Monthly Archives: January 2023

Comic Songs and Variety Shows

After writing about The White Heather Club in my last post I started thinking about other similar shows. It left me wondering what happened to variety shows. The early days of TV were full of them. Now I believe the only one we have left here in Britain is the annual Royal Variety Performance. Yet I hadn’t noticed them disappearing. I’m thinking now that they were probably direct descendants of the Music Hall which thrived in the Victorian era and was pushed out by the arrival of cinema.

Back in the 50s and 60s families all watched TV together. There was only one TV in each house and just one channel at first, later two. The variety shows of my childhood had a main host and a selection of guests including magicians, singers, dancers, ventriloquists, comedians, puppeteers etc etc. Here are some of the shows I remember from British TV in the 50s and 60s..

The Black and White Minstrel Show

This was a family must every week and hugely enjoyable. But it definitely wouldn’t be made now as it featured white people ‘blacked up’.

The White Heather Club

I wrote bout this in my last post. It was a New Year’s Eve ‘must watch’.

The Good Old Days

This show was set up as a Victorian music hall and the acts, the host and the audience were all in period costume. My grandmother absolutely loved it.

Sunday Night at the London Palladium

Another regular family watch. the photograph show Bruce Forsyth who hosted the programme for several years.

Some of these shows gave rise to comic the songs we knew back then. For example, Andy Stewart, who presented The White Heather Club, released a single called ‘Donald, Where’s Your Troosers?’

Where did the comic songs go? I’m not talking about the ones aimed at children like ‘The Laughing Policeman’, but the ones which were for everyone and which got loads of radio play. Here are some of them which I remember. I appreciate that my readers in other countries might not know these songs but this post might remind them of some they do remember.

The Gas Man Cometh by Flanders and Swann

Flanders and Swann were a British comedy duo.. Lyricist, actor and singer Michael Flanders (1922–1975) and composer and pianist Donald Swann (1923–1994) collaborated in writing and performing comic songs. The one I remember best is The Gas Man Cometh.

My Old Man’s a Dustman by Lonnie Donegan

British skiffle singer, songwriter and musician Lonnie Donegan was referred to as the King of Skiffle and influenced 1960s British pop and rock musicians. My Old Man’s a Dustman was one of his most popular and a big favourite in our hose.

Donald Where’s Your Troosers? by Andy Stewart

As mentioned earlier in the section on the White Heather Club.

Goodness Gracious Me by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren

As with the Black and White Minstrel Show, this would definitely not be released nowadays as Peter Sellers was impersonating an Indian Doctor – although not in a deprecatory way.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.

Happy New Year! Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

Those of you who have read this blog before will know that I from Wales and will realise that the second greeting is in Welsh.

Thank you to all readers. This humble blog has just topped 250 000 hits worldwide since I started it about five years ago. This covers everything from my signed up followers to the people who stumble on it by accident when searching for something on Google. But I’m happy that it’s being read and maybe even enjoyed by people all over the world.

When I was a child there was often a New Year’s Eve Party in the village school which doubled up as a village hall. The event started late afternoon/ early evening with tea and party games for the children. Then any children who had a song to sing or a poem to recite could stand up and perform to the audience of mums and dads. As young children were taken home the evening morphed into an adult’s party/ concert. There was a lot of singing by everyone and solo performances by some of the better singers in the village. One farmer had a beautiful tenor voice and always finished his singing slot with a wonderful rendition of Jerusalem. My favourite song was one called Oes Gafr Eto? which involves one singer leading each verse and the audience singing the chorus – which gets longer and faster and is huge fun!

We got our first television in 1962. TV viewing was so new and exciting then. We only had one channel for the first few years but that didn’t matter. The whole viewing thing was simply amazing! The years when there wasn’t a village party the whole family would watch the New Year’s Eve edition of a programme called The White Heather Club which was Scottish and was all singing and dancing. The compere was called Andy Stewart and regular guests on the programme were singers Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar, a duo called Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor and a group of dancers dancing traditional Scottish reels and jigs. The men all wore kilts and the women long white dresses with tartan sashes. Looking it up today I see that the programme finished in 1968. To quote Wikipedia ‘It put forward a ‘tartanised’ view of Scotland that was becoming very dated by the late 1960s’. But for a few years, The White Heather Club was a big part of many people’s New Year’s Eve.

Singers Kenneth McKellar and Moira Anderson and the duo Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor who all regularly sang on the programme The White Heather Club in the 1960s.

On New Year’s Day (which wasn’t made a UK Bank Holiday until 1974) we children loved starting the new diaries we’d been given as Christmas presents. Oh, the joy of all those empty pages, the brand new number on the front and the titbits of information and pictures which were always printed in children’s diaries. After filling in all your personal details at the front you entered all the family birthdays then turned to the back where there were blank pages for notes. Here we made two lists. One list was of the presents we’d received and who had given them so that we could write our all-important thank-you letters before starting back at school. The second list was our New Year Resolutions. I still have several of my old diaries. I’ve shown them on here before so no pictures this time. One of my resolutions lists had the amusing commitment to be nicer to my sister! I love her to bits now but as children we often bickered and annoyed each other.

As an older person now I don’t relish the passing of the years but I try to think positively and I’ve enjoyed looking back at New Year’s Eves from years ago.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.