Musically they suffered in the same way and again had tried to deal with the problem by playing a very wide pop repertoire, in the hope that some of it must inevitably suit their styles. And to ensure that it should all sound indistinguishable anyway, they played at very high volume.
The array of electrical equipment on-stage explained the long delay before the group’s appearance. They were walled in by banks of speakers and amplifiers. When they launched into their first number, Under the Moon of Love, those painted panes of glass in the Winter Gardens’ dome hitherto undisturbed by the wind, joined their fellows in a cacophony of rattling. The waves of sound fluttered the old-age pensioners like sweet wrappers in a windy playground. It was a relief to most of the senses when Mixed Bathing reached their final earth-shaking chord and the curtain fell.
It next rose to reveal Lennie Barber manhandling a small cart onto the stage. He was having difficulty in doing this, first because his hands were encumbered by giant mittens and, second, because one of the cart’s wheels had been caught by some offstage obstruction. He gave a sharp tug and it lurched on. A rattle of laughter came from the geriatric audience, uncertain whether or not this was part of the act.
It was a shock for Charles to see Lennie Barber. He was unmistakably the one who had starred in Short Back and Sides on the radio and The Barber and Pole Show on television, but the familiar contours of his face had shrunk with age. The cheeks, puffed out with affront in a thousand publicity photographs, now hung slack, and deep furrows scored the old laugh lines round his mouth into a mask-like parody. But the greatest surprise was the hair. The old sleek outline of black, raked back from a parting, had now fluffed out into an aureole of springy white. It was only the lack of Brylcreem and the passage of time that had made the change, but perversely it gave the impression that the old Lennie Barber was dressed up, disguised as an old man for a comedy sketch.
His costume also seemed wrong. Gone was the trademark of the white coat from Barber and Pole’s famous Barbershop Sketch; in its place the comedian wore a short red jacket over red and white striped waistcoat and trousers. On his head was a small red bowler hat. He looked like an old print of a comedian from a vanished age.
The mittens added to the incongruity. They did not fit the style of the rest of his costume and their great size suggested that they hid some terrible swelling or deformity.
Barber’s material was also strange. He started on a sentimental note with a little song about being The Simple Pieman. The chorus was quite catchy.
Don’t ask me why, man,
It’s just that I’m an
Ordinary Simple Pieman.
When he came out of the song, he changed gear abruptly. He was no longer recreating an old music hall act; he was modem, sharp, even slick. It was a great change from the old days. In the shows with Wilkie Pole he had been robust, optimistic, slightly self-important, always ready to put down his gormless partner. But now he had tried to break out of the old mould and find a style of his own. Charles regretted the change; he knew he shouldn’t, but he would have liked a wallow in nostalgia.
However, the comedian’s opening patter echoed Charles’ mood, so it was not without appeal.
‘Hello, how are you all doing out there? Comfy? Right. I tell you, those seats out there are unbelievably comfy. Old girl we had in earlier in the year found them so comfy she stayed in her seat for a fortnight.’ A pause. ‘Mind you, she was dead.’
Charles and Frances seemed to be the only members of the audience who laughed at that one. For the rest it was too near the truth.
‘Matter of fact,’ Barber continued, ‘we get a lot of dead people coming to this show. Well, I assume that’s why nobody laughs.’
‘Talking of death, did you hear about the Irishman who tried to commit suicide by jumping off the top of the Empire State Building? He missed the ground.’
The preoccupation with death was not going down well with the audience. The act was dying on its feet. Lennie Barber changed gear. ‘Actually, the place I’m staying here in Hunstanton, the landlady’s a real character. First day I arrived I said, are the sheets clean? She said, yes, I washed them only this morning. If you don’t believe me, feel them — they’re still damp.’
From then on he was into the familiar territory of Your Favourite Seaside Landlady Jokes. The audience, which, like all audiences, felt more comfortable with jokes they had heard before, began to respond. The restraint remained, but there were a good few wheezy chuckles.
Charles found it strange. At the start Lennie Barber had had something, a certain attack, in spite of the audience apathy. But he had gone into the seaside landlady routine with resignation, performing on automatic pilot. Though the audience preferred this Identikit comedy, Charles, as a performer, could recognize that the comedian had opted out. His comic potential was being diluted to nothing. Just as age looked like a disguise on the real Lennie Barber, so did this undistinguished style of performing. In fact, to call it a style was a misnomer; it was lack of style that made it so colourless. But through the drabness of the performance, Charles could still feel the power coming across the footlights.
Lennie Barber’s modest ovation was followed by the return of These Foolish Things to do their dance again. This time they were miming to When You Need Me, though only an expert would have noticed. However, there was a more significant change. One of the unalterable precepts of the great Chuck Sheba was that all dance groups should comprise an equal number of boys and girls. And, whereas in the opening routine there had been four of each, there were now four boys and only three girls. The seven of them continued with their smiles screwed in as if nothing had happened, but one couldn’t help noticing. Charles found it rather funny. Four men would stand in wait; three girls would cavort across the stage and launch themselves into their arms; three men would twirl round with their burdens; and the fourth would also twirl round, trying to look as if he had a girl in his arms too.
The absence of one of the girls was made the more obvious to Charles by the fact that the missing one was the prettiest. All of them had a kind of lacquered, manufactured beauty, but she had looked more authentically beautiful than the others. Long bouncy blonde hair, sweet childish face, trim figure. Charles had found his eyes constantly on her during the opening number and now she wasn’t there, he felt cheated. Still, she didn’t come back and, at the end of the dance, the group spread out in another depleted fan, the curtain fell to a rattle of applause and the lights came up for the interval.
Walter Proud was leading the four of them to the bar in the hopeless quest of an interval drink, when he stopped and greeted a stocky man with a small bald head. ‘Dickie.’
‘Oh hello, Walter.’ The man called Dickie spoke without enthusiasm. He didn’t remove from his mouth the cigar at the end of which two inches of ash hung precariously.
Charles recognized Dickie Peck, one of the biggest agents in the business. They had met when Charles had been working with Peck’s client, Christopher Milton, on the troubled pre-London tour of Lumpkin! a musical loosely based on She Stoops to Conquer. Dickie Peck had either forgotten this previous meeting or chose not to recognize Charles.