Edinburgh Fringe: How the banned “Racist Joke Show” was a cunning stunt

Last night at about 8.45pm, I had a half hour snooze. When I woke up, it was 6.55am this morning. Einstein was right. Time warps. Especially at the Edinburgh Fringe. Well, to be honest, most things are odd at the Fringe.

Jay Islaam was at yesterday’s Grouchy Club

At yesterday’s eventually crowded Grouchy Club show (people keep wandering in willy-nilly and then don’t leave – which is good), Jay Islaam talked about his Racist Joke Show.

This had been billed as part of the Freestival, the new free show organisation at the Edinburgh Fringe which got a reported £25,000 in sponsorship from La Favorita pizzas matched by £25,000 sponsorship from Arts & Business Scotland.

When Jay Islaam’s Racist Joke Show poster/flyer was brought to their attention, Arts & Business Scotland decided they did not want to have their name associated with the show.

“I have a confession to make,” Jay told us yesterday. “I put out this very provocative poster with just the words RACIST JOKE SHOW – BANNED FROM 100+ VENUES.”

“It hadn’t been, had it?” I asked.

“Well, I have,” said Jay.

“Why?” I asked.

“For a lot of reasons,” he replied.

“And the poster had a golliwog on it,” I said.

Jay and his much-loved golliwog, as seen on his own website

“It was my own personal golliwog,” explained Jay. “But I had no intention of using that on the final poster, though I was thinking of using it on the flyers. It was a publicity stunt. I sent it to the media knowing it would get a reaction.

“(The comedy website) Chortle picked up on the poster and sent it to Arts & Business Scotland, who issued a statement without checking what the show was. I won’t comment on whether that was right or wrong, but that’s what they did.

“On the back of the flyer, it asked a series of questions:

• Are we all racist?
• Is political correctness an effective way of tackling the Far Right?
• Is positive discrimination patronising and therefore intrinsically prejudiced?

“But, sadly, the show did not happen.”

“I know this is racist in itself,” I said, “but surely the name Jay Islaam would imply you are not – let’s say 500 years ago – of white British origin.”

“Well,” said Jay. “this is the thing. Part of the Racist Joke Show was about the fact it should not matter whether you are black or white or Indian if you want to discuss issues of culture or race or religion or sexuality. There should not be restrictions on someone just because they are the ‘wrong’ minority or majority.”

“Your name was on the poster?” I asked.

One of Jay’s characters: decidedly odd Michel de Fromage

“No. It was on the back of the flyer – as was my photo – but in tiny writing. I did not want to be given a free pass to do the show because I was part of a minority – because the point is the things that I say about race and religion and sexuality and different types of prejudice should be something that anybody can say because they have a logical basis to them. You should not be censored because you are white or male or Chinese so you can’t talk about Indians. That was the point of not putting my name or picture on the poster.”

“I have never understood the argument,” I said, “that a black person can say the word ‘nigger’ but a white person can’t. The word is either offensive or it is not.”

“This is one of the things I was going to discuss,” said Jay, “and why I was using the golliwog as a symbol. People talk about ‘reclaiming’ offensive words, reclaiming insults like the Americans did with the word ‘Yankee’, which was supposed to be an insult.

“The show was wanting to do the same thing with words like nigger or Paki or Chink. You can say: I am black and I am going to reclaim the word nigger. But, if a white person says it and you are upset by it, then you have not reclaimed it because the word still has power over you. The show was going to be about taking the power away from these words and symbols.

A piece on Jay in this month’s Eastern Eye

“The poster was a blatant publicity stunt using the golliwog, but the upshot was the controversy snowballed to a certain point where the show was cancelled. That was not my intention.

“My intention was to create enough controversy that people would come and then I could preach to them. Get them in the church and then you can preach to them. But the church was knocked down before I was allowed to proselytise views.

“Hopefully next year I will be able to bring the show to Edinburgh. I have already been asked by some promoters in the North of England if I will come and tour it at their theatres.”

Meanwhile, back in what passes for the real world outside the Edinburgh bubble, this morning (when I eventually woke up) I read an e-mail from my farting chum Mr Methane – the world’s only professional flatulist act – whose company is called BO Productions. Yesterday, he received this e-mail:

Hi,

This is the first time I’ve been in touch and I wanted to find out whether you’d be interested in the idea of running a banner ad for B O Productions Limited on the Daily Mail website?

