How Bernard Manning was almost cast in a classic British children’s story…

Comedian and actor Matt Roper is going to the Edinburgh Fringe in August and should have a baptism of fire, as he is performing in two separate productions – as his comedy character Wlfredo in Wilfredo – Erecto! at the Underbelly and as a Satanic and sometimes singing spin doctor in the satire Lucifer: My Part in the New Labour Project (And How I Invented Coalition Government)at The Phoenix.

Matt is the son of George Roper, one of The Comedians in what was at the time the startlingly original and cutting-edge 1970s ITV series which introduced the British Isles to the ‘old school’ likes of Bernard Manning, Frank Carson, Stan Boardman and Jim Bowen.

I went with Matt to Soho last night to see London-based New York comic Lewis Schaffer‘s extraordinary on-going thrice-a-week Free Until Famous show. It was Matt’s third visit. I go to see the show maybe once every month – as Lewis Schaffer says, it is “never the same show twice”.

Matt, though every inch a ‘new-school’ comedian, grew up hanging round the old school comics as a kid.

Granada TV producer Johnnie Hamp was a seminal figure in British comedy of the time – he is also credited with putting The Beatles on TV for the first time. But I did not know until Matt told me last night that Johnnie had also put a young Woody Allen on British TV screens for the first time.

The most surprising story Matt had, though, was that his dad George Roper and Bernard Manning were originally considered for the parts of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in the mega-all-star 1972 movie version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

At the time of the casting read-through in London, George Roper was starring nightly on stage at the Palace Theatre, Manchester. On the day of the read-through, train hold-ups in the North West of England delayed him to such an extent that getting down to London and back up again in time for his appearance on stage in Manchester was going to prove impossible, so he had to cancel his trip.

The ever-exuberant and straight-talking Bernard Manning did make it down to the session, though, striding brashly into the room where Dame Flora Robson, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Robert Helpmann, Dennis Price, Peter Bull and other creme de la creme of up-market British theatrical nobility was holding court.

With an outspoken fucking this and a What the fucking hell is that? and a right old fucking load of old fucking bollocks, Bernard soon made his presence felt and…

as a result, neither Bernard Manning nor George Roper were cast in the film.

The parts of Tweedledum and Tweedledee went to the Cox Twins

I can’t help feeling that Bernard Manning and George Roper would have been a casting made in  movie comedy heaven.

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More Matt stories Here.

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For Brutus was an honourable man… and so is Tony Blair

It has taken me most of my life to come to the conclusion that Adolf Hitler was simply a man trying his best to improve the world. He had great plans to re-build Berlin; he called himself, entirely reasonably, a National Socialist; he aimed to create better buildings, better roads, better cars for “the people”; he passed laws to stop cruelty to animals; and he wanted to breed and build better human beings. In his own mind, he was doing good. Was he evil? Not in his own mind.

It is one small step from deciding, for whatever personal reasons, that all red-haired men are sub-human to deciding they should be wiped out as a way of improving the human gene pool. The Chinese government sent tanks over the students in Tienanmen Square for the greater good of future generations. In their own minds. Within my lifetime – I was in my early teens – the USA – the flag-bearer for Western democracy – discriminated against blacks in the Southern states and throughout the States – because they were seen as second-class human beings.

Like Hitler, the people who did this were not in their own minds evil men. They believed that their belief systems were valid. They wanted a better world. The road to hell can be paved with the good intentions of men who believe they are in the right.

And so we come to Tony Blair.

He had great plans to re-build Britain; he called himself a nationally-minded “new” Socialist; he aimed to create better buildings, better roads, better lives for “the people”. Was he evil? Is he evil?

Did he really wage war against Iraq thinking they were NOT actively developing and were not perhaps close to creating nuclear weapons? Bollocks. Of course he believed it. It was beyond belief at the time that Saddam was playing a game of bluff with an empty hand.

Was Dr David Kelly murdered by shadowy operatives of the Blair State because he was an embarrassment to the government? Bollocks. The risk of a murder being uncovered was too high to risk, given the number of people who would have had to be in the know in the chain of events.

Claiming Dr David Kelly was murdered is letting Blair off the hook.

Which is worse?

That Blair or his System had Kelly killed?

Or that a Blair government based for over a decade on spin, manipulation, lies and bullying hounded a decent man to the point where he committed suicide?

I have always gone for the cock-up theory of history rather than conspiracy theories. And for simpler explanations over more complex ones.

If Dr David Kelly was killed, it was an extraordinarily incompetent, pointless and ineffective thing to do.

If he was psychologically pressured, harassed and hounded by the Blair government, then Blair truly is an evil man. Like Hitler, his road to evil must have seemed to him to have had the best interests of future generations in mind. The result, though, is a truly, madly, deeply evil man.