Blonde Bombshells of 1943

Published Wednesday 14 June 2006 at 16:10 by Andrew Liddle

“What’s Swing?” Duke Ellington replied, “If you gotta ask, you’ll never know!” No one seeing this belter could remain in any doubt.

The leader of a hot dance band, Betty, forcefully played by Elizabeth Marsh, has to find new recruits urgently, to get out tonight’s big broadcast. What she stumbles on amounts to a bunch of innocents. There’s Lily, the ukulele-strumming nun, hammed up delightfully by Claire Storey, oblivious to George Formby’s innuendoes. The splendid Chris Grahamson sings like Sinatra as the draft-dodging drummer, Patrick, who imagines he’ll miss the war by sending back his call-up papers. And Rosie Jenkins’ Miranda, the lady toff from the army, is lovely to behold and riotously out of step with reality, but boy, can she play that trombone.

Karen Paullada is both the present-day narrator at either end of the frame drama and her granny, Elizabeth, the young school girl saxophonist coming of age on a single day. Looking remarkably like an unworldly Claire Trevor - one of Hollywood’s original BBs - and with a fine voice very reminiscent of the young Kaye Starr, she really is a star amongst stars, in this cast of eight hugely talented actor-musicians.

She discovers the joy of jazz and her pulse briefly races to the drummer’s beat before he’s exposed as just a gigolo - but where’s the promised epiphanic feast? If Plater’s characters sing joyously in the swooping close harmonies of the Andrews Sisters, his dialogue is more like Andrews liver salts - briefly effervescent and a little stringent with it. The suspicion remains at the end, when everyone dons blonde wigs and red frocks and gives the performance of their lives on the wireless, it wouldn’t mean a thing if it didn’t have that swing.