Web Windows is an advertising agency who are occasionally able to pick up some amazing late-availability banners. This is one of those occasions and you can find all the details of the offer on this link: One month Daily Mail banner campaign just £480.

If you’re not sure whether online advertising is right for you we’ve put together a Video Review: Why Online Advertising.

I appreciate this offer has appeared out of the blue, so if you’d like me to explain things in more detail, I can be contacted on the number below. Or maybe you’d just like to go ahead?

Best regards

Today’s front page of the Daily Mail

It is good to know that the Daily Mail is obviously trying to expand and subtly alter its brand image and thinks its readers would appreciate a banner ad for a farting act and is actively courting Mr Methane. Meanwhile…

In other, more tragic, showbiz news, the increasingly time-constricted Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show on Friday seems increasingly UNlikely to include a string of comedians doing impressions of iconic Lewis Schaffer (though we did try it out to great success at yesterday’s Grouchy Club).

Perhaps our final Grouchy Club show should be devoted (as, of course, we all are) to Lewis Schaffer.

A show or event? Who knows? But it is happening this Friday

There is even worse news, though – I am told by his agent that Jim Davidson is unable to accept my invitation to take part in the Scottish National Russian Egg Roulette Championship during the aforementioned increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show this Friday.

I tried my best.

We will just have to soldier on with what we have.

Have we got a show for you?

Well, it is certainly going to be an event.

Now I must go away and figure out a running order.

Comedy news: Martin Soan is a fool; Viv Soan in court; Matt Roper mugged

BBC photo of Martin the fool, but he is no fool on payment.

After my ongoing jury service yesterday, I went to the Pull The Other One comedy club run by Vivienne and Martin Soan only to find out that Vivienne has also been called up to do jury service next month.

Perhaps the court system was in awe of her husband Martin who, last weekend, was crowned “official fool” at the annual International Jesters’ Tournament at Muncaster Castle in the Lake District and who receives an annual salary in beer. (Martin is clearly no fool.)

Miss Behave was showing her class last night

Last night, Pull The Other One had an even more extraordinarily varied bill than normal with the utterly brilliant Men In Coats doing their visual gagathon, the surreal Cheekykita doing whatever it was she was doing (that’s a compliment), Mr Susie getting bigger laughs than most comics by simply holding up one-word gags on cards and close harmony trio Totes Awes strutting their thing.

Topping the bill were Owen O’Neill and Miss Behave, the latter of whom confirmed, much to my relief, that she is hosting the increasingly prestigious annual Malcolm Hardee Awards at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, as well as staging her own Game Show and helping Bob Slayer run the new Bob’s Bookshop venue.

Owen O’Neill needed no redemption last night

I suspect the hottest show on the Fringe, though, will be The Shawshank Redemption which Owen adapted for the stage and which will star a cast including Omid Djalili, Phil Nichol and Ian Lavender (of Dad’s Army).

Throughout yesterday (when not in court) I was having a staggered e-conversation with comedian Matt Roper. It went along these edited lines:

Me: The last time my blog readers heard of you, you were in a wheelchair in Saigon… then you were getting wet in Burma and ultrasound scanned in a Bangkok hospital. So, for the sake of any future eBook readers if nothing else, what happened with the deep vein thrombosis you had?

Matt: It’s gone. Now we just have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Drugs, drugs, drugs. (dribble).

Me: You mean by taking drugs in the future?

Matt: Yes, of course. To keep me from getting a recurring deep vein thrombosis. I don’t do drink, drugs or anything these days. Tucked up in bed at 11.00pm wearing my compression socks, sipping a glass of water. Thirty-six and waiting for God. My pee is so clean I could drink it.

Me: Too much information. What happened about the calcification in your flesh which they found in Bangkok?

Matt: Harmless, they now tell me.

Me: Where did you go and what did you do betwixt Bangkok and Blighty?

Mcleod Ganj in the Himalayas – storms & mugging monkeys

Matt: Went to India… Delhi, then a train journey up to the foothills of the Himalayas and the town of McLeod Ganj. It’s an old British settlement given to the Tibetan community-in-exile when the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959. Lovely place. I like being up by the mountains. We had some terrific storms. McLeod Ganj nestles about 5,000 feet above sea level. You have large eagles swooping down in the valleys BENEATH you and snowcapped peaks above. Magic. No bizarre people involved, but I did nearly get mugged by a monkey – all for a bag of samosas.

Me: Where are you at the moment?

