Britain Had Talent

A History of Variety Theatre

Oliver Double

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780230284609
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350316584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

In the first major academic work to examine British variety theatre, Double provides a detailed history of this art form and analyses its performance dynamics and techniques. Encompassing singers, comedians, dancers, magicians, ventriloquists and diverse speciality acts, this vibrant book draws on a series of new interviews with variety veterans.

Part One

History of Variety Performance

1

Britain’s Got Talent

It’s Sunday 21 June 2009, and I’m going to Wembley Arena with my wife and two sons for the 1.30 p.m. performance of the Britain’s Got Talent live show. As we leave the station, we quickly become aware that we’re not the only ones who are making our way there through the hot summer air. The crowds are positively thronging as we reach the concourse in front of the venue, which is filled with stalls selling unofficial merchandise – scarves emblazoned with the names of the acts, little Unions Jacks, even light-up bunny ears. Inside the venue, the official merchandising stalls will sell you a more tasteful array of mugs, posters, keyrings, bags, T-shirts and programmes. We take our seats and listen to a non-stop barrage of high-energy pop hits. Finally the house music stops, the lighting changes, and instantly the air is rent by ear-splitting screams of excitement from all around us.

We are perplexed and amused by the hysteria the rest of the audience is unashamedly unleashing, but perhaps we shouldn’t be. Since it started broadcasting in June 2007, Britain’s Got Talent has become one of ITV1’s most popular programmes, regularly attracting around half of the total peak-time audience.¹ The 2009 final of this top-rated talent show attracted an extraordinary 19.2 million viewers, and in the course of the series the public cast over 4 million votes.² Since 2008, the programme has produced annual spin-off live tours, and the performance we are at is just one of a run of 26 shows at big theatres and arenas around the UK.

While it is first and foremost a talent show, Britain’s Got Talent is essentially variety entertainment. Piers Morgan, a member of the show’s judging panel, has described it as ‘the ultimate variety show’, and newspaper critics have called it ‘the closest thing we’ve got to a mainstream variety show’ and admitted, ‘We’re watching variety and we love it.’³ In addition to a large cash sum, the prize for winning the series is to appear at the Royal Variety Performance.

Having said this, there’s plenty in the live show which differentiates it from variety theatre as it used to exist. To start with, the promoters have wisely employed a professional compère – the impressively efficient Stephen Mulhern – whereas traditionally, variety theatre managed without one. Then there is the use of film footage, which is so heavy that this barely qualifies as a live show. At the beginning, a lengthy montage of clips from the 2009 series is projected onto a giant screen at the back of the stage, and each individual act is prefaced by their own individual montage of TV highlights. As if that weren’t enough, many of the audience are filming the show on cameras or phones. We’re on the thirteenth row, and the bottom of my field of vision is filled with lots of little glowing screens, each showing its own view of what’s happening onstage.

On the other hand, there’s plenty here to connect it with variety theatre, starting with the staging. Oblong-shaped LED bars flank the stage forming a kind of proscenium, and traditional red-velvet tabs twice make an appearance – Stephen Mulhern stands in front of a large red curtain while introducing the show, and later, CGI red tabs are projected behind the singer Susan Boyle, in what must be a conscious reference to variety’s past. Even the projected footage at the back of the stage has an echo in variety, recalling the ‘bioscope’ of the music hall – films shown between the live acts.

However, the most powerful echoes of variety are in the performance itself. There’s no narrative, fictional setting or any other kind of overarching conceptual structure, just a series of unconnected individual acts. As in variety, the performers work directly to the audience, making eye contact and speaking and singing directly to them. The audience play an active role in the show, the applause they give at the end of each number or routine validating the efforts of the performers onstage. They also applaud any conspicuous show of skill, particularly when a singer hits a loud sustained note.

The skills of street-dance team Diversity unknowingly echo the daring throw-and-catch moves of adagio acts like the Ganjou Brothers & Juanita, and even the long lean-forward of the music hall comedian Little Tich’s Big Boot Dance. There’s also novelty in the show, in the spoof dancing of the rotund father-and-son act Stavros Flatley, and the cheerfully awful gold-clad, middle-aged rapper DJ Talent.

Above all, each act is built around the identity of the performer, and the clips which introduce them show not just moments of performance but also film of them talking about their offstage life and the ‘journey’ they have been on to get here. The effect of this becomes particularly obvious when Susan Boyle hits the stage.

Boyle has become instantly famous thanks to her first appearance on the TV show on 11 April 2009. It’s a supremely manipulative piece of television. The pre-performance interview sets her up as a rather pathetic figure. We see an image of her stuffing a large piece of food into her mouth, and her looks are such that a journalist would subsequently describe her as ‘small and rather chubby, with a squashed face, unruly teeth and unkempt hair’.⁴ She reveals to Ant and Dec that she is nearly 48 years old, unemployed, single (‘Never been married – never been kissed!’), and lives with her cat, Pebbles.

She takes to the stage, and the editing leads us to believe we are about to see a cruelly enjoyable train wreck of a performance. As she chats with the judges, stumbling over her words and announcing that she hopes to become a professional singer, we see cynical reaction shots from both them and the audience – brows knit, and derisive giggles are shared. Then when she sings the first line of her song with power and control, the reaction is transformed – eyes widen, jaws drop, and the audience burst into spontaneous applause. She finishes to a standing ovation, and the judges heap praise on her, each alluding to the fact that they were completely surprised by her talent.

