A word from the Editor Martin TOWNSEND
ISPENT an enjoyable evening last week watching Michael Ball cutting people’s throats. It’s not the sort of behaviour any of us expects from Michael Ball. This is the affable fellow, after all, that we listen to on Radio 2 on Sunday afternoons as he swaps jokes with The Osmonds or some such.
Yet on stage at London’s Adelphi Theatre, starring in a new production of Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant musical Sweeney Todd, Ball emerges as an utterly menacing figure, almost unrecognisable with his slicked black hair and powder-white face.
Bulked up and brooding he raises a cut-throat razor to the lights. “At last,” he sighs, “my arm is complete…”
I also suspect that at last his career is complete. After years playing cuddly characters in stage musicals his performance as Sweeney Todd proves he is perfectly capable of, er, meatier roles. Not a bad step up for a bloke who hits 50 this June and something of a poke in the eye for all those stars who whine about being destined for the scrap heap or becoming the butt of everyone’s jokes once they move into their later years.
Only last week Nicholas Parsons, somewhat older than Michael admittedly, complained that the elderly were the last minority at which it is “acceptable” to poke fun. Well, let them. Michael proves that life can easily kick-start again at 50.
A GP I had lunch with a few months back told me that he considered 60 “young”. He also said that he was amazed at the energy of most of the 70-year-olds he treats and would concede, only very reluctantly, that 80 “might be when you can start thinking of yourself as old” but he didn’t seem particularly convinced about that.
Last night 71-year-old Tom Jones took his career in yet another direction as one of the judges of The Voice and in May Engelbert Humperdinck, 75, (pictured) hopes to win the Eurovision Song Contest for Britain.
If you are in good health, have sufficient talent and can hang in there long enough, the world eventually catches up but what Ball, the Hump and the Jones boy also have in common is a natural refusal to take themselves too seriously. They take the work seriously but themselves? Not at all.
Some years back I was lucky enough to spend a day with Engelbert. I was invited to his mansion in Leicestershire. The exact location of his bolt-hole is lost in the mists of time but the mists of time were certainly swirling about when I pitched up at his railway station. It was grey, drizzly and a long way from the Las Vegas hotels which, in my head at least, must still be the Hump’s natural habitat. A taxi took me to his home, a large, stone-built country house with low beams and an ancient-looking courtyard out back.
The gap between expectation and reality where the famous is concerned can be a deep and yawning chasm but in Engelbert’s case it was not quite so dramatic: I was expecting a permatanned bloke with big lips and carefully coiffured hair worn in a splendidly unfashionable feather cut, probably wearing a suit. What I got was all the above but in a big jumper. He looked like your successful uncle who’s just got back from running a bar in Malaga and is feeling a bit parky.
A log fire burned in the Hump’s hearth, there were gold discs on the wall and, curiously, lots of antique or pseudo-antique furniture still wrapped up in the polythene it had been delivered in.
I can’t remember everything we talked about but I do remember him spending an inordinate amount of time apologising for the fact that The Last Waltz had kept The Beatles’ Penny Lane/strawberry Fields Forever from the No1 spot. I felt like saying: “Let it go Engelbert; their career had to end some time,” but somehow that sentence died on my lips. “Shall we have a drink?” he said, rubbing his hands together. The miniature “pub” he took me to may have just been in another room but I seem to remember it as an extension in the corner of the little courtyard. It had more low beams and a bar. I “ordered” a pint of bitter.
“Ah, good choice,” said the Hump and the next bit I remember as clearly as if it was yesterday.
He took up an ornamental chain from the bar and hung it around his neck. At the end of it was a metal plaque that read “Bar Keeper”.
My jaw dropped open. Engelbert smiled, chuckled and drew my pint like a proper landlord. I think it was at that point I realised that the charming and slightly eccentric Mr Humperdinck was going to be around for a very long time.
‘In his jumper he looked like your successful uncle who’s just got back from running a bar in Malaga’
SWEENEY TODD REVIEW:
PAGES 56-57