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
The brightly-lit room with its loose tables and chairs | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
was replaced by fixed seating in a darkened auditorium. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:09 | |
The theatre and the music hall, | 0:55:09 | 0:55:11 | |
who had gone their separate ways after the Theatres Act in 1843, | 0:55:11 | 0:55:15 | |
found their paths converging some 40 years later. | 0:55:15 | 0:55:19 | |
But none of these changes had any effect | 0:55:20 | 0:55:23 | |
on the popularity of the entertainment on offer. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
The music halls held up a mirror to their audience, | 0:55:26 | 0:55:29 | |
reflecting a comical, sentimental vision of their own working lives. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:34 | |
The Cockney coster became a regular turn in the 1880s. | 0:55:34 | 0:55:39 | |
A costermonger was an itinerant fruit and veg seller, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:42 | |
a romantic working-class stereotype that could be admired by all. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
The most successful costers had questionable qualifications as Cockneys. | 0:55:47 | 0:55:53 | |
One of the first was The Great Vance, whose Costermonger Joe | 0:55:53 | 0:55:57 | |
disguised his former profession as a solicitor's clerk. | 0:55:57 | 0:56:00 | |
Or Albert Chevalier, who was dubbed the costers' laureate, | 0:56:01 | 0:56:05 | |
even though he was born on the Royal Crescent in Notting Hill. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:09 | |
A more authentic model was Gus Elen, formerly an egg packer | 0:56:09 | 0:56:14 | |
who had a massive hit with If It Wasn't For The 'Ouses In Between. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:19 | |
It was supposed to be a parody on the '90s middle classes' mania for gardens, | 0:56:20 | 0:56:25 | |
trying to ape the upper classes, I suppose, with their estates, | 0:56:25 | 0:56:29 | |
and this is a song about a Cockney who presumably had a barrow. | 0:56:29 | 0:56:33 | |
He didn't have a garden, he had a backyard. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:35 | |
# If you saw my little backyard "Wot a pretty spot," you'd cry | 0:56:35 | 0:56:39 | |
# It's a picture on a sunny summer day | 0:56:39 | 0:56:42 | |
# With the turnip tops and cabbages wot people doesn't buy | 0:56:42 | 0:56:46 | |
# On a Sunday market I make 'em look all gay | 0:56:46 | 0:56:50 | |
# The neighbours finks I grows 'em And you'd fancy you're in Kent | 0:56:50 | 0:56:54 | |
# Or in Epsom if you gaze into the mews | 0:56:54 | 0:56:58 | |
# It's a wonder as the landlord doesn't want to raise the rent | 0:56:58 | 0:57:02 | |
# Because we've got such nobby distant vie-e-ews | 0:57:02 | 0:57:09 | |
# Oh, it really is a wery pretty garden | 0:57:09 | 0:57:14 | |
ALL SING TOGETHER: # And Chingford to the eastward could be seen | 0:57:14 | 0:57:19 | |
# With a ladder and some glasses | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
# You could see to 'Ackney Marshes | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
# If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between. # | 0:57:25 | 0:57:32 | |
-Very good. -Gus Elen, yes. -Good lyric, isn't it? | 0:57:33 | 0:57:36 | |
The coster was just one amongst a gallery | 0:57:36 | 0:57:39 | |
of familiar stock characters that appeared on every bill. | 0:57:39 | 0:57:42 | |
Irish and Scottish acts were particularly popular. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:47 | |
We're going to go Roamin' In The Gloamin' by the bonnie banks of Clyde. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:52 | |
Harry Lauder became the most famous Scotsman in the world, | 0:57:52 | 0:57:57 | |
singing his own compositions like Roamin' In The Gloamin'. | 0:57:57 | 0:58:00 | |
# I've seen lots of bonnie lassies Travellin' far and wide | 0:58:00 | 0:58:04 | |
# But my heart is centred now On bonnie Kate McBride... # | 0:58:04 | 0:58:09 | |
Lauder, a former miner, was often criticised in Scotland | 0:58:09 | 0:58:13 | |
as a crude caricature of a Scot, | 0:58:13 | 0:58:15 | |
and the stereotypical tight-fisted Scotsman | 0:58:15 | 0:58:18 | |
may owe a great deal to Lauder's stage act. | 0:58:18 | 0:58:21 | |
# Roamin' in the gloamin' | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
# On the bonnie banks o' Clyde... # | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 | |
In his early days, he was just as likely to perform as an Irishman. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:31 | |
English audiences, unfamiliar with the nuances of the accent, | 0:58:31 | 0:58:35 | |
seemed just as happy either way. | 0:58:35 | 0:58:37 | |
# Oh, it's lovely roamin' in the gloamin'! # | 0:58:37 | 0:58:43 | |
You have to start with the stereotype, | 0:58:43 | 0:58:45 | |
with a character that everybody will recognise. | 0:58:45 | 0:58:47 | |
You've only got a very short time, a turn, well...seven minutes? | 0:58:47 | 0:58:52 | |
