A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (1 September 1973)

 Yorkshire seem to have tightened their belts in allocating the Sez Les budget since 1972. There's only one special guest artiste, only one dance routine, and little in the way of filmed sketches this time round.

 The unisex Irving Davies Dancers have replaced the Les Girls troupe, and they are quite a contrast to their predecessors. This week, they interpret Neil Sedaka's 'I'm A Song (Sing Me)" through the medium of mime. A curly-haired (male) lead dancer stands at the foot of a staircase, in front of the rest of the troupe who are arranged on the steps. All are in Marcel Marceux-type whiteface (something current in music at the time, with Leo Sayer and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band). The lead dancer is awarded a lot of close-ups and performs straight to camera. The effect is alarming. Someone in the team must really like Neil Sedaka because Dana's song is an unremarkable cover version of 'That's When The Music Takes Me'.

 There's a very curious long sketch with Roy Barraclough as a suitor of Dawson's daughter, announcing his intentions to the father. He is a wildly mincing character, and the mixed messages that he gives off cause Dawson to repeatedly respond inappropriately ("A CAMPari? Mind the POUFFE!", etc.). In a bewildering punchline, the suitor removes his cap and wig and reveals himself to actually be a butch fellow. It isn't made very clear why he should have been disguising himself in the first place... It's a frustrating watch, because it's an exciting premise and Roy Barraclough is so good in the role, but ends up as such a pointless skit.

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.

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (12 August 1972)

 Thirties and forties revivals were going on at various times in 1970s culture, and Sez Les embraces these old styles and trends, with big band sounds from the Syd Lawrence Orchestra and Busby Berkley homages from resident dance troupe Les Girls. This is a welcome development from all of those trad jazz acts that cluttered up sixties comedy shows, and if anything this edition of Sez Les is stronger on music than on comedy, with three musical acts - plus the band and dance routines crammed into 40 minutes. A lot of imagination and craft has gone into the show.
 

 Daliah Lavi was an unfamiliar name to me, and would also have been so to most of the original audience. An Israeli actress and model, she also had a popular schlager singing career in Germany. She's given slightly subtler material to attempt to win the British public over with, singing a version of 'I'm Leavin'' with much emphasis on the "La la la la la la la la la la la la la" lines. It's acceptable enough, but it felt a hell of a lot more distinctive and freighted with personal meaning when Elvis did it the previous year.
 

 Daliah is wearing an ankle-length canary yellow dress with black trim, and a rather odd pattern, which from a distance looks like paw prints down her legs.

 Mac & Katie Kissoon still have a few years to wait for a UK hit, but 'Hey You Love' - in which the singers exchange promises of devotion before joining in a mutual declaration of "Hey! You Love! I'll never let you go!" - isn't bad (although the scansion of the chorus is distractingly similar to that of 'Rule Britannia'). Yorkshire Television really go for an innovative staging here. The singers' backs are to the audience, with the twelve Les Girls dancers on various platforms behind them, dressed in white bikinis and waving pink and orange cloaks in time to the music.   Some of the audience seem to be much more interested in the girls than the singers -
 

 Sandie Shaw was a pop veteran by 1972, but still only 25 years old. Her contract with Pye had just expired and her two very different slots here show an artist with many new possibilities ahead of her, but uncertain of what direction to take next. Performing of 'Happy Feet' (a song that goes back to the twenties) is a bid to demonstrate her versatility. In a sparkly period turban and scarf, and backed by the Les Girls dancers, the routine requires a little tap dancing from Sandie. She's game and her character carries it off, but placing her in front of professional dancers doing the same actions, does make you aware that movement wasn't where her primary talents lay.

 Her second performance is more what you'd expect from Sandie Shaw. Her interpretation of Gordon Lightfoot's recent hit 'If You Could Read My Mind' is very much of a piece with her terrific, lightly melancholic, 1969 album Reviewing The Situation and makes you wish that she could had carried on in that vein for a bit longer. Her outfit, however, must have looked unfortunate even at the time (Les Dawson jokes about her stealing Glenda Jackson's costume from Elizabeth R), and illustrates just how difficult it is to keep an image evolving in a long-running pop career without starting to look odd.

