Referente a los métodos

Building-up a psycho-biographical profile of Charlie Drake

Charlie Drake is all but forgotten today. None of his television shows are shown on UK television (not even on the classic comedy channel UK Gold), and the four films he made for ABPC have not been screened since the 1980s.48 This lack of exposure has probably contributed to the lack of interest in his work by academics in film and media studies. Inevitably, this has resulted in a lack of any real appreciation of Drake, a comic who rose to the very top of his profession alongside those other famous names of the 1960s who have not been forgotten by them. Drake’s career in television comedy spanned nearly two decades from the mid-50s to the late 1970s. In that regard alone his work in television comedy is interesting because his shows reflect changes in the genre from the mid-50s, as standup and sketch formats of variety gave way to character driven realist sitcom and satire in the 60s. One of the reasons for Drake’s success and enduring popularity in the mid-60s was due entirely to the fact that he managed to incorporate the old performance variety formats with sitcom, a new form that had become more popular with shows such as Steptoe and Son in the early 60s.

The Worker series, for example, is a mix of standup, variety, and sitcom styles. And it was typical of Drake that he would switch back to the old variety format with a show called

Slapstick and Old Lace in 1971 when standup and variety shows like The Comedians,

Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies and The Good Old Days were becoming very popular with audiences. Of course the reasons why comedy formats changed so quickly so early was entirely due to the burgeoning new medium itself, which was making immense technological advances throughout the mid-late 50s.

A visual comic like Drake soon saw the potential of the medium and quickly learned how to use the technology to showcase his solo performance slapstick sketches that soon became his signature trademark. As television became available to more of the population – the BBC for example was broadcasting to 99.4 per cent of the population by 196249 - Drake became one

48_{Sands of the Desert, ITV ‘The Tuesday Film’, 29 September, 1970, 18:55, Petticoat Pirates, ‘Friday Morning}

Cinema’, Friday, 5 Jan, 1973, 10:00am.The film most regularly screened was Sands of the Desert on ITV ‘Saturday Cinema’, Saturday, 14 January, 1978, 11:00am, ITV ‘Monday Matinee’, 14 January, 1980, 14:30. Source: TVTimes index project (TVTiP)) – database of TVTimes listings 1955-1985, http://tvtip.bufvc.ac.uk alt. www.rhul.ac.uk/media-arts/courses/libraries.shtml See Appendix.

49_{Statistics quoted in Graham (1974:75).}

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the biggest stars in light entertainment television. Transmission was predominantly ‘live’, which suited Drake, who had the kind of variety skills that early television comedy relied on.

The 1960s proved to be a golden time for many comics who had learned to work and work ‘with’ a live audience by treading the boards in army camp concerts during their national service. Drake (1986:64-70) had shown early promise as a writer working with Dick Emery as they toured army bases and variety halls during the early 50s. Many would-be comics simply changed their uniforms from combat jackets to Redcoats when they decamped to Butlin’s Holiday Camps to entertain a ‘captive’ audience that really was only different because they were dressed in civvies. Armed with this kind of variety training Drake found the progression from Redcoat to Rediffusion an easy one.50 In his autobiography Drake’s Progress Drake talks about the importance of having acquired the experience of working with a live audience and the pitfalls of telerecording shows: ‘In a live television show the actors have to keep going whatever happens, just as they do in a live stage show […] Personally, I think telerecording mars the performance of many actors. They don’t perform with the edge and fear that to my mind are essential to all of the performing arts’ (98).51

As television reached larger audiences and was being broadcast for longer hours there was an increasing demand for programmes and for new faces. Once the invisible faces of comedy stars from radio (which as Burton Graham states had been the ‘foremost medium of communication for more than forty years’ (1974:57) began to appear on television, it was arguably the ones with funny faces that helped to make them more famous in the new medium. Television was (and still is) primarily a visual medium. Comics with funny faces were popular, and attracted huge audiences. Audiences could now see these comic characters whereas previously they had to imagine what they looked like as they listened to them telling