Matt: I’m out the back of a pub in south London on the set of a short comedy film I’m making with Charlie Henniker and Susan Husband called Knock Knock. Then tomorrow (Saturday) I fly to Cape Town for the comedy festival there. As Wilfredo.

Me: What part are you playing in the film?

Matt: Ironically, a drinker in a pub.

Me: You had to cancel your own Edinburgh Fringe show because of your medical problems earlier in the year. Are you popping up to the Fringe at all in August?

Matt: I hope so…

Matt Roper in his Parkinson’s Disease teeshirt

Me: And are you going to do a show sooner or later about your worldwide exploits and medical mayhem?

Matt: Yes!

Me: Have you got any photos that cover the answers to any of the above?

Matt: No. But I have got one of me wearing a t-shirt to support (the American comic) Rick Shapiro in his Parkinson’s awareness campaign. But Rick Shapiro is another blog entirely…

Me: Yes it is.

Anne Frank with her clothes on proves offensive to UK comedy-going audience

It’s Springtime for Hitler and SE London

Sometimes it is strange what people find offensive.

Last night, my eternally-un-named friend and I went to Vivienne and Martin Soan’s monthly variety and comedy club Pull The Other One in Nunhead, South East London.

Ending the night was Frank Sanazi, the wonderful act that sounds like Frank Sinatra but looks like Hitler.

Three people walked out.

The problem was his new sidekick ‘Anne Stank’ who talked about being lonely up in the attic and sang Björk’s Ssshhhhh….It’s Oh So Quiet.

Anne and attic antics

“I don’t understand,” my eternally-un-named friend said afterwards, “why they didn’t find Frank Sanazi offensive but they did find the Anne Frank bit offensive.”

And, indeed, the three walk-outs did seem to have found Frank Sanazi’s re-versioning of Sinatra’s That’s Life as Third Reich entertaining and found the re-writing of the Strangers in the Night lyrics as Strangers On a Plane (as in the 9/11 hijacks) perfectly OK.

But Anne Frank they walked out on.

I had never seen the Anne Frank part of Frank Sanazi’s show before – his Das Vegas Night is returning to the Edinburgh Fringe this August (it got a 4-star review last year) – but ‘Anne’ told me after the show that I had blogged about her during last year’s Fringe.

“I was the one wearing a lettuce,” she told me.

“You didn’t recognise her with her clothes on,” Frank Sanazi added.

This is the reference from my blog last August:

__________________________________________________

I was walking down Niddry Street, and found comedian Bob Slayer standing in the street outside his Hive venue.

“I had to get naked in my show,” he told me. “I think it was the worst show I’ve ever done so I had to get naked. Jamie the sound guy sees my show every year and he told me: You failed on so many levels there, but it was definitely my favourite show. I had to get naked and there was a lady in the audience who turned up just wearing a lettuce.”

“Just a lettuce?” I asked.

“Just wearing a lettuce on her fanny,” said Bob.

“She had nice tits,” a female staff member added, tweaking one of Bob’s nipples. Passers-by ignored it. This is the Edinburgh Fringe.

“The lady with the lettuce was a friend of Frank Sanazi’s,” said Bob.

“That might go some way to explaining it,” I said.

__________________________________________________

Frank Sanazi’s 2012 Christmas show

The boundaries of offensiveness vary.

A girl wearing nothing but a lettuce leaf  over her frontal bits was almost normal in Edinburgh last August. But a girl with her clothes on (never referred-to as Anne Frank) in South East London last night triggered three people walking out of an always-bizarre monthly comedy show.

Personally, I thought it was slightly eerie and very funny.

But, then, I like Chinese pickled ginger with scrambled egg on toast.

Comedian Malcolm Hardee’s legendary escapades: the real truth remembered…

The legendary comedian Malcolm Hardee, man of mistake (photograph by Vincent Lewis)

Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the death of comedian Malcolm Hardee – he drowned in a dock in London’s Rotherhithe in 2005.

When he died, Time Out wrote that he was “one of the great characters in the comedy business…his scams, scrapes and escapades will be talked about for years to come.” And they have been. The many stories about him have become legendary, sometimes confused and embellished upon. As the saying goes When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

In his many newspaper obituaries and since then, many stories were re-hashed from his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake, which I wrote with him. So I know that a few of these re-hashed true stories, even though they were taken from an original, first-hand source, were mangled and embellished upon in the re-telling. And now, because the embellished versions were printed in reputable newspapers, they have become fact. History is whatever is written down.

