Celebrity Interview – Tommy Cannon
They go together like fish and chips, bread and butter or salt and pepper. But now Cannon and Ball, the comedy duo who at one time pulled in almost 20 million viewers for their weekly television show, are having to undertake solo projects to stay in work. But the pair who have been a double act for 55 years will join up again later in the year. They will both be in Bobby’s play The Dressing Room which will tour for two months before Cannon and Ball spend Christmas in panto, the third successive year they have been signed up to play at Crewe Lyceum. This year’s show is Jack and the Beanstalk. Tommy looks on acting as a challenge, although he admits it’s a bit odd looking around and his old mate Bobby – catchphrase “Rock on Tommy!” – isn’t at his side. “It’s a bit nerve-racking to be honest with you. But sometimes we have to do things separately simply because if we don’t work we don’t earn any money.” Tommy, a likeable northerner with no pretensions, doesn’t hold anything back when he talks about how the world of entertainment has been turned upside down over the past couple of decades. “When you think about what we do, we’ve got nowhere to go and do it. Summer seasons have gone. In the ‘80s we used to do 25 weeks at Bournemouth and 25 weeks in Blackpool, Torquay and all them sorts of places. But they don’t do it any more. “When variety died it were just like somebody had switched the light off. We went ‘where’s all that gone? Where’s the summer seasons gone? Who’s changed that?’” Tommy appeared in a Christmas special of Lee Mack’s TV sitcom Not Going Out – Bobby plays Lee’s dad – and Tommy also made a guest appearance last year in the soap Doctors. Four years ago he and Bobby toured a farce, Ha Ha Hood!, with Su Pollard – but apart from that he has done little acting. That’s why he’s enjoying Seriously Dead. “I’m a character by the name of Albert Blunderstone who’s a bit of a northern boy, has a bit of a way with the ladies. Me and another guy have done a bank robbery and he’s disappeared. It was £50,000 we stole and I’m trying to find out where it’s gone because I never got any of it.” How did Tommy get the job? “I know Leah Bell who’s the director. She’s written it and is in it as well. I heard that she was after me to do the play. I rang Leah up and she said it would be lovely if I could do it. So I said let’s give it a go. It was as simple as that.” Thomas Derbyshire was born in Oldham on 27 June 1938. He met Robert Harper in the early 1960s while they were working as welders in the same factory. They formed a club act and turned professional in the late 1960s, changing their names to Cannon and Ball. Their primetime Saturday night programme The Cannon and Ball Show was one of London Weekend Television’s most successful series and lasted for 12 years. They recently returned to the small screen in a reality-type show called Last Laugh in Vegas. Nine showbiz legends from the worlds of comedy, music and variety were given a last shot at putting on an act in Las Vegas, the variety capital of the world. Cannon and Ball joined Bernie Clifton, comedian Mick Miller, pianist Bobby Crush, singer Kenny Lynch, pop idol Jess Conrad, singer Anita Harris and Su Pollard for a five-part TV series in which they prepared for the gig of a lifetime. Tommy admits it was fun but it was also challenging. “We didn’t know what we were going to do. All we knew was that we were going to be out there for virtually two weeks. We enjoyed it.” But while they were there a gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at a music festival on the Vegas Strip, leaving 58 people dead and 851 injured. “Vegas was very special apart from the fact that all them people got killed,” says Tommy. “That was very sad. Typical Americans – the following day they were going down the Strip with banners the size of a garage saying ‘keep your heads high America, we can beat this’. It was fantastic to think they were rallying round so quick.” The programme may lead to new opportunities for the showbiz veterans who went to Vegas, although Tommy is taking nothing for granted. “If anything does happen it would be in the early stages of next year. TV don’t work that quick any more. We’ll have to wait and see. Who knows?” After Seriously Dead Tommy and Bobby will start another tour of The Dressing Room. It features a group of comics having a laugh before Cannon and Ball do 25 minutes of their own material. “It’s variety within a play,” says Tommy. He agrees there is still an outlet for variety but the problem is that the younger generation doesn’t experience it. “It’s 30-odd years since we were on TV, every Saturday, Christmas specials and Easter specials and all that stuff. There’s a whole generation who’ve grown up in that time. They don’t know about us unless they go on YouTube. “The funniest thing of all is when you do pantomime the kids are waiting for an autograph and they say ‘you’re really funny, why aren’t you on telly?’ There’s a new generation out there who don’t know what variety is about.” As well as the good times, Tommy has had a number of bad experiences. When variety died, he found it difficult to get back on his feet. Last year he was made bankrupt but remains stoical about it: “It’s just one of those things in life – it happens to lots of people.” He lives with his second wife
Celebrity Interview – Steve Delaney aka Count Arthur Strong
