Ed McLachlan
‘Isn’t it time they got rid of this old telephone box?’
outspread and legs apart, kept bursting into song, in the street, on the beach and in a slate quarry; anywhere, really. Here was a man turning in full public view into Harry Secombe, who was also known as Neddy Seagoon, though in fairness Ball has yet to start blowing raspberries. The eagerness of manner is exactly like Sir Harry’s, as is the wobbly, strained tenor and sheer love of being loud. Good luck to him, when it comes to reviving Pickwick and If I Ruled the World! The producer was fond of aerial drone shots – you don’t need a helicopter these days. Two things struck me. First, the documentaries were filmed on the only day when it wasn’t raining. Secondly, what a lot of empty Welsh countryside there is. There was another one on A Year in the Beacons, narrated by Dame Siân Phillips, Mrs Peter O’Toole as was, but by then I’d had a gutsful of the Principality. I heard that Gyles Brandreth did a programme about the Brontës. I didn’t
see that, either. But I hope Gyles dressed up in a frock and bonnet, as Valerie Singleton did on Blue Peter years ago, when she went to the Parsonage. Another week, Valerie got into character as St Thérèse of Lisieux. The one many of us are hoping Gyles will soon re-make is the Blue Peter Royal Safari, of 1971, where Valerie had a peep around Kenya with Princess Anne.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE EDINBURGH’S FALSTAFF In the late 1960s, as I waited for the curtain to go up on a matinée performance in Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, I confided to one of the city’s fabled Morningside ladies that I was tempted to move to Edinburgh, so addicted had I become to the city and its festivals. ‘Och, no,’ she counselled, ‘it’s vairy quiet in the winter.’
This year, it was ‘vairy quiet’ in the summer, too. And not before time, some would say. It’s estimated that, in 2019, 4.4 million people arrived in the city to witness 25,000 performers in some 5,000 events. Whatever your point of view, it’s a situation that had become unsustainable. Has 2020-21 provided a welcome firebreak to the expansion, here and elsewhere? I suspect so, though it may also have provided the cue some editors and arts administrators have been seeking to dump online – or simply dump – such old-world inconveniences as printed concert programmes and comprehensive review coverage. Thinly reported, even in Edinburgh, the 2021 International Festival was a largely local affair, much of it performed to limited-capacity audiences in opensided tents. It was the price exacted by the social-distancing rules in force when booking opened in June. Curiously, the reduced capacity remained, despite the fact that Scotland abandoned such measures at the start of the festival’s first full week. Festival director Fergus Linehan cited on Radio 4’s Today programme the need to keep faith with those who had ‘felt safe’ booking under the old two-metre rule. It was an odd excuse, one that denied scores of visitors the chance to relish, say, David McVicar’s theatrically absorbing English-language production of Verdi’s Falstaff, a cherishable one-off with Roland Wood powerful as the disreputable knight and a sublimely sung Nannetta from Gemma Summerfield. Seen in broad daylight, the local audience did, indeed, seem to be as cautious as it was compliant, queuing like supplicants before a communion rail for a dollop of the ubiquitous handsanitising gel before entering open-sided venues in which there was, in fact, nothing to touch: no tickets, programmes or chair arms. They also seemed pretty keen on the masks that remained mandatory in Scotland in enclosed public spaces. Yet, looking round the thinly peopled Festival Theatre as the house lights went down before the third act of Falstaff, I noticed that virtually no one was wearing one. What a strange charade the whole thing has become! The larger of the two concert venues, pitched in the capacious playing fields of one of Edinburgh’s many private schools, worked rather well, with decent sound insulation – though the £18 return taxi fare from the city centre was a bit of a downer. The Royal Scottish National The Oldie October 2021 67
