A Splendored Performance
This is short, but sweet. Yes, I know I yammer a lot about my fave Harry Secombe, but that’s one of the pleasures of having one’s own website. Besides, since we got to meet once in 1968 when I was a kidling – backstage before a performance of the musical he was starring in, The Four Musketeers -- I feel that qualifies me for Yammer Status.
Also, while there are a lot of audio recordings, there isn’t a lot of video footage of him singing, so finding this here – and in color, from 1981 – was a treat for me to come across. He’s also in great voice here, and singing a song I like, the Oscar-winning best song “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” written by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster. And the last couple of videos I’ve posted of him singing were doing opera, so I thought it best to make clear that that was only an occasional sidelight for him.
I’m not sure what TV show this is from. It doesn’t appear to be one that Sir Harry is the host of, but perhaps someone else’s variety show. What always leaps out to me when I see him sing like this is that one has to remember that his career was not as a singer (though he did record a lot, and did several musicals), but at heart he was not only a comedian, but a clown, who came up from vaudeville. (In fact, you even see a touch of that here, as he makes a little jokey kick before starting. And even a bit of a comic flourish at the end) But then, for all that, he’d stand there and sing – and this is what would come out.
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