The voice on the other end of the telephone is confident and assured. It’s soon evident that Steve Delaney is a businessman as much as an entertainer. You hear only occasionally a trace of Steve’s alter ego: the bumbling, pompous, delusional, malapropism-uttering Count Arthur Strong. The character came to light in the early 1980s when Steve was at drama school. But Count Arthur existed only in Steve’s head for the next 15 years until he and a friend started running comedy evenings. Steve opened up the shows as Count Arthur who has been with him ever since. Count Arthur has seven radio series, three television series and more than a dozen tours behind him. He is preparing to take his new show, Count Arthur Strong is Alive and Unplugged, on the road. He will be appearing at Buxton Opera House – “one of my favourite theatres” – for the sixth time as well as Derby Theatre during a three-month trek around the country. It follows previous tours which had more exotic names, such as Somebody Up There Licks Me in 2015 and The Sound of Mucus in 2017. If you haven’t come across him, you won’t know what to expect from the septuagenarian Count Arthur whose trademarks are his trilby hat, bow tie, dark-framed glasses and pencil-thin moustache. Steve reckons it’s hard to explain exactly what one of his shows entails because it unfolds on the night and he doesn’t want to give anything away. “I always find it extremely difficult to comment on live shows. You’ll see all the traits that Arthur’s known for: delusional traits, the notion that he’s always succeeding when he’s actually failing. But I can’t really go into specifics.” He says fans can expect “more of the same” – although that doesn’t mean there won’t be any new material in the show. “Arthur’s Arthur – he couldn’t do anything wildly different. Hopefully it’s the writing that makes each show different.” When I spoke to Steve he was taking the week off to finish his new show. “It’s all pretty much written but some of the words aren’t necessarily in the right order, as Eric Morecambe might say. “I enjoy the craft of writing. It’s quite a challenge reproducing the same thing and giving it a freshness night after night. “I like the discipline of reproducing things pretty much verbatim. I also enjoy being able to pause and go off at a tangent if I want to. But that’s never the modus operandi – that’s just a happy occurrence, really.” Steve Delaney who this year turns 64 was born in Leeds where his father was a foundryman and his mother a seamstress. Steve became a carpenter before he went to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, graduating in 1982. He appeared in television dramas including Juliet Bravo, Casualty, The Bill and All Creatures Great and Small, returning to carpentry during lean times as an actor. He explains how the idea for Count Arthur came to him while he was at drama school. “It was just for an exercise to show something to the rest of the year, something that everybody had to do. I came up with an oddball five-minute sketch and it was a very embryonic version of Arthur. But it went down very well – a lot of people laughed.” When he resurrected Count Arthur for the comedy evenings, people immediately liked the character. “I got instant feedback and I thought ‘this is better than auditioning’ which I wasn’t really suited for. I didn’t have the right temperament for it. So I packed acting in and just concentrated on bringing Arthur on at my pace.” Five months after Count Arthur Strong was unleashed on the unsuspecting public, Steve took him to the world’s largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe. His Edinburgh shows increased his popularity, although he has not played the festival for several years. “When I went to Edinburgh it was to get people from arts centres along to see the show and book a tour on the back of Edinburgh. Even if you were at a good venue, you still tended to come away with eight or nine thousand pounds worth of debt.” In 2004 Count Arthur Strong was given his own BBC Radio 4 show. Five years later it won the Sony award for best radio comedy. Fifty episodes have now been broadcast including a Christmas special last year. Another special has been recorded which should hit the airwaves in eight months’ time. Almost five years ago Count Arthur’s facial oddities were revealed on the small screen when BBC2 transmitted the first series of a new sitcom. Steve co-wrote it with Graham Linehan who had penned shows such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd. Three series were produced, with the second and third transferring to BBC1. But last year the BBC announced that no more would be made despite the show being voted fourth-best sitcom of the 21st century by the Radio Times. Steve refuses to criticise the Corporation although he admits it was unfortunate that transmission dates and times were moved around. The general election meant two shows in the second series were put back by a fortnight and others were delayed because of tennis at Wimbledon. “The television series was a great bonus. You just have to take the decision and move on. “If you look back and analyse these things, we were shunted around quite a bit for the entire three series. You live and die by the ratings and we just didn’t get enough people watching it. “Graham and I felt that with every series we were almost starting from scratch, which was frustrating. I’m quite philosophical about it – I’m very busy with the rest of the stuff I do with Arthur.” Like many people who work in show business, Steve says his career has had a fair amount of fortune. “I’ve been lucky to be able to perform live, to
Celebrity Interview – Kay Mellor
