A Comedian Dies Read Free

taking an Associated Board music exam. Every note was right and the interpretation was unsullied by the elaborations of pace and understanding. Everything she sang sounded the same. Her finale,
Bring On the Clowns,
was indistinguishable from
My Secret Love,
which preceded it. She was frozen like a defunct insect in the amber of musical comedy.
    The warm applause of her superannuated audience suggested that they wanted to get back into the amber too.
    The act which followed the lovely Vita Maureen and Norman del Rosa came from the opposite end of the musical spectrum. First, there was a longish delay, filled with thumps and muffled curses from on-stage, and then the curtain rose to reveal a pop group called Mixed Bathing.
    Mixed Bathing was obviously a group in search of an image, which had tried to cover all its options by dressing each member in a different style. The lead guitarist/vocalist affected electric green satin trousers and a silver lamé string vest. The rhythm guitarist wore a striped blazer and white flannels. The keyboard player had on a black leotard and top hat, while the drummer wore a complete army combat kit.
    Musically they suffered in the same way and again had tried to deal with the problem by playing a very wide pop repertoire, in the hope that some of it must inevitably suit their styles. And to ensure that it should all sound indistinguishable anyway, they played at very high volume.
    The array of electrical equipment on-stage explained the long delay before the group’s appearance. They were walled in by banks of speakers and amplifiers. When they launched into their first number,
Under the Moon of Love,
those painted panes of glass in the Winter Gardens’ dome hitherto undisturbed by the wind, joined their fellows in a cacophony of rattling. The waves of sound fluttered the old-age pensioners like sweet wrappers in a windy playground. It was a relief to most of the senses when Mixed Bathing reached their final earth-shaking chord and the curtain fell.
    It next rose to reveal Lennie Barber manhandling a small cart onto the stage. He was having difficulty in doing this, first because his hands were encumbered by giant mittens and, second, because one of the cart’s wheels had been caught by some offstage obstruction. He gave a sharp tug and it lurched on. A rattle of laughter came from the geriatric audience, uncertain whether or not this was part of the act.
    It was a shock for Charles to see Lennie Barber. He was unmistakably the one who had starred in
Short Back and Sides
on the radio and
The Barber and Pole Show
on television, but the familiar contours of his face had shrunk with age. The cheeks, puffed out with affront in a thousand publicity photographs, now hung slack, and deep furrows scored the old laugh lines round his mouth into a mask-like parody. But the greatest surprise was the hair. The old sleek outline of black, raked back from a parting, had now fluffed out into an aureole of springy white. It was only the lack of Brylcreem and the passage of time that had made the change, but perversely it gave the impression that the old Lennie Barber was dressed up, disguised as an old man for a comedy sketch.
    His costume also seemed wrong. Gone was the trademark of the white coat from Barber and Pole’s famous Barbershop Sketch; in its place the comedian wore a short red jacket over red and white striped waistcoat and trousers. On his head was a small red bowler hat. He looked like an old print of a comedian from a vanished age.
    The mittens added to the incongruity. They did not fit the style of the rest of his costume and their great size suggested that they hid some terrible swelling or deformity.
    Barber’s material was also strange. He started on a sentimental note with a little song about being The Simple Pieman. The chorus was quite catchy.
    Don’t ask me why, man,
    It’s just that I’m an
    Ordinary Simple Pieman.
    When he came out of the song, he