The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How I See It
Let’s celebrate another 96-year-old whose brilliance is hidden in plain sight
I’m so glad Dick Van Dyke is still alive. That might seem an odd thing to say when we’re in the throes of toasting the only major global celebrity who’s older than him, but it’s something I think quite often. If I don’t usually express the thought out loud, that’s only superstition. I’d hate to be wittering on about how much pleasure I take in the continuing good health of Dick Van Dyke just as a tidal wave hits the beach outside his Malibu home.
Wait! An interruption from Mr Google. The Queen is not older than Dick Van Dyke. He is four months her senior, having turned 96 just before Christmas. Oh, I do hope they meet sometimes. Share a few memories, compare notes over a cup of the old bamboo. I expect Her Majesty would enjoy feeling like a skittish young thing in Dick Van Dyke’s company, like when a 6ft woman gets chatting to Richard Osman.
The Dick Van Dyke Show ran from 1961 to 1966. You might think that’s a long time ago but it’s practically recent, relative to the lifespan of this old-timer. Dick Van Dyke served in the US Army Air Forces in the Second World War! He ran an advertising agency in Illinois in the 1940s! It’s amazing that he’s still hale and hearty, considering he was an active alcoholic for over two decades. (He sobered up sometime before the Silver Jubilee.)
Then there’s his love of fast cars; aged 87, Dick Van Dyke was pulled out of a burning Jaguar on the Los Angeles freeway. I think he might be magic. He posted a photograph of the charred wreck online, captioned “Used Jag for sale REAL CHEAP!”
He also might be the greatest entertainer of all time. I was reflecting on this while watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, currently free on Amazon Prime; ideal for this holiday week. (Though it was a departure for me. I normally watch films using the medium with which Dick Van Dyke shares his initials, because I’m nearly as old as he is.)
What a phenomenal performance. He dances with grace, character and technical perfection. He sings beautifully. He acts with charm and truth. And he’s funny throughout! Take that, Fred Astaire! Ginger Rogers might have done it backwards in heels, but Dick Van Dyke does it with comedy, which is even better.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a terrific movie but it’s strange, fanciful and very long; Dick Van Dyke carries it. And he carries it as lightly as a whippet with a stick. If you’ve got five minutes and the internet, it’s worth looking up You Two. Watch him sell that song with a perfect combination of silliness, poignancy and melody, alone with two small children, while cooking a fried breakfast at the same time. Magnificent! The only downside is that you’ll spend the rest of the afternoon singing “I have YouTube” to the tune of the song.
(The children are also terrific. With some trepidation I looked up Heather Ripley, expecting the usual child-star tale of drug addiction and shoplifting, to find she retired soon after and joined her family’s optician business.
She spends her free time helping refugees and campaigning for the environment. This was all as cheering as the film itself.)
And yet Dick Van Dyke is not revered as he should be. His stardom is trivialised. He isn’t spoken of in the hushed tones reserved for a Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro – you know, the ones who did the grim stuff – nor even a Cary Grant or James Stewart, who worked with a lighter touch in a previous generation. Do you know Dick Van Dyke has never been nominated for an Oscar?
Is it because the singing and dancing are too much fun and we’re all masochists? Is it because he did television and the film industry are snobs? Or is it because of his accent in Mary Poppins?
It’s infuriating when people moan about his accent in Mary Poppins. I would put “people doing impressions of Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins” in Room 101 – and I’m from London! I know that’s not what Londoners sound like! But they don’t sing and dance like that either, nor chase cartoon foxes on enchanted merry-go-rounds. It’s a stupid gripe; Dick Van Dyke is a brilliant and versatile performer who could easily have mastered cockney but was misled by incompetent vocal advisers, and yet his charisma is such that it doesn’t matter at all. He sparkles in Mary Poppins, he dazzles. He is a person in whose company it is relentlessly delightful to spend time.
He’s not cool, of course. Just like ABBA aren’t cool. This week their new avatar (or ABBAtar) show opened at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. For all the millions who’ll scrabble for tickets and hundreds of thousands who’ll give standing ovations during the long lifespan this show will inevitably have, ABBA still won’t be admired like David Bowie or Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones because… well I don’t really know, but I think their stuff is just too jolly and never seems to be about heroin.
So, ironically, they become a “guilty pleasure”.
Thus let me upset the internet algorithm with this published assertion: DICK VAN DYKE IS PROBABLY THE GREATEST PERFORMER OF ALL TIME. He is a force majeure of entertainment. I’ve found old episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show online and I’m gleefully looking forward to watching them. God bless Dick
Van Dyke, and long may he reign.
Dick Van Dyke is not revered as he should be. His stardom is trivialised