Kay Mellor can hardly contain her excitement. The scriptwriter and director who was behind such gripping television dramas as Band of Gold, Playing the Field and The Syndicate has come up with her first musical which will visit Nottingham on a huge tour – and she can barely stop herself from attending every night. She’s teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s son Nick to write Fat Friends the Musical. The popular characters from her TV series Fat Friends, which aired for five years from 2000 are back, but are now living in a world of mobile phones and social media. Kay says the themes featured in the work are even more relevant now. “The diet industry is absolutely booming and people are feeling really bad about their body image. Magazines are showing super-skinny people and saying ‘you need to look like this to be of any worth to anybody’. And I’m trying to challenge that.” The cast includes Jodie Prenger as Kelly Stevenson, a bride-to-be who works in her father’s fish and chip shop; former cricketer Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff as her fiancé Kevin; The X Factor winner Sam Bailey as Kelly’s mother Betty; former Coronation Street actor Kevin Kennedy as Kelly’s dad Fergus; and ex-Atomic Kitten singer Natasha Hamilton as slimming guru Julia Fleshman. Originally Flintoff was not going to take to the stage in Nottingham because of other commitments. Now he will be in the show from Monday until Thursday, with Joel Montague sharing the role on Friday and Saturday. “Freddie loves this musical. You can see when he’s on stage how much he loves it,” says Kay. “Joel is fantastic so nobody’s seeing something second best if they come at the end of the week. He’s amazing and has the voice of an angel.” Kay says everyone she approached to be in Fat Friends the Musical agreed straight away. “I’ve got a dream cast. I didn’t know whether Sam Bailey could act. She came to audition for me and I knew within five seconds of her saying her lines that she could play this part – she’s amazing.” She pays tribute to composer Nick Lloyd Webber for being very careful about who he chose for the ensemble. “He had a sound in his head that he wanted for the chorus. Sometimes I’d say about a singer ‘they’ve got a lovely voice’ and he’d say ‘it’s not quite what I want’. When the ensemble sing it’s incredible. It just fills the auditorium.” Lloyd Webber also wrote the music for Loves, Lies and Records, Kay’s 2017 TV series which was set in a register office. “He gets my work and that’s not always easy. You could turn it into a dirge or it could be too poppy. But Nick understands it. He’s got an understanding of character. I think he’s a really smart man.” So what’s the difference between writing a stage play and writing a musical? “It’s different inasmuch as you have to think where the songs will come in. A song has to tell you something different from what the dialogue says – it either needs to let you in on a thought that you’re not privy to or it needs to move the plot on. “It was very difficult because I didn’t know the language of musical theatre. I’d sat in many auditoriums watching musicals and loving them but I didn’t know how to go about it. “A song’s a poem with a melody going on in my head. And Nick would say ‘well, just sing it’. I’ve got the most terrible singing voice to be honest with you, so I croaked down the phone what would be in my head. I’m sure he had a good few laughs but it gave us an idea. And then he’d come up with something absolutely stunning.” Kay Mellor OBE was born Kay Daniel on 11 May 1951 in Leeds to a Catholic father George and a Jewish mother Dinah. She has an older brother, Robert. Her parents divorced when she was young and she was brought up by her mother. She trained as an actress and secured parts in the soap opera Albion Market and the TV series All Creatures Great and Small. Her writing career began in the 1980s with Granada Television. She worked on Coronation Street and also wrote for Albion Market. She then penned seven episodes of the Channel 4 drama Brookside. Bosses at Granada spotted her talent and broadcast her first major series, Band of Gold. Starring Geraldine James, Cathy Tyson, Barbara Dickson and Samantha Morton, the programme revolved around the lives of a group of sex workers in Bradford’s red-light district. She also branched out into theatre. Her play A Passionate Woman featuring Derby-born Gwen Taylor had a run at the old Derby Playhouse in 1995 and a later version was seen in Nottingham. “I missed it in Derby but I did see it in Nottingham,” says Kay. “It went down so well there. Sometimes people immediately get my work and it seemed that the Nottingham audience did. “Gwen is a fabulous actress and I love her to bits. She’s a wonderful woman.” Kay was awarded the BAFTA Dennis Potter Award in 1997 for outstanding writing for television. She was appointed an OBE in the 2009 birthday honours and in 2014 she was awarded the Writers’ Guild Award for outstanding contribution to writing. Kay is hoping to have a holiday after Fat Friends the Musical finishes its tour. She has had a really busy time, penning two television series as well as the musical. After Loves, Lies and Records, she wrote and directed Girlfriends, a series about three middle-aged women. They have been friends since their teenage years and get into all sorts of scrapes. It starred Miranda Richardson, Phyllis Logan and Zoë Wanamaker. Kay says she couldn’t believe her luck to get such great actresses for the six-part series. Girlfriends also featured Rachel Dale who trained at the University of Derby and
