Music Hall What a Performance! Pioneers of Popular Entertainment

This is the story of popular entertainment...

..from the music-hall era of the 19th century...

Don't you know Mrs Kelly?

..through the golden age of variety...

..to the working men's clubs of the 1950s.

I love it!

I'm Frank Skinner, a comedian.

And I'm Suzy Klein, a music presenter.

Together, we plan to celebrate our rich entertainment heritage

by finding out all we can about the great acts of the past

and, yes, by having a go ourselves.

It's harder than it looks.

So, join us now, as we go back to a time when

Britain really did have talent.

Entertainment first burst on to our TV screens in 1955.

It was a watershed moment and, as a nation, we haven't looked back,

but how did we get there?

Our story starts in the emerging world of 19th-century music hall.

The music hall would come to dominate 19th-century entertainment,

turning stage performers into household names.

And to understand a bit more about what it was like for entertainers

and audiences back then, Suzy and I are going to get

under the skin of two of the biggest stars of the day.

I want to find out how a woman like Marie Lloyd battled her way

through a male-dominated industry to be crowned queen of music hall.

# If it satisfies their desires... #

And I'm going to find out about eccentric comedian Dan Leno,

who many call the grandfather of stand-up.

But the entertainment industry that made them famous

had a far-from-glamorous birth.

It's a world with murky beginnings,

in the underground basements of 1840s London.

All that you shall hear Enacted in this humble hall

'Tis the true tale As you shall hear

Of poor Maria Marten's fall

And though we fill you full of...

The 19th century was a boom time in popular entertainment.

After the Industrial Revolution, workers flooded into the towns

and cities and, after a hard day's graft, they wanted a great night out.

Think of 19th-century popular entertainment

and you think of music hall.

There was a lot more going on than just that.

At the start of the 19th century, Britain had become a powerful

mercantile nation and was expanding its empire.

And back home, the British stage offered

some of the finest entertainment in Europe.

# Let me entertain you! #

But in the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution took hold

and Britain's urban populations tripled overnight.

Entertainment venues popped up in all kinds of places

to meet the demands of new audiences.

Oooh!

At the bottom of the social ladder were the penny gaffs.

Often no more than a makeshift stage in a shop basement,

they offered home-made entertainment to a local clientele

of costermongers and factory workers, all for a penny.

Bloodthirsty melodramas and crude songs about real-life murders

were all the rage at the gaff,

including a newly written 1840s horror story, Sweeney Todd.

Mmm, mmm, mmm...

Loads of gravy!

Oh!

How did a button come into a pie?

If working-class people needed a break from the penny gaffs,

they could go to saloon theatres, like the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton.

Oh.

It used to be here.

Oh, no, look, it DID used to be here.

Charles Dickens visited the Britannia Saloon.

This is what he wrote, "Among the audience were a large

"number of boys and youths and a great many very young girls,

"grown into bold women before they had well ceased to be children.

"These last were the worst features of the whole crowd

"and were more prominent there than in any other sort of

"public assembly that we know of, except at a public execution."

My kind of crowd!

If you were a bit more posh,

you could go to a song and supper room, which,

by the early 19th century, had become known for their celebrity singers.

Sadly, all the song and supper rooms have long gone

so instead, I'm off to the local gastropub,

where Michael Kilgarriff is waiting to tell me all about them.

-Michael.

-Frank. Hello.

-Good to see you.

-How are you? All right.

These were really for the men about town,

-so they were a little grand, quite grand.

-OK.

That was the audience, the entertainment wasn't so grand.

It was said that it "appealed to the most depraved propensities,

"and whenever there was a burst of unwanted enthusiasm,

"you can be certain that some genius of the place had soared

"to a happy combination of indecency with blasphemy."

And the kind of songs... Well, I'll give you some titles.

There's No Shove Like The First Shove.

He Did It Before My Eyes.

And one that still baffles me,

called The Friar's Candle.

Make of that what you will.

They were all male, of course, the audiences.

-OK, so it was a gentleman's club.

-It was a gentleman's club, yes.

-The entertainment was...

-Was pretty saucy.

-..not refined.

Pretty raunchy, yes.

And also, it was very late, you see.

They were called supper clubs, so the entertainment wouldn't start

until after the theatre or the opera had turned out.

Were they rough and raucous crowds?

If you can imagine a stag night,

I mean, everybody was on stag nights, the way they behaved there.

-It was a stag night every night.

-Every night, yes.

One of the biggest hits of the song and supper rooms

was Sam Cowell's song, The Ratcatcher's Daughter.

IN COCKNEY ACCENT: Ladies and gentlemen, attend ye the tale

of the poor ratcatcher's daughter.

# Not long ago in Vestminster there lived a ratcatcher's daughter

# But she didn't quite live in Vestminster

# Cos she lived t'other side of the water

# Her father caught rats

# And she sold sprats all around and about that quarter

# And the gentle folks all took off their hats

# To the pretty little ratcatcher's daughter

# Doodle-dee, doodle-dum

# Dum dim-dum doodle-da. #

HE REPEATS THE PHRASE ON THE PIANO

Oh, yes.

Always repeat for the audience.

So, I think what we've probably got here

is some authentic Cockney, and some exaggeration for comic effect.