50 _{It was while he was working as a Redcoat that the seed of an act that was to make Drake famous was sown. He}

formed a double-act with the six foot four and a half giant Jack Edwardes a partnership that not only gave him his first television series Charlie Drake and Jack Edwardes , but the format that Drake revisited ten years later in

The Worker. Their second series Mick and Montmorency (1955-1958) propheticallyre-titled Jobstoppers saw the useless pair(who really were two Laurel and Hardy types) foul-up every job they tried. See Appendix.

51 _{Howard R.Pollio, Rodney Mers, and William Lucchesi conducted an empirical study for the Department of}

Psychology at the University of Tennessee to see ‘if there were any differences in the properties of canned laughter compared to more naturally occurring spontaneous laughter’. The study concluded that ‘naturally occurring laughter is quite different in a great many specifiable ways from canned laughter’ (224) which does give some indication why Drake did not like telerecording his televisions shows. The study also noted that the duration of the canned laughter continued over a longer duration and at a higher amplitude than the recorded live laughter which tailed off in intensity which might suggest that television audiences are being encouraged to laugh longer. See ‘Section II. Naturalistic Observations of Audience Laughter, ‘Humor, Laughter, and Smiling: Some Preliminary Observations of Funny Behaviours’ in Goldstein & McGhee (1972).

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jokes on the radio. Now there was an added pleasure; the comic was something that audiences ‘found in their movements, forms, actions and traits of character’ (Jokes 189,see façade 181) as Freud suggested, and whereas previously the physical characteristics of comic characters had ‘altogether escape[d] the hearer’s attention’ (193), now that they could see them, they could relate to ‘their mental ones as well’ (189).

Even a cursory glance at the face of the toothy Terry Thomas or the hangdog features of a droll like Tony Hancock bear testimony to those clowns who did not need to put on the face paint to look comic. Drake, who was too young to have become a radio star52 had ‘the most wonderful face’53 for television comedy noted Phyllis Rounce when she first saw Drake at International Artistes. Drake says, ‘Phyllis Rounce saw me with a look of amazement as my little cherubic face peeped nervously round the door, followed by fifty-one inches54 of shy but eager comedian’ (1986:62). If we were to ask Drake to provide us with a definition of his ‘little man’ character this would suffice. It was his memorable face that attracted the attentions of an agent and made him one of the most recognised stars in television comedy for over two decades; yet it is a face that has been forgotten today. Film comedy had always been a canvas for displaying famous fool’s faces, and comics who knew the importance of pulling a funny face to get laughs, whether it was the guppy-mouthed gormless George Formby,55 the toothless Frank Randle (who famously had his own teeth taken out), the single-toothed Moore Marriott, or a gurning Wisdom, Drake had one of those faces that audiences found funny and could not forget.

The aim of this thesis is to bring back into the light one of the most famous faces from television light entertainment that has been forgotten for almost forty years now. Drake was as

52 _{Drake did make his radio debut as a comedian in 1951 two years before he appeared on television in the}

children’s television shows Jigsaw and Showcase. See Appendix.

53 _{Drake suspects that Phyllis Rounce must have said this to her partner Colonel Bill Alexander who}

subsequently became Drake’s agents. (1986:62).

54 _{Is Drake’s slip of the tongue an example of a Freudian slip? As a shy nervous unknown comic he sees himself}

even smaller than he actually is. He meant to say he was sixty-one inches tall.

