A homage to Larry Grayson
The audience filed in. The set furniture was covered in white sheets. As the lights went down a spotlight hit the sheets and a face emerged from within; it was Madame Blower, a charlatan clairvoyant connecting the gullible with the dead who she said were sending messages from beyond. I thought I’d come on the wrong night as I was expecting a biog of Larry Grayson, writes Michael Holland.
Eventually, the sheet came off and there stood Larry in his trademark double-breasted suit, singing his Shut That Door song and all was good in the world again.
Tim Connery’s What A Gay Day tells the life of William Sulley White, born in 1923 to an unmarried mother and a never-known father. Fostered out after ten days to a loving family, the young Billy soon grew into a boy who loved entertaining others by putting on his own shows in the front room. He called his birth mother Aunt Ethel when she visited.
When, aged six, his foster mother died, he was raised by foster father Jim and foster sisters Flo and Mary. His best friend from school, Tom, died in WWII and Billy never forgot him.
At 14 he became Billy Breen and performed a drag act with the Freeman family next door who did shows around working men’s clubs. It was in the 1950s, when his agent got him to change his name to Larry Grayson.
The writer has researched Grayson’s life and career well, and created a piece that has laughter and tears as we follow his story from boy to man. We get some background on the nicknamed characters that peopled his anecdotes: Sterilised Stan, the milkman, Pop-it-in Pete, the postman, Peek-a-boo Pete the window cleaner, as well as the legendary Slack Alice and Everard.
He began getting work in the early days of TV but this was too much for the homophobes who complained loudly enough for the offers to dry up. The Sixties were a better time with more freedom to be yourself and the Sexual Offences Act making homosexuality legal helped those comedians doing a camp routine.
Michael Grade, of the big TV impresario family, took him on as a client and his luck changed. From earning £75 a week at the start of 1972, by the end of the year he was on £6000 a week! He bought a big house in his hometown, Nuneaton, and a Rolls Royce he didn’t know how to drive. By 1978 he replaced Bruce Forsyth on the Generation Game and made the show his own. His star was shining but it was through hard work.
Most of his life he allowed himself to be guided by astrologists, Tarot card readers and crystal ball gazers and it was one he had visited who said he should leave the Generation Game. He did and was rarely seen on TV again after that mistake.
Luke Adamson brings Grayson to life in What A Gay Day through mannerisms and catchphrases. It is a play for fans who know the familiar looks, pouts and eye-rolls, who expect the innuendos and will laugh out loud at their implied naughtiness. It is for those that are ready for audience participation and can laugh when he says their outfit ‘just screams Croydon’. One man had to creep out for a loo break giving Adamson the perfect opportunity to shout, ‘Shut that door!’ as he tried to make a quiet exit.
In part it is a homage to 1970s’ television, but for me it was learning about the life of a man who only gave a small part of himself to the viewers in his pretend world of baker’s with large Viennese Fingers, postmen who pop it in the wrong letter box, and Everard who needs no explanation. It was discovering that he looked after all his foster family and always kept in touch with his natural mother that was most telling about a man who put smiles on many faces.
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