Oddly enough, I remember my mother telling us (as children) about what she used to listen to on the pre-war BBC radio. She called it “the wireless” and sometimes, so do I too still. But as she was a chronic depressive, life was odd with mother.
Of course, when we were children, we didn’t know that she suffered from depression, and although I suspect that she knew that something was not right, we never did. Yet she never sought any help at all. This was not a good thing for her, but it was worse for us.
Latterly, she had to go into a care home, where unfortunately, she became restive, quarrelsome and unapproachable. In this state, and after plenty of verbal fisticuffs, she hit out at a care worker and the assault caused her to be placed in the care of the authorities. This entailed a social worker and a few visits from the mental health team. They assessed her, and, just before she died, she was brought to a type of reality by chemical means, and during one late autumn morning, died totally sane.
Only my darling sister was to witness the transformation, and it fell to her in a last dreadful meeting, to have to explain to mother what she had completed and achieved in a life where she had been largely unaware of much of it, or at least, absent from many of the implications and consequences of her actions.
Mother’s life as presented to us, was a series of carefully rehearsed anecdotes. One of which was about the BBC radio programme “Bandwaggon”. She told us about the programme’s hosts, Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch who fictionally lived in a fictional flat at the top of the non-fictional BBC Broadcasting House.
She remembered for us their nicknames for each other (“Big” and “Stinker”) but she never told us why these epithets were so appropriate. She also remembered for us the permanently-absent (in all senses of the word) Mrs Bagwash, and her daughter, Nausea. She told us it was funny, and we wondered what made it funny (apart from the silly names), but she couldn’t tell us. We knew better than to ask questions anyway. We had learned that the hard way when we were very young.
Fast forward to 2023 and I was lucky enough to find a complete recording of one episode of Bandwaggon on youtube. I had to listen to it on three or four separate occasions in order to work out the references, and understand the format of the show, as well as some of the jokes. It showed up well for a topical reference comedy from eighty five years before 2024.
The programme in question is one of only two complete recordings to remain in existence, and it dates from 30th September 1939, a Saturday night, and broadcast at 7.45pm on the Home Service – the national broadcasting channel.
The show takes the form of some sketches between Murdoch and Askey, some detailed musical items from Jack Hylton’s Band and the singer Dolly Elsie, a parody song from Arthur Askey, and an original music hall song again, sung by Arthur Askey. A decent feature is the inclusion of Syd Walker, addressing the audience familiarly as “Chums” and talking his way through a sketch set over several days, about how gossip spreads, but done in such a way as to present “the ordinary man in the street to the ordinary man in his own home”.
Some of the sketch “action” is presented as a music hall or theatre sketch might have been, but some of it is in effect, Brechtian, with Askey talking directly to the audience (live in the studio) and the listener at home, and thus, breaking the fourth wall and brooking no disagreement. The listeners are engaged by their collective nickname too – “Playmates”. One character who is always absent but looming in the wings, is “Old Nasty” who was actually Adolf Hitler. This was the beginning of the second world war too, and there wasn’t going to be a lot of fun for quite a long time.
I don’t wonder really that mother couldn’t remember the details of this show. I doubt if she understood the references at all, and I doubt if she understood the nature of the talk by Syd Walker. I don’t think that she could have had any inkling at what was to come, and I don’t think that she would have really understood the lyrics of Rube Bloom’s lovely but plangent song, “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me” nor would she have understood the significance of the heavily symphonic arrangement by Peter Yorke and way it was sung by Dolly Elsie.
Only through the online resources on ancestrydotcodotuk, did I discover that the England and Wales Register 1939 contained all the details of the bulk of the population at that exact time (although there are some notable absentees, even in my own family) but it can hardly be said to be “complete”. The National Registration that is referred to playfully in the early part of the show, was an attempt at identifying people too (“You Are Required by Law to Carry This Card with You at All Times”). I don’t think that my mother was affected by this at all. But her parents were, and although the Register records my grandfather as a “heavy worker”, it fails to record my grandmother’s being obliged to go back into the dyeing trade, and performing heavy work there and records her as performing “unpaid domestic duties”. The snapshot might be true but the bigger picture really does beggar the details.
However, what I did find more affecting, was the ability I now have to partake in the listening experience – or to have been able to listen exactly today as my grandparents and my own mother did, on that one Saturday evening in 1939, when they sat in their newly-bought cottage, listening to tentative satire; a tearful song or two; the comfort of “old jokes” in “Chestnut Corner”; and gentle hints and warnings that people might die, not to mention the coming privations and shortages. It wasn’t really about laughs though, as a lot of the laughter is hollow. This is a recording that captures the end of their optimism and the loss of their hope. Mother was eight and her parents were barely turned forty four.
And I wonder now, what anybody at the time made of the show at all. Over eighty five years since the start of “the duration”, I wonder did they laugh? Did they turn the Artie Shaw arrangement off and declare it strident? What did people in Scotland, or Wales make of it all – especially the Londoncentric nature of the programme in a land that thrives more on its regional differences?
As I age, I think that they probably didn’t laugh much at all. I suspect that the metropolitan studio audience was sympathetic and laughed more easily. But the workers who would endure six years of hard labour and more than ten years of rationing might not have been so amused. The music anyway strikes a note of perturbation and even the deus ex machina endings of some of the sketches were going to turn out to be as nothing compared to the deus ex machina that would arrive from the sky, and quite soon.
All in all from a contemporary point of listening, a good experience, and a show that stands up even today, even if most of the music is written in sobs.
But a cross-generational experience unshared in the family.
It wasn’t ever going to be possible for that to happen.
And not in the least for the reason that the recording was unavailable.
voxturturis 