This edited article about Charles Dickens originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 705 published on 19 July 1975.

The charismatic novelist, Charles Dickens, gave dramatic readings which captivated his spellbound audiences. Picture by Neville Dear

The fashionably dressed audience applauded enthusiastically as the curtain went up. Most had paid heavily for their seats, some as much as £5, which was a lot of money in 1870. But none regretted it. It was money well spent to hear the great Charles Dickens reading from his own works.

Dickens stood there in the glare of the gas lights, a grey-haired, bearded man in a perfectly tailored evening suit with diamonds gleaming in his shirt front, but looking a good deal older than his 58 years. Then, as the house lights went down, Britain’s greatest living author began to speak. Within a few minutes, no fewer than thirty members of the audience had fainted.

It was not unusual. The medical attendants who set about rendering first aid had known what to expect as soon as they had read the programme. Even veterans of the Crimea were likely to feel distinctly queer when Charles Dickens read one of his bloodthirsty episodes, because he always made it sound even worse than the real thing.

Reading in public from his own work was something that Dickens started quite late in life.

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This edited article about William Shakespeare originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

Shakespeare is caught poaching deer by Ron Embleton

There had been people with the name of Shakespeare in Warwickshire for centuries. Some villages contained several families of that name, so that when John Shakespeare from a village near Stratford married Mary Arden, a girl from neighbouring Wilmcote, nobody took much notice.

They even lost the register in which the couple signed their names, so that no one is certain where the marriage actually took place. John and Mary had four daughters and three sons. Of these, the eldest boy, William alone is remembered.

John Shakespeare preferred town life to that of the country. He took his bride to a house he already owned in Stratford-on-Avon. There, he carried on his trade as a glove-maker, but ran a few sidelines in raw hides, wool and leather, corn and malt. He even worked as a butcher, a trade in which his son William, was said to have some skill.

As his business prospered, John Shakespeare also rose in his duties for the town council. He began as the official ale tester in 1556. Ten years later he achieved the top job as bailiff, and applied for the grant of a coat of arms.

It was against this background of a busy market town, of which his father was a leading citizen, that young William Shakespeare grew up. No doubt he was proud of his father’s prosperity and popularity, and enjoyed meeting all sorts of people at the fine house occupied by his family near the town centre.

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This edited article about Charlie Chaplin originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 688 published on 22 March 1975.

Charlie Chaplin

The Canteen Theatre in Aldershot was an entertainer’s nightmare and many regarded an engagement there as a week of terror. Most of the audience were soldiers who simply came to jeer. One night a charming lady singer got “the bird” when her voice cracked and became a mere whisper, and she was howled off stage.

The stage manager was a friend of hers and, recalling that her five-year old son had proved a good comedian in front of his mother’s friends at home, decided to gamble to keep the curtain up. He sent on the little boy.

Out went the toddler to appease the soldiers, and when he sang them a song called Jack Jones they started throwing money on the stage. He stopped singing and announced that he would pick it up first and sing again afterwards, which earned him his first laugh. Charlie Chaplin, now Sir Charlie, was on his way to the top.

But fame did not come at once for, from that night onwards, his life was bleak in the extreme for many years. He had been born in 1889 and brought up by his loving mother. When he was not roaming the shabby streets of South London, he was flitting from job to job, including selling newspapers, making toys, and acting as a doctor’s errand boy.

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This edited article about the cinema originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

Count Dracula by Oliver Frey

Pioneer film-maker Georges Melies was astonished!

He had begun by viewing film he had developed after shooting a street scene in front of the Paris Opera House. Then he found to his amazement that a bus had changed into a hearse before his eyes. He realised that the camera had jammed for a few seconds and the flow of film had been interrupted, accidentally causing this extraordinary effect.

It was the beginning of all cinematograph trickery: films of fantasy were born!

Between 1896 and 1897, more than a dozen film halls were opened in the centre of Paris and movies were much in demand.

