Monday 7 July 2014

ANY OLD BRIAN?

Back in 1972, my 23-year-old younger self put on a 'One-Man Show'as a fund-raiser for Christ Church, Chislehurst., aided and abetted by my best friend, Ash, and the church organist on the pianoforte...

On the bill were monologues, songs, sketches and skits and featured my then extensive repertoire of vocal impersonations advertised as being subject to change "as the fancy takes me or the voice leaves me"!

The programme had cover-art (I use the word 'art' loosely) featuring some of those whose voices I borrowed. One or two of the caricatures owe something to the work of artists I hugely admired – among them Hirschfeld and Trog – others were (as Bert says in Mary Poppins) "all me own work from me own memory..."

I wonder how many of my subjects you can identify, although you probably have to have been born in Britain and been around in the '60s and '70s to get them all...

Feel free to guess – and I'll reveal the answers later...





3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm. Robert Morley? Katherine Hepburn? Peter Cook as E. L. Wisty? David Frost? Harry Corbett? Joyce Grenfell? Brian from The Magic Roundabout? As for the others, I haven't the foggiest - they must have been on the telly after my bedtime!

Michael Flowers said...

The one between Tony Hancock & Robert Morley could be Rex Harrison. The first one on the right hand grouping may be Frankie Howerd. The old monk may be someone from All Gas & Gaiters, which is before my time - goggling results in William Mervyn, who was the nice old gentleman from the Railway Children?

Brian Sibley said...

Well done, between you both, you've pretty much got there!

Left to right: Boris Karloff (as Frankenstein's Monster), Brian the Snail (from a political skit I did based on 'The Magic Roundabout'), Tony Hancock (another sketch where he meets, for some reason now forgotten, Sooty!), Rex Harrison (as Henry Higgins), Katherine Hepburn, Frankie Howerd, Peter Cook (as identified above), Joyce Grenfell and between her and David Frost, the unidentified character – writer-and-TV-chat-show-host-turned-Christian-apologist, Malcolm Muggeridge.