The Oldie of the Year 2020 Petula Clark Gyles Brandreth
She’s danced with Fred Astaire, sung with Sinatra and sold 68 million records. And now she’s our Number 1 award-winner
Petula Clark is a phenomenal phenomenon. I am not quite sure why she hasn’t been our Oldie of the Year every year for the past quarter of a century. She is 88 on 15th November, looks 60 (and a fab 60, too), and has been doing her thing (singing, acting and composing) for more than 80 years.
She made her professional debut in 1939, singing with a teatime orchestra in the hall of Bentalls department store in Kingston upon Thames. She was paid with a tin of toffee and a gold wristwatch.
Petula became a household name during the Second World War, entertaining the troops on radio and in person, not simply as a child who could sing and dance (‘the British Shirley Temple’) but, more intriguingly, as a pre-teen impersonator (‘Radio’s Merry Mimic’), who could do impressions of everyone from Vera Lynn to Carmen Miranda and George Formby. Apparently, Winston Churchill simply adored her. She could do him, too.
She made her first film in 1944, her first TV series in 1946 and her first hit record in 1949. You know about her 1964 global Number 1, Downtown, but there have been countless others, before and since. For many of them, she was the composer as well as the performer.
Late to the party, we TOOTY judges realised we had to recognise her when she stole the notices in this year’s West End revival of Mary Poppins, playing the old lady who sings Feed the Birds.
Thanks to COVID-19, the show closed almost as soon as it opened, but it will be back in 2021 and Petula Clark will be back with it. She doesn’t simply have snap in her celery. She’s a trouper who sang through the Blitz and, come what may, the show goes on.
Quentin Letts, Craig Brown, Rachel Johnson, Roger Lewis, James Pembroke and Harry Mount).
She was at her home in Geneva, Switzerland, and I was at the Museum of Carpet in Kidderminster. Do go. It’s a disused carpet factory transformed into a world of weaving wonders. You can even work your own loom. It was a fitting setting to roll out the red carpet for Britain’s longest-serving and most successful female singing star.
Chatting with Petula, I realised why we haven’t rated her as we should. She does not live here and she is very unassuming. She has sung with Sinatra, danced with Fred Astaire (in Finian’s Rainbow (1968), she was his last on-screen dancing partner) and sold 68 million records, but she never shows off.
Her real name is Sally. Her dad claimed to have invented Petula by combining the names of two former girlfriends, Pet and Ulla. Her parents, Leslie and Doris, were both nurses. Born in Surrey, she was brought up in South Wales, but her childhood heroine was Swedish (Ingrid Bergman), her first boyfriend was Norwegian and ever since she first performed in Paris, in the 1950s, she has been a European.
She has sung as much in French, German, Italian and Spanish as in English. In Britain, we are not entirely comfortable with all that, are we? That must be the reason she isn’t yet a dame.
When I first met her on a TV show in the 1980s, the producer (an old boy) said to me, ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? But people of my generation don’t feel we are allowed to fancy her because we got to know her when she was a child. Funny that. It’s the same with Julie Andrews.’
When Petula starred in The Sound of Music on stage, the living members of the Von Trapp family all declared that Petula was the definitive Maria.
She’s a very unstarry star. I knew she had worked with everyone, from Sacha Distel to Sammy Davis Jr – she wouldn’t gossip about any of them. She knew the Beatles (she got her first Grammy before they got theirs) and was befriended by John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their bed-ins. They wanted her to join them on the mattress – but only to meditate.
Elvis Presley, on the other hand, was up for a proper threesome. When Petula and her friend Karen Carpenter turned up at his dressing-room door in Las Vegas, he made it plain he was ready to entertain them both – and how. The girls laughed politely, made their excuses and left. Petula had further encounters with the King, but nothing happened.
Elvis has long since left the building, but Pet is still with us, still riding high and now, at last, our Oldie of the Year. Hurrah!
See overleaf for our other winners