55 _{George Formby’s comments in the article, The Boy’s Cinema Annual 1941are interesting considering Freud’s}

observation that, the ‘comic’ is ‘found in people’. The interviewer asks: ‘What’s the secret of being funny George?’ ‘Secret?’ he exclaims. ‘Why, there isn’t any secret. You see, people always laugh at anybody goofy. There are people in the world who are always serious about everything, and nobody laughs at them. Then there are other people who are naturally funny. They can’t help it. It’s a sort of disease. Whatever they do, people just laugh at them. I don’t mean on the stage or in films. I mean in ordinary life. If they have anything to say or do, they always pick the goofy way of doing it. They were born that way, I suppose. And I’m one of them […] I must have a funny mouth or something’. The interviewer ends, ‘He makes millions of people hold their sides with laughter, and that’s no small thing in this very serious world’, p.82.

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big a television comedy star as any in his day. If he is remembered at all today though, it is for his rather rakish public life, and his inflated sexual ego. Peter Hepple’s review of Drake’s autobiography tells us a lot about Drake. Titled ‘Tainted talent’ he says,

If ever a man was the opposite of his best-known show business persona, that of the incorruptible simpleton with a babyish streak, it is Charlie Drake. […] the man is an undoubted survivor, in private as much as in his profession […].With due respect for his honesty, he does not come across as a particularly nice man, especially at the height of his television and stage career. He was awkward and stubborn, unfaithful to his first wife and given to high living which encompassed everything from gambling to champagne for breakfast […] He fell from grace in 1972 when he insisted a raw beginner should have a role in his Bradford pantomime, and gained further notoriety when he married someone 30 years his junior. Neither of these things were major crimes in themselves but, in the way of such things, he somehow became tainted.56

This unsavoury image is repeated in an email sent to the author by Simon Trewin who once worked with Drake in pantomime. ‘When I was a stage manager I spent a weird Xmas working with Charlie Drake at the Beck Theatre Hayes doing ‘Jack and The Beanstalk’. Very much at the end of his active career it was a slightly sad affair and he was obviously suffering from that real sense of his fame slipping away’.57 ‘Drake was one of the most unpopular men in show business and he managed to be completely oblivious of the fact that most people hated him!’58

Unfortunately, his own comments about young women in his autobiography, which he dedicates typically to “Prettybody”, do little to alter this public perception about the way he thought about the very young women he was sexually attracted to. “Prettybody” was actually his pet-name for Elaine Cameron his second wife, but it sounds more like a catch-all name for all the young women he pursued in his sexual conquests. ‘I wrote her into the show, so I would have something to do between houses’ (1986:89) he boasts of the woman he later married, and who, half-driven mad by living in ‘Charlie Drake Land’59 tried to commit

56 _{April 2, 1987, p. 10. Source: The Stage Archive.} 57 _{email. 16/06/2008, 16:46.}

58 _{email. 16/06/2008, 17:32.}

59 _{Drake is referring to his private life which he calls ‘Charlie Drake Land’ in his autobiography. The fact that he}

describes it in this way gives some indication of the tragic nature underlying comedy. His working class character had brought him fame and fortune, but only at the expense of reliving painful experiences. However, one feels that Drake enjoyed his life as a big star in Charlie Drake Land and found it objectionable to be classed as ordinary. The irony is that while his worker character lives an ordinary life, audiences were more than happy

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suicide before running away and divorcing him. It is this sexual predator that appears from behind the clown’s mask that made his ‘little man-boy’ character(s) so appealing (but to many others so appalling). Drake seemed unable or unwilling to hide the double nature of his ‘little man’ character(s), but he was aware of the libidinous beast baying behind the innocent baby face. In his autobiography he says, ‘It’s said [he does not say who said it, so the assumption is that Drake is saying it] that in order to reach its full power [and presumably Drake is talking about his own potential to become a famous clown here] intelligence seems to require both the presence of well-developed sexual glands and the temporary repression of sexual appetite. Despite meeting these criteria, I found that, on the contrary […] Emotion was beginning to rout my reason and I was getting out of control. I think I would have gone mad’ (236). Then there was the drinking (“I’ll have another drink first” he told Hancock, who reputedly asked Drake if he wanted to commit suicide with him),60 the drugs (he used cocaine as an aphrodisiac - he even called one of his girlfriends “Coke” (126), the gambling (he lost millions betting on the horses and left very little in his will) and the inevitable ageing, which meant that the Botticelli cherub-faced61 screen persona with the falsetto voice of an angel, gradually mutated into a gargoyle with a foul-mouth and became Baron Hard-On in Jim Davidson’s bawdy adult pantomime SINderella (1995) who hands his daughter Cinders a huge black dildo and tells her that if she rubs it three times the ‘Genie O’ the Prick’ will appear. ‘It’s a cock!’ he shouts petulantly when Cinders innocently asks her daddy, the Baron Hard-On, what the gift he has given her is. Yet, there are some who remember Drake fondly as well. The author received a message from an ebay member who had worked as a booking agent at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford. She remembers that ‘Charlie was pleasant, friendly and generous, both with his time and the occasional thank you gift in the form of flowers’.62

