RATHER A long time ago, I got my first job, in a pantomime, and I’ve never forgotten the experience. Indeed, it helped inculcate in me a love of the performing arts, including of course, broadcasting.
I was very young at the time, 14 to be precise, and I was still at school.
We were living in Birmingham, which then existed almost entirely for its car-making industry. I'd heard that a big local theatre, the Hippodrome, was going to be staging a Christmas spectacular, in the shape of the Robinson Crusoepantomime, and that extra workers would be needed to get the show organised.
With the innocence that only comes with youth, I went downtown to the theatre’s stage door and found some people who were putting the production together. Despite my age, or lack of it, and complete absence of theatrical or indeed any other kind of work experience, I managed to talk myself into a job as an assistant stagehand. They mentioned the wages, cash in hand, no messy paperwork, told me to be there the following evening at 7pm for the dress rehearsal, and that was that. My entry into the raffish world of theatrical work had been so easy that I couldn’t quite believe what had happened.
Two nights later, the curtain went up on the first performance for the paying public. I always remember the tremendous air of anticipation as the band in the orchestra pit struck up the first few notes, the curtain flew up and the show got under way. With the powerful footlights, I could see little of the audience, but it was a full house and their enthusiasm was quickly evident. As the show progressed, act followed act.
It was a very complex show to stage, with many variety acts. These included Wilson, Keppel and Betty, a music hall trio of great renown who did an ancient Egyptian style dance; later, I discovered that Joe Keppel was a Corkman. Other acts included the Singing Mariners and Kirby’s Swimming Ballet, performed in a large onstage pool.
The star of the show, pop singer David Whitfield, made his appearance, to a deluge of applause and friendly cat calls. The audience got into the spirit of the performance and enjoyed it tremendously.
In the wings, one of my jobs was to help work the dry ice machine that produced clouds of “smoke” to drift across the stage. For the first time in my life, I made close acquaintance with the girls in the chorus. To me, they were incredibly exotic, with costumes to match, but what appealed to me most was their sheer zest for life and their enthusiasm for their work as the Hippodrome Dancers.
Their language was colourful and I added many words to my vocabulary that I’d never heard of before. In those far off days, it was unknown for anyone to utter even the mildest profanity in public, let alone on radio or television. Sex, too, was on another planet, scarcely mentioned in polite society, and it soon became clear from what they were talking about, that their personal lives were exciting and fun-filled, to say the least.
The chorus girls were so outgoing, vivacious and irreverent, it was a delight to be in their company. Then right on cue, they trooped on stage to perform their high-kicking routines with immaculate precision. Something else I remember vividly was all the scenery, the way it was stacked and how each relevant piece had to be moved swiftly into place within seconds for each scene change. The smell of that scenery also stuck in my mind, a combination of size and paint.
The stage was brightly lit, but in comparison, the heights above the wings were in pitch darkness. With the stage lights shining in on the part of the wings where the stage hands stood, the air was full of dancing dust particles. At the end of the show that first night, the curtain came down and shot up again, several times, as the audience applauded the cast. Then it was out into the still, silent night; the sense of exhilaration after a successful first night has stayed with me ever since.
Some years later, I read of the sudden death, at the age of 54, of David Whitfield. He had been touring in Australia, when he collapsed suddenly and died. Later came the news that despite his tremendous successes in the pop charts, he had died virtually penniless. His many women friends had helped him spend the vast sums he had been earning.
As for that job in the pantomime, it must have been in the genes. When my father was a young man, dangerously addicted to high speed sports cars, he mixed in the theatrical set in Birmingham and one of the women with whom he did a serious line was one Noelle Gordon, who later became the first soap star, “Meg Richardson” in the Crossroads TV series (famed for its wobbly sets), all about life in a motel. I’m often amused that I nearly had a soap star for my mum! Another theatrical event in Birmingham, at a slightly later date, also had a huge impact. One night at the Alexandra Theatre, just up the street from the Hippodrome, I went to a one man show by a noted Irish actor, Micheál MacLiammóir. At that time, of course, everyone thought he was Cork through and through, not a product of London’s Cockney East End with a ferocious appetite for languages, including Irish.
He was doing his performance in homage to Oscar Wilde and the torrent of words was intoxicating. That theatrical night was one of the deciding factors in my own life, when I came to the conclusion that I was living in the wrong country and decided to come back to Ireland for good.
It’s all years ago now, but the memories of that pantomime job are as fresh as ever. Every time I go into a radio studio and the microphone goes “ live”, that very same sense of first night excitement is there.
Many years later, I came to know Laurence Foster, former head of RTÉ radio drama, and now very much involved in the Page to Stage project with the Dublin City library service, and was delighted to discover that he had came from that very same geographical and theatrical milieu with which I had been so familiar. And I still remember fondly those impossibly glamorous chorus girls and their salty turns of phrase that appealed so much to that young teenager.