A Royal Treat

The 1963 Royal Variety Performance was a remarkable one (especially for me, for a very biased reason).  It’s best-known for featuring the Beatles in an 11-minute set – and I’ll get to posting that later – but for me it’s a special treat for including some of my personal faves.  That includes Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, whose work I love – most notably their West End and Broadway revues, At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat.  This was a particular treat for me since Flanders didn’t particularly like performing on television, so there’s very little video of him.  I’ve posted as much of it as I can find, so it was a joy to not only find this footage…but learn that they were on the same bill as the Beatles!  I’ll get to that video later, too – which includes another major performer, Marlene Dietrich.
 
But it was something else that most-pleased me, which I’ll get to here.  The video of the full event is posted online, but it’s broken into segments.  So, that was a big hurdle, and I didn’t know how much of the show I’d be able to track down.
 
This came about when I was searching for a song from the British musical Half a Sixpence to use in my article about tariffs, a song called “All in the Cause of Economy.”  The show starred Tommy Steele, who was a truly major rock star at the time in the U.K., often with songs written by Lionel Bart, who later went on to write Oliver!  But Steele has said that he always wanted to be in musicals, and a vehicle was written for him, based on the novel Kipps – by of all people, H.G. Wells – with a score by David Heneker.  It was a massive hit, and later come to Broadway with Steele, where it was again a massive it.  And made into a movie, that Steele starred in.  (It was not a massive hit, but did fair.)  My folks saw the musical on a trip to London and brought back the cast album, that I thought was terrific, which was my introduction as a young kid to Tommy Steele.
 
It was actually a notable trip for musicals that my folks took that year.  Because they also saw the musical Pickwick starring Harry Secombe – who readers of these pages know I have long been a major fan of (and even got to meet him backstage of another musical he was in about five years later, The Four Musketeers), which led me to discovering The Goon Show – that he starred on the radio with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, which the members of Monty Python all said they grew up on --  and am a huge lover of the musical, based on Dickens’ novel, with a score by Cyril Ornadel and Leslie Bricusse.  I’ve posted several videos here of Sir Harry, but only one of Pickwick, when the show was on Broadway and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, since I’ve been unable to find any other footage of it.  (A BBC/Time-Life video was made of a trimmed version of the show which aired a few times on local NBC stations around the country, and though I finally tracked down a copy, no videos from it exist online.)
 
Anyway, when searching for that “Economy” song, I came across a video of Tommy Steele and the cast of Half a Sixpence at that 1963 Royal Variety Performance.  I’d seen it before, and even posted it on the site several years back.  But I didn’t see it in full context, and this new video I found had the introduction to the number – in which the emcee mentioned that they had the casts of Half a Sixpence…and Pickwick! 
 
As you might imagine, boy, did that catch my attention.  The problem was that the video was short, and further it was only identified by Half a Sixpence.  When the number ended, though, the sequence from Pickwick began.  I watched anxiously, but with heart-sinking, since there wasn’t much time left in the video, and it was only the “Hell of an Election” chorus number that leads into Harry Secombe’s major hit, “If I Ruled the World.”  (So huge that Tony Bennett had a hit with it in the U.S., and even – among many others --James Brown recorded it, which I’ve posted.)  And as I expected, the video ended after only about 30 seconds of the chorus number.  It was a treat to see – but not the prize.  And a touch wistfully disappointing
 
And so, the search began.  I found a number of standalone videos from the Royal Variety Performance, but none of this.  There was also no single, full video of the event.  There was an edited-down version of the entire evening – I believe for TV -- but it didn’t include anything from Pickwick.  Though it did have Harry Secombe as the host of the broadcast at the beginning.  But the full evening was broken down into separate videos.  The problem was that I didn’t know how many segments there were – or in which one Half a Sixpence and Pickwick might appear. 
 
After a while, though, it became a bit disheartening.  Though at least there was that half-a-minute of the one chorus number, which – when you’ve been looking for any material for decades, is no small thing.  That said, not shockingly to most anyone here, I didn’t give up.  And kept searching.  It eventually became clear that there were four segments.  And I’d found three.  And it stayed at just three.  Until finally…finally…I found all four!  And there among the performances were Half a Sixpence and two songs from Pickwick!  Including Harry Secombe singing “If I Ruled the World.”
 
I believe the phrase is, “O joy!”
 
And here is that Part 4.  (As I said, I’ll get to the Beatles, Flanders & Swann and Marlene Dietrich later.  But for me, this was the treasured find.  And so it gets first position.)  Furthermore, as it happens, these two musicals finished the evening, and lead into the curtain call by the entire cast.  You also don’t have to search for the musicals – the video starts with Tommy Steele and Half a Sixpence.  (The introduction to it is, unfortunately, at the end of the Part 3 video – and in that stand-alone video I’d initially found.)  But stick around to the end for that curtain call, which tops off the find – that’s because, not only is it fun to see everyone return to the stage (the Beatles come on about halfway through), but Harry Secombe serves as sort of a spokesman and makes a nice speech at the end…but what leaps out is an impromptu joke he makes that involves the Beatles, and you can see them laughing at it.
 
So, here then, finally (!) is Tommy Steele and the original cast of Half a Sixpence singing “Flash, Bang Wallop!” in a wedding scene near the end of the musical – followed by Harry Secombe and the original cast of Pickwick singing “Hell of an Election” after which Mr. Pickwick is mistaken for one of the candidates, and pushed to make a speech -- which is "If I Ruled the World.”
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