-Yes, yes.

-OK.

But it works beautifully because it creates another world,

and if you're doing this on stage as a sort of Cockney character,

if you're not at all familiar with Cockneys, I think

you take this all in as this colourful land of East London.

-Yes. Slightly foreign.

-Yes, exactly.

# They both agreed to married be upon next Easter Sunday

# But ratcatcher's daughter She had a dream

# That she wouldn't be alive on Monday

# She vent vonce more to buy some sprats

# And she tumbled into the vater

# And down to the bottom all kivered up with mud

# Went the pretty little ratcatcher's daughter

-BOTH:

-# Doodle-dee, doodle-dum

# Dee-dum, doodle-da. #

And again!

-BOTH:

-# Doodle-dee doodle-dum

# Dee-dum, doodle-da. #

That's it, so she's drowned in the Thames.

Nothing was funnier, it would seem, to Victorians of this time,

than people dying.

There's love and tragedy and blood and drowning,

and that's what's great about it,

it's not sanitised like so many songs in later years.

It's a real thing of beauty, The Ratcatcher's Daughter.

Entertainment venues were starting to respond to the tastes

of their clientele, and it seems the Victorians loved

nothing more than tales of death and murder.

But the one thing that was absolutely forbidden was a play.

Before the 1840s, entertainment was heavily controlled

by the authorities, and it was illegal for theatres

to put on a play without a licence, so the smaller theatres responded

with their own subversive take on the classics.

I'm going to the Charing Cross Theatre on the Strand,

the former centre of London's fringe theatre scene,

where an alternative breed of comedy, called doggerel,

was gaining popularity.

-Nice to meet you, how are you doing?

-Good to meet you.

-Hi.

So, why was doggerel, and particularly doggerel Shakespeare,

why was that such a hit with 19th-century audiences?

Victorians were obsessed with doing Shakespeare, the great national

playwright, so there was this sense that, "Well, we can,

"we alternative theatres..." -

the theatres around the Strand, where we are right now -

"..we can thumb our noses at the great stewards of culture

"at Covent Garden and Drury Lane."

So the smaller theatres said,

"We're going to do Shakespeare, but on our terms, and we're going

"to do the great Shakespeare tragedies as if they were comedies.

"We're going to take something very serious and make it look ridiculous."

So, who was coming to these theatres?

What was the audience made up of?

One-word description of that audience is "bohemian".

They were people who went to Covent Garden and Drury Lane

and saw legitimate Shakespeare,

and then they would go, on the other night,

to the burlesque and see the travesty or satire version of Shakespeare,

so imagine going to see Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet

on a Tuesday night and then on Thursday you go to a small fringe theatre

in London, and somebody is imitating Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.

OK, we're going to do the burlesque balcony scene from Romeo And Juliet.

I quite like my moustache.

Romeo, are you ready?

I am. What do you think? Ta-da!

-Perfect.

-But every Romeo needs a Juliet.

True.

Oh! She's a looker! Oh!

Ha!

'Tis he!

You are still playing in verse, even though it's funny.

The actors would have done a comic voice and, often, for

a 19th-century performance, this would have been a regional accent.

Oh, I can handle that!

I think you can.

THEY CHUCKLE

Ha! 'Tis he!

Juliet.

Romeo, ah, yes, 'tis he.

Oh, say that name again.

Oh, me-o, Romeo!

Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

Well, 'pon my soul, my love, my sweet ray, dear,

I haven't got the most remote idea.

-My father perhaps.

-Deny him!

-Then my mother.

-She does... Oh, sorry.

-Get off!

Go, go!

-Then my mother, she does not know I'm out.

-Oh, what a bother.

What is bother, sweet?

That you, my Romeo, should be a Montague.

And I a Capulet, and yet,

what's in a name?

Great. That was wonderful!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

He looks even tastier in the flesh, I'll tell you.

I really enjoyed that. Didn't you think it was great?

I kind of thought that this burlesque would be

sort of anti-Shakespeare entertainment.

But in fact, if you love Shakespeare, you love this...

-It celebrates it, absolutely.

-..even more.

Exactly, that's what the people who wrote the burlesque said.

Because all the critics in the big theatres said, "How dare you do this?

"This is a travesty, this is a bastardisation of Shakespeare,

"this is an insult to Shakespeare."

And people who did the burlesque said,

"You've got it all wrong, we love Shakespeare."

It's a great love letter to Shakespeare.

The big theatres had lost their control over entertainment.

By the 1840s, it was the minor theatres,

penny gaffs and supper rooms that drew in the crowds.

Popular entertainment was becoming a real money-maker

and the stage was set for the arrival of...

music hall.

The music hall would eventually come to define 19th-century entertainment

and at one time, there would have been one in every neighbourhood.

I've come to Wilton's in East London, one of the last remaining halls

in the country, where many a music-hall star performed.

But none of it would have been possible

without one canny Victorian businessmen, Charles Morton.

Fern, Charles Morton was this extraordinary entrepreneurial figure,

just tell me a bit about him. Who was he?

Well, we call him the Father of the Halls

because he really does create music hall for the first time.

He was a publican and he was an East End boy, Hackney born,

and he'd started as a pub owner.

