Life in Solitary: Is There Going to Be an Orgy?

Published on: 2 Oct, 2020
Updated on: 4 Oct, 2020

Tony Edwards

The Lockdown Diary of Tony Edwards

Seen on a T-Shirt

“When this pandemic is over, I still want some of you to stay away from me.”

But please do read on – from a safe distance…

Testing Times

If it’s true there’s been an increase in cases of Covid 19 because there’s been an increase in testing, does it mean that if more people took IQ tests, there would be a similar increase in idiots? [It’s in the post. Ed]

Dame Diana Rigg in the 1960s. Photo – flickr

Star Struck

As the world said goodbye to Dame Diana Rigg earlier this month I was reminded of a time when she was a near neighbour, living for a while in a flat opposite mine in Notting Hill.

My bachelor mates regularly found an excuse to drop by and hang around on my elegant, Edwardian front steps in Elgin Crescent in the hope of catching a glimpse of ‘The Avengers’ star getting in or out of a taxi.

In today’s ‘woke’ world it would probably qualify as stalking, or even a hate crime. Back then, it was simply known as being star struck.

Man’s Best Friend in Fashion

London’s haute couture fashion cat-walks were abandoned last week during the first-ever ‘lock-down’ London Fashion Week when the cream of Britain’s young fashion designers did their best to compensate by coming up with zany ideas to grab the attention of the world’s fashion editors. I know exactly how they felt having once been handed the job of publicising what was, at the time, Britain’s largest men’s tailoring chain. With an incredible 600 branches, Montague Burton sold its suits to nearly 25 per cent of the male population but, regrettably, their styles were not the stuff of newspaper headlines.

Man & Dog Show

An innovative idea was badly needed to add a bit of ‘picture power’ to attract a potentially disinterested press. Off-the-wall publicity schemes hadn’t really been ‘invented’ back in 1964 so while my plan to stage a men’s fashion show at London’s Café Royal raised no eyebrows, the idea of twenty pedigree dogs accompanying a dozen male models down the catwalk raised Burton’s corporate blood pressure to dangerous levels.

The board never quite warmed to the idea but, after a few meetings at their Leeds HQ, ‘One Man & His Dog’ was finally given the OK and dogs took to the catwalk in a blaze of international publicity and an avalanche of congratulatory pats on well-suited backs.

I’m pleased to say there were no doggy ‘accidents’ or fights but we did hit a minor canine problem on the day. Persuading a very large St Bernard dog to leave the stage after his debut stroll down the catwalk proved an impossible task so he lolled around, hogging the limelight as the undoubted, but unintended, star of the show.

Carnaby Kings

“Lord John” and the “pop art” Carnaby Street shop front.

The 1960s also saw an East End market trader from Petticoat Lane open a menswear shop with a difference, up-west, in Carnaby Street. His name was Warren Gold, one of a new breed of shop-keeper ‘showmen’, who quickly morphed into ‘Lord John’ and became one of the founder retailers in the world-famous street.

His customers included The Rolling Stone, The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks, the Small Faces and many American bands of the era, all drawn there by the madcap, international publicity generated by Press-Link, a PR company I’d set-up with a fellow journalist to promote what eventually became known as ‘Swinging London’.

We made sure the first ‘Lord John’ shop, at 43 Carnaby Street, stood out from the rest when we called in ‘pop art’ design trio Doug Binder, Dudley Edwards, and David Vaughan to daub a psychedelic design across the front of the premises, making it an iconic London landmark of the ‘Swinging Sixties’.

The picture here is from a poster of the entire street we produced while an on-going PR battle raged over who was the rightful ‘King of Carnaby Street’ – ‘Lord John’ or John Stephen, the Glasgow-born fashion entrepreneur who’d started it all a few years earlier.

The mock conflict was played out in front of a media audience and someone even penned the musical ‘McCluskey & Goldstein’ which chronicled the Carnaby wars. The show never quite made it to the stage but the battle for the crown didn’t matter to me as I later PR’d John Stephen too – along with Sid Brent’s ‘Take 6’ chain and Irvine Sellar’s ‘Mates’ shops. You may be interested to know that Irvine Sellar later became the developer behind London’s Shard building.

WANTED – An Arm and a Leg

Clown marionette – work in progress.

