Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 19

In the course of about an hour onstage at the Royal Albert Hall in the early nineties, Eltham-born nonagenarian Bob Hope tells approximately twelve jokes. A shorter version of one of them (‘Me, George Burns and a couple of older fellas, we get together every Saturday night and try to get in touch with the living’) will turn up a decade or so later in the course of the first single to be taken from Robbie Williams’s fourth solo album Escapology, but that is not the end of the elder Bob’s contribution to modern show business.

Learning lines was never a priority for this godfather of the autocue (‘What comedian’, Hope is once reported to have asked, ‘is going to give up playing golf for a script?’) and as befits a man who hit puberty before the Russian revolution, most of his material on this occasion has to be fed to him by his piano player. But when he does ‘It’s Delovely’, with his long-suffering wife Dolores singing the first word of each line, there is a flash of that effortless mid-song repartee that once made him and Bing Crosby the coolest men in the world.

Bob Hope was always older than he had a right to be – playing the romantic lead with Natalie Wood and Eva Marie Saint when he should have been their dad – but his audience is younger than anyone would have dreamed. Some are here to see Britain’s own old-fashioned song-and-dance funnyman Brian Conley, who does a lovely turn from Me and My Girl, but then falls victim to a heckler of rare acuity. When Brian asks the audience to suggest impressions for him to do, a mighty voice booms down from the balcony with the following crushing proposal: ‘a comedian’.

Most of the people, however, have come to pay tribute to a pioneer postmodernist, perhaps sensing that without Bob Hope’s Road to…movies (and Son of Paleface), there would have been no Bob Monkhouse and maybe no Farrelly Brothers. Hope’s short, sprightly bursts of stand-up (and sometimes sit-down) comedy are punctuated with long film-clip compilations of past career highlights, projected on to a large screen above the heads of the New Squadronaires Orchestra. His commentary on these is recorded, not live, so there is a weird reality lapse where the real Hope rasp fades into the taped Hope rasp.