What they are searching for is not just their scenery
but their own hopes and dreams, for this is both architecturally and musically a fascinating theatrical folly in itself, still oddly unfinished as James Gold- man's book, which effectively runs out at intermission, tries to parallel lost lives with lost scores. Follies has always been, in its many concert and stage variants, about the sheer schizoid nature of nostalgia: if you can imagine a lavish spectacle conjured up on a wet afternoon by Proust and Pirandel- lo with a little help from the Berlins, Irving and Isaih, then you will have some idea of the scale on which it is conceived. Middle- aged ladies with faithless husbands are shadowed on stage by the ghosts of the dancers they once were, while song after song manages to recall three entire genera- tions of Broadway musicals, simultaneously celebrating and parodying their very essence.
Mary Millar as Sally and Buster Skeggs as Carlotta are very strong in an otherwise patchy company, but from Losing My Mind and I'm Still Here all the way through to Could I Leave You?, this is Sondheim 's most brilliantly evocative and acidly disillu- sioned score, perhaps the first one to go to if you are still wondering about what makes cheery audience as they drank their beer. `We are red, we are white, we are English dynamite' they went on in what Bushell assured us was a traditional display of working class patriotism.
I thought this was pretty suspect but then Bushell would no doubt include me amongst 'the middle-class thought police' and 'the culturati' whom he spent most of the programme setting up in opposition to his working class hero Alf Garnett. Bushell was very keen to distance himself from the far right saying that his sort of patriotism was All Garnett's patriotism (`genuine patriotism, built on hope, on pride') and not at all the moronic patriotism of say the British National Party. He showed a clip of Derek Beacon, the BNP councillor and Alf Garnett-lookalike, and said that it was unfair to compare Beacon to Alf because `Beacon is deeply humourless and Alf is funny'.
Bushell has of course missed the point. Alf was a character in a sit-corn. A deeply humourless character who became funny because the writer wanted us to laugh at him. His views were not a celebration of Gary Bushell's views but an attack on them. It is a pity the actor Warren Mitchell did not appear on the programme to retell his story about a man coming up to him in the street and saying to him 'I love the way you have a go at the coons, Alf'. Mitchell told the man 'Actually we're having a go at fuckwits like you'.
Writer Johnny Speight did appear, talk- ing of Alf's ability to reflect some of the worst aspects of society and maintaining that great comedy should be critical. But Bushell had already said in his introduction that Alf was 'bigger than the comic intent of his creator' so he could ignore Speight's point and continue with his portrait of Alf Garnett as a straightforwardly lovable ver- sion of Gary Bushell.
There was an interesting programme to be made here about the way satirical char- acters can become misappropriated. Harry Enfield for example had to kill off Loadsa- money because he was being used as a tri- umphal symbol by the very people Enfield had set out to ridicule. Alf Garnett, as a more complicated and more enduring char- acter has sometimes had a similar fate. The sheer energy of the creation can take over some viewers and when the steam-valve of Alf s prejudices is opened it is the force of the ranting rather than the comic exposure of it which survives.
Bushell however was never going to tack- le this because he wants Alf s views to be taken seriously and he thinks Alf is being censored by all the sushi-eating, pony-tail wearing, foreigner-loving nancy-boys that now rule television.
`All that unites them is their voracious- ness for other cultures — and their igno- rance of their own'. This is not Alf talking actually but Bushell. You can tell because there is no humour in it. Bushell ended the programme by getting veil/ serious and
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