Mad, mad, just gloriously mad
Thirty years after Donald Swann’s death, NEIL CLARK lauds the lasting legacy of the influential and much-loved musical comedy double act Flanders and Swann
THEY were perhaps the unlikeliest stars of the Swinging Sixties. Dressed in dinner jackets and bow ties, the public school and Oxford-educated Michael Flanders and Donald Swann delighted audiences with their witty songs and humorous observations on everyday life.
They sang about the terror of finding a spider in the bath, the delights of bed and the pressures of one-upmanship.
They considered how labour-saving devices in the kitchen often created more work and how calling the gas man on a Monday led to a week of upheaval, as a succession of handymen had to put right the work of their predecessor.
Probably their most famous song was The Hippopotamus, with its sing-a-long chorus of “Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood”.
And of course, there was the dear old Gnu, who is fed up with being confused with other animals.
“I’m a g-nu, I’m a g-nu, The g-nicest work of nature in the zoo. I’m a g-nu, spelt G-N-U, call me bison or okapi and I’ll sue.”
While satire boomed in the 1960s, the duo were not having any of it. “The purpose of satire, it has rightly been said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth. Our job, as I see it, is to put it back again”, insisted Flanders.yet, in their own gentle and quintessentially British way, Flanders and Swann were as subversive as any satirist.
In Pxx px bxxxx bxx dxxxxxx (Pee, Po, Belly, Bum, Drawers), they lampooned the fashion for swearing in “smart circles” and how being gratuitously offensive was rather ludicrously seen as “avant garde”.
“Let’s write rude words all down our street, stick our tongue out at the people we meet, let’s have an intellectual treat”, they sang. But unlike many of today’s comedians, Flanders and Swann did not have to use bad language to be funny.they were far too clever for that.
Flanders could be considered Britain’s first disabled celebrity. He was confined to a wheelchair due to contracting polio in the Second World War, after his ship had been torpedoed in the Atlantic.
Swann was a brilliant pianist and composer, whose Russian-born parents had fled following the 1917 revolution. In the Second World War, Swann, a pacifist and conscientious objector, drove ambulances for the Quakers in Palestine and Greece.
The two men put on their first show in 1940, when their school, Westminster, was evacuated to thewest Country in the Blitz.
Their stage manager and life-long friend was Tony Benn, later a prominent Labour politician. After the war Flanders and Swann met up again in Oxford, but it was not until New Year’s Eve 1956 that they first performed their revue – At The Drop Of A Hat – in London.
The show proved to be a sensation and ran to sell-out audiences until 1959.
“One night almost the entire Royal Family was there, singing ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud’, with the commoners”, recalled their friend John Amis.
The duo took their revue around the world.
The Prime Minister Harold Macmillan asked them how they could hold an audience for two hours, while he could not hold the House of Commons for more than 20 minutes. “Try singing to them,” replied Flanders.
Flanders’ humorous monologues were a treat too. In By Air he commented on air travel: “It has been calculated that it’s safer to fly than to cross the road. Mind you, I gave that up years ago where I live, in Kensington, near the air terminal.
“They have these airline buses whizzing about. I think the drivers’ instructions are to keep the statistics favourable.”
Yet the double act had their serious side too. “We’d always spend the morning talking about life,” said Donald.
“Philosophy in the morning, song-writing in the afternoon, supper, then performing to Michael’s mother,” was their daily routine.
Their classic 1963 song Slow Train was both a poignant lament for the branch-line stations lost to the Beeching Axe, and a reflection on a way of life fast disappearing under modernisation.
“No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat, At Chorlton-cum-hardy or Chester-le-street, We won’t be meeting again, On the Slow Train.” In their powerful anti-war song Twenty Tons of TNT, they criticised the nuclear arms race.
Flanders and Swann performed their last show together in 1967, but remained friends. Flanders was working on various projects when he died suddenly at 53 on a family holiday in North Wales in 1975.
While Swann continued composing and performing, he said he always felt he had the ghost of his old partner behind him in those shows he played alone.
He died 30 years ago on Saturday, at the age of 70, and was widely mourned.
Comedy historian Graham Mccann argues that Flanders and Swann are the most influential British comedy double act of all time, even placing them ahead of Morecambe and Wise.
In 2021, 24-year-old PHD student Jonathan Gibson became the youngest BBC Mastermind champion, scoring a perfect 11 out of 11 with Flanders and Swann as his specialist subject.
But the duo’s legacy is not just their humour. Because of his own problems in getting on and off stage, Flanders and his wife Claudia campaigned for better access for wheelchair-bound people to theatres and for disabled rights generally.
After his death, his widow continued the work, devoting herself tirelessly to the cause and achieving much success.
‘No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat, At Cholton-cum-hardy or Chester-le-street, We won’t be meeting again, On the Slow Train’