You can't build up some character from nowhere. | 0:58:52 | 0:58:56 | |
You can't come on and have people think, | 0:58:56 | 0:58:58 | |
"Oh, what might this be meant to represent?" | 0:58:58 | 0:59:00 | |
That's not going to work, so you come on | 0:59:00 | 0:59:03 | |
dressed as a stage Irishman with a shillelagh and a crushed hat | 0:59:03 | 0:59:07 | |
and collapsing corduroy trousers, and they know who you are. | 0:59:07 | 0:59:10 | |
The biggest stars of music hall were by now becoming household names, | 0:59:13 | 0:59:17 | |
better known than the Prime Minister, and usually more popular. | 0:59:17 | 0:59:21 | |
David Drummond, who runs a small shop just off Charing Cross Road, | 0:59:23 | 0:59:26 | |
has a treasure trove of material related to these performers. | 0:59:26 | 0:59:30 | |
This shop really is an Aladdin's cave of music hall ephemera. | 0:59:32 | 0:59:36 | |
Mention almost any performer from the heyday of the halls | 0:59:36 | 0:59:40 | |
and David will have something tucked away to show you. | 0:59:40 | 0:59:43 | |
-What do we know about Little Titch? -His real name was Harry Relph. | 0:59:44 | 0:59:49 | |
-He was more of a physical comedian? -Yes, but first of all he was small. | 0:59:49 | 0:59:54 | |
He was most famous for these big boots. | 0:59:55 | 0:59:58 | |
And I have somewhere his date book, | 1:00:00 | 1:00:03 | |
and there is not one free date the entire year. | 1:00:03 | 1:00:07 | |
Oh, that looks like a contract. I'd recognise a contract anywhere! | 1:00:08 | 1:00:12 | |
This is a contract for Little Titch to appear... | 1:00:12 | 1:00:17 | |
-Star comedian, it says. -Yeah. | 1:00:17 | 1:00:20 | |
-Look at the salary. -£225 per week. | 1:00:20 | 1:00:25 | |
What would that be now? | 1:00:25 | 1:00:26 | |
MICHAEL SIGHS | 1:00:26 | 1:00:28 | |
20,000? | 1:00:28 | 1:00:29 | |
Little Titch's contemporary Dan Leno, a full nine inches taller, | 1:00:29 | 1:00:34 | |
started his career as a clog dancer | 1:00:34 | 1:00:36 | |
but eventually became the most popular comedian on the halls. | 1:00:36 | 1:00:41 | |
-Her Mother's At The Bottom Of It All. -There's a world of truth in that! | 1:00:42 | 1:00:48 | |
There's tiny bits of patter in between the verses here. | 1:00:48 | 1:00:52 | |
"Oh, they do beat me, and of course you daren't hit a woman. | 1:00:52 | 1:00:55 | |
"Well, I know I daren't!" That got a big laugh, I bet. | 1:00:55 | 1:00:58 | |
Terrible material! | 1:00:58 | 1:01:00 | |
"I don't know what I wanted to get married for..." | 1:01:00 | 1:01:03 | |
-With respect, I think it's the way you perform it! -Maybe. | 1:01:03 | 1:01:06 | |
"My life's one long wretchedness, | 1:01:06 | 1:01:09 | |
"and it's all through a woman with a cold black eye." Wonderful. | 1:01:09 | 1:01:14 | |
Another hugely popular music hall staple | 1:01:14 | 1:01:18 | |
were the male impersonators, female comic singers who dressed as men. | 1:01:18 | 1:01:22 | |
A woman wearing trousers was considered quite shocking at the time, | 1:01:22 | 1:01:27 | |
but, once again, the music halls seemed to get away with it. | 1:01:27 | 1:01:31 | |
-Ah, well, there we are, they've got Vesta Tilley here. -Wow, look at that. | 1:01:31 | 1:01:37 | |
And there she is as a fine gentleman. | 1:01:37 | 1:01:41 | |
You wouldn't want to cross her, would you? | 1:01:41 | 1:01:43 | |
What you might be interested in, | 1:01:43 | 1:01:45 | |
that is Vesta Tilley's waistcoat. | 1:01:45 | 1:01:48 | |
-It's very frail. -Fine silk. | 1:01:48 | 1:01:51 | |
She probably flattened her boobs, didn't she, for the effect? | 1:01:51 | 1:01:55 | |
-She certainly wasn't petite if that fitted her. -No, no. | 1:01:55 | 1:01:58 | |
Vesta Tilley was real music hall nobility, | 1:02:03 | 1:02:06 | |
the best remembered male impersonator on the halls, | 1:02:06 | 1:02:09 | |
eventually becoming Lady de Frece when her husband was knighted. | 1:02:09 | 1:02:13 | |
But she was already something of a toff in her onstage persona. | 1:02:13 | 1:02:17 | |
If you contrast Vesta Tilley with the male on the music halls, | 1:02:19 | 1:02:24 | |
he is the idol of the young men, in fact, in the audience, | 1:02:24 | 1:02:31 | |
the clerks who have just got enough money together | 1:02:31 | 1:02:35 | |
to come to the West End music hall. | 1:02:35 | 1:02:38 | |
He struts on with an explosive champagne bottle | 1:02:38 | 1:02:42 | |
and songs about being drunk, | 1:02:42 | 1:02:45 | |
and songs about the number of women that he's mashed, | 1:02:45 | 1:02:49 | |
and lots of aggressive masculinity and huge mutton chop whiskers, | 1:02:49 | 1:02:55 | |
and stomping about being, OK, quite sexy, but quite scary. | 1:02:55 | 1:03:00 | |
Whereas Vesta Tilley's young men, you'd want to pet. | 1:03:00 | 1:03:05 | |
They're little boys, doing their best to be like that, | 1:03:05 | 1:03:09 | |
but not really like that, and they're so much more romantic, | 1:03:09 | 1:03:12 | |
and they're so much less threatening. | 1:03:12 | 1:03:16 | |
Music hall audiences loved seeing threat reduced to comic caricature, | 1:03:18 | 1:03:24 | |
