'The Reluctant Juggler', The Edwardians (BBC Two, 26 January 1972)

The first time I watched ‘The Reluctant Juggler’, I was rather impatient to get through it quickly, and may even have – gasp! – fast-forwarded some of it. Plater contributed the episode to an eight-part dramatic anthology series called The Edwardians (1972-73), each episode focussing on figures of historical importance from the Edwardian era, including the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, David Lloyd George and Robert Baden-Powell.

Georgia Brown as Marie Lloyd

Plater’s episode takes place almost entirely in the course of a single night’s performance at a London music hall. We’re on the eve of what is known today as the ‘music hall strike of 1907’ (no, me neither) when artistes and employees walked out of London’s theatres for a fortnight, in dispute with their proprietors over pay and conditions. The reluctant juggler of Plater’s drama, who goes under the stage name The Great Alfredo, considers himself too precarious in his work to join the upcoming boycott, not least because he has a wife and kids to support, and there’s not much work in his native Sheffield other than coal-mining. So his fellow performers take turns to persuade him to join their cause.

Jo Kendall as Vesta Victoria

In his introduction to the show when it aired on PBS’s ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ strand in 1974, Alistair Cooke said that the juggler character (played by Jack Douglas) was ‘real but obscure’, but I get the impression he’s fictitious. However, the other performers are real-life figures: Gus Elen (George Sewell), Charles Coburn (Peter Pratt), Vesta Victoria (Jo Kendall), George Formby Sr (Gerald Moon) and arguably the most famous of them all, Marie Lloyd (Georgia Brown). The perspective shifts constantly between the on-stage performances on this particular night’s bill, and the conversations taking place in the dressing rooms and backstage areas.

On my slightly unengaged first watch of the episode, I quickly cottoned on to Plater’s device of juxtaposing a series of reasonably well-known music-hall singers and songs with pleas for collective industrial action – and reckoned I could avoid a bit of hectoring with some judicious double-speed viewing.

But then I decided to look into the scheduling of the programme, and something interesting occurred to me. The Edwardians was broadcast on BBC2 on Tuesdays between 28 November 1972 and 9 January 1973. ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ was shown as the sixth episode on the Tuesday that happened to be Boxing Day. Given that the series consisted of standalone episodes that could be run in any order, it’s plausible that a deliberate decision was made to schedule Plater’s episode during the festive period (although I doubt that Plater would have known this at the writing stage).

What else was showing on the three UK channels that night? Just as ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ was getting started at 9.55pm, on BBC1 viewers were being offered a Shirley Bassey special, whilst ITV was mid-way through The Val Doonican Show, with guests including Georgie Fame, Alan Price and Charlie Drake. Earlier that evening, BBC1 had kept things fairly upbeat with The Last Goon Show of All and a Christmas special of the sitcom Til Death Us Do Part – even though the latter begins with an oddly unsettling sequence in which Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) goes out to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and is spooked by seeing the show’s star Paul Nicholas being crucified on stage; Garnett then squares up to Nicholas when he meets him in the pub afterwards (you can watch it here). Meanwhile, on BBC2, ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ sat between a documentary about an Alpine sky party, and a compilation edition of The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Jack Douglas as the Great Alfredo

The overall flavour of Boxing Day evening 1972 TV was clearly celebrity-oriented light entertainment with a nostalgic bent, and ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ certainly delivers some of that. The scenes of musical performance, delivered on-stage in a real theatre to an warm audience of extras in period costume, are very close in spirit to what BBC1 viewers would have seen the previous night on The Good Old Days (1953-83). On Christmas Day night at 11pm, the channel ran an anniversary special celebrating 150 episodes – and almost twenty years – of the long-running music-hall nostalgia show. Filmed at the Leeds City Varieties, The Good Old Days tried to evoke the atmosphere of a music hall entertainment from the Victorian/Edwardian era (you can watch a typical 1972 example here). Max Miller may have died in 1963, but The Good Old Days was evidence of a continuing interest in variety/music-hall culture, alongside the undiminishing appeal of the associated Players' Theatre in London, where audiences could see ersatz period recreations.