He's been going to the Evans' song and supper room, which is kind of

men singing songs and drinking, and he realises that this is

a really good way to make money and he thinks, "Well,

"I could do this but I could do it a little bit differently."

So, having bought the Canterbury Arms,

he opens it as the Canterbury Music Hall,

as a 700-seater hall, and he also allows ladies in,

so this is doubling his money, doubling his revenue.

The Canterbury is very like Wilton's.

It's kind of a free-for-all, so you have long tables,

you might have short tables, everyone's sitting around.

There's waitresses with beer and porter, and people bringing in food.

Kids running around, smoke everywhere.

It is a real mix of classes that you don't see anywhere else

in Victorian England, and it's our first mass entertainment in the UK.

We've never seen anything like it.

Music halls were an escape from the living conditions

of the average 19th-century urban resident.

City life was poor and crowded, with no running water or heating,

and night-time for most was seen through the dim flicker of a candle.

There was a time when a lot of people would have been too scared

to venture out to a place like the Canterbury after dark,

but in the early 1800s a revolutionary new invention

transformed the world of popular entertainment for ever.

Gas lighting first appeared on Britain's streets in the early 19th century,

and allowed people to walk safely at night for the first time.

By the 1850s, as more and more music halls were being built,

auditoriums were now being lit by gas.

A trip to the halls for the average punter could be the only time

they would experience such a luxury.

Combined with the cheap beer and entertainment on offer,

music halls like the Canterbury became more and more successful.

This booming business led to a race to build music halls

all around the country.

Another modern-day survivor of this music-hall boom

is the City Varieties in Leeds, built above a pub in 1865.

And just a few years later, City Varieties had the privilege

of presenting a massive star of the future.

Yes, me.

I've played City Varieties quite a lot of times

and have always had a great gig.

The first time I ever played here, I can see it now from here,

I dashed out onto the stage, bursting with enthusiasm,

and stages in theatres like this are tilted forward,

what they call the rake, so the audience can see better,

but I hadn't really played anywhere like this before,

so I ran out on stage and I'm basically running downhill,

I damn near ran straight off the end of the stage.

It was a terrifying opening.

But I always think of that...

that horrible moment before the show began.

It was on this very stage that Dan Leno appeared

as an emerging performer, travelling the country with his act.

He was born in the slums of King's Cross in 1860,

but immediately was on the road with his family of entertainers.

He would go on to perform

everything from acrobatics, comic singing,

and pantomime.

As a touring performer myself,

I feel a certain kinship with the itinerant Leno.

And who should be waiting for me in the stalls but Dan Leno expert,

Caroline Radcliffe.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-God, I have had crowds like this.

-Pleased to meet you.

THEY CHUCKLE

So we're in quite a beautiful old music hall.

What kind of places would the Leno family have been playing?

He would have gone to local fairs,

because every local town and village had a fair at that time,

and there would have been a whole variety of shows

and performances, and they would have just walked miles and miles,

knocked on pub doors, played at free-and-easies...

And a free-and-easy is what comedians would now call a door split -

you do the gig and it depends on how many people turn up

-and what they pay.

-Yes. So sometimes you wouldn't make anything.

-Yeah.

So you're talking about, you know,

it's a survival of the fittest, really.

I have here a lyric from one of the songs he did

in those early pantomimes, which is very beautiful, I must say.

"If I had my husband now, I wouldn't thrash him,

"I'd clasp him in my arms and smash him.

"His ugly neck I'd dearly like to twist,

"and prove the strength of a woman's love...

"and fist."

-Wow!

-Beautiful.

Yeah, it's got that sort of girl power feel to it!

That's very typical of his humour, I think.

There's this whole Victorian...

I guess it makes me think of the penny dreadfuls and all that -

they like a bit of horror

and a bit of death in their entertainment.

His act was basically just a catalogue of domestic violence.

Really, really aggressive songs about beating each other up at home.

So it's the sort of musical version of Punch and Judy

-but with real people.

-Actually, yes.

When you look at the poverty that he came from, it was one step away

from the workhouse, and that's the humour that he's reflecting.

His really, really tough poverty.

Most of the music halls arose in industrial towns.

You got a lot of factory workers, you got a lot of dockers,

a lot of sailors.

It was a really rough clientele that you got in this style of music hall,

particularly in the 1850s and the 1860s, when Leno's career started.

There are accounts of huge fights taking place in the music halls.

If they didn't like an act, they'd just lynch you round the back of

the music hall, throw a brick at you, or just start a fight.

So you have to be really tough to deal with that kind of audience.

I think stand-up comedians now, they have the odd heckler,

but they don't expect to be beaten up around the back.

I thought my early audiences were rough, but this lot!

Luckily, back in the 19th century, there was someone to sort them all out.

Now, you may remember a television programme called The Good Old Days,

where a very polite audience sat in rather dodgy period costume,

enjoying some music-hall entertainment.

Well, the real music-hall crowd was not remotely as sedate as that,

and it was down to one man to keep them in check.

My lords, ladies and gentlemen, good evening,

and welcome to this magnificent melange

of musicality, magic and mirth,

in which we transport you back to the good old days of Queen...

-Queen Vic... You're not Queen Victoria.