but looking back at their portrayal of black people | 1:03:24 | 1:03:27 | |
is quite shocking for us today. | 1:03:27 | 1:03:29 | |
When black American minstrel troops arrived in London in the 1840s, | 1:03:31 | 1:03:36 | |
they became hugely popular. | 1:03:36 | 1:03:38 | |
The music halls appropriated the musical style, | 1:03:38 | 1:03:41 | |
but the songs were performed by white men in blackface make-up. | 1:03:41 | 1:03:45 | |
One of the most obviously appalling things to us | 1:03:47 | 1:03:51 | |
is the way that it was absolutely central | 1:03:51 | 1:03:54 | |
to an enormous amount of Victorian entertainment | 1:03:54 | 1:03:56 | |
that white men blacked their faces and pretended to be black men. | 1:03:56 | 1:03:59 | |
We have all kinds of problems about that, obviously, | 1:03:59 | 1:04:03 | |
but one of our problems is that we cannot imagine what, | 1:04:03 | 1:04:07 | |
to a Victorian audience, it would mean to see somebody with a black face. | 1:04:07 | 1:04:11 | |
There were not many people with black faces around. | 1:04:11 | 1:04:14 | |
In America, it was very different, of course. | 1:04:14 | 1:04:16 | |
In America, the impersonating of black people by white people | 1:04:16 | 1:04:21 | |
was all connected with slavery. | 1:04:21 | 1:04:23 | |
In the music halls, the absolutely ubiquitous black-face act | 1:04:23 | 1:04:29 | |
moves away from being the kind of thing | 1:04:29 | 1:04:31 | |
that the Americans originally brought | 1:04:31 | 1:04:33 | |
to being a kind of broad clowning, so it's a mask. | 1:04:33 | 1:04:37 | |
Then it taps into very deep roots in British culture of folk masking, | 1:04:37 | 1:04:42 | |
of people blacking their faces to burn the ricks, | 1:04:42 | 1:04:47 | |
to dance, to carry out strange antique rituals. | 1:04:47 | 1:04:52 | |
All of those things sit behind it for the British audience, I think. | 1:04:52 | 1:04:56 | |
People knew so little of what the lives were like | 1:04:56 | 1:05:00 | |
of African-Americans on the Southern plantations | 1:05:00 | 1:05:03 | |
that it could not be seen as really attacking them personally. | 1:05:03 | 1:05:09 | |
What I think happens with black-faced minstrelsy | 1:05:09 | 1:05:12 | |
is that there's a mixture of fear in the reception of the music, | 1:05:12 | 1:05:17 | |
that people don't understand what black people are like. | 1:05:17 | 1:05:21 | |
They're very attracted to the music, | 1:05:21 | 1:05:23 | |
and then you find that an instrument | 1:05:23 | 1:05:25 | |
that previously would be seen as a mark of degradation, | 1:05:25 | 1:05:30 | |
like the banjo, goes more and more upmarket | 1:05:30 | 1:05:33 | |
until, by the time we're in the later century, | 1:05:33 | 1:05:36 | |
even the Prince of Wales wants to learn to play the banjo, | 1:05:36 | 1:05:40 | |
and he hires a black banjo player, James Bohee, | 1:05:40 | 1:05:44 | |
to teach him to play the banjo! | 1:05:44 | 1:05:46 | |
By the 1890s, British imperialism, | 1:05:48 | 1:05:51 | |
and confidence in its positive benefits for the world, | 1:05:51 | 1:05:55 | |
was at its height. | 1:05:55 | 1:05:57 | |
The word "Empire" was everywhere, | 1:05:57 | 1:05:59 | |
and Edward Moss, a theatrical impresario from Scotland, | 1:05:59 | 1:06:02 | |
chose it for his new chain of large music hall theatres. | 1:06:02 | 1:06:06 | |
At the same time, another chain was established by Oswald Stoll | 1:06:06 | 1:06:11 | |
from his base in Liverpool. | 1:06:11 | 1:06:13 | |
These two organisations either built new theatres | 1:06:13 | 1:06:17 | |
or took over existing venues | 1:06:17 | 1:06:19 | |
until they had a considerable grip on music hall entertainment in the provinces. | 1:06:19 | 1:06:23 | |
They became known as the syndicates, | 1:06:23 | 1:06:26 | |
and they introduced another seismic change | 1:06:26 | 1:06:29 | |
in the way the music hall operated. | 1:06:29 | 1:06:31 | |
Back in the Garrick library, The Era gives us a good idea | 1:06:31 | 1:06:35 | |
of how the system worked. | 1:06:35 | 1:06:38 | |
To fill their chains of theatres with new acts, | 1:06:38 | 1:06:40 | |
Stoll and Moss built up their own roster of performers | 1:06:40 | 1:06:44 | |
who went from town to town each week. | 1:06:44 | 1:06:47 | |
And instead of one long show across the whole evening, | 1:06:47 | 1:06:50 | |
they discovered they could double their money | 1:06:50 | 1:06:53 | |
by dividing it into two houses. | 1:06:53 | 1:06:55 | |
Of course, that would have to work like clockwork, | 1:06:55 | 1:06:58 | |
and the secret to that lies in these pages here. | 1:06:58 | 1:07:02 | |
The syndicates would publish a list of the acts appearing | 1:07:03 | 1:07:07 | |
at the Empires the following week, | 1:07:07 | 1:07:09 | |
along with travel information, rehearsal times and stage calls | 1:07:09 | 1:07:13 | |
for the two nightly performances. | 1:07:13 | 1:07:15 | |
It was an intricately detailed operation on a massive scale, | 1:07:15 | 1:07:19 | |
ensuring a completely new roster of acts | 1:07:19 | 1:07:22 | |
would appear in each theatre every week. | 1:07:22 | 1:07:24 | |
