"FASTEST SHOW ON EARTH"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 295, 16 February 1945, Page 16

"FASTEST SHOW ON EARTH"

The Amazing Tommy Handley ASTER than the American shows, as Bob Hope is said. to admit, and, as some think, more truly crystallising the English comic character in terms of pure radio than anything else on the air, Jtma, the Tommy Handley show, has reached amazing heights of popularity. An English journal says that when Itma went on the air one Thursday recently, more than 12,000,000 people tuned in to a programme which climbed a new peak of fantasy. By lunchtime on Sunday, when the show was repeated, Skipper Tommy Handley, with straw in his hair (he was back on the farm again) had played to almost half the population of Great Britain within a week. Handley has developed a new line in humour. While the rapid fire cross-talk comedians of old New Zealand vaudeville days surprised with their speed, Handley travels verbally at such a rate that only by regular listening can one enjoy the full range of his comedy. In a recording heard recently from 2YA, MHandley’s script writer, Ted Kavanagh, an Aucklander, and a brother of Paul Kavanagh, of Wellington, told listeners that he set out in life with the idea of becoming a doctor. He went to ‘Scotland as a medical student, and came "perilously near to the final of his course." He learned a lot about human nature and now, for many years, he and Tommy Handley have been associated. They are still on speaking terms. Once a "C.T." . Handley is a Liverpool man. After school he entered a corn mefchant’s office where, he says, he learned to flick corn with incredible accuracy at adjacent office windows. Then he becatne a commercial traveller by day-and by night. Finding that he could make more in one. night entertaining than in six days of selling toys, he entered the theatrical profession seriously. In London he expected managers to fall on his neck-but found himself pushed into the chorus at Daly’s. Then he managed to secure the job of under$tudy to the comedian, and, when the latter was "off" (through eating a surfeit of lampreys or something) played the part. Since then he has never looked back-except at a pretty face, he says, or to see if a policeman was following him. ae During the war he served with th Kite Balloon Section of the R.N.A.S. and after demobilisation played in the musical comedy "Shanghai" in a concert party and finally in his famous musichall sketch, "The Disorderly Room." A memorable occasion was the Command Performance at Windsor on the birthday of Princess Elizabeth. The Mythical Geekee Nearly 40 years ago Handley was walking down to the landing stage at Liverpool to eat his mid-day lunch when he saw the name on the door of a haulage contractor’s office. He forgot it, but (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) it lived in his head.. Then one day, just as Archimedes might have cried "Eureka!" he shouted it out at the Wednesday script conference with the producer, Francis Worsley, and Kavanagh. And "Peter Geekee," the character who never arrives-who may never arriveswam into the world at the performance next night, How does the script conference work? Miss Irene Goss, right-hand woman to Francis Worsley, stays in the room with the principals when the ideas begin to flow. She it is who cuts off the telephones, and bars all the messengers from lunchtime on Tuesday until Wednesday night. Years of work with films gave her the right temperament to act as a shock absorber between what Handley would call the cerebral concentration at Francis Worsley’s desk, and what Kavanagh considers to be the larger lunacy outside. Kavanagh is an impassive man with a large face and red eyebrows who never smiles. Handley, says Miss Goss, begins to laugh delightedly at his own ideas; the "wisecrack" comes afterwards. Worsley stares with a faraway look, coming back to earth to make alterations to the script as the ideas develop. Kavanagh brings his original script in, partly written, on° Tuesday. This is the framework, the wild, fantastic plot which always looks as if it is just going to break into sense but never does. Scratch a Duchess Dorothy Summers, who plays. Mrs. Mopp, looks in her own person something like-a duchess. Scratch a duchess, says Kavanagh, and you find a Mrs, Mopp. Newspapers pile high on Worsley’s desk while the work goes on. Down to the last stop-press items they are combed for topicality. Handley is married. A girl named Jean Allistone was in radio shows with him. During a lull in the conversation, he proposed to her. Greatly to his astonishment she accepted him; greatly to her astonishment, he married her.

And how did the catch-term "Itma" come into being? It was during the vogue for, the use of initials, such as "Ensa," and so on. "It’s That Man Again" arose through Handley cropping up so frequently in the entertainment © world.