Malcolm was part of Martin Soan’s Greatest Show on Legs troupe. Martin and his wife Vivienne Soan knew Malcolm well and one or both of them were around when many of the stories actually happened. I was round at their home a few days ago and Martin was telling me the full ‘Service Station’ story which does not appear in Malcolm’s autobiography. I had heard the story before – first from Malcolm – but never in detail before.

Martin Soan in his living room this week

It all happened after a comedy gig at Cheltenham Town Hall when The Greatest Show on Legs – Malcolm Hardee, Martin Soan and Steve Bowditch – were travelling back to London in Malcolm’s dodgy car of the time… a second-hand London black taxi cab with a noisy engine.

“So we left the gig in Cheltenham,” Martin told me. “It was a taxi, so the back half was a sectioned-off compartment for the passengers. Malcolm was driving, Bowditch was in the front with Malcolm… and I was lying down in the back, trying to get some sleep.

“After a roundabout on an ‘A’ road just before Oxford, we pulled in to a small service station. I got up and said to Malcolm: I’m going for a piss, which I did – in a building separated from the main building. Meanwhile, Malcolm got out, filled the cab up with diesel, paid for it and I heard the throb of the taxi starting up.

“I thought, No… and it did flash through my mind… all those times that we threatened to leave each other at motorway services… I’d left my jacket, my money, everything in the taxi cab… and then I heard it move off.”

“This was in the day before mobile phones?” I asked.

“No,” said Martin, “There were mobile phones. Malcolm had his very first mobile phone. But I didn’t have one.

“When Malcolm and Steve shot off, I was running after them, waving my arms in the air. Then I heard them going round the roundabout and I saw Malcolm’s face only about a metre from me as I waved my arms. I was shouting Malcolm! Malcolm! Malcolm!, but he didn’t see or hear me.

“I couldn’t believe it. They shot off. I was in a shirt and it was mid-winter, around one o’clock in the morning. So I went back into the Services – it was just one of these small A-road ones – and said Is there a phone? Is there a phone!

“I got on the phone, rang Malcolm’s mobile and he told me later it had rung, but the battery went dead. So I rang up Vivienne, explained what had happened and she said Oh God-God-God-God! So then I was cold and I didn’t know what to do, so I started hitching.

“Later, Vivienne told me she was sitting at home (in Nunhead/Peckham in South East London) when the taxi cab pulled up outside our house. Malcolm got out of the cab, opened the back door and realised I wasn’t in there. Apparently he said to Steve in a calm voice: Martin’s not there.

“So Malcolm closed the door and Vivienne presumed he was going to knock on the door and say: We haven’t got Martin. But he gets back into the taxi and starts shooting off. Vivienne then runs downstairs and runs along the road after the cab shouting Stop! Stop! Stop! – This is now about three o’clock in the morning.

“She said: Where’s Martin?

“Malcolm mumbled: Dunno.

“Coincidentally, at this point, I ring up our house’s landline, Vivienne hears it, rushes back in and I say I’m cold! I’m cold! I’m very cold! How am I going to get back to London? and she says It’s alright, I’ve got Malcolm here.

“I’d got no money, no coat; I was just in my shirt and trousers. And Malcolm says on the phone to me: It’s alright. I won’t charge you for half the petrol.

“He was speaking to me from inside my house, where I should have been!

“I got home about 9.00am or 9.30am in the morning. I got to Oxford Circus in the West End, then walked home to Peckham.”

At this point, Martin’s wife Vivienne came into the room where we were talking and realised which Malcolm incident we had been talking about.

“I always thought,” I said to her, “that they’d driven maybe ten minutes down the road, realised Martin wasn’t there in the cab, turned round and gone back to collect him. I didn’t realise he’d had to make his own way home.”

“I heard the taxi pull up outside the house,” Vivienne told me. “I saw Malcolm open the taxi’s door, so I came downstairs to open the front door of our house for Martin and left the door on the latch for him, then went back upstairs and, through the window, saw the taxi drive off and thought Where’s Martin? I went downstairs again. Nothing. Nobody. Malcolm had just driven off.”

“No,” said Martin, “I remember I spoke to Malcolm when he was inside the house.”

“I think he just went off,” said Vivienne.

“Oh no,” said Martin. “Is this me inventing part of a Malcolm story? Jesus!”

“I don’t,” said Vivienne, “I don’t think he even bothered to…”

“But he did turn up here,” interrupted Malcolm.

“He did turn up here,” confirmed Vivienne. “He thought you were in the back of the taxi.”

