|
|
|
|
Articles
|
|
|
Articles |
Variety - the Extinct Spice of Life?Dateline: 26th September, 1999 Is variety dead? The question has been exercising letter writers in The Stage for some weeks, ever since one of the ITV companies let it be known that they thought it was. I have vivid memories of going to the Sunderland Empire Theatre during the late forties/early fifties and sitting in the "gods" to watch variety shows. My father was a pitman - North East word for a miner - and we couldn't afford the stalls, let alone the Dress Circle which, of course, was where all the rich people sat, so we were right up at the top, sitting on bench seats which were raked so steeply that you felt that, if you tripped, you would fall straight into the stalls, which seemed miles below. For me, the highlights were the comedians and the acrobats: the singers and dancers were necessary interruptions to the real meat of the show. At least, that was the case until one day - I must have been about ten or possibly eleven, I imagine - I fell in love! She was a dancer and, from where I was sitting, seemed to be the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I still remember that she was wearing a bottle green costume with a very short skirt. She was, I think, a brunette. Of course, we were so far away that she could have been very plain, but my hormones were just beginning to stir and to me she was gorgeous. Perhaps it is to this that I owe my life-long fascination with theatre! There was also radio, which everyone listened to. I remember coming home from school at lunchtime and eating my dinner, as we called it then, to the accompaniment of Workers' Playtime on the Light Programme (later to become Radio One). It had the variety show format, but without the speciality acts - except for ventriloquists. Imagine that! Vent acts on radio! Weird! Then we stopped going to the theatre. It never really occurred to me to wonder why: kids didn't question at that time. But the theatre still held its fascination, but not for the same reason. You see, obviously the variety shows weren't bringing in the money so they switched to the "nudie" shows, with "artistic" tableaux of diaphanously clad or even nude young ladies. So on my way to church on a Sunday morning (Oh! this is so shocking!), I would make sure I walked past the theatre, hoping for a glimpse of breast or nipple in the production photos outside! New Venues, New Media Variety had moved. It was now to be found on the new medium that we couldn't afford, the television. And as we moved towards the sixties, the singers - and some of the comics - were now playing the new ever-so-sophisticated nightclubs that were beginning to open. I think they had a life of between ten and fifteen years before they began to change, sometime in the seventies, to discotheques. At the same time, pop stars began to dominate the TV variety shows. The seventies/early eighties were the time of the Working Men's Clubs, variety's new home. Most WMCs had entertainment on Saturday and Sunday evenings (with, often, strip shows on a Sunday afternoon), but most of the larger clubs had acts appearing every evening. These acts were ballad singers and comedians to begin with, but increasingly pop-style groups began to appear. I remember one NE band called the MPs - not the Members of Parliament or the Military Police, but the Musical Prostitutes! They called themselves that because they worked two kinds of venue: one type dedicated to real rock music, where the punters wanted to hear new original work, and the other the WMCs. The pay for the former was barely enough to cover the expense of getting to the venue, but for the latter it was very good, so this band worked under its own name in the rock venues and as the MPs in the clubs, where they did cover versions of chart hits. Those were the great days of the WMCs. They still exist, of course, but entertainment is usually limited to the weekend and there are rarely support acts, just the headliner. Variety Now So, where is variety in the late nineties? There's the odd TV progamme, the occasional show which tours to provincial lyric theatres, a few venues which continue the old Music Hall tradition, out of which variety grew, and a few specials at WMCs. The only time you get really large scale variety shows is when an entertainment agency holds their showcase or someone puts on a talent competition. But even these talent shows are not what they were. I remember judging one in a nightclub in Stockton-on-Tees back in the late seventies (I was working for a trade paper called Cabaret and Variety Revue at the time), and it ran for one night a week over six weeks. For each of five weeks we saw six acts and placed them in order of merit, then on the sixth week we had the final, with the winners of the previous five, plus the highest marked runner-up, appearing. The club was packed each night. Just five or six years later the only sort of entertainment that could draw a crowd at the same club was a pop group or a fashion show. Theatre Variety saved quite a number of theatres from closure. Thanks to variety (and, later, even the nudie shows) the Sunderland Empire remained open until the early sixties, when prosperity began to return after the post-war years and a change in attitudes and ideas meant that the way had opened for the (as it was then) town council to take over the theatre, so that it became one of the earliest civic theatres. It began to book in plays, musicals, opera, ballet, some one-night stands, and, of course, its big money-spinner, the pantomime. It even ran a six week summer rep season. Of course, the sixties and early seventies saw the growth in small-scale touring companies, playing in arts centres, schools, pubs and WMCs - and even on the streets, in parks and other outdoor venues. During the early seventies I was, for a time, responsible for booking theatre companies for Sunderland Arts Centre. We were actually booking three or four companies a month into the Centre's basement bar or even an upstairs room at a local pub. That's where I first saw Mike Leigh's work, in the bare, dusty upstairs room of the Londonderry pub on Sunderland's High Street West. What a sense of excitement there was in those days! We were sure we were witnessing the renaissance of theatre, a theatre which went out to the people, in the places where they congregated. This was the time of John McGrath's 7:84 Company, of Welfare State, of the pre-John Godber Hull Truck, of performance art and "happenings". It was a time when we could watch an experimental company at the Arts Centre one night, the work of an emerging major playwright or director in a pub the next, see a piece of street theatre in the town centre on Saturday morning and then the Welsh National Opera doing Aida at the Empire the same evening. There was a tendency to despise variety, to look down on it as mindless pap, but, in Sunderland and across the country, variety had saved the very theatres we were - and are - so proud of. And theatre people can learn a lot from the sheer professionalism of the variety artistes - and not just the greats, either! And now variety is, if not dead, at least in a very parlous state. It won't really die, but it may be gone for some time. Articles Indices: |
|
|