Any last vestiges the music hall had of its folksy origins, | 1:07:29 | 1:07:33 | |
jolly amateur evenings in the back room of the pub, had gone for ever. | 1:07:33 | 1:07:37 | |
This was now big business and the big boys had taken over. | 1:07:37 | 1:07:42 | |
Using their conglomerate muscle, Stoll and Moss wanted to ensure | 1:07:42 | 1:07:46 | |
their middle-class audience would find nothing vulgar to offend them at their Empires. | 1:07:46 | 1:07:52 | |
But the double entendre had developed for a reason | 1:07:52 | 1:07:56 | |
and it proved almost impossible to stamp out. | 1:07:56 | 1:07:59 | |
Tell us about "Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow", which is a perfectly innocent lyric, isn't it? | 1:07:59 | 1:08:04 | |
No, it's not. It's not really. | 1:08:04 | 1:08:07 | |
Not to the Victorians. | 1:08:07 | 1:08:08 | |
It was innuendo. | 1:08:08 | 1:08:11 | |
She's talking about her cat | 1:08:11 | 1:08:13 | |
and how it comes to school with her each day and sits upon the form | 1:08:13 | 1:08:18 | |
because her cat is her lady's bits | 1:08:18 | 1:08:20 | |
and she wants a bow-wow which is a reference to the man's bits. | 1:08:20 | 1:08:25 | |
# I love my little cat I do | 1:08:25 | 1:08:29 | |
# Its fur is oh so warm | 1:08:29 | 1:08:31 | |
# It comes with me to school each day | 1:08:31 | 1:08:34 | |
# And sits upon the form | 1:08:34 | 1:08:36 | |
# When teacher asks | 1:08:36 | 1:08:37 | |
# Why do you bring | 1:08:37 | 1:08:39 | |
# That little pet of yours? | 1:08:39 | 1:08:41 | |
# I tell her that I bring my cat | 1:08:41 | 1:08:44 | |
# Along with me because | 1:08:44 | 1:08:49 | |
# Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow | 1:08:50 | 1:08:53 | |
# Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow | 1:08:53 | 1:08:57 | |
# I've got a little cat | 1:08:57 | 1:08:59 | |
# And I'm very fond of that | 1:08:59 | 1:09:01 | |
# But I'd rather have a bow-wow-wow. # | 1:09:01 | 1:09:05 | |
Sometimes however the double meaning was very clumsily disguised. | 1:09:06 | 1:09:12 | |
I have brought along a song which in my experience | 1:09:14 | 1:09:18 | |
is just about the dirtiest I've ever come across. | 1:09:18 | 1:09:21 | |
It's all about double entendre. It's called "The Tuner's Opportunity", | 1:09:21 | 1:09:26 | |
cos every middle-class, lower middle-class family had a piano. | 1:09:26 | 1:09:29 | |
So you had your piano tuner. | 1:09:29 | 1:09:31 | |
-Tuner's opportunity? -Get it? | 1:09:31 | 1:09:35 | |
# Miss Crotchety Quaver was sweet 17 | 1:09:35 | 1:09:38 | |
# And a player of infinite skill | 1:09:38 | 1:09:40 | |
# She could play all the day All the evening as well | 1:09:40 | 1:09:43 | |
# Making all the neighbourhood ill | 1:09:43 | 1:09:45 | |
# And to keep her piano in tune | 1:09:45 | 1:09:47 | |
# She would have a good tuner | 1:09:47 | 1:09:49 | |
# Constantly there | 1:09:49 | 1:09:51 | |
# And he'd pull up her instrument | 1:09:51 | 1:09:53 | |
# Three times a week | 1:09:53 | 1:09:55 | |
# Just to keep it In proper repair... # | 1:09:55 | 1:09:57 | |
HE LAUGHS | 1:09:57 | 1:09:58 | |
# And first he tuned it gently | 1:09:58 | 1:10:01 | |
# Then he tuned it strong | 1:10:01 | 1:10:03 | |
# Then he'd touch a short note | 1:10:03 | 1:10:04 | |
# Then he'd pass a long | 1:10:04 | 1:10:06 | |
# Then he'd go with vengeance | 1:10:06 | 1:10:08 | |
# Enough to break the key | 1:10:08 | 1:10:09 | |
# At length he tuned whenever he got | 1:10:09 | 1:10:11 | |
# An opportunity. # | 1:10:11 | 1:10:13 | |
-And that's just the first verse. -Wonderful. It goes on from there? | 1:10:13 | 1:10:17 | |
It goes on, yes. | 1:10:17 | 1:10:19 | |
It seemed that the more Victorian society | 1:10:20 | 1:10:23 | |
tried to put a lid on sexuality, the more demand built up. | 1:10:23 | 1:10:27 | |
Exotic dancing girls became a regular feature of music hall entertainment. | 1:10:31 | 1:10:37 | |
The Alhambra became as famous for its can-can girls as it had been for its ballet. | 1:10:40 | 1:10:45 | |
It briefly lost its licence when a dancer called Wiry Sal, | 1:10:45 | 1:10:50 | |
"raised her foot higher than her head several times | 1:10:50 | 1:10:53 | |
"towards the audience and was much applauded." | 1:10:53 | 1:10:56 | |
The can-can became a truly global phenomenon. | 1:10:58 | 1:11:01 | |
And in 1891, a young English girl called Lottie Collins | 1:11:01 | 1:11:06 | |
saw a version of it being performed in New York | 1:11:06 | 1:11:09 | |
to a very catchy new song called "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay". | 1:11:09 | 1:11:13 | |
She brought it home with her to London and became an overnight sensation. | 1:11:13 | 1:11:18 | |
# A sweet-tuxedo girl you see | 1:11:18 | 1:11:20 | |
# A queen of swell society | 1:11:20 | 1:11:22 | |
# Just the type you'd like... # | 1:11:22 | 1:11:24 | |
Lottie would begin the first verse very demurely, | 1:11:24 | 1:11:27 | |
then explode into the chorus with her legs kicking, | 1:11:27 | 1:11:31 | |
and skirts swirling, to expose an indecent amount of stocking, | 1:11:31 | 1:11:34 | |
suspender, bare thigh and more. | 1:11:34 | 1:11:37 | |
# Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay | 1:11:37 | 1:11:38 | |
# Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay... # | 1:11:38 | 1:11:40 | |
The naughty Nineties were in full swing. | 1:11:40 | 1:11:45 | |
The very epitome of naughtiness however was not a chance glimpse | 1:11:45 | 1:11:49 | |
of Lottie's stocking tops, | 1:11:49 | 1:11:51 | |
but the legendary wink of another East Ender, Marie Lloyd. | 1:11:51 | 1:11:55 | |
Marie's career began on the stage of The Eagle when she was 14. | 1:11:57 | 1:12:01 | |
And it was obvious from the outset | 1:12:01 | 1:12:03 | |
that she possessed a great deal of charm and charisma. | 1:12:03 | 1:12:06 | |
Innuendo was not hard to detect in songs like, | 1:12:08 | 1:12:10 | |
"She'd never had her ticket punched before", | 1:12:10 | 1:12:14 | |
which told the story of a country girl arriving at Euston for the first time. | 1:12:14 | 1:12:18 | |
On a similar theme, in "Oh! Mr Porter", | 1:12:18 | 1:12:21 | |
a young woman accidentally catches the wrong train. | 1:12:21 | 1:12:24 | |
But the message is that she has | 1:12:24 | 1:12:26 | |
"gone too far". | 1:12:26 | 1:12:28 | |
# Oh, Mr Porter | 1:12:29 | 1:12:32 | |
# What shall I do? | 1:12:32 | 1:12:34 | |
# I want to go to Birmingham | 1:12:34 | 1:12:37 | |
# They're taking me on to Crewe | 1:12:37 | 1:12:38 | |
# Send me back to London | 1:12:38 | 1:12:40 | |
# As quickly as you can | 1:12:40 | 1:12:43 | |
# Oh, Mr Porter | 1:12:43 | 1:12:45 | |
# What a silly girl I am. # | 1:12:45 | 1:12:48 | |
The rapid spread of the railways across Victorian Britain | 1:12:49 | 1:12:52 | |
offered a rich new vein of sexual metaphor | 1:12:52 | 1:12:56 | |
which was enthusiastically embraced by the music hall songwriters. | 1:12:56 | 1:13:00 | |
The moral crusaders knew it was rude | 1:13:00 | 1:13:03 | |
but how do you outlaw a song about shunting? | 1:13:03 | 1:13:06 | |
These music hall performers, they got these stories told about them, | 1:13:06 | 1:13:11 | |
sometimes they were very rude. | 1:13:11 | 1:13:14 | |
One is that Marie Lloyd sang her song called | 1:13:14 | 1:13:17 | |
"She sits amongst the cabbages and peas", | 1:13:17 | 1:13:21 | |
and she was told she couldn't sing this so she altered it to | 1:13:21 | 1:13:24 | |
"She sits amongst the cabbages and leeks". | 1:13:24 | 1:13:27 | |
And if ever people talk about Marie Lloyd now, | 1:13:27 | 1:13:30 | |
they quote this song, but there never was such a song, | 1:13:30 | 1:13:33 | |
and certainly Marie never sung it. | 1:13:33 | 1:13:35 | |
Now my grandma, who was very much a typical Victorian person, | 1:13:35 | 1:13:40 | |
who was very straight-laced, she loved Marie Lloyd. | 1:13:40 | 1:13:46 | |
And she said, "The thing about Marie Lloyd was her personality. | 1:13:46 | 1:13:50 | |
"She was so warm and she was able to project to the audience." | 1:13:50 | 1:13:54 | |
And she had a lot of vulgar innuendo | 1:13:54 | 1:13:57 | |
but nothing really offensive. | 1:13:57 | 1:14:00 | |
And that was one of the things that Marie was so successful. | 1:14:00 | 1:14:04 | |
Other people probably had better songs | 1:14:04 | 1:14:06 | |
but they didn't have the personality that Marie had. | 1:14:06 | 1:14:09 | |
Marie Lloyd became and probably remains the greatest star | 1:14:10 | 1:14:14 | |
the music hall ever produced. | 1:14:14 | 1:14:16 | |
# Up to the West End right in the Best End... # | 1:14:16 | 1:14:20 | |
But there'd always been a section of Victorian society | 1:14:20 | 1:14:23 | |
who felt she represented the worst sort of vulgarity | 1:14:23 | 1:14:26 | |
and that music halls corrupted the minds of their audience. | 1:14:26 | 1:14:30 | |
In the 1890s, these moral guardians began to make their presence felt. | 1:14:30 | 1:14:36 | |
The National Vigilance Association was formed to encourage | 1:14:36 | 1:14:40 | |
the suppression of criminal vice and public immorality. | 1:14:40 | 1:14:45 | |
And they saw plenty of that in the music halls, | 1:14:45 | 1:14:47 | |
both on the stage and off. | 1:14:47 | 1:14:50 | |
It wasn't just the ballerinas' legs or the can-can girls' garters, | 1:14:50 | 1:14:56 | |
there was a new vogue for living statues, or pose plastique. | 1:14:56 | 1:15:00 | |
This involved a group of figures who would pose stock still on stage | 1:15:00 | 1:15:04 | |
in the attitude of classical statuary or famous paintings. | 1:15:04 | 1:15:08 | |
They almost invariably included a virtually naked female Venus, | 1:15:08 | 1:15:12 | |
if not several. | 1:15:12 | 1:15:14 | |
These disreputable performances were seen to encourage | 1:15:14 | 1:15:18 | |
the public immorality they sought to stamp out. | 1:15:18 | 1:15:22 | |
A prominent voice in the vigilance movement | 1:15:22 | 1:15:25 | |
was a Mrs Laura Ormiston Chant who devoted herself to the cause. | 1:15:25 | 1:15:29 | |
Mrs Ormiston Chant spent the warm summer evenings of 1894 | 1:15:31 | 1:15:37 | |
patrolling the five-shilling tier promenade | 1:15:37 | 1:15:40 | |
of the Empire Leicester Square here, | 1:15:40 | 1:15:43 | |
