The Stage

Radio review - Light programme

Published Monday 8 December 2008 at 14:45 by Nick Smurthwaite

On the eve of the West End opening of Oliver! it was salutary to remember the man who made it happen in Talking About Lionel. Bart’s rags to riches to rags again story is almost worthy of a musical itself, such is its catalogue of histrionic excess.

Though he began as a writer of pop songs for Tommy Steele (Rock with the Caveman) and Cliff Richard (Living Doll) in the fifties, Bart’s heart was always in musical theatre. He got off to a good start with the music and lyrics for Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be in 1959, then hit the jackpot with Oliver! the following year.

Despite earning £50,000 a week in the early sixties, Bart was bankrupt by the end of the decade. His spending and generosity made Elton John look stingy. His friend Miriam Karlin recalled one game of poker where he paid out £30,000 in losses at the end of the evening.

After the disastrous Twang! which closed after two weeks, he ended up in a small flat over an off-licence in Acton, west London, having sold off most of his rights to Oliver! to pay off his debts. Ed Wilson, director of the National Youth Theatre, helped rehabilitate his reputation in the eighties, then Cameron Mackintosh cut him a share of the profits of his blockbusting revival of Oliver! in 1994, ensuring Bart’s solvency until he died in 1999.

Famous for his professional intensity, the actor Paul Rhys proved an interesting choice for Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions. In affable mood, Rhys revealed that when he was filming Vincent and Theo for Robert Altman he drifted around Paris with Ravel blaring out on his Walkman, between takes presumably. Beethoven, Schubert and Puccini also loomed large, as did early David Bowie, a massive influence on the younger Rhys. Brought up in working-class Wales, Rhys said he had since overcome his adolescent distaste for Welsh male voice choirs, proving it by including the Treorchy Choir with a transcendent All Through the Night.

Elaine Paige got the best out of Bette Midler on her Sunday show, probably because they like and respect each other in equal measure. Paige was happy to sit back and chortle while Her Divinity rattled off a succession of career anecdotes, including the time when Mae West - “the meanest woman in showbiz” - wrote her a note ordering her to “decease and desist” from including one of her songs in a less than flattering sketch.

A new panel game, Act Your Age, ostensibly pitting comics from different generations against each other, sounded like a poor man’s Mock the Week, with the six contestants, including Lucy Porter, Stephen K Amos and Barry Cryer, vying to come up with the funniest jokes or anecdotes. It wouldn’t have mattered that chairman Simon Mayo’s scoring was fashionably arbitrary if he’d made a wittier contribution, or helped the contestants out when they were floundering. Any panel game that is reduced to knock-knock jokes in its first outing is going to struggle to find an audience.

No such problems afflicted R4’s Listen Against whose scripted flights of lunacy recalled the best of The Day Today. For the first time, a Satanist occupied the Today Programme’s Thought for the Day slot, recalling the time he sacrificed a goat and drank its blood (“That should give us all something to think about,” he concluded), while Compton Pauncefoot, controller of BBC Animal Entertainment, was questioned about offensive messages left on John Cleese’s messaging service by the stars of Radio 2’s The Monkey and the Parrot Show. He told presenter Alice Arnold: “As a result of this outrage, Radio 2 is to be bulldozed to the ground and in its place we’re creating a spring meadow of quiet contemplation.”

DETAILS

Talking About Lionel - R4, Saturday, December 6

Private Passions - Paul Rhys - R3, Sunday, November 30

Elaine Paige on Sunday - R2, Sunday, November 30

Act Your Age - R4, Thursday, November 27

Listen Against - R4, Tuesday, December 2