Download or read book The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick written by Patrick Newley and published by . This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In real life, Mrs Shufflewick was the glorious creation of Rex Jameson, a music hall great and one of radio and TV's most original and brilliant comics. Shy, difficult, bisexual and alcoholic, his private and public life often reached spectacular highs and appalling lows. In this candid and incisive biography, Patrick Newley, who managed Jameson's later career, examines the life of the man who was lionised by comedians such as Bob Monkhouse, Barry Cryer, Danny La Rue and Barry Humphries. 'Rex was a comic genius, ' said Roy Hudd. 'Even in his cups he was gloriously funny.' The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick pays tribute to Jameson's talent
Download or read book Drag written by Jacob Bloomfield and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A must-read for anyone interested in the history of drag performance.”—Publishers Weekly A rich and provocative history of drag's importance in modern British culture. Drag: A British History is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture—drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage.
Download or read book Old Time Variety written by Richard Anthony Baker and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An illustrated history of good old-fashioned entertainment from names like Tessie O’Shea, George Formby, and the early days of Bruce Forsyth.” —Yours As one of the richest sources of diversion for the people of Britain between the end of the First World War and the 1960s, the variety theater emerged from the embers of music hall, a vulgar and rambunctious entertainment that had held the working classes in thrall since the 1840s. Music hall bosses decided they would do better business if a man going to theaters on his own could take his wife and children with him, knowing they would see or hear nothing that would scandalize them. So variety, a gentler, less red-blooded entertainment was gradually established. At the top of the profession were Gracie Fields, a peerless singer and comedienne, and Max Miller, a comic who was renowned for being risqué, but who, in fact, never cracked a dirty joke. They were supported by acts that matched the word variety: ventriloquists, drag artists, animal acts, acrobats, jugglers, magicians and many more. But the variety theater was constantly under threat, first from revue, then radio, the cinema, girlie shows, the birth of rock ’n’ roll and finally television. By the end of the 1950s, the variety business seemed to have given up, but the recent and extraordinary popularity of talent shows on television has proved the public appetite is still there. Variety could be about to start all over again. “A priceless record of the people who entertained several generations between the wars and, for a brief time, after WWII . . . thoroughly entertaining.” —Books Monthly
Download or read book Marie Lloyd Music Hall written by Daniel Farson and published by London : T. Stacey. This book was released on 1972 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Forgotten Heroes of Comedy written by Robert Ross and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this long overdue and affectionate salute, celebrated comedy historian Robert Ross pays tribute to some of the finest, funniest and most fascinating names in comedy from both sides of the Atlantic. Monty Python’s Terry Jones wrote the foreword. With the passionate input of such comics as Tim Brooke-Taylor, Hattie Hayridge, Roy Hudd, Michael Palin, Ross Noble, Chris Addison and Bernard Cribbins, Ross honours these legends of humor who, for a variety of reasons, didn't quite reach the heady heights of stardom or, once they had, couldn't cope with the pressures. Whether it is a favorite from the distant smoke- and ale-stained world of the Music Hall like the great George Robey, or the downbeat poetry of Hovis Presley, who dropped disenchanted bombs on the late 1990s, Forgotten Heroes of Comedy will finally elevate them to the Hall of Fame where they belong. Forgotten, no longer. UK Joe Baker UK Eric Barker UK Alfie Bass UK Michael Bates India (to English parents) David Battley UK Michael Bentine UK Harold Berens UK Wilie Best USA Alec Bregonzi UK Michael Ward UK Douglas Byng UK Marti Caine UK Esma Cannon Australia (but moved to UK) Patrick Cargill UK Jimmy Clitheroe UK Danny Ross UK Billy Dainty UK Janet Davies UK Florence Desmond UK Jerry Desmonde UK Eddie Leslie UK Maidie Dickson UK Charlie Drake UK Jimmy Edwards UK Gus Elen UK Ray Ellington UK Dick Emery UK Pierre Etaix France Barry Evans UK Mario Fabrizi UK Doug Fisher UK Ronald Frankau UK Leslie Fuller UK Dustin Gee UK Peter Glaze UK Tommy Godfrey UK Harry Locke UK Ken Goodwin UK Bernard Gorcey Russia (died USA) Bert Gordon USA Monsewer' Eddie Gray UK Raymond Griffith USA Deryck Guyler UK Brian Hall UK Lloyd Hamilton USA Arthur Haynes UK Richard Hearne UK Dickie Henderson UK Gerard Hoffnung Germany (died UK) Shemp Howard USA Nat Jackley UK Rex Jameson UK Spike Jones USA John Junkin UK Dave King UK Roy Kinnear UK Dennis Kirkland UK Patsy Knox USA Debbie Linden UK Hugh Lloyd UK Malcolm McFee UK Moore Marriott UK Graham Moffatt UK Ray Martine UK Zeppo Marx USA Glenn Melvyn UK Eric Merriman UK Christopher Mitchell UK Albert Modley UK Robert Moreton UK Gladys Morgan UK Lily Morris UK Richard Murdoch UK Tom E. Murray USA David Nixon UK Larry Noble UK Ole Olsen USA Chic Johnson USA Ken Platt UK Sandy Powell UK Vince Powell UK Hovis Presley UK Cardew Robinson UK Joe E. Ross USA Patsy Rowlands UK Derek Roy UK Derek Royle UK Leslie Sarony UK Larry Semon USA Ronald Shiner UK Johnnie Silver USA Dennis Spicer UK Larry Stephens UK Jake Thackray UK Thelma Todd USA Jack Train UK Karl Valentin Germany Liesl Karlstadt Germany Norman Vaughan UK Tom Walls UK Ralph Lynn UK Elsie and Doris Waters UK Rita Webb UK John Wells UK George and Kenneth Western UK Gordon Wharmby UK Bert Wheeler USA Robert Woolsey USA Albert Whelan Australia (died UK) Robb Wilton UK Mike and Bernie Winters UK Georgie Wood UK Dolly Harmer UK Harry Worth UK Mario Zampi Italy (died UK)
Download or read book The Best Burlesque Sketches written by Ralph G. Allen and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1995 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Applause Books). Here is the first-ever collection of classic comic sketches from the bawdy, rowdy world of our slum music halls! Habitues of Burlesque (and sons of habitues) will revel in the boisterous stock scenes and blackouts of this uniquely American form of popular entertainment. Features a foreword by Dick Martin.