-I'm Suzy.

Suzy, hello, I thought you might be Queen Victoria.

I'm sorry to disappoint you.

Wonderfully impressive chairmanship there.

Well, a little something.

I may have got the job, I'm not sure.

Johnny, tell me about the role of the chairman.

When did it come about?

The middle of the 19th century.

Usually, they were the landlord or the governor of the pub,

and his job was purely to introduce the acts

and keep order, with his gavel,

and make sure that everybody... make sure they ordered drinks.

When he says, "Order! Order!" - order the drinks, order the food.

He would get some talented local amateurs in

and give them a few bob to sing and he would then compere the show,

so the chairman developed into a bit of a personality of his own, really.

So, what would the chairman be doing then when the acts were on stage?

How did the evening unfold?

He would be actually facing the audience with a mirror on a table

and he'd look through the mirror at the acts behind,

to make sure there was nothing going on on stage that shouldn't be.

His job, really, is to keep an eye on the audience

because it was a very rowdy house indeed.

When you say rowdy, what kind of audience behaviour are we talking?

Just shouting out?

Shouting and throwing things. They were very good at throwing things.

There were lots of acts, there were no breaks

and if an act didn't turn up - quite a lot of them did

about two or three shows a night - so if they didn't turn up,

another act would go in its place, or the chairman would sing,

and he would say, "Now it's time for the chairman to do his song."

And we're here in Hoxton Hall, used Macdonald's Music Hall,

it's got a very fine history, this building.

So, who would have come to a hall like this?

It's working-class people.

It was a people's entertainment

and they would spend pence on getting in.

Upstairs even cheaper, upper circle, bit more.

Downstairs, food and drink. Occasionally, you'd get the nobs

from the West End, who would drop in, but that wasn't very regular.

They had their own music halls to go to.

It was the people's entertainment and the people came out to see it.

They loved it.

Well, I'm glad I won't be facing a 19th-century crowd at the end of this.

I've certainly got a new-found respect for the stamina of these music-hall performers.

So, here's a slightly strange thing.

I'm just off to see, well,

what I'm told is the closest I'll ever get to Dan Leno live.

Yes, Dan Leno.

The tragical, comical history of the hard-boiled egg and the wasp.

# A hard-boiled egg on the table lay

# As hard-boiled eggs often do, do, do

# A gentle wasp charged past that way

# And in through the open window flew

# And the wasps saw the hard-boiled egg's pale face

# As it lay there alone in that lonely place

# Dearest, I am with you I am by your side

# Give me just one word of hope That sad wasp cried

# But not one word said the hard-boiled egg

# The hard-boiled egg The hard-boiled egg

# And what a silly wasp for just one word to beg

# For...

# You can't get any sense out of a hard-boiled...

# Hard-boiled...

# Oh! Boil the egg! #

-Magnificent.

-Good to see you.

Where have I seen you before?

So, the hat's off, now you become Tony Lidington for a second.

I can be me again.

OK, so, Dan Leno, do you think all this stuff you read about him,

that he was the funniest man on Earth, and all that, is it fair?

Thousands and thousands of people adored him.

He was the highest-paid entertainer of the age.

Fairly eccentric and fairly bizarre.

I mean, a song about an egg and a wasp

-in itself is kind of a bit weird.

-It's a great combo.

It's the sort of thing you might get a pub called now.

The Hard-boiled Egg and the Wasp.

He came down to London.

I've sort of come to think of him, with what little I know, as maybe

the first-ever stand-up comedian.

Is that a reasonable description?

He became synonymous with this idea of having

an interlude in the song, where he would have no accompaniment

and just deliver his material, his shtick, as it were,

and so, for that, people often say he was the first stand-up.

He was alone on stage, no mic, with 2,000, maybe 3,000 people

in front of him, performing,

and with the pit band in front of him, maybe nine or more,

and he would be able to top all that, fill the stage.

But he couldn't do that from the centre,

he had that same manic energy that, you know, Lee Evans has got now,

and with that he was able to electrify an audience.

# My mind's made up I'm going to marry him

# He'll have to come to church If he don't, I'll carry him

# For five and twenty years I've had my eye on Jim

# If he won't marry me then I'll marry him. #

He portrayed people that were recognisable then and recognisable now.

They're all people with a kind of lower-middle-class profession,

and that was the audience that was starting to come,

that was the mass audience at the end of the 19th and

start of the 20th century, and they were recognisable. They were real.

So when he started to play people like Mrs Kelly, which was perhaps

his most famous character, it's that gossip who lived next door.

It's like Les Dawson, it's the person who you instantly recognise.

It is a time before television, it's a time before moving pictures,

so it's a time before there was any sense of things being focused in.

You have to create that focus with your acting.

'I don't want to let Tony or Dan Leno down. The pressure!'

Is it a good idea?

# For 25 years I've been doing my... #

Is that... What's that?

PIANIST PLAYS TUNE

# For 25 years I've been doing my best to make Jim Johnson a match

# I've done everything but ask him point-blank

# But he won't come up to the scratch

# Of course I know Jim's very partial to me

# Though never one word has he said

# Though this morning I passed where he's building a house

# And he dropped a large slate on my head... #

You're there, mate.