Wearying of the somewhat stereotyped programmes provided by the American pioneer, Thomas Edison, the public flocked to see the imaginative fantasy films created by former stage illusionist Melies, who came to be known as the Magician of the Screen, the King of Phantasmagoria.

Recognised as his masterpiece and a major achievement in the first decade of moving pictures, was “A Trip to the Moon” (1902), which he adapted from stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. It is full of invention and the first screen version of science fiction and interplanetary travel. Using the camera’s full bag of tricks – the fade, the dissolve, double and multiple exposure, fast, slow and stop motion, he produced incredible effects.

By 1908, films everywhere were taking on a more sophisticated look and Melies fell from favour, but he must always be regarded as the father of the supernatural fantasy film.

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This edited article about the American cinema originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 684 published on 22 February 1975.

Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed

In the cosmopolitan cities of the United States, with their mixed races and nationalities, violence speedily became established as a way of life. The early film-makers realised this and a string of films were made which turned men like the trio above into a part of the Hollywood legend.

The big, black saloon swerves and skids around a corner at top speed, bullets spraying from a flung-open door. Bodies slump on to the pavement as, one by one, the members of the rival gang are eliminated.

“Cut!”

The director gives this instruction to stop filming and the “dead” men get up and dust themselves down, ready for another “take”, this time in close-up.

A gangster film is in the making, but this scene is not just a figment of a screen-writer’s imagination; it was happening in many cities across America in the early Thirties when crime had reached a frightening peak.

Gang warfare was front-page news and Warner Brothers’ Company in Hollywood, sensing that the public would appreciate seeing reality, however harsh, in their pictures, decided on a new policy. Movies based on headline items in the newspapers would henceforth be given top priority.

In 1930, they made “Little Caesar”, starring Edward G. Robinson. It was an instant success and started a cycle of gangster films which were immensely popular both in America and in Britain.

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This edited article about the Western originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 680 published on 25 January 1975.

John Ford’s favourite outdoor location is Monument Valley which spreads over Utah and Arizona

The hot, dusty street is deserted, the stillness broken only by the creak of a rusty saloon sign, gently swinging.

A lone cowboy, hand poised over gun-holster, walks slowly into view. From the shadows emerges a dark, menacing figure.

The classic Western confrontation scene, the showdown, is about to be played – a scene so familiar that it has often been parodied, yet it remains part of an action pattern, a ritual which seldom fails to grip an audience.

The story of the Western is nearly as old as the Cinema itself.

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This edited article about pantomime originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 676 published on 28 December 1974.

‘Dick Whittington’  is a popular pantomime, by Richard Hook

What makes a good pantomime? Catchy songs? Spectacular scenery? Certainly knock-about comedy, and at least the outline of some well-known fairy story, of which “Cinderella” is the outright favourite. Though it is essentially a Christmas entertainment, pantomime also has more to do with the old fashioned summer pierrot show at a seaside resort, than the “pier” on which it is acted.

For pantomime has a long history, and many learned books have been written about it. At different times “pantomime” has meant very different kinds of entertainment, some of which bear practically no resemblance to a modern performance of that name. Yet nearly all of them have contributed something to the entertainment which, even today, fills our theatres as nothing else can.

“Pantomime” is really a pair of old Greek words meaning “Let’s all pretend”. It began as a kind of play without words, in which masks were used to represent different people and their moods. Many modern pantomimes make great use of disguises in their stories – giants, fairy godmothers, witches and wolves, for example. Cinderella is full of them, just like those Greek “pantomimes” of 2000 years ago.

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This edited article about Sheridan originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 665 published on 12 October 1974.

The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Picture by John Millar Watt

Being short of money as usual, the manager of Drury Lane Theatre decided that a “dog-drama” might bring the patrons in. So an epic called The Caravan by one Frederick Reynolds, in which a dog rescued a child, was hastily staged in the most famous playhouse in London.

