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Roy Hudd's career began in the 1950s and since then he has worked with most of the major stars of the last forty years. Born in Croydon in 1936, his early life was turbulent. His father left home and his mother committed suicide during the war, leaving his formidable, but adored grandmother, to raise him, and it was she who gave him the title for this book. His big television break came with Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life with David Frost, John Bird and John Fortune and he also had a brief stint in the popular TV soap Coronation Street. His radio career includes the hugely popular The News Huddlines, which he starred in and ran for twenty-six years. With over thirty pantomimes under his belt, as well as many memorable Variety and West End performances, perhaps most notably as Fagin in Cameron Mackintosh's first production of Oliver!, A Fart in a Colander brings together some wonderful stories from his life, and sparkles with the fun and laughter Roy has brought to millions of people throughout his career.
Each Christmas entire families in the UK troop off to see, what one could almost say is 'the obligatory'. annual entertainment, known as Pantomime. It is a traditional, seasonal way of life for the British envied the world over, and one which only the British seem to understand! Pantomime serves both to entertain and to introduce each new generation to the joys of theatre in the most unique of ways, for this is not a type of theatre one merely watches, but one in which the audience participate often in the most seemingly boisterous and bizarre of ways. The whole experience is steeped in tradition, traditions which only the British seem to understand, which is probably why we are proud to cal...
As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosex...
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.
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