You're within spitting distance.

Yes, yes, I'm in the same postcode as the melody line,

but I'm not in exactly the right house.

So, I really enjoyed meeting Tony.

I loved watching him perform The Hard-boiled Egg And The Wasp.

It gave me a sense of what Leno was like, I think

probably for the first time, because all I've seen is photos

and heard scratchy old recordings.

And he was great. And also, his love and enthusiasm

for Leno provided a sort of a bridge to me, it gave me some access,

you know, across the years, to this mysterious figure.

So he was brilliant, really, really helpful,

and I feel he's kind of...

he's opened the door for me a bit, which is fantastic.

While Frank's getting to grips with Dan Leno,

I'm trying to get under the skin of Marie Lloyd.

I need to understand how women like her in the 19th century

managed to defy their social status to take centre stage.

Two feisty women who paved the way were Jenny Hill and Bessie Bellwood,

a new breed of female singers called seriocomics.

# I am a girl what's doing very well in the vegetable line... #

Seriocomics would tend to portray sort of the market sellers and

the coster women and the servant girls,

and would show elements of their lives.

With Hill particularly, she came from a very working-class

kind of background, as did Bessie Bellwood,

and most of the performers at the time, they did kind of then know

the streets and they knew the people that they were portraying.

She was asked once by an interviewer about how she got that life-like

image of an East End girl, and she said, "Well, from life, of course.

"I go down to the shops and I buy the same clothes

"and I see what they are doing."

One more!

# What cheer, Ria

# Ria's on the job

# What cheer, Ria... #

With Bessie Bellwood, she was very boisterous in her performances

and she was very good at putting down hecklers, so I think a lot

of people watched to see how she'd put down hecklers in the crowd

and she was a very typical kind of coster girl who would,

you know, sing all of these songs that they'd hear on the market,

but also, there was an added sort of dimension to her that, in real life,

she was constantly up on assault charges,

she was up on all sorts of

non-payment of bills and things like that,

so the audiences knew that she was a bit of a bad girl in real life.

When you think of somebody like Marie Lloyd,

how huge a star she was, people like Jenny Hill

and Bessie Bellwood really set the template for that.

Definitely, and the times when she was attending the halls

and had got the idea of going on stage was when Jenny Hill

and Bessie Bellwood were at their height, so she would have seen

these performers and, certainly, she was often praised for

the fact that she would know exactly what was in a charwoman's handbag,

so if she got up on stage she could perform the patter perfectly

and she'd know exactly the right level to lift your skirt up

to show a particular type of woman.

She definitely had that realistic sort of side to her but,

again, she was definitely tabloid fodder as well.

I'm beginning to understand the toughness of Marie Lloyd now,

and she really would need it to survive in music hall.

Born Matilda Wood in 1870's Shoreditch, she took to the stage

as Marie Lloyd aged just 15,

appearing at places like the Britannia Saloon.

She continued to scramble her way to the top,

to be called the queen of the music hall.

Of course it would be extremely convenient, Suzy, wouldn't it,

if we could go back in time and actually meet these people?

Well, I'm going to do the next best thing. It's back to Wilton's.

I'm told Jan Hunt's there

and if anyone knows Marie first-hand, it's her.

# ..Stamped all over them

# Oh, I felt sorry for the lady and the chap

# So I says to 'em, 'scuse me If you want to have a cuddle

# Have a cuddle cos I'm gonna have a nap

# I always hold in having it if you fancy it

# If you fancy it That's understood

# I'll be dreaming while you spoon

# That I'm on my honeymoon Phwoar!

# A little of what you fancy does you good

# Oh, I always hold in having it if you fancy it

# If you fancy it...

# Oh, I fancy him!

# And suppose it makes you fat I don't worry over that

# Cos a little of what you fancy A little of what you fancy

# Little of what you fancy does you good. #

Oh, yeah!

Fantastic.

So, what made Marie Lloyd so popular with audiences?

Why did they love her so much?

She sang for the people, she sang to them, she didn't sing at them.

She played every one of them, she took in all the downstairs,

she took the circle, she took in the gallery.

And she just made her audience feel that she was there for them.

And she was vulgar but she was humorous.

The song about the young girl travelling by train

on her own for the first time, you know, when she gets to

the barrier and they ask to see her ticket and she says,

# I told 'em all, I'd never had me ticket punched before. #

Well, that can all be a very innocent line but Marie does it...

# I told 'em all, I'd never had my ticket punched before. #

And you know exactly what's behind it.

When you think about the people who came before, the Jenny Hills

and the Bessie Bellwoods, and then on to Marie Lloyd,

these were women who were so obviously incredibly talented,

they could have had a career in straight theatre,

but evidently working in music hall gave them something else.

Why did they come to these places?

Music-hall audiences are very, very important.

You want them to answer you back, you want them to sing,

you want them to throw out the ad-libs so that you can come back at them,

and she sang to the toffs, she sang to those with a bit more money

but Marie's heart was with the people up in the gallery.

# I'm a young girl and I've just come over

# Over from the country where they do things big

# And amongst the boys I've got a lover

# Since I've got a lover Why, I don't give a fig... #

'The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery was the song that first made

'Marie Lloyd famous as a teenage music-hall performer.'

