Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
He was once as popular as Harry Potter. But now he’s almost forgotten
Oh crikey! I say, you chaps, I’m currently in Edinburgh at the Festival Fringe and there’s a moment in my one-man show that’s causing a bit of a stir.
It’s the moment when I look back to the television of my childhood and mention my favourite BBC series of the 1950s, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School.
Greyfriars was our generation’s Hogwarts and the 14-year-old Bunter (gleefully played by the adult Gerald Campion) was our Harry Potter, though six stone heavier and into jam tarts and stealing postal orders rather than magic and wizardry. At my show, when I first mention Bunter’s name, audience members of my vintage murmur their approval, some even applaud.
When I explain to the younger members of the crowd that much of the comedy in the TV series revolved around Bunter’s obesity and that ‘the Fat Owl of the Remove’, as he was known, was routinely bullied by the other boys (including Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur) and regularly beaten by the masters, they’re aghast. At one performance, someone even hissed.
Greyfriars School was created by Frank Richards (real name, Charles Hamilton, 1876-1961), the most prolific children’s author of the 20th century. Bunter first appeared in The Magnet comic in 1908 as a minor character, but, like a schoolboy John Falstaff, he quickly became the star attraction, and for half-a-century, in comics, novels, cartoon strips, on television and on stage, was a household name.
In the 1970s I tried to get Bunter back on TV. I acquired the rights, wrote a pilot script, and lined up quite a cast (including Christopher Biggins as the boy Bunter, Robert Morley as his pater, and Sir John Gielgud, no less, as the school’s headmaster), and went in to make my pitch to the BBC.
The moment the door opened at the commissioning editor’s office, I knew the project was doomed. The lady commissioner was, alas, exactly the size of Billy Bunter’s gargantuan sister, Bessie – and failed to see any of the comic possibilities in a teatime programme featuring corporal punishment being inflicted on a fat schoolboy.
Billy Bunter had no further place at the BBC. I believe they put Jimmy Savile’s children’s show in the vacant slot.
These days, my favourite television series is probably The Durrells, a gentle drama (very) loosely based on the autobiographies of Gerald Durrell about his childhood on Corfu.
The other day I bumped into the delightful Chris Hall (son of Peter Hall and Leslie Caron and looking disconcertingly like both), who produces the series. He told me that it’s done wonders for Corfu’s tourism trade – to the extent, his wife chipped in, that, if you are on holiday in Corfu, all you need to say is ‘I’m a friend of Mr Chris’ and whatever you want you get.
On the strength of this, I was about to book my flights for a late-summer Greek island break and then I thought, ‘I can’t face foreign travel any more.’ The planning, the packing, the getting to the airport, the nightmare of struggling through security (shoes off, belt off, ‘No, I don’t know why the machine is bleeping, I haven’t had a hip replacement’), the horrendous hen parties gathering in the airport terminal Wetherspoon where the drinking starts at daybreak... I don’t need it any more. I am going back to Lancashire.
The sunset in Morecambe Bay is as lovely as anything you will find in the Aegean, and strolling along the fabulous Morecambe Promenade is quite as enjoyable as wandering along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice – with the bonus that the natives are friendly, the winkles are fresh, and halfway along you will find a completely delightful statue of the late, great John Eric Bartholomew, who took his stage name from his birthplace and became the comic legend that was Eric Morecambe.
The Queen unveiled the statue in 1999 and it is one of many intriguing works of art freely on show in the seaside town which also boasts a surprisingly rich assortment of striking art-deco buildings. Forget Corfu. Get up to Morecambe.
Can this be true? My friend the movie producer Douglas Rae says it is and he was there – working as a 15-year-old bellhop at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh in the 1960s when hellraisers Richard Burton and Peter O’toole were in Scotland promoting their film Becket.
They were merrily making their way into the hotel restaurant when the maître d’ stopped them, explaining apologetically that they could not come in because neither was wearing a tie.
‘Do you know who we are?’ protested the stars, who were then both at the height of their fame.
‘Of course,’ said the maître d, ‘and we will be honoured to give you our best table when you are wearing ties. We have ties you can borrow.’
The actors took the ties they were offered and went in to the cloakroom to put them on. Moments later, they reappeared and entered the dining room wearing the ties. And nothing else.