#robb wilton

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Look Up and Laugh (1935) Basil Dean

April 8th 2021

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In the earliest days of radio, and through to the 1950s, Britain was kept amused by the great Liverpudlian comedian Robb Wilton. Paul McCartney recalls getting his autograph. John Lennon went through a phase of watching Wilton and others at the Empire after a day at art college. He was particularly taken, apparently, by Wilton’s classic discourse on The Day That War Broke Out (‘My missus says to me, Well, what are you going to do about it?’) It’s been claimed, though impossible to prove, that Wilton was the first to say you had to be a comedian to live in Liverpool. Yet he rather played down his accent - the time had not yet arrived to parade your Scouseness as a virtue in itself.

Wilton’s contemporary was Aigburth’s Tommy Handley, another radio legend, chiefly remembered for his wartime show ITMA (‘It’s That Man Again’) and the rash of catch-phrases he launched from it: ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ and ‘I don’t mind if I do’ and TTFN or ‘Ta-ta for now’. It was largely thanks to Handley’s show that non-Liverpudlians came to know the term Scouser: over the years it would replace ‘wacker’, which had in turn displaced ‘Dicky Sam’. His comedy had a deep streak of nonsense to it - he stands in ancestry to the Goons and Monty Python - which might be why John Lennon put him on the Sgt. Pepper sleeve. Upon his death he was given a national send-off at St Pauls Cathedral, where the Bishop of London pronounced: ‘The flame of his genius transmuted the copper of our common experience into the gold of exquisite foolery.’

Handley’s accomplice in that ‘exquisite foolery’ was Deryck Guyler, whose character Frisby Dyke was taken from the name of a Liverpool draper’s shop. Handley and Guyler eschewed the stage Lancastrian voice of Wilton and the others, preferring the greater levels of absurdity they could achieve with their Mersey accents: another of the catch-phrases, ‘Don’t forget the diver, sir’ was comprehensible only to those who’d watched a certain one-legged swimmer, at New Brighton, passing the hat around. Guyler himself became a mainstay of TV comedies, playing the genial copper PC Corky for Eric Sykes and the cantankerous caretaker, Potter, in Please Sir.

From deepest Toxteth, Arthur Askey was an early possessor of the Liverpool Institute desk inherited by Paul McCartney. The old comic had supposedly carved his name on it. ‘Big-hearted Arthur’ insinuated himself into the public mind via some catch-phrases of his own, notably the Liverpool tram-conductors’ ‘Aythangyew!’

(Liverpool - Wondrous Place by Paul Du Noyer, 2002)

Part (I), (II), (III), (IV), (V), (VI), (VII), (VIII), (IX), (X), (XI), (XII), (XIII), (XIV), (XV), (XVI), (XVII), (XVIII), (XIX), (XX), (XXI), (XXII)

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Northern comics

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The Love Match *** (1955, Arthur Askey, Glenn Melvyn, Thora Hird, Shirley Eaton, James Kenney, Robb Wilton) - Classic Movie Review 3259

The Love Match *** (1955, Arthur Askey, Glenn Melvyn, Thora Hird, Shirley Eaton, James Kenney, Robb Wilton) – Classic Movie Review 3259

Director David Paltenghi’s boisterous, lovely old 1955 comedy stars Arthur Askey and Glenn Melvyn as Bill Brown and Wally Binns, two English North-country football-loving railway workers. They get up to their ears in trouble after racing their engine home to get to a match on time, ‘borrowing’ money from a football holiday fund to pay a fine and getting robbed of £50. However, soccer fans club…

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