# The boy I love is looking down at me... #

See him.

# ..There he is, can't you see?

# Waving his handkerchief... #

Now to the audience.

# ..As merry as a robin that sings on a tree. #

CHEERING

Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd were treading the boards

at the very moment that music hall was taking off.

But it wasn't just the working-class scoundrels like myself in the halls now.

The allure of music hall was spreading beyond the working class.

In particular, a new breed of audience member appeared -

the toffs.

So, I imagine these toffs, these fashionable icons...

what did they wear?

It was flamboyance, gaudiness, being a male peacock.

Bright colours.

You'd carry a cane with a silver top to it.

You would generally flounce about in these garments

and consider yourself a picture to be looked at.

And, remember, in the audience you've got young men

that are wondering what to do with their leisure time

and they are shopkeepers, clerks, they've got a bit of money.

They want to emulate that type of person.

The appearance of the toffs at the music halls inspired

one of the period's greatest hits, Champagne Charlie.

It was sung by dashing working-class boy George Leybourne,

part of a group of male singers called the Lion Comique,

a sort of Victorian Rat Pack.

-So, George Leybourne, he was an enormous star.

-Yes.

It was Champagne Charlie that did it for him.

It grew and grew in popularity

until it became THE song associated with him.

It really took him over

because he just became known as Champagne Charlie.

He was reported to drink a lot of Champagne, yes,

-but by the pint, in tankards.

-Oh, OK!

It's fabulous.

That's what happens when two classes collide!

It is interesting to me because I was part, not deliberately,

of a phenomena known as the New Lads in the '90s,

and it had an element of this, cos it had a laddish, drinking,

womanising culture, but also, people liked to dress smartly

and started caring about fashion, so there are definite echoes in this.

As I'm at Wilton's Music Hall, well, I thought I'd give

this 19th-century lad culture a go.

So, are you ready, Frank?

Yes, I think so.

DRUMROLL

# I've seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life

# For all my grand accomplishments I ne'er could get a wife

# The thing that I excel in is the PRFG game

# I noise all night

# I sleep all day

# And swimming in Champagne

# For...

-# Champagne Charlie is my name

-Yes!

-# Champagne Charlie is my name

-Yes!

# Good for any game at night, my boys

# Good for any game at night, my boys

-# Champagne Charlie is my name

-Yes!

-# Champagne Charlie is my name

-Yes!

# Good for any game at night, boys

# All come and join me on a spree. #

Let's dance!

'Just to think I'm treading the same boards as George Leybourne himself.

'You know, I really could get into Champagne Charlie!'

Yes, Frank, not sure about the whiskers, though.

Entertainers like Leybourne weren't just performers, they were stars,

and their fans expected them to appear at several venues a night,

so they could see their signature routines.

That's a lot of Champagne to get through.

Charles Dickens's son offered advice to potential newcomers to music hall.

He said, "It's undesirable to visit many of these establishments

"on the same evening, as it's quite possible to go to

"four or five halls in different parts of the town and to find

"widely diverse stages occupied by the same sets of performers."

Come on, Suzy, put your back into it, we've got another five music halls to get to!

Yes m'lud.

Not to be outdone by Frank, I'm back to see my mentor Jan Hunt

to take my Marie Lloyd act up a notch.

Marie didn't always sing sweet songs about boys in galleries.

By the 1890s, she was really pushing the boundaries

of what was legally and socially acceptable.

Jan looks a bit different from when I saw her last.

# I lost me way... #

-Hello.

-Hi, sweetie!

-How are you?

-Nice to see you.

-Fine. Lovely to see you.

-Hi, I'm Suzy.

-This is Lawrence.

-Hi, Lawrence. Great to meet you.

Jan, I've gone away, I did my homework exactly like you said.

Ten out of ten!

I've read up more about Marie, I've listened to some songs

and the thing I was thinking was, the song we did before,

The Boy In The Gallery, gorgeous and sweet,

but the more I've read about her, the more I've realised that,

as the career went on, she got a bit naughtier, a bit more risque.

Oh, she did, yes.

I just thought, is there a song that I could learn that really

kind of typifies the big, high point of Marie.

-Expresses the way she was developing, yes.

-Yes.

Well, there is. Well, Morning Promenade is a very good one

because that's when she gets quite cheeky with her skirts.

You know, before, it would be a little touch of the skirt.

Now the skirt develops and it gets higher and higher.

Plus, she would do a lot of this

so there'd be a little bit of showing the decolletage.

'Now down to the serious business of rehearsing.'

Now, how would Marie have sung or said these words?

-Just give us a...

-She would have spoken that.

-Go on, then.

When I take my morning promenade,

quite a fashion card on the promenade.

-And then maybe go into the singing.

-OK.

# Oh, I don't mind nice boys staring hard

# If it satisfies their desire. #

-So...

-BOTH:

-When I take my morning promenade,

quite a fashion card on the promenade

Oh, I don't...

Swap the stick over.

..I don't mind nice boys staring hard...

Only a little bit.

..If it satisfies their desire.

That's it.

When I take my morning promenade,

quite a fashion card on the promenade.