The kid down the road and I were about ten years old when we carved the heads for our first wooden marionettes. It was a major leap forward from our previous papier-mache glove puppets and inspired us to set-up a puppet theatre in his dad’s garden shed – after we’d dumped all his dad’s gardening equipment in a heap behind the coal bunker which doubled as our ‘head office’.

Albert and Violet, his mum and dad, seemed unconcerned and said nothing so our Saturday morning puppet shows, for up to six local kids at a time, went ahead for most of the school holidays, without parent protest. The shows netted us an untaxed income of 2/6d or half a crown (that’s 12½p to younger readers) most weeks – sometimes more if our home-made lemonade powder drinks were in demand at a penny a go – and kept us all occupied during those never-ending summer days.

Fast forward the best part of a lifetime and I’m still fascinated by puppets and puppeteering so was reminded of our garden shed theatre when I read that ‘Spitting Image’ was making a welcome return to our TV screens tomorrow (October 3), twenty-four years after the last series.

The cast will include Dominic Cummings, the Donald, Harry and Meghan, Greta Thunberg and Boris. It also reminded me that I’ve yet to finish a marionette of a clown I started carving a very long time ago, when I found myself twiddling my thumbs during another of life’s unexpected ‘pauses’. I still need to make his upper arms, legs and feet so, with the new virus restrictions keeping me relatively close to home for a while, this will be a good opportunity to, finally, get him strung-up and mobile.

The Comedy Duo that Never Was

Ern & Norm or “Wisdom & Wise’, the comedy duo that never was.

There’s a unique and very special photograph hanging on my study wall. It’s a black and white shot of two famous comedians who were never pictured together either before or since I snapped them in the Embankment Gardens, outside London’s Savoy Hotel, one sunny September morning. And there’s a story to go with it. After Eric Morecambe’s sad and sudden passing, I’d asked Ernie Wise if he’d ever consider working with a new partner. Ernie, who was by then staring in Dickens’ ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ at the Savoy Theatre, said it sounded like a potentially good idea. I put the same question to Norman Wisdom who seemed relatively enthusiastic and said he’d give it some serious thought.

But, despite the initial enthusiasm, the comedy duo ‘Wisdom & Wise’ wasn’t to be and, sadly, all that remains of the idea is the photograph on my study wall. I still think they’d have made a truly great double act – with the right scriptwriter.

The Pandemic ‘Push Off’

Have you noticed how many TV news interviews are cut short these days by the ‘Pandemic Push-Off’? That’s when the interviewer asks a question but doesn’t have time for the answer. It usually goes a bit like this.

Interviewer: So, Eric, what was it like climbing backwards up Mount Everest, wearing a deep-sea diving suit and carrying a life-size replica of ‘Dumbo’ the elephant on your back, while juggling three pineapples and a cantaloupe melon, for charity?

Eric: Well, Matthew, it was really quite daunting. I remember thinking I was well and truly done for when I suddenly lost my footing and…

Interviewer: Sorry, Eric but we’re out of time. I’m afraid we’ll have to cut you short there as we go over to Carol for an update on what the weather has in store for us today.

Didn’t happen quite so often before the daily avalanche of repetitive news that typifies the Covid 19 pandemic.

The UNI-Farcity Fiasco

The daughter of a friend left her Cheltenham home last week to check-in at Leeds University, 170 miles away, only to discover that – like so many other students – her tuition will be almost entirely on-line, courtesy of Zoom etc.

She’s sharing a house with 12 other students and paying a substantial rent for the privilege when she might just as well have stayed at home. There is also the possibility that if Covid infection rates continue to soar, she and her fellow students will not be allowed to return home for Christmas.

All in all, this surely ranks as one of the craziest, cock-eyed, farces of the pandemic but I doubt that our internationally-revered seats of learning will be the losers here.

Thought for the Day

The Rule of Six works OK for the ‘Three Musketeers’, the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ and Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ but could mean a £10k fine for the ‘Magnificent Seven’. Altogether – Dah Daaah, Da Da, Dah Daaah………

Cheers

Time for a large ‘Quarantini’ – one part Johnnie Walker, one part Chivas Regal and one part Glenlivet – with a Ballantines chaser.

Just Checking

When the great plague of London finally ended in the mid-1660s, they celebrated with days of drink-fuelled orgies. Does anyone know if anything like that is being planned this time?

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