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (9 August 1974)

 Last in the series, and there a lot of German-themed gags are linked by a pastiche routine of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret, with the women of the Irving Davis Dancers dressed as Sally Bowles. John Cleese plays the M.C., delivering an impossibly long introduction clearly inspired by Monty Python's Silly Party election declarations. Dawson appears in drag as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Roy Barraclough takes the part of Hitler. There's a lot of material about the war, at its best with Dawson and Cleese as pilots in a knocked-together cardboard Spitfire prop and at its worst when the safari-suited men of the Irving Davis Dancers finish their routine with a synchronised Nazi salute.

 The jazzy guest singer is Marian Montgomery, dressed and groomed with I think may be the least flattering period get-up that I've yet seen in a 1970s light entertainment show. In particular, the non-matching hair extensions add a element of the bewilderingly grotesque, exacerbated in close-ups by spiders' legs false eyelashes. 

 Her unidentifiable song (perhaps entitled 'I'm Gonna Build a Summer House') adds to the sense of the peculiar. It seems to going for a note of sunshine pop whimsy, with daydreamy lyrics about living in a summerhouse of her own imagination. But the impractical details of this house ("I'll fill it full of balconies and stairs that do not end") and specific instructions for its contents ("fill it full of lilac flowers and children with bright curls/ and china pots and crystals and baskets full of bread") have a deranged quality ("to make me quiet inside my head").

 The feverish nature of the song is magnified by Montgomery's performance, looking to camera with a heavy-lidded blank gaze, as if in a valium trance. The final verse appears to be aiming for a note of fantastical affirmative self-discovery but comes across as a case study in depersonalisation -

I'm gonna build a summerhouse - I hope that you know why!
I have to take a piece of me and throw it to the sky
And watch it soar and watch it dance and see a part of me
Up there laughing, knowing that I'm free.

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (2 Aug 1974)

 Thanks to its half hour form, one of Sez Les's great virtues is that (unlike many comedy LE spectaculars of the time) it zips along. You almost never see a sketch that outstays it's welcome. You have just enough time to appreciate what's funny about an idea and then it's gone, as in the best sketch this week, Dawson and Cleese as two pub drinkers who have both lost their voices and communicate through 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'-style boards. It's an original idea - they shout through bolder type, they have a silent brawl, etc. - but having hit upon something genuinely unusual, many sketch shows would stretch it until it breaks, rather than getting out of it within a couple of minutes.

 There's a Colditz sketch with both prisoners and guards as cowardy custards - seeing Roy Barraclough as Bernard Hepton's commandant is incongruous.

 Brenda Arnau is back with the Irving Davies dancers, performing 'Fever'. It’s another elaborately edited routine this week, including a costume change. She starts out in a shiny snakeskin dress, pestered by a nimbus of the male dancers' disembodied hands.

 When she changes into a looser tangerine dress, the lighting changes from contained chiaroscuro to cycloramic sky blue, and the female dancers turn up to join in the fun. Brilliant and fascinating though they are, once you've seen half a dozen Irving Davies Dancers routines, you do start to notice repetitions of some of their specialities. In this routine, we get; the singer lying on top of all the men who propel her along like rollers; two concentric circles of male and female dancers, one moving clockwise and one anticlockwise; and (a particular treat) a cutaway shot of three sultry sirens beckoning the viewer...

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (26 July 1974)

I'm not religious. For years I was an atheist but I gave it up. I was getting no holidays.

 John Cleese plays a precise and haughty hotel manager! Only in a little throwaway sketch, but he's noticeably good in this part... I'd imagine that the 'Hotel Splendide' is a higher class of place than Fawlty Towers, though.

 In a similar vein, there's a sketch with Dawson as a diner in a swanky restaurant (a familiar comedy situation of this time) arguing about hidden charges with Frank Thornton's supercilious waiter - "You used the wrong fork with your salade Nicoise, sir. Anything that lowers the tone of the Cafe Marcel has to be paid for."

 This week's guest artiste is a very tanned Clodagh Rogers, not entirely flattered by being dressed and styled in the period fashion. I dimly remember women's dresses being held up by hoops like that when I was a small child, although Roger's ones are studded with sequins...