# Oh, I don't mind nice boys staring hard

# If it satisfies their desire

Good girl, and then often she used to do...

# Satisfy their desire... #

And then a little kick of the foot.

# Their desire. #

That's it.

And then she would walk to include that side of her audience.

-BOTH:

-# Do you think my dress is a little bit

# Just a little bit

# Not too much of it?

# Though it shows my shape just a little bit

# That's the little bit the boys admire. #

Then she'd go back.

You make a statement with the stick at the end, which is lovely.

-That's great.

-It's harder than it looks.

-It is.

-So, I've been trying to practise my Marie Lloyd act.

-Oh, yes.

I probably haven't been doing as much homework as I should,

being honest, but I'm finding her really difficult.

It feels something like a very long way away in history.

I don't know if I just need the dress, or I need the hat,

or I need something, but trying to do her shtick of funny and naughty

and a bit kind of classy and yet lowbrow,

plus movement, plus a song.

It's a bit of a tough call.

How's the world of Dan Leno?

Are you trying it at home, by the way?

Are the family sort of thinking, "Why is Mum doing that?"

Yeah, I mean, they're slightly getting used to me

wandering around with 19th-century teeth, trying to do that.

I've been wandering around with 19th-century teeth for years.

How are the teeth with Dan Leno?

-Is that working out for you?

-He never shows his teeth, Dan Leno.

No, really, Dan Leno always does this Stan Laurel type smile.

-And...

-Maybe his teeth were worse than Marie Lloyd's, if that's possible.

Maybe there are no teeth.

What I like about Dan Leno is, he clearly loves words and language.

You can tell him just enjoying stuff like "chloroform"

and stuff like that that he just chucks in,

and I've got that sort of slight obsessiveness about words as well,

so I'm enjoying that.

I've found a bit of a common bond, I think, between us.

And some of the stuff is funny, you don't know why,

just cos he's chosen exactly the right word, and that's beautiful.

And you get wear a frock. I can't wait to see you in your dress.

Yeah, it's... I wouldn't say it was slinky.

-You can't have everything.

-No.

Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno had to work really hard

to keep their acts fresh for their growing audiences.

The increased demand for entertainment in turn led to

the building of Shaftesbury Avenue and the creation of the West End.

But singing stars like Lloyd and Leno

were just one part of the entertainment on offer.

To give you an idea of the sort of variety of acts you might see,

this is Dickens' Dictionary Of London by Charles Dickens's son.

He lists some entertainers - the sort of thing you might expect -

performing animals and ventriloquists,

but also winners of walking matches, shipwrecked sailors,

velocipedists, decanter equilibrists,

living models of marble gems,

fire princes, mysterious youths,

spiral bicycle ascensionists,

flying children and, my own favourite,

Mexican boneless wonders.

Oh, Mexican boneless wonders! Couldn't you just eat one of those?!

Victorian audiences now expected to be astounded as well as entertained.

Magicians and spiritualists drew in the crowds in the late 19th century

as theatre-goers became fascinated with invention and the paranormal.

And even more shocking than Marie Lloyd was the arrival on stage

of a new scientific discovery.

Electric acts quickly appeared in the hall.

Chief among them was Walford Bodie,

whose speciality act was sending several thousand volts

of electricity through his glamorous assistants.

Lights off, please.

Now, can I establish that you're not actually Walford Bodie?

I'm not actually Dr Walford Bodie, MD, no.

-This is just in the style of Walford Bodie.

-So, who was he?

Walford Bodie was one of the highest-paid

and most popular entertainers of his day.

In the late 19th century, he was top of the bill in every music hall,

every theatre in the UK, he was one of the best speciality acts.

So he was doing, basically, weird stuff on stage.

He'd charge himself up with the electricity,

he could do anything, he could cure the sick, he could hypnotise people,

at least that's what he said on his playbills.

So electricity was still quite a novelty thing,

and people weren't used to it,

so it's kind of like if I did an act now in which I used the sat nav

and no-one had seen it before and they were going, "Whoa!" and all that.

That is it, yes. And nobody knew about electricity at that time

so he really took advantage of it.

And did he work alone on stage, or did he have what we

normally would look for in a magician, the glamorous assistant?

Well, Bodie did use a glamorous assistant,

he married several of them, actually.

One of them was called La Belle Electra,

and La Belle Electra would also get attached to these machines and

using the power of Bodie's special Bodic force, as he called it,

she would also withstand the power of electricity.

Have you got a Bodic force?

Um, I might develop one during this.

Did he use dangerous electricity, or did he just pretend to?

Well, he used machines that... Nowadays, we would consider them quite dangerous.

The things that I'm using here are the modern versions, producing the

same amount of electricity, but just a bit less likely to kill anybody.

OK.

On a score out of 100, how likely are they to kill somebody?

Cos I'm thinking that I might actually take the role

of La Belle Electra. It seems I was born for that.

-OK, shall I mount the plate?

-You certainly can.

Is there any things I definitely shouldn't do?

Don't touch the floor.

No, don't touch the floor, and if you've got a pacemaker, turn it off now.

Oh!

That's...

At last I'm in light entertainment!

'With 50,000 volts running through my body,

'I'm starting to think this stuff's got a bit of comic potential.'

Oh!

