The Stage

Chit chat - A right balls-up

Published Thursday 31 May 2007 at 17:05 by Tabard

Scourge of the variety stage, writer and performer Michael Kilgarriff vents his spleen on two recent BBC 4 offerings, Marie LLoyd - Queen of the Music Hall and Music Hall Meltdown, the 90-minute show which attempted to recreate an Edwardian music hall.

Writing in the summer issue of The Call Boy, the lively journal of the British Music Hall Society, he describes the Marie Lloyd drama, starring EastEnders’ Jessie Wallace, as having “a feeble, cliche-ridden script, bog-standard characterisations and third-rate production values,” but he goes for the jugular with Music Hall Meltdown: “This dismal offering, of which the BBC should be ashamed, was lazy, careless, amateurish, and so full of infantile crudity as to display indifference, if not contempt, for the viewer. The nadir was reached in a sketch in which Harry Enfield appeared stark naked except for fake genitals displaying a tiny penis and a massive scrotum dangling down almost to his knees.” So you don’t fancy buying the DVDs then, Michael?