title of Red Hot & Blue Moments and this was its first London date after going round the provinces for months. Consequently, when I found myself a seat in the stalls the following Monday afternoon to watch it, I knew nothing about its principal comedian, Sid Field.
No point in making a meal of this. From the moment Sid Field made his first entrance, I was entranced. For the rest of the week, I not only watched every one of his three-a-day performances, I came in on my day off to see two more of them.
It’s an abiding shame that no trace of his quality remains on film. Do not, I implore you, assess him on the basis of what you see of him in London Town. Shot in an empty studio without an audience, his reproduced stage sketches are given a stilted, not to say embalmed, look, offering no hint of the delicacy of his comic touch.
Months later, whenever I came home on leave, I would go to see him in his hugely successful revues at the Prince of Wales Theatre. He repeated several of the sketches I had first seen him perform in Red Hot & Blue Moments. But when it came to his portrayal of ‘Slasher Green’, the archetypal spiv, nothing in the West End could match the additional ingredient the Trocadero lent to it.
Hobbling awkwardly in an ankle-length, wide-shouldered black overcoat, knotted white scarf and turned-down black trilby, he would wring tears of laughter from the packed Elephant & Castle audiences, most of them dressed in long black, wide-shouldered overcoats, knotted white scarves and turned-down black trilbies.
Phil Park, for many years the organist at the Regal, Edmonton, was more than just a gifted musician. A superb showman at the organ, he also composed much of the music for some of the London Palladium’s most successful revues and brought to the Wurlitzer a keen grasp of technical innovation.
In a bid to replace the narrow bench on which organists sat, occasionally sliding sideways along it to reach one of the end foot-pedals, he sought a means by which they could remain in one position. He came up with the idea of a seat fashioned along the lines of that used in boats by solo scullers. It consisted of two cunningly shaped halves, one for each buttock, connected by a central spring. Seated on this, the occupant was no longer obliged to slide his whole body sideways, he merely stretched out a leg.
A prototype was built and, a few weeks later, the Monday first house audience heard the opening notes of Phil’s signature tune and saw him rise slowly into view upon his new seating arrangement. Then, as the music was reaching a crescendo, it suddenly stopped, and in its place came a shrill cry of agony.
As Phil himself good-humouredly agreed afterwards, the strength of the spring appeared to need something of a rethink. He never entrusted himself to it again, however, leaving his invention to live on in cinema organ folklore as ‘The Nutcracker Seat’.
My earliest venture into what I suppose, stretching it a bit, you could call ‘writing for the screen’ was at the Trocadero, when I foundmyself providing the words for the slides that were projected on the iron curtain during the organ interludes.
In those days, the Mighty Organ was a popular element in the cinema-going ritual, though admittedly, it could drive some people to distraction. (Graham Greene called it ‘the world’s wet mouth drooling’.) At the time, it was the loudest musical noise around, always in danger of sounding overwrought, bombastic or syrupy, but in the hands of a Quentin MacLean or a Sidney Torch it would offer a pleasurable quarter of an hour.
The organ interlude’s place on a cinema’s list of attractions may well have been prompted by the prevailing Fire Regulations. These demanded that the proscenium-size fireproof curtain separating the stage from the auditorium (the ‘iron’) be lowered at least once during each programme.
It was sometimes a laboriously slow process so, as the iron descended, up from the circular pit in front of it, to the strains of the organist’s signature tune, would rise the mighty Wurlitzer. (There has never been a better illustration of the phrase ‘to come up smiling’ than the cinema organist.)
The organ itself could verge on the spectacular. Shaped like an enormous, intricately fluted jelly mould, its panels were illuminated from within in constantly changing pastel colours that nicely set off its occupant’s white dinner jacket.
As for the content of the interlude, that would take the form of either a recital or a sing along (in those days known as ‘community singing’). One of the most frequently requested items in the repertoire was ‘In a Persian Market’, with its tinkling bells and dramatic cymbal clashes. Another crowd-pleaser was ‘Coronation Scot’, in which some organists would ostentatiously hold their hands above their heads and use only the foot-pedals to play the opening ‘puffing out of the station’ bit. It invariably drew a round of applause.
Whatever the music, it would be illustrated, and occasionally enhanced, by a succession of slides projected on the iron. These would bear text appropriate to the musical theme and we ordered them from Morgan’s Slides of Gray’s Inn Road at a cost of ninepence per slide.
One week at the Trocadero, Bobby Pagan, ‘popular broadcasting organist’, didn’t have time to write the linking text for his interlude and asked me to help out. It was a medley entitled ‘Memories of Albert Ketèlbey’ and as my knowledge of the composer was something less than sketchy, I suggested to Bobby that I convert the recital into a sing along by fitting words to all the melodies. I feel it is to my credit that I can recall nothing of this desecration, except that I opened one of his flimsier pieces with the words, ‘When Ketèlbey’s feeling bright, / He will write Something light. / Dainty dances, melodies sweet, / Making your feet tap to their beat.’ Nevertheless, Bobby was pleased with the package and recommended it to the other organists on the circuit. So, within weeks, my writings were achieving a kind of syndication, displayed to audiences in Edmonton, Commercial Road, Norwood, Kilburn and far-flung Watford.
I continued working in this now vanished area of literary endeavour until my managerial duties left no time for it. This was despite the fact that, in addition to my shameful ignorance of musical matters, I was so totally unaware of copyright laws, I never even considered applying for permission whenever I set about parodying current popular songs. We found these were what went down best with wartime audiences, so I wrote umpteen of them, without ever receiving one reprimand from any publisher. As always happens, the only example Time has not scrubbed from my memory is one hardly worth preserving, a version of an almost totally forgotten ‘Last Waltz’ of the period, ‘Stay in My Arms, Cinderella’. Its new words were projected against a background photograph of Neville Chamberlain and began ‘Stay on my arm, Umbrella’.
Perhaps the reason why that one has remained with me is that it was, I believe, the first time I saw an audience laugh at something I had made up.
An incident that revealed the Wurlitzer could occasionally be something less than Mighty happened at the Troxy one afternoon when I was acting as relief manager. At the end of the interlude, the organ’s lift mechanism failed and the organist had to remain perched up in the air during the ensuing film, while all available staff searched the cinema for the winch handle that would wind him down manually.
The bomb that destroyed the Holborn Empire fell on the night of 11 May 1941. Probably the best loved of London’s Variety theatres, next in prestige to the Palladium as a showcase for top-line stars, it was also the annual home of the children’s patriotic Christmas classic,