Download or read book Beyond a Joke written by Bruce Dessau and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond a Joke is a celebration of comedy - one of the modern world's most dominant and compelling art forms - but it is also the story of comedy's dark side, homing in on the scandals that have surrounded some of light entertainment's biggest stars, and telling it as it is, featuring insight from one who was there at the time. While Beyond a Joke explores the extremes of this world it also addresses another question. Are comedians naturally dysfunctional, or does the stress and pressure of the job make them dysfunctional? Ruby Wax once told the author that she had builders in her house who were just as emotionally unstable as most stand-up comedians she had worked with. But they don't want to go on stage and plead with an audience to love them. Bruce Dessau is the only person who could write this book. From Russell Brand slashing his chest onstage to Jo Brand trashing a friend's car on the motorway, he has heard it all. Bruce Dessau knows where the bodies are buried.
Download or read book Decca Group Records Tapes Main Catalogue written by Decca Record Company and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Life s A Drag written by Peter Underwood and published by Peter Underwood. This book was released on 1974 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While it is true that there have been forms of drag, both private and public, since earliest times, as a form of modern entertainment drag in recent years has developed into a phenomenon which is now a world-wide multi-million pound entertainment industry in itself. This penetrating study, giving a depth background of the world drag scene is, however, primarily a book about one drag artist - the hugely-successful Danny La Rue, himself a veritable Industry of Drag and unquestionably the highest-paid performer of his type in the world. Strangely, no one has previously written a book about Danny la Rue, probably because he is a very private person despite his huge public persona. To write this work, Peter Underwood, the well-established author of the highly-successful Boris Karloff biography and other books, researched widely and interviewed nearly seventy people close to the drag star - people who have worked with Danny la Rue both on and off stage over many years. The result is this absorbing story of a unique star which intimately surveys the life and work of the Irish Danny la Rue. He started on the stage in a village hall, later joined the Navy at 17 and became in turn a window dresser, chorus boy and then left the stage to work in a shop, returning to the theatre and the chorus to become a dancer and drag artist in an all-male show (which he left because he couldn't stand it). He was eventually spotted in a small revue at London's Irving Theatre and offered his big chance in cabaret at Bond Street's Churchill Club. So began the real success story of the fabulous Danny la Rue - a succession of successes: His own exclusive night club, recordings, countless pantomime hit shows, two Royal Command Performances, his first film, his three homes, three cars, greyhounds and racehorses, his hugely successful summer seasons, television appearances and the acclamation by the Variety Club of Great Britain as 'Show Business Personality of The Year'. Surrounding the story of the inimitable Danny la Rue is a vivid examination of the Drag Scene which has projected Danny's success - how it has become a major entertainment phenomenon in top theatres, on TV, films and in pubs and clubs throughout the world. Author Underwood relevantly appraises the lure of drag, the pleasures and the pain, the hard work, the dangers and the impact of what is daily becoming an ever-growing phenomenon of the twentieth century's Permissive Age.
Download or read book Twelve o clock by the author of Grandmother s money written by Frederick William Robinson and published by . This book was released on 1861 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Winchester to This written by Willie Donaldson and published by Peter Owen Publishers. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Donaldson reveals all in a frank and often scurrilous memoir where past and present collide in a hilarious vision of his extraordinary life. The author charts his course from his public school childhood, through production of the celebrated 1960s satire Beyond the Fringe, a riotous lifestyle in the company of pop stars, actors, models, and sundry celebs—sometimes in a brothel in which he lived for a time in Chelsea—literary success and on into his drug-fuelled slide into bankruptcy and lost love in the alleged present. Many will know Willie Donaldson and his friends behaving badly from his long-time column in the Independent. He writes in the tradition of Nabokov's "unreliable narrator," with his insightful contemplations on the memoir's often-scandalous indiscretions about—to list just a few—page-three girls, the aristocracy, former girlfriends Sarah Miles and Carly Simon, Peter Cook, Kenneth Tynan, drug dealers, and the criminal fraternity—even the rightful King of Spain. Moralist as well as mischief-maker, Donaldson writes with candor, wit, and style.
