It was Alex Armitage who had the brilliant idea to set his grandfather, Noel Gay’s iconic quixotic songs, into a moral-boosting wartime BBC radio show Variety Bandwagon. Set in London, at the height of the blitz, when he invited me to write the book, I leapt at the chance. As a kid, I’d been obsessed by The Goons, Round the Horn etc, and everyone’s favourite musical is Singin’ in the Rain where Arthur Reed and Nacio Herb Brown’s songs were re-set by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. I also grew up loving the Hawksian screwball comedies of the era (think My Girl Friday) along with Billy Wilder, Izzy Diamond, not forgetting Sgt Bilko, and I’d written for dozens of comedians, so it was a match made in heaven. With a backstage let’s get-this-the-show-on-the-road story, and a fourth wall breaking live radio show, complete with sound FX, the hard bit was going to be making the 1940s radio show funny. I ploughed through hours of Tommy Handley’s ITMA, and barely smiled. Catchphrases, puns, innuendo, silly voices did nothing for me.
Then I found one joke that made me laugh:
Handley: “I was walking down Whitehall, and I asked a policeman: ”What side’s The War Office on? And he said: ”Ours, I hope.”
Just as I discovered a skit by Tran and Helle, the Nazi’s comedy double act, about listening to foreign radio, with the punchline, if you get caught, you’ll be sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly those puns were hilarious. When someone’s trying to kill you, laughter is an act of resistance. Knowing all I had to do was make the threat work, and everything could play against that, it was time to work out what among Gay’s 100s of songs could go where. Run Rabbit Run, was a shoo-in, then Hey Little Hen, Who’s Been Polishing the Sun, I’m still proud that I created a home for I Took My Heart to a Party. Every one a winner. I based the selfish wisecracking Sammy Shaw on an amalgam of comics I’d known, borrowed the dialogue pacing from Frasier (the wittiest workplace comedy every written) and worked on raising the stakes, romantically, professionally, and physically. Watching it come together was as exciting as a musical should be. Tony Slattery was the first Sammy at Birmingham Rep and The Queen’s Theatre in the West End, where the fabulous Ian Bartholomew was nominated for an Olivier award, and a young Tamzin Outhwaite excelled in the chorus. It has since become an am-dram regular and has been revived, most notably by The Watermill with Gary Wilmot who brought his own brilliance to Sammy Shaw, followed by hugely successful national tour. As Ernest Bevin, Churchill’s Minister of Labour “We can not only work and fight, but we can be cheerful doing it as well”. Never gets old.