making copious notes of the contact between the sexes. | 1:15:43 | 1:15:47 | |
The promenade bars were the last vestiges | 1:15:47 | 1:15:50 | |
of the old informal nature of the original music halls. | 1:15:50 | 1:15:54 | |
But they had become notorious places where prostitutes plied their trade. | 1:15:54 | 1:15:59 | |
Mrs Ormiston Chant discounted from her survey accompanied ladies, | 1:15:59 | 1:16:04 | |
those without make-up and those who avoided the gaze of gentleman | 1:16:04 | 1:16:07 | |
with whom they were unacquainted. | 1:16:07 | 1:16:10 | |
Once this minority were excluded, it was plain that there were | 1:16:10 | 1:16:13 | |
a great many women who were there for the very worst of reasons. | 1:16:13 | 1:16:17 | |
Her evidence to the licensing authorities | 1:16:19 | 1:16:22 | |
briefly closed down the Empire. | 1:16:22 | 1:16:24 | |
"We have no right to sanction on the stage that which if it were done | 1:16:24 | 1:16:28 | |
"in the street would compel a policeman to lock the offender up. | 1:16:28 | 1:16:33 | |
"The place at night is the habitual resort of prostitutes | 1:16:33 | 1:16:37 | |
"in pursuit of their traffic and that portions of the entertainment | 1:16:37 | 1:16:41 | |
"are most objectionable, obnoxious and against the best interest | 1:16:41 | 1:16:44 | |
"and moral well-being of the community at large." | 1:16:44 | 1:16:48 | |
The theatre was closed until a screen was erected | 1:16:48 | 1:16:51 | |
between the promenade and the auditorium. | 1:16:51 | 1:16:54 | |
A vocal opponent of this was a young Sandhurst cadet | 1:16:54 | 1:16:57 | |
by the name of Winston Churchill. | 1:16:57 | 1:16:59 | |
"Did you see the papers about the riot at the Empire last Saturday? | 1:17:01 | 1:17:05 | |
"It was I who led to the rioters," he boasted to his brother. | 1:17:05 | 1:17:08 | |
He and his colleagues tore down the wooden canvas screens | 1:17:08 | 1:17:12 | |
and he climbed up onto the debris | 1:17:12 | 1:17:14 | |
and addressed the theatre audience on the subject of liberty. | 1:17:14 | 1:17:18 | |
He described it as his true maiden speech. | 1:17:18 | 1:17:20 | |
Churchill may have gone on to greater things | 1:17:20 | 1:17:24 | |
but it was Mrs Ormiston Chant who more accurately reflected the mood of the age. | 1:17:24 | 1:17:30 | |
Respectability was becoming a Victorian obsession | 1:17:30 | 1:17:33 | |
and was the cornerstone of the success of the syndicates. | 1:17:33 | 1:17:37 | |
In Leeds in 1898, the Empire Palace Theatre opened. | 1:17:42 | 1:17:47 | |
It was built by the newly-formed Moss Empire syndicate, | 1:17:48 | 1:17:51 | |
an amalgamation of the Stoll and Moss organisations. | 1:17:51 | 1:17:55 | |
Though they were still very much a provincial operation, | 1:17:55 | 1:17:59 | |
it was a clear sign of their confidence and ambition. | 1:17:59 | 1:18:02 | |
Determined to place music hall at the heart of mainstream city life, | 1:18:04 | 1:18:09 | |
alongside the theatre they built a hotel | 1:18:09 | 1:18:12 | |
and one of the world's first purpose-built shopping malls, | 1:18:12 | 1:18:16 | |
a far cry from the city varieties across the street. | 1:18:16 | 1:18:20 | |
The theatre itself is now a department store, | 1:18:20 | 1:18:23 | |
but Barry Cryer remembers it well. | 1:18:23 | 1:18:25 | |
One of my earliest memories was being taken to the theatre with my mother. | 1:18:25 | 1:18:29 | |
We had the City Varieties, | 1:18:29 | 1:18:31 | |
no decent woman would be seen there. | 1:18:31 | 1:18:34 | |
So we go now and again to the Empire, | 1:18:34 | 1:18:37 | |
number one Moss Empire. | 1:18:37 | 1:18:39 | |
I remember the atmosphere. It was brash and colourful | 1:18:39 | 1:18:42 | |
and noisy and people arriving, | 1:18:42 | 1:18:44 | |
and then you went into the auditorium. | 1:18:44 | 1:18:45 | |
It was just magical. | 1:18:45 | 1:18:47 | |
Then the curtain goes up and it gets even better. | 1:18:47 | 1:18:49 | |
The bands strike up and all that. | 1:18:49 | 1:18:51 | |
And I sat next to my mother in this theatre | 1:18:51 | 1:18:54 | |
watching her twinkling away, loving every minute of it. | 1:18:54 | 1:18:57 | |
It was superb. | 1:18:57 | 1:18:59 | |
The architect who designed every part of this bold development, | 1:19:01 | 1:19:04 | |
from the Grand Theatre to the last square of mosaic in the pavements, | 1:19:04 | 1:19:09 | |
was Frank Matcham. | 1:19:09 | 1:19:10 | |
Matcham was undoubtedly a genius who could thread his way | 1:19:12 | 1:19:16 | |
through the increasingly complex Victorian building regulations | 1:19:16 | 1:19:19 | |
and still produce a stunning, thrilling and magical space. | 1:19:19 | 1:19:23 | |
These arcades earned Leeds the title "the Milan of the North of England". | 1:19:27 | 1:19:32 | |
Moss Empire's progress towards London | 1:19:38 | 1:19:41 | |
was like the stealthy approach of an invading army | 1:19:41 | 1:19:44 | |
who first establish outposts in the suburbs before the final push. | 1:19:44 | 1:19:49 | |
One of these was the Hackney Empire, another Matcham masterpiece. | 1:19:49 | 1:19:55 | |
He was extraordinarily inventive as an architect. | 1:19:57 | 1:20:01 | |
