That Man
Tommy Handley. By Ted Kavanagh. (Huddler and Stoughton. 7s. 6(1.) OUR greater drolls always get themselves much loved. When Tommy Handley died of cerebral haemorrhage in January this year, millions felt that they had lost a good and friendly neigh- bour ; and he was sincerely mourned. They will correspondingly enjoy this tribute of memory to him by Mr. Ted Kavanagh who, as the writer of those radio scripts of his which culminated in Jima, was as close to him as is the thumb to the fingers of a glove. I pass over the assessment of his gifts—the "simplicity, the humility, the kindliness, and the great sense of comedy"—because these, by the power of radio, became as familiar to the furthest listener as to the nearest, friend. (As Mr. Kavanagh observes, " the microphone analyses character.") In this matter, the book, while properly pious, is also a shade platitudinous. It is Mr. Kavanagh's peeps behind the Irma scenes that will give the general reader his greatest interest. He will tell us that Tommy Handley was tired, worried and slowing down in his last months ; or that the war-time Irma series—on no Government instruction, but by a private sense of public duty—were designed week by week with an eye on the country's morale. He sketches the hurried evacua- tion of the B.B.C. to Evesham in 1939, when the earlier pro- gramme It's That Man Again evolved into lima, as a jibe against the fine rash of departmental initials that broke out in those days. Tommy Handley's earlier years on the stage, on which he made his greatest success in the profitable but commonplace music-hi sketch, The Disorderly Room, are lightly enough pencilled This seems to me a weakness, but it also seems, in its way, just; for Tommy Handley was no more than a straight up-and-down-the' wicket comedian till he met the microphone. In his alliance with the microphone, Mr. Kavanagh played a considerable part al marriage-broker. Handley had had earlier successes, with Mr.
Ronald Frankau, in the Murgatroyd-Winterbottom sketches, where puns ran horrible riot: A. Let's talk about affairs of the world.
B. Yes—take the humming top.
A. What's that got to do with it ? B. Well, it's a whirled affair.
A. We've got to tighten our belts. B. I only wear braces. Think of sugar.
A. I du —and a lump comes in my throat. Actually there's enough
corn raised. ...
B. To cover every toe in England—and that would spoil the Pilgrim's progress.
A. That's Bunyan. .
It sounds like a ghastly parody, and hardly (you ,perhaps agree) submits to print. What lima did was to keep something of these verbal euphuisms, and lit them into a new world of inverted logic. A good half of Mr. Kavanagh's book recreates the limo world, Tomtopia and all, peopled as it was with its Mrs. Mopp, and its spy Funf, and that wonderfully enquiring Liverpudlian, and the crapulous Chinstrap, and its host of oddities. To any student of radio (if such there be, for there is yet no university chair of this exasperatingly effective medium) there is much interest in Mr. Kavanagh's implicit recognition that radio has its own strict laws, and that luau succeeded by inventing them first and thereafter obeying them. For the rest of the readers there will be the great pleasure of recapturing the bygone voices of Hotchkiss and Sophie Tuckshop and the rest of the cast of Tommy-M-Wonderland, here given to us in a print that pales against recollection, and yet revives it. And from the book, gossiping and hasty as it is, there emerge the bonhomie and bounce of Tommy Handley.
LIONEL HALE.
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