The Bard of Frying Pan Alley

PERSONAL COLUMN COLIN MacINNES

Comedians art rare who delight succeeding generations. Bud Flanagan charmed audiences for forty years, and came to be a kind of Comic Elder Statesman. Yet not one like Durante, whose appeal is that of an antiquity, splendidly surviving; for Bud was a star in each decade of his career.

How did he hold, when well past middle age, brash audiences at the Palladium and the Vic- toria Palace? Most of them were younger than he was—many far younger. After the Second World War artists of entirely different styles arose, and won huge popular applause. But Bud's following did not desert him, and con- stantly renewed itself.

Evidently he had the training: concert parties in the First World War, a stint on American vaudeville as Chick Harlem, seasons with Florrie Forde in the declining Music Hall. To the sardonic bathos and sentimentalities of these styles Chaim Weintrop of Frying Pan Alley could also bring an element of Jewish irony and schmaltz. His Yiddisher wit was that much sharper, and his pathos bore folk memories of ghettos and pogroms in the past.

The Crazy Gang did not explain his continu- ing success—it was rather the other way around. True, the Gang, which derived distantly from Karno's Krazy Komics, began without Bud and Chesney Allen; but when Allen retired, Flana- gan, though politely seeming one light in an equal firmament, was manifestly none other than the star. The proof of this was the dismay when he sometimes could not appear; he was lamented as other absent colleagues never were. Nor is it likely that, without him, the Gang would have survived so long.

He could sing, which few comedians can now, though almost did in the classic Halls, But his voice was unremarkable, if engaging; and except for 'Underneath the Arches,' most of his songs had only a saloon-bar cheeriness and verve. Nor were his jokes all that good until he said them, when they seemed so; and their frank vulgarity - would have been dull without a kind of spiri- tuality he gave them, like that a Flemish painter bestows on a gross scene. If his style and sketches came from Music Hall, part of his art was that, while serving up his chestnuts (comic clergy, weird relations, transvestism—the lot), he contrived to send up Music Hall as well. He was, like Picasso, a critic in his art, as well as a creator.

He managed, in a way almost inexplicable, to convey to the audience that he was, as well as being sad or funny, unaffectedly nice. I am sorry for this banality, but really cannot put it better. You 'couldn't help liking him' in the same sort of way—if the comparison be allowed—that people feel instinctively the Queen Mother to be a nice person.

He was immensely human in that he showed life to be a redeemable disaster, well worth its pains; and in that he credited the audience, implicitly, with a similar conviction. Most comedians--perhaps the best of them—have, after all, an alarming vision of existence. Their worlds, if hilarious, are not exactly reassuring; and though we are glad they move in them, we don't much want to follow them there our- selves. On the stage he possessed, as few artists do, the quality of 'projection': a word none can define except, rather feebly, by saying, `Go and see, and you'll know at once what I mean.' When he came on, without doing anything in particular (let alone opening his mouth), every- one was captivated; even when he was known to be in the wings, the tension rose. I recall a `marriage' sequence with the Gang in which Bud was a deplorable Reverend. On his first entrance, all he did was walk across the stage with an engaging leer. Roars of applause: for this look conveyed an improbable amalgam of sexual innuendo, disrespect for authority, a pro- mise of high jinks to come . . . and yet that marriage was not a comedian's jest, but an inevitable, and even possibly delightful, cele- bration in the human lot.

The thought of 'Underneath the Arches' may depress until one hears it : those outcasts of the railway terminus, down on their luck and dreaming dreams . . . you can't catch me with corn so hoary! But to get out the record and put it on, is perilous; for the voice is insinu- ating, and immediately winning. And it dawns on you that Flanagan is singing of something that has, very precisely, happened to him: youthful visions of glory 'up West' in the poverty of the East End. The trouble about corny situations is that, if we flee all of them in horror, we may flee what thousands have experienced, and even we have. Of course, if a sentimental theme is sung sentimentally, it is unbearable; but if the sentiment comes 'straight,' one must be rather perverse not to be affected at some level of experience.

Few comedians today (Ken Dodd is an ex- ception) wear 'funny' clothes that are their visual trade mark; but all the old-timers did, and Flanagan preserved the style, with his bat- tered straw hat, and vicuna (was it?) gnawed by a thousand moths. To this unconvincing claim for grandeur he did, however, bring enormous dignity. His clothes, one knew, might be worth all of two quid at the nearest pawnbrokers; but Flanagan wore them like a crown and robe. As in his song, his dress hinted at the longed-for metamorphosis of the tramp into the toff.

In his private life—or what might be called his public private life—he stood between the two extremes of English pop cultural conven- tion—Merrie Englander and Puritan, Music Hall and Salvation Army. He liked racing, gam- bling, eating, celebrations; but all with a measured pleasure, an affable decorum. Off stage, he looked at moments like a prominent restaurateur, at others like a bookie (both of which he was). There was nothing freakish about his presence, gravely benign, at Bucking- ham Palace, or resembling an elderly prank- ster at Jack Solomon's eym. Even in the theatre, while he urged the audience to let down its hair, there was an unspoken hint that, after the last curtain, all must report back in good order to the Wife.

When the cultivated like a pop artist, the kiss of ennui frequently ensues. Fortunately, they usually like bad ones or, if the good, years after everybody else. Thus their comments, especially those written, refer either to what doesn't matter or. if to what does, they cannot trap the unwary into boredom by any novelty. However, the admiration of the literate for Bud was real, and it is yet another tribute to him that he left them speechless.

Though his recordings preserve something, on films and television little came across; for a live audience, with a slightly varied performance every night, seemed indispensable to Bud. He is not alone in this, for many comedians' films —even those of men far younger—do often, unless the actor had adapted radically to the medium (and even then), seem disappointing. I would also guess that Flanagan wasn't greatly interested. All the same, I hope that a full per- formance of the Crazy Gang has been filmed by someone, since that was about our last chance of recording what Music Hall, even as adapted for the times, was really like. The filmed history of the Halls, in their last thirty years when they and the Edisonoscope both thrived, is wretchedly meagre: it is maddening to think we could have known what Marie Lloyd looked like, and a hundred others, but that we never shall; all that remain to us are a few flickering scraps.

What seems to me Bud's ultimate achieve- ment is that he made out of something ordin- ary, sometng rare. His stage character was not, after all, so very peculiar, as most come- dians' are. He was simply the neighbour, uncle, old friend who, if you were lucky, you might possess: acute, tolerant, amusing, friendly. What was remarkable is how he blew up this personage, fairly conventional in itself, to such heroic comic proportions.

He was also a very English artist or, more precisely, Cockney-Jewish; which people, till the dispersal of the old East End after the Second World War, were notably idiosyncratic London `characters.' If a list were made of men born within a mile of Frying Pan Alley between 1890 and 1940, it would include dozens of names now illustrious in art and commerce. And of Spital- fields as it used to be—with its ingrown, ener- getic, laconic yet emotional inhabitants—Bud Flanagan was the bard.

About his art there was, finally, something that seemed ancient. When he played Bottom it was not a whit incongruous, but he seemed a figure from an even older tradition, dating back almost as far as theatres do. Perhaps what all great comedians of each race and century had in.common is that, through laughter, they could explain audiences to themselves with an accept- able degree of poetic realism. Thus. when people went to the Victoria Palace, however weird the goings-on up on the stage, I think they recog- nised, if not their own families, those of next door.