Hackney is a stylistic mash-up of Moorish Indo-Romanesque baroque. | 1:20:01 | 1:20:07 | |
But a Victorian theatre-goer's enjoyment of this opulence | 1:20:07 | 1:20:11 | |
was very much affected by their social class. | 1:20:11 | 1:20:14 | |
Othman Read has worked at the Empire for 20 years. | 1:20:14 | 1:20:19 | |
Where we are in the gallery was generally poor people, | 1:20:19 | 1:20:22 | |
very working-class people. There used to be a sign up here, | 1:20:22 | 1:20:24 | |
"No spitting or swearing. Offenders will be ejected by order." | 1:20:24 | 1:20:29 | |
I mean, that gives you some idea of the sort of people | 1:20:29 | 1:20:31 | |
-who they expected in the gallery. -But they had their own entrance? | 1:20:31 | 1:20:35 | |
Absolutely. Their entrance was at the rear of the theatre. It was only them who could come in through it. | 1:20:35 | 1:20:40 | |
So who came in the front of the theatre? | 1:20:40 | 1:20:42 | |
The front was reserved solely for the dress circle | 1:20:42 | 1:20:46 | |
and the front stalls, the armchairs. | 1:20:46 | 1:20:50 | |
Back of the stalls area was actually a separate entrance called the pit | 1:20:50 | 1:20:55 | |
where you'd have people selling goods and services, no doubt! | 1:20:55 | 1:21:00 | |
Goods and services?! | 1:21:00 | 1:21:02 | |
Which were easily accessible to gentlemen in the front rows... | 1:21:02 | 1:21:05 | |
Say no more. | 1:21:05 | 1:21:06 | |
..without having to leave to go to another floor to be seen amongst, | 1:21:06 | 1:21:10 | |
clearly amongst, a lower class of people. | 1:21:10 | 1:21:12 | |
How long it did it take to build this magnificent edifice? | 1:21:12 | 1:21:16 | |
At the turn of the century, 36 weeks from scratch. | 1:21:16 | 1:21:21 | |
That is without the modern technology we'd have now. | 1:21:21 | 1:21:24 | |
By today's standards, you couldn't paint it in that time. | 1:21:24 | 1:21:27 | |
You couldn't paint it in 36 weeks?! | 1:21:27 | 1:21:29 | |
There's very little you'd get done in 36 weeks now. | 1:21:29 | 1:21:32 | |
It was absolutely state-of-the-art when it was built. | 1:21:32 | 1:21:35 | |
-It was one of the first cantilevered balconies. -Really? | 1:21:35 | 1:21:39 | |
Pre-stressed concrete balconies, no pillars, | 1:21:39 | 1:21:42 | |
which is where the incredible sight lines come from | 1:21:42 | 1:21:44 | |
because you have unobstructed views from every floor. | 1:21:44 | 1:21:47 | |
A couple of years ago, we had Madness doing a reunion gig in here. | 1:21:47 | 1:21:50 | |
You had about 300 guys, reliving their youth, in their mid 30s, | 1:21:50 | 1:21:55 | |
jumping up and down and you could see it literally flex. | 1:21:55 | 1:21:59 | |
-This is down in the dress circle? -This is the dress circle. | 1:21:59 | 1:22:02 | |
It must have been flexing by about four inches up and down. | 1:22:02 | 1:22:06 | |
-The whole of it. -Wow. | 1:22:06 | 1:22:08 | |
If you really want to understand | 1:22:08 | 1:22:10 | |
why Frank Matcham was the greatest theatre architect that ever lived, | 1:22:10 | 1:22:14 | |
you only have to sit here where I'm sitting, | 1:22:14 | 1:22:17 | |
the worst seat in the house, I have got a fabulous view of everything. | 1:22:17 | 1:22:22 | |
And yet, in all Matcham's theatres, as far as one can tell, | 1:22:22 | 1:22:26 | |
there were never problems with the sound. | 1:22:26 | 1:22:28 | |
I think there's a lot more science actually applied to it than he's given credit for. | 1:22:28 | 1:22:32 | |
The stage itself acts as a speaker. | 1:22:32 | 1:22:36 | |
The shape of the auditorium acts as a cone, if you like. | 1:22:36 | 1:22:39 | |
How did he know that stuff? I'd rather like to test that. | 1:22:39 | 1:22:44 | |
Would you mind going on the stage and asking me a question very quietly? | 1:22:44 | 1:22:48 | |
And I'll see if I can hear it from back here. | 1:22:48 | 1:22:50 | |
-Absolutely. It would be a pleasure. -OK, thank you. | 1:22:50 | 1:22:53 | |
Don't do any of my material now! | 1:22:55 | 1:22:57 | |
OTHMAN LAUGHS | 1:22:57 | 1:22:59 | |
-Can you hear me? -I can. | 1:23:05 | 1:23:08 | |
I can hear you. | 1:23:08 | 1:23:09 | |
Othman, the two domes on either side of the proscenium, | 1:23:09 | 1:23:12 | |
what are they made of? | 1:23:12 | 1:23:14 | |
It is all plasterwork, all of it is Rococo plasterwork. | 1:23:14 | 1:23:18 | |
What's amazing is there's no echo, | 1:23:18 | 1:23:21 | |
there's no reverb, so there's incredible crystal clarity. | 1:23:21 | 1:23:24 | |
I can hear every syllable. Amazing. | 1:23:24 | 1:23:27 | |
The Hackney Empire was the technological wonder of the age, | 1:23:29 | 1:23:33 | |
one of the first theatres to be built with a projection box | 1:23:33 | 1:23:36 | |
to show the new bioscope movies. | 1:23:36 | 1:23:40 | |
The bioscope had begun as a fairground attraction | 1:23:40 | 1:23:43 | |
but was now a feature of every music hall bill, | 1:23:43 | 1:23:46 | |
an ominous development that would have far-reaching consequences. | 1:23:46 | 1:23:52 | |
In 1912, at the Palace Theatre, Oswald Stoll received | 1:23:52 | 1:23:57 | |