About a third of the 75-minute running time of ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ consists of the kind of musical impersonation that would have appealed to viewers who appreciated the formulaic reassurance of The Good Old Days. Plater also teases us with early hints that we’ll eventually be getting an appearance from arguably the most famous performer of them all, Marie Lloyd. Whilst many of the initial musical numbers in the episode are excerpted or interrupted with back-stage dialogue, viewers that stay the course are rewarded with a bravura, uninterrupted sequence of Georgia Brown stealing the show. In the story, it’s Lloyd who eventually persuades the ‘misery-guts’ juggler to see the light of day and join the strike, by turning the full beam of her charisma on him backstage, and the episode ends a fortnight later with Lloyd and her colleagues toasting the success of their walkout.

I wouldn’t go as far as deducing that ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ was a conscious subversion of televisual light entertainment tropes, but its scheduling during the Christmas period, among other festival treats and baubles, draws our attention to its deconstructive energy. For a start, there’s the tension between the pleasures of the musical performances and the back-stage conversations where the artistes contemplate the commodification and exploitation of their labour. At one point, the theatre boss tells the singer Charles Coborn that going on strike is pointless, given the nature of their work: ‘these places aren’t factories or shipyards’. Coborn responds by telling him: ‘don’t believe what you see on the stage. Enjoy it. Make your living by it, if you like. But don’t believe it. That’s fairyland’.

Plater’s script conveys the repetitious, wearying grind experienced by the likes of the juggler character, dashing from theatre to theatre across town and country. The audience we see in 'The Reluctant Juggler' are also more unruly and interactive than those in the episodes of The Good Old Days, at least in the handful of episodes I've seen. They boo and harangue the juggler, don't hold back on heckling the singers, and leave the theatre noisily and (some of them) drunkenly.

At the same time, I think Plater would have bristled at this reading of ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ as a kind of trolling of its likely audience: whether the Good Old Days viewers choking on the programme’s blatantly pro-union stance, or those more sympathetic to Plater's political leanings being frustrated by having to sit through endless music-hall numbers. Plater would return to the subject of popular music-hall artistes in later biographical dramas about Gracie Fields and Arthur ‘Mother Riley’ Lucan, and he also adapted the cheerful The Good Companions (1980) from J. B. Priestley’s novel about a travelling concert party. Furthermore, he assembled a documentary film called ‘Wish You Were Here’ for the BBC’s Omnibus strand in 1974, on the topic of seaside entertainment shows, and starring figures synonymous with the British music hall tradition such as Elsie and Doris Waters, Nat Jackley and Leslie ‘Don’t be Cruel to a Vegetabuel’ Sarony.

And then we have Georgia Brown – appearing as Marie Lloyd in ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ – whose own career challenges simple notions of ‘light’ versus ‘serious’ entertainment. By then a veteran of stage and screen, her slate of activities around this time included appearances on the aforementioned The Good Old Days, but also a key role in the devising of the feminist history drama Shoulder to Shoulder (1974). Indeed, Plater would go on shortly to write an episode of that, starring Brown as the working-class activist Annie Kenney.

Away from TV, Plater’s most notable stage work of this period was the highly political Close the Coalhouse Door, a history of the Durham coalfields in the form of a ‘entertainment’ heavily indebted to music-hall traditions of song and performance (I've covered this elsewhere in the context of Plater's collaborations with Alex Glasgow). In other words, if you could have an appealing, popular entertainment about serious stuff, why couldn't you tell a serious tale about light entertainment? Or, for that matter, why couldn't you explore an issue of huge contemporary relevance – after all, 1972 had witnessed the most significant miners’ strike for fifty years – via the history of stage performers who did tricks with spoons or sang songs about the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo?

Peter Pratt as Charles Coborn

You can get the whole series of The Edwardians on DVD, but the majority of episodes are only available in black-and-white, despite originally going out in colour. Of course, many of the original 1972 viewers would have seen ‘The Reluctant Juggler’ in black-and-white too, but the combination of that, a rather murky sound design (presumably through the tele-recording process), and the bare minimum of historical contextualisation of the strike in the script, adds to the overall effect of a programme you have to work quite hard at – hence my initial response of reaching for the fast-forward option. Not quite light entertainment, more like murky grey, perhaps.

A question remains, though. It’s Boxing Day evening, 1972. What do you fancy watching? Is it Shirley Bassey? Val Doonican? Or Marie Lloyd persuading a juggler to join the union? Hand on heart, I'm not really sure myself.

You can watch 'The Reluctant Juggler' on youtube here.