Tuesday 12 February 2019

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (13 February 1962)


 First episode of a new series without Nicholas Parsons, whose absence is felt. First long sketch is a domestic scene of the tramp "at home", rowing with his wife on a church bench. Speight has fun with presenting familiar marital niggles between a couple who have nothing, but after several minutes of this I started to find the combination of homelessness and unhappy marriage depressing to think about, rather than funny. The second sketch is a long vaudeville routine with Haynes as a pain-inflicting dentist. I was interested to see that dentists were still using cocaine in 1962.

 Musical guests are husband-and-wife duo Ken Morris & Joan Savage, who will be appearing throughout the series. The unassuming Morris is behind the piano, while Savage sings, a ball gown-and-peroxide Babycham vision in the 1950s style. She has an exceptionally expressive face, and looks a bit cross-eyed and fish-mouthed at times when miming 'As Long As I Have You' (which concludes with her producing a large photograph of a baby, to the audience's delight). Their second song, 'Rock-A-Bye Baby With A Dixie Melody' (sung by both) reveals the thinking behind this extreme performance style, when they extract considerable comedy from picking up the wrong cues and impersonating each other miming each other's voices, Savage moving behind the piano, and so forth. I found watching them work together in this routine actually made me laugh rather more than Haynes did, their cheerfulness working well as a corrective to the rather sour comedy that surrounds them.

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