Yet, it seems likely (human nature being what it is) that Drake’s ‘tainted’ reputation has

discouraged the entertainment industry from recognising the contribution he undoubtedly

to enter the surreal world of Charlie Drake Land to be entertained by the clown who was king there just to escape from the mundanity of ordinary life for a while. However, when Drake describes his private life as Charlie Drake Land, his joking comment betrays an underlying sadness which reveals that he felt his ordinary life seemed surreal to him now that he was famous, and that for other people (in particular his two wives) it was not a happy place to be if they were there just to entertain king Charlie.

60 _{Quoted in Fisher (2008: 479).}

61 _{Drake (1986: 5). Drake quotes from memory a comment made about him in the press. Spicer (2001:107) uses}

the same quote which he traces to a review of Petticoat Pirates in The Times, 1 December 1961. The description is reused again in an obituary by Stephen Dixon in ‘The Guardian’, Obituary, Thursday December 28, 2006. http:// www.guardian.co.uk. [Accessed 22 September 2008].

62 _{ebay member: ultraviolet0123, message received 13 September 2012, 18:17.} 33

made to British television comedy63 and why his work has been forgotten. The result of this is probably why there has never been a sustained and considered academic study of Drake’s work.

Even though Drake was still seen regularly on television in the 1970s his reputation as a comic genius was dissolving away. He did not get his own show again after mini-episodes of

The Worker were slotted into Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night variety extravaganza, a show which in itself was a failure. The episodes were a sad echo of the series former glories for a number of reasons: The situation format that began every show was the part they decided to retain because Drake was too old to do any slapstick (the very thing that had made the original show a success) and even though Drake had decided to concentrate on verbal comedy, the

duelogues64 between Mr. Pugh and Charlie were muted by comparison. The old combatants seemed to have called a truce; they behaved more like old friends gossiping over a garden wall about current events instead of defending their own side of it. The counter at the labour exchange was always the thin red line drawn in the sand between Mr. Pugh and Charlie in The Worker. Theongoing joke was that Mr. Pugh would try to drag Charlie over it into adulthood and make him behave responsibly, but the joke was always on him because the audience knew he would never be able to do that.

After that Drake was only seen on panel game shows like Quick on the Draw65 and Celebrity Squares.66 No doubt Laurie Mansfield, his manager, was (like Mr. Pugh), doing his best to keep his client (who was not being offered contracts to do his own shows anymore) in work. Drake was redundant in comedy after 1978. Today many comics make their living from panel

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One only has to think of the furore surrounding the recently deceased Jimmy Savile who is accused of sexually abusing young girls throughout his long career at the Beeb and the moral watchdog at the BBC barking loudly now to prevent the programme that was meant to celebrate his life and work in television from being aired. Alarmingly many other male celebrities including Jim Davidson and Freddie Starr have recently been accused of similar heinous crimes against young girls since the Saville exposé.

64_{I have adopted to use the term ‘duelogue’ instead of the more usual ‘dialogue’ because it is a more psycho-}