his ultimate accolade when he was invited to arrange | 1:23:57 | 1:24:00 | |
the Royal Music Hall Performance by Command of His Majesty. | 1:24:00 | 1:24:05 | |
Stoll wanted to make it a night to remember | 1:24:05 | 1:24:08 | |
and decorated the theatre with three million roses, | 1:24:08 | 1:24:11 | |
most of them clustered around the royal box | 1:24:11 | 1:24:15 | |
which looked like a florist shop. | 1:24:15 | 1:24:17 | |
The event was staged in front of George V | 1:24:17 | 1:24:20 | |
and a smattering of other related minor European royalty. | 1:24:20 | 1:24:24 | |
On a hot July night, the King himself, for the very first time, | 1:24:26 | 1:24:30 | |
came to see the stars of the music hall on their home turf. | 1:24:30 | 1:24:34 | |
His father, Edward VII, loved dressing up for a party | 1:24:34 | 1:24:39 | |
and often invited music hall stars to perform at his private soiree. | 1:24:39 | 1:24:44 | |
But by coming to the theatre himself, | 1:24:44 | 1:24:46 | |
his son was publicly acknowledging that music hall was finally | 1:24:46 | 1:24:51 | |
and undeniably respectable. | 1:24:51 | 1:24:54 | |
142 artists were specially chosen to appear on this stage. | 1:24:54 | 1:25:01 | |
It was a balanced bill representing all facets of the music hall. | 1:25:01 | 1:25:05 | |
There was one pointed omission... | 1:25:05 | 1:25:07 | |
Marie Lloyd. | 1:25:07 | 1:25:09 | |
This newly-won respectability was too precious to be put at risk | 1:25:10 | 1:25:14 | |
by the legendary wink. | 1:25:14 | 1:25:17 | |
She staged a rival performance the same evening at the London Pavilion. | 1:25:17 | 1:25:22 | |
"By order of the British public", said the poster. | 1:25:22 | 1:25:26 | |
But she needn't have worried. Back up the road at the Palace, | 1:25:26 | 1:25:29 | |
things weren't going at all according to plan. | 1:25:29 | 1:25:32 | |
The theatre was packed with specially-invited bigwigs | 1:25:32 | 1:25:36 | |
and there was none of the usual rapport with the performers | 1:25:36 | 1:25:39 | |
on which the music hall stars relied. | 1:25:39 | 1:25:42 | |
A young comedienne called Fanny Fields | 1:25:42 | 1:25:45 | |
nervously told the audience that, | 1:25:45 | 1:25:47 | |
"I'm suffering just as much as you are." | 1:25:47 | 1:25:50 | |
In a strange twist, this high-water mark of music hall fortunes | 1:25:51 | 1:25:56 | |
also seemed to emphasise how little this performance had in common | 1:25:56 | 1:26:00 | |
with the original spirit of its birth. | 1:26:00 | 1:26:03 | |
Having achieved the common admiration of the King | 1:26:03 | 1:26:06 | |
and the costermonger, the music hall may have gained in status | 1:26:06 | 1:26:09 | |
but it had lost any connection with its roots. | 1:26:09 | 1:26:13 | |
In 1914, when the First World War broke out, | 1:26:18 | 1:26:22 | |
the minor royals who attended the Command performance | 1:26:22 | 1:26:26 | |
found themselves on opposite sides of the barbed wire. | 1:26:26 | 1:26:29 | |
The troops dug trenches whilst singing the music hall's greatest hits. | 1:26:29 | 1:26:34 | |
But back in Blighty, the war closed many of the halls for the duration. | 1:26:34 | 1:26:40 | |
The male impersonators were hugely popular, | 1:26:40 | 1:26:43 | |
turning out in military uniform. | 1:26:43 | 1:26:45 | |
Vesta Tilley earned the nickname, Britain's best recruiting sergeant, | 1:26:45 | 1:26:50 | |
and distributed chocolate to the Tommies. | 1:26:50 | 1:26:53 | |
But songs like "Good luck to the girl who loves a soldier" | 1:26:53 | 1:26:57 | |
expressed a very different sentiment | 1:26:57 | 1:27:00 | |
to the jingo songs of 40 years earlier. | 1:27:00 | 1:27:02 | |
And when the war was over, the halls, like everything else, had changed. | 1:27:02 | 1:27:08 | |
In 1919, the King visited Frank Matcham's magnificent London Coliseum, | 1:27:10 | 1:27:16 | |
the grandest theatre in Moss Empire's chain, | 1:27:16 | 1:27:19 | |
but it was to attend the Royal Variety Performance. | 1:27:19 | 1:27:23 | |
Variety, the sanitised child of the music hall | 1:27:23 | 1:27:27 | |
had quietly replaced its unruly parent. | 1:27:27 | 1:27:30 | |
There were other competitors for the punters' pennies. | 1:27:33 | 1:27:37 | |
Stars could now be heard on the gramophone, | 1:27:37 | 1:27:39 | |
radio was just around the corner | 1:27:39 | 1:27:41 | |
and most significantly, cinema had hit the big-time. | 1:27:41 | 1:27:46 | |
We're at the back of the balcony at the Britannia Glasgow | 1:27:52 | 1:27:57 | |
and this is a projection booth | 1:27:57 | 1:27:59 | |
which was just hacked into the back of the building | 1:27:59 | 1:28:03 | |
so they could project the great novelty | 1:28:03 | 1:28:06 | |
of the bioscope moving pictures onto the stage. | 1:28:06 | 1:28:10 | |
What began as a minor attraction at the bottom of the bill | 1:28:10 | 1:28:14 | |
had become the headlining act. | 1:28:14 | 1:28:17 | |
And at some point in these inter-war years, | 1:28:17 | 1:28:20 | |
people began to refer to the music hall in the past tense. | 1:28:20 | 1:28:26 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:28:41 | 1:28:45 |