Following the show, the clip was posted on YouTube, where it was watched over 26 million times within a week, spawning international media coverage.⁵ Boyle was immediately tipped to win the series, but ended being beaten to second place to the street-dance troupe, Diversity. Following her defeat, the stress of the experience became overwhelming and she was admitted to a private clinic. The Guardian commented, ‘Boyle has ... suffered a more accelerated version of a common musical journey: from unknown to Priory in seven weeks rather than the months it takes hardened professionals.’⁶ Even Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, expressed his concern for her well-being.⁷

All of this is reflected in the audience’s reaction at the Wembley Arena. Boyle gets a standing ovation even as she steps onto the stage, and each of her numbers is greeted in the same way. In an important essay about popular entertainment written in the late 1970s, Clive Barker argued that ‘the private life of the performer forms an important part of the performer’s persona’, giving the example of Judy Garland, whose well-publicized offstage struggles ‘helped to invest the singer with an aura of pathos’.⁸ In the same way, Boyle’s excessively accelerated trip from ‘unknown to Priory’ gives the audience the pleasure of seeing the little woman struggling with adversity and triumphing through her talent. It is this as much as the performance she gives onstage that wins her the unusually extravagant audience response.

It strikes me that there is a certain irony here. It has often been argued that television killed variety theatre, but now a TV show – Britain’s Got Talent – has engendered a series of live tours which represent the biggest resurgence of live variety since the theatre circuits collapsed in the late 1950s. I’d guess that there are around 8,000 people here this afternoon, and this is one of two shows at this venue on this day alone. Most variety theatres would be pleased with a total weekly attendance of 16,000.

However, what the Britain’s Got Talent live show lacks is the true depth and power of variety theatre. There are no Max Millers or Gracie Fields here, nobody whose persona is expertly crafted through their performance onstage rather than their trials and tribulations offstage. There is none of the expertise with which variety performers built their relationship with an audience. As one TV critic has pointed out, Britain’s Got Talent is ‘the variety show with no variety’.⁹ Almost all of the acts at the Wembley Arena are singers or street dancers. There are no comedians, magicians, acrobats, jugglers, ventriloquists or any of the other weird and wonderful acts which appeared in variety theatres. The extent and range of skill on offer here this afternoon is far more limited. Nor is there anything to approach the sheer bizarreness of the more outlandish speciality acts which variety produced.

This is not surprising. The Britain’s Got Talent live show got its acts from a flavour-of-the-month TV programme which has been around for only a few years, whereas the top acts of the variety were the product of a large circuit of big theatre chains running large venues which put on two shows a night, six nights a week in towns and cities up and down the country throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century.

2

The Variety Bill

Although it is now half a century since the vast majority of the variety theatres were closing their doors for the last time, an image of what variety was still lingers on in the public imagination. Thanks to television programmes like Sunday Night at the London Palladium, we understand that a variety show involved a compère like Tommy Trinder or Bruce Forsyth introducing a series of individual acts, which would perform straight out to the audience with the hope of entertaining them as much as possible. The show would start with a chorus line of high-kicking showgirls, and at the end all of the acts would come back onto the stage and wave to the audience over the closing credits.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this image of variety is only partly accurate. The televised version took some of the most essential elements of variety theatre but also added its own touches. The compère is an obvious example. In the majority of shows which took place in variety theatres, there was nobody to introduce the acts onto the stage. Instead, the audience would know which act was on the stage by consulting their programme, where each item on the bill would have a number printed next to it. This number would be shown while the act was performing, either on painted wooden number boards built into the proscenium, or later by similar boards which picked out the number by illuminating a series of miniature light bulbs. If the running order of the show was changed, the numbers on the number board would not run sequentially, because they had to match the number printed next to the name of the act on the programme.¹

Having said this, what television took from variety theatre was its very heart – the direct, immediate relationship between performer and audience, and crucially, the separateness of the individual acts. Unlike legitimate theatre, or even more popular forms like pantomime and revue, a variety show was not bound together by a narrative or even a theme. Each act stood for itself, and there was, as Brooks McNamara put it, ‘no transfer of information from one act to another’.² However, there were certain conventions about the way that the individual acts were put together to create a coherent show, and attempts to explain these usually work by describing a hypothetical ‘typical’ bill.³ I am going to take a different approach – looking at a show which actually happened.

The Lewisham Hippodrome

I have on the desk in front of me the programme for the show that was seen at the Lewisham Hippodrome in the week commencing Monday 8 April 1946 (see Illustration 2.1). The first thing to notice is that it runs twice a night, with performances starting at 6 p.m. and 8.20 p.m., from Monday to Saturday. This is important, as the introduction of the twice nightly system was one of the key changes in the evolution of nineteenth-century music hall into twentieth-century variety theatre.

Figure 2.1 The inside pages of the programme for the Lewisham Hippodrome, week commencing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: History of Variety Performance
• Part Two: Performance Dynamics
• Part Three: Variety Performance Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index