by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie I’d recently downloaded off archive.org: Band
Waggon [sic], a 1940 Gaumont-British/Gainsborough
production based on a then-popular radio show on the BBC starring comedians
Arthur Askey and Richard “Stinker” Murdoch. It’s a wild, zany comedy that
proves that the no-holds-barred style of British laugh-making did not begin
with Monty Python, as a lot of U.S. Python fans assume, but if anything it was
a tradition that ended, or at
least culminated, with the Pythons. The opening of Band Waggon is an engaging satire of the BBC’s monopsony power
(for those of you who missed Econ 102, a “monopoly” is a single seller and a
“monopsony” is a single buyer) —
if you were a British entertainer and you wanted to get on the radio, until the
advent of commercial broadcasting in the U.K. in the early 1950’s the BBC was
the only game in town. And in this movie the gatekeeper to the golden airwaves
is Claude Pilkington (Peter Gawthorne), a sour old man who dictates a memo
lecturing a sportscaster who used “can’t” instead of “cannot” three times in
broadcasting a football game (soccer to us) — of course, he himself says
“can’t” while dictating his memo — and is being inundated with over 500 bands
demanding auditions for the BBC even though Pilkington can’t stand music. The
plot of Band Waggon, to the
extent it has one, deals with the sheer desperation with which Askey, Murdoch
and Jack Hylton’s band (they play themselves and Hylton not only leads his
famous orchestra — he was deservedly called the “British Paul Whiteman” — but
even sings on a few of the film’s 14 songs) seek an audition. Askey and Murdoch
actually camp out on the roof of Broadcasting House, the BBC’s famous
headquarters in London, and live there for three months, subsisting on eggs
laid by their own chickens and stringing a clothesline between the BBC’s two
transmission towers so they can hang their washing. They’re caught when a pair
of their long johns gets blown off the line and lands in Pilkington’s face, and
later when they lower a can containing water and eggs into the fireplace of a
BBC conference room to boil them — and they’re discovered in the middle of a
staff meeting. Hylton’s band strings glass across the roadway Pilkington and
his driver use every day so his car will develop a flat tire and he’ll be
forced to wait while it’s repaired in the roadhouse where the band regularly
performs.
Eventually Askey and Murdoch are forced to load all their stuff into
a tiny Morris car — and they end up renting a cottage in the country that,
unbeknownst either to them or the people who rent it to them, is also the
headquarters for a German fifth-column effort that seeks to commandeer the
BBC’s experimental TV outlet and use it to broadcast German propaganda. Our
Heroes stumble on the TV equipment and use it to produce a show which they intend to jam onto the BBC’s airwaves and thereby
get noticed — and hired — at last, and it all ends with a free-for-all in which
Askey’s and Murdoch’s pet goat ends up with the Germans’ time bomb (they were
planning an act of sabotage somewhere or other) blowing the house to
smithereens, providing a spectacular end to the movie as Askey and Murdoch
emerge from the rubble and Askey tells the audience, “And that’s how Band
Waggon got on the air.” Band
Waggon is an appealingly loony comedy that
looks backwards and forwards —
Charles said Askey and Murdoch as a comedy team sometimes seemed like Abbott
and Costello and sometimes like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz; I was thinking
more along the lines of Wheeler and Woolsey (if only because Askey wears the
same sort of round glasses Woolsey did), and like Wheeler and Woolsey and the half-British
Laurel and Hardy, they frequently played around with sexual identity: though
neither Askey nor Murdoch does drag in this movie (as both Stan Laurel and Bert
Wheeler often did), certainly the opening scenes showing them living together
in a disused BBC rehearsal hall as well as on the building’s roof look like a domestic comedy (which was probably what had
Charles thinking of Lucy and Desi as the Ricardos). Band Waggon is a pretty trivial movie but it’s good fun, and
sometimes better than that; it was also nice to see Hylton’s female singer,
Patricia Kirkwood (who, like most of the people in this movie, used her own
name for her character), because though she’s not homely she’s clearly a woman
“of size” and, like the modern singer Adele, seems quite at ease in her body
and unwilling to starve herself to concentration-camp-inmate proportions to
satisfy the U.S. idea of female attractiveness then or now. She’s also got a
quite comfortable and pleasant voice that’s a joy to listen to. Directed by Marcel
Varnel (odd that something this thoroughgoingly British would be helmed by a
French émigré!) from a script written by the usual committee (no fewer than
eight writers are credited), Band Waggon is a minor but very funny little gem that deserves to be better known
— even though there were probably a lot of topical references in the script
that sail over a modern viewer’s head!