“But,” said Martin, “I talked to Malcolm on the phone in this house. On my life. I could not write a punchline like that. He said, It’s alright. I won’t charge you for half the petrol. That’s what Malcolm said to me.”

“Wow!” said Vivienne. “All I remember is that you weren’t in the taxi. How did we get you home? Because Malcolm didn’t go back.”

“I got myself back by hitching,” said Martin.

“You were picked up by a maniac,” remembered Vivienne.

Long ago, in a place far, far away…

“Yes,” said Martin. “He was going so fast. He was coming back to London from Wales and he was tired and had been drinking. He was driving so fast like a lunatic and drifting off, dozing off, that I was actually holding the wheel for him as we were overtaking lorries. I was thinking At this rate, I’ll overtake Malcolm! He dropped me off at the start of a slip road onto the M25 motorway.

“And the top act at Cheltenham Town Hall that night had been?” Martin asked me.

“Jo Brand,” I guessed.

“Lee Evans,” said Martin.

“When he was a relative unknown?” I asked.

“No, it wasn’t Lee Evans, actually,” said Martin, correcting himself. “No, it definitely wasn’t Lee Evans because, the time we did Lee Evans, he gave us a lift there, so,” he laughed, “It was probably us!”

Even with vivid, ‘unforgettable’ stories, people do forget and, over time, memories differ.

I can barely – and often don’t – remember what I did yesterday.

In this story, it is only a final detail that is uncertain. The agreed near-unbelievable story itself is true. But with Malcolm Hardee, even more than most, the rule-of-thumb should always be: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

It is what Malcolm would have wanted.

Wannabe policeman is illegally ripping off London comedy show posters

(This piece also appeared in the Huffington Post)

The bike, after the attack by the representative of ‘The Law’

In joke-telling, there is ‘The Rule of Three’.

Sometimes, this spills over into real life and overlaps with the saying ‘It never rains but it pours’.

In my blog three days ago, I mentioned that comedian Martin Soan had broken a rib in a bicycle accident and that a comedian who double-booked himself for two simultaneous shows had caused problems for Martin’s Pull The Other One comedy club in January.

In the last year, Pull The Other one has featured top comedy acts like Omid Djalili, Stewart Lee and Arthur Smith.

On Friday, as an end-of-year thankyou to locals, Pull The Other One staged a free comedy show in Nunhead, Peckham. As normal, Martin and Vivienne Soan publicised it widely locally – as they have done for over five years – with flyers and posters. Some of the posters were on bicycles which were ridden round the area.

The show was a success – despite what appear to be illegal actions by a local wanna policeman.

To save money on paying the police, England and Wales are now blessed with cheaper “Community Support Officers” to back-up the ‘real’ police. I suspect (with no evidence, m’lud) that these are often wanna policemen and wannabe policewomen with over-developed superiority complexes.

“It seems we now have a special constable,” Martin Soan told me yesterday, “who has taken it upon himself to tear down our posters and most disturbingly rip them off our bikes… I’m not sure that’s within his powers or even if it’s legal.”

I would have thought it was most definitely not legal. This guardian of ‘The Law’ appears to have decided to remove a piece of private property attached to a private vehicle without the owner’s permission which I would think, in legal terms, must be pure vandalism and damaging private property – perhaps even theft.

“This bloke,” says Martin, “rides around on a bike with a ‘Comunity Warden’ sticker on it…. Am I within my rights to rip that off?… Or deface a Sainsbury’s lorry?… Or paint over shop signs?… He also told me that he would remove my bike if I put a poster on it again.”

The offensive poster for a free comedy show

Martin’s wife Vivienne, who co-runs Pull The Other One, says: “The community policeman has systematically taken down all our publicity, telling us that we are making money from free advertising at the council’s expense. He says we are no longer allowed to put our poster on local notice boards and even took down a poster from British Rail property on which we have placed posters over the last five years!”

To my mind, this seems to be, again, a case of the ‘Community’ wannabe policeman damaging private property which stands on private land and removing property without the owner’s permission.

An interesting mindset for a guardian of ‘The Law’.

“Mind you,” Vivienne told me yesterday, “it has saved Martin a job, as he usually takes down all the posters the day after the show. And Martin’s rib is obviously greatly improved, as he wants to punch the guy in the face !!!!!”

The most unexpected performers come out of Radnorshire

I tend to have a bit of a problem with character comedy, but any generalisation has its exceptions. Last night was one.

