This week with Ted Ray, Arthur Askey, Ray
Martine, Les Dawson, Clive Dunn and Stubby Kaye. Always a compelling watch, if
only tangentially ever an actively amusing one, no other programme in the
archive that I've come across gives you quite the same insight into how
comics live off their wits.
Speculating as to how the panellists feel about each other is a source of fascination, the series' form exposing both professional sympathy and needling resentment (especially between Ray Martine and Les Dawson). You can sense a lot of fellow feeling between the two captains, both Liverpudlians in their sixties, with Ray admiring Askey's ability to generate communal good cheer and Askey respecting Ray's smoothness and patter. There's an interesting moment of deference in this one when Askey starts to sing and Dawson joins in to to accompany him.
The jokes themselves are always an interesting text of oral social history. There are a spate of stories about commercial travellers and rep actors seeking digs this week, all of which I'd imagine were first told before the War. When did these stories eventually die out, or have they now mutated into something else?
Speculating as to how the panellists feel about each other is a source of fascination, the series' form exposing both professional sympathy and needling resentment (especially between Ray Martine and Les Dawson). You can sense a lot of fellow feeling between the two captains, both Liverpudlians in their sixties, with Ray admiring Askey's ability to generate communal good cheer and Askey respecting Ray's smoothness and patter. There's an interesting moment of deference in this one when Askey starts to sing and Dawson joins in to to accompany him.
The jokes themselves are always an interesting text of oral social history. There are a spate of stories about commercial travellers and rep actors seeking digs this week, all of which I'd imagine were first told before the War. When did these stories eventually die out, or have they now mutated into something else?
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