Reviewed: Anthony Newley Night at the NFT

As someone who, only a year or two ago, would have written off Anthony Newley as a light entertainer of little interest to the modern viewer, I felt a little embarrassed to be proven completely wrong about the man with the superb ‘Small World of Sammy Lee’. I can only blame my childhood memories of the inevitable ‘Junior Choice’ playing of ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’ & ‘Strawberry Fair’ for it all. I was obviously too young to have seen Newley in full mature entertainer mode, on adults’ TV.

After my damascene conversion to all things Newley, I was thrilled to hear that those top fellahs at The Flipside had organised a special Newley Night at London’s National Film Theatre, not only securing a print of ‘Will Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?’ but had also pulled in a grab-bag of stupendous clips from a wide range of his TV performances. A brief conversation with Vic Flipsider one afternoon, whet my appetite, with a mention of an episode of ‘Gurney Slade’ in the offing. He remained cruelly tight lipped about the rest.

A dash across the river to the South Bank’s NFT, a swift glass of Vin (Very) Ordinaire with my good lady, to shake off the foul day I’d had, and we were in the plush seats of the NFT‘s main screen.

First up, a few words from the delightful Tara Newley (Mother: Joan Collins, Father: Anthony Newley-talk about lucky genes!) who treated us to her memories of appearing in ‘Hieronymous Merkin’ as a child, along with her mother and brother, playing unwitting audience members to her father’s off the wall ideas. She gave us a vivid picture of the fun they had, in spite of the strain this exercise in over-the-top egotism must have placed on her parents’ already sinking marriage. Time scheduling was tight, so not time for a ‘Q&A’, but straight into the film.

I was already aware of this film from various books I have read about 60’s films (one or two!) and the cost to Newley’s wallet, time, marriage and reputation it represented, but had never actually seen it before. I don’t recall it ever being screened in recent years, not at the cinema, nor on TV, not even at the long-gone and much lamented Scala Cinema, nor made available on VHS or DVD anywhere. I therefore approached it with a sense of huge anticipation tempered with caution.

Those of you who are familiar with Newley’s way of working, the stories of his chaotic personal life, his magpie imagination and raging leonine drive for new ideas to bounce around, this film will prove to be everything you think it will be. Opening on a beautiful beach with an azure sea and sky, that could only be the Mediterranean, I was instantly reminded of ‘Help’, and the untrammelled stream of consciousness script it follows is not a million miles from that other off-kilter product of the magical 1960’s, The Monkees’ ‘Head’. Newley takes us, sometimes unwillingly, on a dark funhouse ride through his ailing psyche, dramatised and enlivened with stagecraft old and new, corny and sophisticated, funny and despondent, punctuated with song and dance numbers delivered sometimes by his good self, sometimes by his many friends in the performing arts. In a scene reminiscent of ‘The Knack’ a long line of girls wait at the waterside to enter his four-poster, each one discarded as he bores of them, only to take on the temporary services of the next. Newley once emphatically denied that this tour of his neurotic, self-doubting, self-loving dilemma was autobiographical, but later admitted it was completely so.

In spite of the egomaniac nature of the script, this is not a one-hander. Instead, Newley is aided and abetted by a roll-call of accomplices, such as Milton Berle as his ‘manager’ Good Time Eddie Filth, George Jessel as a wise-cracking ghostly presence, a bevy of beauties with campy names like ‘Trampolina Whambang’ and ‘Miss Maidenhair Fern’. His audience in all this is his wife ‘Polyester Poontang’ (played by real-life wife Joan Collins) and his children Tara and Sacha, the latter two kept in check by the ever-welcome Patricia Hayes as ‘granny’.

Merkin/Newley’s early life in show business is illustrated by familiar routines, but with Newley’s totally original songs. Bruce Forsyth in particular puts up a terrific performance that reminds us how he got where he is today, and how he’s managed to stay there all these years. We pass on quickly to Merkin/Newley’s pathological bed hopping in some truly hilarious vignettes. The casting must have been the most fun anyone had had since VE Day. It is not difficult to guess how quickly all this salacious lunacy must have destroyed what little was left of the Newley/Collins marriage, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the audience who thought that Polyester Poontang’s bitterness at Merkin’s oversexed antics was produced from memory, rather than from Collins’ acting skills.

The Mercy Humppe of the title is a tall, blonde nymphet type who initially obsesses Merkin, but who fails to live up to his expectations and our ‘hero’ has to face the fact that he is fated to be alone and unhappy. He sings a ‘Poor Me’ showstopper that actually provoked criticism from an American Church minister for its attitude toward the almighty. 

I could rerun every scene of note, (and there are many, including a ‘Zodiac’ dance that could only have been made in the 1960’s), or reel off the names of all the other distinguished actors who took part in this monument to Newley’s hubris, but I’m going to let it rest. ‘Merkin’ is a true product of that now-distant but still remembered and loved decade, of Newley’s febrile imagination, and of his worsening self inflicted mental state. It left me with the feeling that Newley could have saved himself a great deal of money by simply seeing a psychiatrist-but thank heaven he didn’t.