 Clodagh hasn't had a hit for a few years and has recently been dropped by RCA. She performs her new single 'Saturday Sunday' (released by Pye, who won't keep her on after this). It isn't going to set any charts alight. It's an undistinguished number, but oddly underpinned by a period arrangement of fumping drums and slow bass, a la Hotlegs' 'Neanderthal Man' or David Essex's 'Rock On'.

 The Irving Davies Dancers have been awarded a slot of their own this week, offering their interpretation of 'Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves'.

 Highlights of this routine include a slow tambourine dance and the lead female dancer being wrapped in a red sheet, which the men of the troupe then swing her around in. It's a bit more disjointed than their very best numbers, with a lot of separately recorded cutaways. But this emphasis on individual moments within the routine does give us the splendidly camp moment when, on the line of "Every night the men would come around to lay their money down", a chorus of three gypsy temptresses give the viewer a knowing look...

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (19 July 1974)

 From Ken Dodd and Dickie Mint to Joe Beazley and Cheeky Monkey few comedy ideas are ever so funny as a hapless puppet act, and instead of Dawson's usual stand-up this week the show opens with US superstar Roscoe Chip and Peppy. Chip has no talent, Peppy is a hideous troll-like figure, and Dawson has particular fun with the oleaginous patter of American funnymen - "Isn't that a fun remark?" It's rare to see him play a creation that he clearly has no affection for.

 After dismembering Peppy, Roscoe then goes on to display further talents as a magician, attempting the sawing a woman in half act, only to be foiled by the substitute Yorkshire glamorous assistant, too fat to fit into the box.

 This week's guest artiste is Lyn Paul, going solo after The New Seekers. Her voice is good, but you can see why she wasn't really a solo star in her own right. If Wikipedia is to be believed the wistful ballad that she performs here, 'Sail the Summer Winds' "spent a frustrating seventeen weeks hovering outside the UK Top 50". John Cleese's presence this week is most keenly felt in a sketch that he isn't actually in, a quaint rewrite of the parrot sketch with Dawson as Palin, Roy Barraclough as Cleese and a flatulent, instead of dead, parrot.

 This week, the Irving Davies Dancers aren't backing a singer, but performing a cancan routine behind a series of French-themed gags and characterisations from Dawson. Using them as decoration is rather of a waste of their talents, and the long routine is at it's best when Dawson and companion also join in with the dancing.

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (5 July 1974)

 There's one of Dawson's best-remembered routines this week, the gesturing newsreader. John Cleese is given very little to do. Roy Barraclough fares better, playing a character outside his usual range - a haughty country squire visiting an armorer (Dawson) to buy a new fowling piece. This is one of those sketches that have almost nothing funny in it (the squire keeps on shooting the willing assistant to test the guns), save for what the performers can bring - which is enough! Barraclough is oblivious to the effect of his actions ("I'd laike you to run acraws me at medium grouse speed"), while Dawson - who I don't primarily think of as a physical comedian - totters and falls in an original way with every new gunshot wound.

 The Hollies - a hot property at this time having just had a huge hit with 'The Air That I Breathe' (as plagiarized by Radiohead) - perform their new single. 'Son of a Rotten Gambler' failed to set the charts alight, but is actually pretty good. A cover of a Chip Taylor song better known in Anne Murray's country version, the melodic rock arrangement plays to the group's strengths. Even as early as 1974 The Hollies were getting on a bit though, and they have a weather-beaten look about them. Alan Clarke was still only 32 when this was recorded, but he looks about 15 years older.

 The real business is this week's other musical guest, the lovely Amii MacDonald, singing her version of 'Make It With You'. Amii is introduced via a spotlight with a magenta filter that trails across her reclining body. What is she reclining on, though? Some bumpy sort of chaise longe? No, it's the six male Irving Davies Dancers, laid out in a line along the floor, rolling Amii along like a conveyer belt. The Dancers then sit up, revealing that they are dressed in matching maroon leotards with exposed chests. The six men then spend most of the song manoeuvring Amii through a series of lifts and rolls manipulated by moving their hips and bellies. A dance routine that's performed while either sitting or lying down is certainly original, and we DVD owners are lucky to be able to immediately rewatch such sequences to see how they're done. The original audience would be left wondering if what they'd just seen had ever really happened...

