A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (19 August 1972)

 For such a bevvy of elegant ladies, the Les Girls dance troupe do get put through some indignities on Sez Les. In a visual sketch this is deliberate - Dawson as top hatted crooner with three dancers descending a misproportioned staircase behind him: when the stairs get larger the dancers have to clamber down and eventually use a stepladder. But when in this week's big roaring twenties number - Amii MacDonald singing 'Black Bottom' - the women get dressed as (Mickey) mice, the effect is... peculiar.

 Les Girls are put to more conventional use in the first number from today's big guest star, Roy Orbison. Roy hasn't had a hit since 1969 and is working from his back catalogue. He has updated his look for the seventies, though - still with the dark glasses of course, but replacing his familiar dark suits with a costume in thick white fabric. He performs 'Dream Baby' with Les Girls surrounding him from above, below, to the left and to the right, the dancers wearing either pink or orange tops and silver hot pants as they cavort to the music.
 

 The effect is jolly, but detracts from the song's more ethereal, spectral, qualities. At one point Orbison is seen to give an amused smile, a rare sight. For his second number, he performs 'Running Scared' alone at the foot of a huge white staircase. It's still an amazingly dramatic narrative song, but has been frustratingly truncated for this performance.
 
 Today's other musical guests, The Peddlers, have been placed in front of the audience. A veteran jazz/soul trio, they aren't really light entertainment crowd pleasers. The three hairy men are dressed in matching crocheted waistcoats, not an image that ever caught on. Singer Roy Phillips' voice is a rather vomity-sounding shriek (like Roger Chapman of Family) and their latest single 'Back Alley Jane', a churning locked-on groove largely performed on Hammond organ, is a bit too heavy for this show, as seen in the audience reaction.

 With so many musical guests, Les Dawson does end up a rather marginal figure in his own show. But he does get the best moment, in an elaborate filmed sequence after the end credits, as a marching Salvation Army drummer who takes a wrong turning and ends up unknowingly leading another march before returning to the back of his own band. For added contemporary relevance the march that he heads is a rabble of bra-burning women's libbers.