Download or read book Jack Carter s Law written by Ted Lewis and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an Introduction by Max Allan Collins The author of Get Carter returns to his greatest invention, a smooth-operating hardcase named Jack Carter, who is about to burn a city down in order to silence an informant London. The late 1960s. It's Christmastime and Jack Carter is the top man in a crime syndicate headed by two brothers, Gerald and Les Fletcher. He’s also a worried man. The fact that he’s sleeping with Gerald’s wife, Audrey, and that they plan on someday running away together with a lot of the brothers’ money, doesn’t have Jack concerned. Instead it’s an informant—one of his own men—that has him losing sleep. The grass has enough knowledge about the firm to not only bring down Gerald and Les but Jack as well. Jack doesn’t like his name in the mouth of that sort. In Jack Carter’s Law Ted Lewis returned to the character that launched his career and once again delivered a hardboiled masterpiece. Jack Carter is the ideal tour guide to a bygone London underworld. In his quest to dismantle the opposition, he peels back the veneer of English society and offers a hard look at a gritty world of pool halls, strip clubs and the red lights of Soho nightlife.
Download or read book With Hawks and Angels written by Joel Lafayette Fletcher III and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: the swampy, laissez-faire South where he was born, the red clay hills and piney woods of northern Louisiana where his relatives lived, and exotic New Orleans, where he was educated. Author Joel Lafayette Fletcher III examines his childhood on the campus of what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where his father, Joel Lafayette Fletcher Jr., was president for twenty-five years, to his time as a student at Tulane. The book follows Fletcher through his service as a naval officer—when he began to admit to himself, accept, and explore who he really was—to his life in Europe and, eventually, Virginia where he now resides. With Hawks and Angels intimately explores the life of a young man growing up in the racially segregated Deep South while coming to terms with being gay at a time when being out was not socially acceptable. Based on his personal journals and recollections and filled with the unique characters he met along the way, With Hawks and Angels is the culmination of writing that, for Fletcher, was a way of holding onto an important part of his true self that for many years he felt compelled to hide.
Download or read book John Osborne written by John Heilpern and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-03-04 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, shocked and transformed British theater in the 1950s with his play Look Back in Anger. This startling biography–the first to draw on the secret notebooks in which he recorded his anguish and depression–reveals the notorious rebel in all his heartrending complexity. Through a working-class childhood and five marriages, Osborne led a tumultuous life. An impossible father, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. His last written words were "I have sinned." Theater critic John Heilpern’s detailed portrait, including interviews with Osborne's daughter, scores of friends and enemies, and his alleged male lover, shows us a contradictory genius–an ogre with charm, a radical who hated change, and above all, a defiant individualist.
Download or read book Fabulosa written by Paul Baker and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year “Richly evocative and entertaining.”—Guardian “An essential book for anyone who wants to Polari bona!”—Attitude “Exuberant, richly detailed. . . . A delightful read.”—Tatler Polari is a language that was used chiefly by gay men in the first half of the twentieth century. It offered its speakers a degree of public camouflage and a means of identification. Its colorful roots are varied—from Cant to Lingua Franca to dancers’ slang—and in the mid-1960s it was thrust into the limelight by the characters Julian and Sandy, voiced by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, on the BBC radio show Round the Horne (“Oh hello Mr Horne, how bona to vada your dolly old eek!”). Paul Baker recounts the story of Polari with skill, humor, and tenderness. He traces its historical origins and describes its linguistic nuts and bolts, explores the ways and the environments in which it was spoken, explains the reasons for its decline, and tells of its unlikely reemergence in the twenty-first century. With a cast of drag queens and sailors, Dilly boys and macho clones, Fabulosa! is an essential document of recent history—a fascinating and fantastically readable account of this funny, filthy, and ingenious language.
Download or read book A Fart in a Colander written by Roy Hudd and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Fart in a Colander brings together some wonderful stories from Roy Hudd's life, and sparkles with the fun and laughter Roy has brought to millions of people throughout his career.
Download or read book Getting The Joke written by Oliver Double and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the art of stand-up comedy, its constituent parts and how they work Considering stand-up comedy to be an art-form deserving greater attention and analysis, Getting the Joke provides an exploration of the work of the stand-up comedian. Beginning with a brief history of the art form, the book goes on to examine the key elements, such as the comedian's stage persona, their material and how this is generated, the art of performance, their relationship to and interaction with the audience, and the development of stand-up skills. The book draws on interviews with many of the leading stand-up comedians, including Jo Brand, Alexei Sayle, Ross Noble and Rhona Cameron, and contains detailed analysis of examples from both the British and American markets. Aimed at fans of stand-up and aspiring comedians alike, Getting the Joke is the first book of its kind to offer an accessible and engaging analysis of the art of stand-up comedy. By the author of Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian - 'a fantastic book for anyone who's got any interest in stand-up comedy' (Mark Lamarr)