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (28 June 1974)

 John Cleese is still around, contributing to a few skits, the most interesting of which is a variant of the Monty Python argument sketch, with Dawson as an inveterate liar and Cleese testing the logic of the situation.

 By far the most impressive routine is a big wrestling set piece, with the usually invisible studio audience surrounding the ring and a surprising level of physical activity and risk for Dawson. Even though the comedy's target is the artificial violence and ritual of wrestling, once the routine involves Dawson crouching down while some big men repeatedly jump over him my reaction is to admire his nerves first, and to laugh as an afterthought.

 Musical entertainment comes from Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen, interpreting 'Cabaret'. They've gone multi-coloured since their many appearances on Morecambe & Wise and Arthur Haynes a decade earlier, with a much-hairier Ball resplendent in orange flares, rainbow shirt and navy and green check wide-lapel jacket.

 This week the Irving Davies Dancers accompany a performance of 'The Age of Aquarius' from Barbara Arnau. The men are topless, oiled and in white trousers and the women are dressed in bikinis and diaphanous white capes. The dancers emerge from under a carapace of ostrich feathers, initially in gyrating pairs, and then separate into concentric male and female circles. The men at one point raise the singer, who is wearing a gold chain bikini over a flesh-coloured catsuit. I think that the intended effect at the end of the song is for her to be submerged by the chorus of men, but rather unfortunately it looks as much like they are collectively groping her. 

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (22 February 1974)

  Les Dawson is all well and good, but his comedy is of secondary interest to the amount of thought and imagination that went into the light entertainment sections of his shows. This week's musical guest is Lynsey De Paul (performing one of her signature flirtations, 'Let's Boogie'), sat behind the piano and singing in a sequence of close-up asides to various cameras with interesting mixes between shots.

 Of yet greater interest are the Irving Davies Dancers, whose routine is of the same idiosyncratic quality as their science fiction number of the 25th of January. I don't recognise the song, which lists the senses with a 'touch me' chorus, of the school of Hair or Tommy. It is interpreted with an Eastern spiritual theme, the troupe forming a deity with multiple arms, and an interest in choreographing the unit into one organic entity, from which individuals then break away from and again coalesce. As well as vivid colour lighting - a lime green filter this week - there's an interest in superimposing images, with the lead dancer wearing an enormous blue cloak which then becomes CSOed into a close-up of her face. These bold sequences must have been some of the most ambitious and abstract performance on British television at the time, and it’s exciting to think that they went out on such a mainstream show.

 

A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (25 January 1974)

 Les Dawson only gets a half-hour series this time round, with a lot of very short sketches and one-liners crammed in. They don't outstay their welcome, but few leave much of an impression. The most interesting sketches are the two-handers between Dawson and special guest John Cleese (WW1 batman and officer, patient and Doctor), which play Cleese's natural authority, reserve and suppressed insanity off against Dawson's Northernness and greater worldliness. In the Doctor sketch you can feel the two comedians start to get a feel of each others' performance style and start to experiment with their pausing and responses, taking the comedy in an interesting new direction.

 The singing and dancing is the most exciting part of this edition. Lulu performs an abridged 'Man Who Sold the World' dressed in a white trouser and shirt/ black waistcoat ensemble, with a white fedora with sparkly black headband. She performs the song as a character piece, setting her face in Bowie's 'gazely stare', with her arms pressed to her sides and shuffling about - its disconcerting to see her not smiling and moving about.

 The choreography is yet more odd. The Irving Davies Dancers, a male/ female troupe dressed in white neutral clothing, do an interpretive science-fiction routine this week. To a soundtrack of Tristram Carey-type bleeps, the dancers form together to become a waggling organic gestalt (orange filter), and then break away to become a crowd of displaced, lobotomised individuals (white lighting). The music then changes to a romantic theme, the dancers form a circle around a male-female couple, the lighting turns magenta, and the couple dance together in swooping movements while being blown about by a wind machine. The music and lighting then revert their previous electronic/ orange-white settings and the dancers become a crowd once again. It’s an ambitious idea, and one entirely to be applauded.