D. Mark Lawson
B&W and Colour
A fascinating documentary about the strange and very much neglected and forgotten fact that, whilst Clint Eastwood was the world’s biggest film star in the 1970s, he made frequent appearances on Radio 4 light entertainment shows. This may require some context for overseas’ readers: the BBC’s Radio 4 is a cultural institution in the UK; a talk radio station where high-minded drama mixes with sitcoms, panel shows and sketch comedy, as well as documentaries and hard hitting news exposes. I don’t think there’s another station in the world quite like it and us Brits are all rightly proud. Clint obviously liked it too, as between 1968 and 1979 he made forty-two appearances on various Radio 4 shows. Predominantly he showed up on comedy panel shows, but also in sketch shows, sitcoms, panel discussions and headlining the odd drama. All whilst making Dirty Harry films, ‘The Outlaw Josey Welles’, those movies with the orang-utan and generally dropping box-office gold wherever he went. Even in his pomp Clint seems to have taken every opportunity to cosy up with Nicholas Parsons and Clement Freud and show off his verbal dexterity.
(This isn’t the only surprising revelation from this fascinating documentary. I was completely unaware that Woody Allen had a three month stretch in 1967 as Cousin Wally on ‘The Archers’, or that Susan Sarandon once plied her trade reading the shipping forecast).
‘Just a Minute’ is show where panellists show off their erudition and love of words by speaking on a subject they are given for sixty seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation. It’s a tough game, particularly when other panellists are so keen to challenge for infractions. And it’s bizarrely a show Clint appeared on twenty times in the 1970s. There are archive shots with him sat with Nicholas Parsons, Peter Jones, Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud and Kenneth Williams (and how bizarre and incongruous it is to see Harry Callaghan laughing side by side with Percival Snooper). We hear him discuss subjects that were obviously chosen for him, such as ‘Hollywood’, ‘Cowboys’, ‘Golf’; but occasionally much more challenging, such as ‘Salmon Fishing in Scotland’ and ‘The Best Way to Hail a London Cab’. And through it all he isn’t bad. Okay, he lacks the verbal gymnastics of a Kenneth Williams, or the dry wit of a Clement Freud, but he pushes through with a mix of charm and self-depreciation and the occasional wry aside. ‘Just a Minute’ was clearly his favourite, but he also went through the silliness of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’, cameoed in the radio adaptation of ‘Dad’s Army’ (as an American general who really got up Mainwaring’s nose) and starred in that most bizarre thing – a radio adaptation of ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, not a single second of which seems to have survived. How the vast desert landscapes and the lead character’s lack of dialogue were realised on radio is anyone’s guess, but I would quite possibly sacrifice my little finger to find out.
As I said, it’s an entertaining documentary, but one with a big hole in the middle: there’s no interview with Eastwood himself. Yes, we get Nicholas Parsons, Clement Freud, Tim Brooke-Taylor and a whole bunch of other surviving Radio 4 luminaries, but nothing from the man himself. As such there’s no clue as to why this man who famously hated dialogue decided to expose himself to this dialogue heavy medium again and again, or why he stopped. Instead we get a bunch of still photos and some sound clips which are absolutely tantalising.
No comments:
Post a Comment