Michelle's corner

We British are a curious bunch. We have comedies recorded in our recent history which will never be re-broadcast because our society has changed so much that it is now ashamed of what was impressive and lauded talent of the time.

One of those comedies is, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum." It came to the fore in my memory because one of its stars, Windsor Davies, recently passed away. He made a recording with his long time comedy partner Don Estelle, who had died more than a decade earlier. I happened to be searching for Bernard Cribbins on Discogs and ended up searching for anything that the duo had recorded. (I sometimes get side tracked in odd and unexpected ways.) I knew they had a hit with, "Whispering Grass," but I turned up only the one album which had never been released on CD... and somehow I ended up hunting down Estelle's autobiography... which is difficult to find.

I finally tracked a copy, but one of the reviewers wrote thus...

Estelle died in 2003, having fallen off the British public's radar to such an extent that he was singing and flogging records in shopping centres. It was in his final years that he put the finishing touches to his autobiography: Sing Lofty - Thoughts of a Gemini, widely regarded as the worst (and rarest) of the genre. Encouraged by TV, radio and all-the-excellent-things-in-life's Danny Baker to climb over the dead bodies of your nearest and dearest to get hold of a copy of this bitter literary marvel, I coughed up a 50p reservation fee to have it fished out of Hampshire County Libraries storage facility, and I was not disappointed. It is - to use the language of the professional book reviewer - shit.

I should point out that Estelle comes across as a decent chap who loved making music, enjoyed the friendship of people, and lived to work. This review is not meant to be an attack on the man himself, it's just that his book is - by some distance - the worst I have ever read. And that includes the Dan Brown paperback I once threw out of a train window. So bad, that I took seven pages of notes, and I NEVER research or take notes for any of the crap I write.

Faced with a price of fifteen of our currently-not-so-great British spondulicks to get hold of a hard copy, I read through the review and decided to let the man rest.

Instead, I settled back to watch the first episode of, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum," which I have on DVD, as the whole production was made available by the BBC some years ago. However, due to the stereotypical depictions of Indians and Michael Bates blacking up, they won't re-broadcast. From a logical perspective, it's a bit bonkers really, as Bates was the only actually "genuine" Indian in the entire cast, having been born in Jhansi and later commissioned in the Indian Army; serving in the Burma Campaign with the Brigade of Gurkhas. His knowledge of the people enabled him to put in a performance that various Indian people were reported as loving the show. But that's how screwed up we are in this country; killing things because of the perceived offence of other people, rather than any actual offence. But that's another story.

No... I'll leave Estelle's autobiography to rest in peace, and settle back to enjoy some of his best ever performances, along with the rest of the cast in, "It Ain't Half Hot Mum."