I went to an event called The Literary Cabaret: How to be a Bohemian, held as part of the Bloomsbury Festival at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel – that’s the new one inside the gloriously renovated OTT station building.

One of the performers was Ian Marchant, billed as “author of Something of the Night (to be published in January 2012) and six other books, and writer/presenter of several Radio 4 and TV series”.

This rang no bells.

He appeared as a rather shaky elderly gent called Lionel Spume, with a walking stick, and regaled us with autobiographical tales of his life, occasionally interrupted by forgetfulness. It was suitably highly sophisticated, very funny and, I suspected, required a not-yer-average comedy-club-going audience of a certain age, with its references to Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set, Robert Graves, Burgess & Maclean and John Betjeman – whose wonderful statue in St Pancras station made Lionel Spume blubber with tears.

Lionel Spume’s performance also included some musique concrète he had allegedly written in the 1950s and he ended with a rap song which I think is called Elderly Rhymer. This would have brought the house down except that St Pancras station is so well-built. The soaring eccentricity of St Pancras perfectly matched Ian Merchant’s performance.

I wondered why I had never heard of him and, when I got home and Googled him, realised I actually had seen him a few months ago at Vivienne & Martin Soan’s monthly comedy event Pull The Other One, where he had performed in his other incarnation as half of comedy duo Your Dad – they have also performed at least seven times at the Glastonbury Festival, so that terminally scuppers any street cred I might aspire to.

I had actually talked to him at Pull The Other One and had been surprised he lived in Presteigne, Radnorshire.

Well, who would not be taken aback by that?

The moral to this blog is three-fold.

– Pull The Other One books some of the most interesting acts on the circuit

– there are astonishing hidden gems of comedy out there working mostly un-fêted by the media (except occasionally by Radio 4)

– interesting people can occasionally come out of Radnorshire

A version of Elderly Rhymer by Your Dad is on YouTube here:

Digressions in British comedy and acting and a sad death in Los Angeles

I went to Hastings on Friday for the first of Vivienne and Martin Soan’s monthly Pull the Other One comedy shows there. They now have monthly Pull The Other One shows in Peckham, Herne Hill and Hastings. One laughing audience member came out at the end saying:

“I haven’t seen so many naked men since… well, I don’t think I ever have…”

I guess that will inevitably happen when you have Martin Soan, Bob Slayer and Dr Brown in among fully-clothed Simon Munnery, Sol Bernstein and Charmian Hughes, who tells me she is not (as I thought) giving up her sand dance just at the very point when she is thinking of performing next year in Australia – a land not short of sand.

Australia has sand the way my blogs can sometimes have digressions.

Nay. Nay. Thrice nay. Charmian tells me she is not giving up her sand dance but will be “rationing it due to the erotic pandemonium in unleashes on unsuspecting audience ‘members’.”

She will instead occasionally replace it in her stage routine with the ‘dance of the seven cardigans’.

The real highlight for me of trekking through Friday night traffic to get to Pull The Other One, though, was chatting off-stage to actor and now film-maker Robin Hayter, a man of inexhaustible and fascinating anecdotes.

His ubiquitous father James Hayter starred in BBC TV’s first ever sitcom Pinwright’s Progress in 1946-1947, seemed to be in every British feature film of my childhood and is perhaps most fondly remembered as the definitive on-screen Mr Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers and as the original actor who declared in TV ad voice-overs that “Mr Kipling make exceedingly fine cakes”.

I had not known that James Hayter appeared in a regular role in BBC TV sitcom Are You Being Served? nor that the Mr Kipling cake people paid him a very large sum of money indeed to drop out of the show because they felt it was too down-market a series and his appearances in it might devalue his dignified voice-overs in what they saw as their up-market cakes’ ads.

It also turned out that Robin Hayter and I had both worked with the wonderful David Rappaport. Robin was a fan of ‘Green Nigel’, the character David performed as a piss-take of children’s TV show Blue Peter when I worked on the final series of anarchic TV show Tiswas.

David Rappaport was a very highly intelligent man; a friendly, kind person and a charismatic actor who appeared in Time Bandits and many other movies. I never saw his appearances in his own US TV series The Wizard but, apparently, he was wonderful.

Like Robin Hayter, I was very shocked and very sad, when I heard that he had shot himself, depressed, in Los Angeles in 1990.

Very sad.

_____________________________________________

Robin Hayter’s video ‘pitch’ for a proposed documentary movie is HERE.