Imagine, 45 years after Britney Spears dies, some young kid mimicking her on Stars in Their Eyes. You can’t. Madonna? I’d be surprised. Jagger, Springsteen, Dylan? Ephemera. Hendrix and Presley? Perhaps they are as great as George Formby. Perhaps.
So a treat for the fans amongst our readers (and I know there are some). Scroll down toward the bottom of this page and click “Watch in real media”, and about 3 minutes in you’ll find a lovely little lad playing “My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock”. He doesn’t quite get how dirty it is (thank goodness) and he’s not yet got quite the presence of the master, but it is wonderful. And heart warming. The curious can see the master himself here, here and here (is that the marvelous Beryl there with him?).
{ 9 comments }
Kieran Healy 01.07.07 at 4:53 pm
And he has a ukelele in his hand.
grackel 01.07.07 at 11:42 pm
Well, now at least Tiny Tim makes sense. Thanks for solving that mystery.
Guest 01.08.07 at 12:08 am
How could I never have heard of this guy? He’s brilliant.
josh 01.08.07 at 2:33 am
According to IMDB, at any rate, that is indeed Beryl in the last clip. They’re really awfully cute together.
tom hurka 01.08.07 at 5:32 am
Those are lovely clips. When I was a kid the local TV stations, or maybe U.S. ones just across the border, would sometimes play Formby movies, as they also played Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, etc. I guess that all came to an end when the TV schedule went fully to colour, and anything black and white seemed passe. But it was great while it lasted.
Re Beryl, didn’t she rather run everything in George’s career, to the point of dominating him? I remember reading that somewhere.
astrongmaybe 01.08.07 at 6:28 am
Couldn’t see Britney throwing in a subjunctive: “Although the skies be dreary…”
kid bitzer 01.08.07 at 10:13 am
ukelele?
doesn’t look like it to me, or sound like it.
more like a banjo with a shortened neck.
but the tuning is the real question–if it’s tuned like a uke i’ll be willing to call it a uke.
john h 01.08.07 at 10:36 am
#7 Students of Formby call it a banjolele – a cross between a uke and a banjo.
harry b 01.08.07 at 4:12 pm
Black and white seemed to stay on British tv for many years after colour was introduced, perhaps because all the second world war films were made in black and white (and they had to be shown over and over again lest we forget our finest hour). The happy consequence — lots of George Formby, Gracie Fields, Norman Wisdom, etc, on Sunday afternoons.
My understanding is that Formby fans fall into two camps — those who think Beryl dominated him and those who think she was a vital contribution as it were. The latter certainly are those one hears most from; when the BBC does its periodical radio shows commemorating him they tend to find mostly nice things to be said about her, and they usually sound fair. She doesn’t, to me, sound any more domineering than Laurel was over Hardy or Morecambe was over Wise… (which is to say, it sounds as if she played a management role which Formby realised was necessary, had no interest in performing, and was happy to have her perform).
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