Only a short break later, we were back in our seats for the second part of tonight’s celebration of this unique talent, and what to me would be the real deal of the evening. In 1960, Newley, already a star of the stage, made a very offbeat comedy series for TV, ‘The Strange World of Gurney Slade’. Perhaps picking up on the meandering style of many an episode of shows like ‘Hancock’, the show could not be said to have ‘centred’ on any one idea, unless it was the eccentric musings and ramblings of the show’s main character. Only six episodes were made, and the show was so deeply unpopular, (no belly laughs, and significantly, no laughter track) that it was shunted from primetime to the graveyard slot early on. This, the fourth episode, has our hero Gurney Slade, on trial for having no sense of humour; he’s made a TV comedy show that isn’t funny. Eerily reminiscent of ‘The Prisoner’, which it predated by several years, Slade/Newley, puts up a spirited defence to this heinous charge, attempting to prove that countersunk screws are indeed funny, but to no avail. He is sentenced to death, only reprieved when the executioner’s axe-head falls off, which the judge finds uncontrollably funny. How I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the house of Mr & Mrs Average TV Viewer (who appear as prosecution witnesses) when this went out.

What followed was a superb and beautifully preserved colour clip from Burt Bacharach & Associates (1972), which showed off Newley’s singular talents to maximum effect. A truly hilarious routine for ‘Those Were The Good Old Bad Old Days’, ably supported by a young-ish dance troupe, followed by what may have been the high spot of the whole ‘BB&A’ series; a duet between Newley and the great Sammy Davis Junior. What a pleasure to see two consummate professionals at the height of their powers, playing off each other with their good natured jibes, tailor-made alternative lyrics to Newley’s best songs, and Sammy impersonating Newley to his face and getting away with it! It really was a joy to see and hear, and if this brilliant series doesn’t get a showing on TV or a really good DVD release, I will personally picket ITV’s studios.

An unusual artefact from 1977 was ‘The Beatles Forever’, a show made for the UK which I have no contemporary memory of, whatsoever. Basically an affectionate Beatles cover versions show, Newley duetting with Bernadette Peters (who played the lovable hat-maker in ‘Slaves of New York’), and also performing ‘Within You Without You’, in a 1970’s deco mock up of an Indian temple, with innumerable cast members contemplating the infinite, albeit through their ornate drinking glasses, looking less like mystics in their ecstasies, more like a bunch of jaded sybarites. A revue of The Beatles tunes seemed a very odd career diversion for Newley, given that the Fab Four had proved to be the nemesis of Newley and many entertainers like him.

We passed on to the battle of the blazers, as Newley mounted the banquette for a friendly tussle with Val Doonican. The ever affable Mr Doonican, resplendent in his monogrammed woollen (a stylised ‘Val’, not, I’m happy to report, what you were thinking) and Newley in an open necked shirt and plain navy affair, looking as if he’d wandered in from an afternoon on the Pimms & Lemonade at the Sloaney Pony. Very much a rush-through of his greatest hits, with Newley performing to Val’s appreciative remarks. The same show also offered the musical talents of Elkie Brooks, but sadly not in this clip. We had a lot to get through. 

Time may have taken its inevitable toll on Newley, his voice losing a little of its power, but he was as sprightly as ever, racing up the steep staircase on The Bob Downe Show from 1996, to sing his hits unmolested by the very beige Mr. Downe. It was at this point that I noted Newley’s striking resemblance to Gordon Brown, right down to the hangdog expression our Prime Minister seems to have worn since taking office. Added contributions to Bob Downe’s show, mercifully absent here, came from Ant and Dec and Martine McCutcheon.

To close was a trip back to 1970, to hear Newley sing a selection of his best songs on ‘This is Tom Jones’, and he did not disappoint. On a set that resembled a particularly camp episode of Dr Who, Newley was at his crooning best. 

Evenings like this do a lot to restore my faith in repertory cinema. Clips of Newley on modern day TV are rare as hens’ teeth, and video/DVD, almost unknown. Primarily a live performer, it is wholly possible that we do not have his best performances in any recorded format, but there is at least something out there, as this all too brief selection of clips and curios proved. It was a very welcome lifting of the curtain on a talent that passed away ten long years ago, to little fanfare. I recall an obituary in a major national newspaper which remembered Newley’s meteoric path to international stardom, his occupation of the honour of having once been one of the world’s highest paid entertainers, and then his equally rapid decline and complete disappearance from public notice. These clips prove that even if journalists have forgotten him, the public and the TV archivists have not. Fans of David Bowie are probably aware of the stylistic debt owed to Newley by their idol in his early years, where even Bowie’s song writing resembled the material being performed by Newley, and not just his stage cockney voice. Newley’s repeated use of the ‘puppet’ mime was also appropriated by Bowie, and others, in the otherwise chalk and cheese polarity of rock music and show tunes. Plenty of others have followed the theatrical template Newley himself followed, and for a real memory stretcher, does anyone else out there remember the Newleyisms of late 80’s rock act, Boys Wonder? Newley deserves a proper memorial to his over-reaching, if sometimes misguided, talent, and to reach the maximum number of people. I propose a TV retrospective, followed by a DVD release, would be the way to remind previous generations, and introduce later ones, to this formidable talent, who made a far greater impression on popular culture than most of us realised.

Scenester

Comments

[Will Kane]

Hear! Hear!