Goalkeeper.

Sir Edmund Hillary.

Man with his head trapped

in a lift door.

Can you open the... Can you open the...

Can you just open the door?

Audiences at the end of the 19th century demanded a wow factor with their entertainment.

And as the bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue lit up for the first time,

music-hall entertainers like Leno and Lloyd were entering a new era.

But before we say goodbye to the 19th century,

it's back we go to the gas-lit world of the music hall...

..where it's finally time to see if Suzy and I

can bring Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd back to life.

-Ow!

-I'm sorry.

-Genuinely ow!

I'm very sorry. I'm really sorry.

See how difficult she is!

He's a bit Cara Delevingne!

-So, I'm actually playing Dan Leno playing a woman today.

-Right.

I thought I'd up my game and do a double-whammy impression,

whereas you've taken the easy route of being a woman playing a woman.

-She's not...

-I mean, you are halfway there.

She's not that easy, Marie Lloyd,

cos she had total star quality, which...I'm...

I'm somewhat searching around for.

The thing I love, I've chosen this Marie Lloyd song,

which does have that brilliant thing of taking something very biblical,

you know, what seems like a very nice high Victorian subject

-and turning it into such filth.

-OK!

It's really smutty.

I was just trying out my Dan Leno mouth.

Let's see it.

-They said that Dan Leno... he had a look.

-That looks like...

-They said Stan Laurel...

-I was going to say it's the Stan Laurel smile.

-They say Stan Laurel took his smile from Dan Leno.

-Show us again. Yeah.

And that Chaplin took... He used to dress, like, in this shabby...

baggy trousers and a long coat so that Chaplin, he...

You know, there were all these young comics there watching Leno and...

not nicking his stuff so much, but being massively influenced by him.

But it's interesting. You sort of think comedy starts with

those guys, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, not comedy,

but the comedy we know, cos it's on record, cos there's films of them.

Mmm.

Well, one plus about this is that nobody really knows

what Dan Leno...what he looked like and what he moved like and

stuff like that, so they can't really shoot me down for getting it wrong.

-There might be a plus to being a non-performer.

-Really?

Cos I find that you start doing it and then I'm thinking,

"Oh, no, that was just me, that was just me doing a line,

"rather than Dan Leno doing a line,"

so at least you're coming with a blank page.

And you are a performer as well, in that you...

-Communicate, you communicate for a living.

-Frank, I talk.

You do work in a call centre, don't you?

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Good evening!

I bring to you Miss Marie Lloyd.

CHEERING

# Fancy the girls in the prehistoric days

# Each wore a bearskin to cover up her fair skin

# Lately Salome has charmed us to be sure

# Wearing just a row of beads and not much more

# Fancy me dressing like that too

# I'm sure the Daily Mirror man would love an interview

# As I take my morning promenade

# Quite a fashion card on the promenade

# Now, I don't mind nice boys staring hard

# If it satisfies their desire

# Do you think my dress is a little bit

# Just a little bit

# Not too much of it

# If it shows my shape just a little bit

# That's the little bit boys admire

# If it shows my shape just a little bit

# That's the little bit the boys admire. #

APPLAUSE

Carrying all before her.

-I did it! I did it!

-Brilliant.

God, it was actually like standing in the wings at the music hall

-watching Marie Lloyd.

-No, it wasn't.

It really was how I imagine it would be. Dan Leno waiting to go on.

I really, totally enjoyed it, it was great.

Ladies and gentlemen, the delectable Dan Leno.

APPLAUSE

Good luck, you're on, you're on, you're on. Good luck!

Good luck! Go for it.

# For 25 years I've been doing my best to make Jim Johnson a match

# I've done everything but ask him point-blank

# But he won't come up to the scratch

# Of course I know Jim's very partial to me

# Though never one word has he said

# But this morning I passed where he's building a house

# And he dropped a large slate on my head... #

Of course he did that more really to draw my attention, you see.

Oh, but you know, Jim's a totally different man.

Jim does love me, you know.

And he's lodging now with Mrs Kelly.

You know, Mrs Kelly.

You know Mrs Kelly.

Don't you know Mrs Kelly?

Her husband's that little stout man

always on the corner of the street in a greasy waistcoat.

Good life, don't look so stupid.

Don't you... You must know Mrs Kelly!

Don't...don't...

don't you know Mrs Kelly?

Well, of course, if you don't, you don't, but I thought you did

because I thought everybody knew Mrs Kelly.

Still, here I am talking to you about Mrs Kelly

and I want to talk to you about Jim.

# Oh, my mind's made up

# I'm going to marry him

# He'll have to come to church

# If he don't, I'll carry him

# For five and twenty years I've had my eye on Jim

# If he won't marry me I'll marry him

# If he won't marry me... #

Well, I'll insist upon it and take him to church myself

if I have to chloroform him.

Upon my word, I will, I'll have him!

CHEERING

'Next time - we enter the golden age of variety...'

Brilliant!

'..find out about the extraordinary acts of long-forgotten performers...'

If you see it done exactly how she would have done it,

it's still pretty jaw-dropping.

'..and discover if we've got what it takes...'

Hi!

'..to recreate the magic of the era's greatest stars.'

Pretty good.