The results were sensational, for the public flocked to see the canine character actor whose, name, incidentally, was Carlo.

At the end of the opening performance, the manager rushed backstage.

“Where is my preserver?” he shouted.

“I am here,” said the worthy author, Mr Reynolds.

“No, not you, sir,” retorted the manager, “I mean the dog.”

The manager of this true story was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright, politician, duellist, eloper, orator, debtor and wit. He lives on today nearly 200 years after his masterpieces, The Rivals, The School for Scandal and The Critic were the rage of London, because they are as fresh, funny and brilliant now as they were then. But in his own time he was, as can be seen from that list of his accomplishments, an extraordinary all-rounder, renowned even for his debts. On one occasion he told his son Tom that they were descended from O’Sheridans, but that the family had modestly dropped the “O”.

“Who has a greater right to the O than we have?” said Tom. “We owe everybody.”

An Irish singer who worked for him, named Michael Kelly, said of Sheridan: “Tomorrow was always his favourite pay day.”

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This edited article about the theatre originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 663 published on 28 September 1974.

David Garrick facing a riot by Fitzgerald’s mob

There wasn’t a very large audience, but that was hardly surprising. A “Gentleman who has never appeared on any stage” was billed to appear as Shakespeare’s King Richard III, and all too often in the past such an announcement had meant that an untalented amateur wanted to show himself off at the audience’s expense. So the patrons of Goodman’s Fields Theatre on October 19, 1741, feared the worst.

The theatre was a new one and already in trouble. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, had recently suppressed several small theatres because they had attacked and mocked him in a number of shows. So to get round the ban the management of Goodman’s Fields announced “A Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music, divided into two parts”, and in the – very long – interval Richard III was to be given free. It was an odd setting for perhaps the most important debut in English theatre history.

The “Gentleman,” who turned out to be a young man of 24 called David Garrick, had, in fact, appeared “on the boards” already, most of his short career having been during the previous summer at Ipswich. But this was the vital test for him.

Garrick proceeded to change the course of English acting in a single evening. The speech and movements of most actors had become absurdly mannered, yet here was a beginner who spoke and moved like a human being and who gave a performance of such brilliance that after the audience had recovered from the shock, it cheered the newcomer to the echo.

He was the sensation of London to the point of alarming other actors. Their leader, James Quin, summed things up, saying that if this young man’s methods were right, theirs must be wrong. William Pitt, later the great Prime Minister, and Lord Chatham, roundly declared that Garrick was the only actor in London.

Within five years the phenomenon was director of Drury Lane, England’s leading theatre, and from then on, until his retirement in 1776, he was the leader of his profession.

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This edited article about cinema originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 652 published on 13 July 1974.

Marx Brothers stills

Sam looked on, aghast. Seeing his wife’s face twisted in pain, he knew her leg must be broken. Minutes earlier, Minnie had been happy and excited, standing on a chair, having her new dress fitted for the great occasion next day. Then she slipped and fell.

He was sure that she would never make the opening night now. But he was wrong. The following evening, encased in plaster, his wife, Minnie, was carried triumphantly into the Casino Theatre in New York on a stretcher and deposited in a front-row box seat.

This was an event Minnie was determined not to miss – “the culmination,” said one of her sons, “of twenty years of scheming, starving, cajoling and scrambling. A little thing like a broken leg was not going to rob her of that supreme moment.”

The hit-show was “I’ll Say She Is,” a Broadway musical comedy, and it starred her sons, the Marx Brothers, a team of crazy comics whose zany antics brought a fresh approach to comedy more than half a century ago and whose films still delight modern audiences today.

Sam Marx was a dapper, young, European immigrant from Alsace when he married Minnie Schoenberg, a pretty eighteen-year-old girl whose family had left Donum, in Germany, when she was quite young to make a new life in America.

Sam was a tailor, but not a very good one. After their five sons had been born, between 1891 and 1901, it was Minnie who took charge of the family and left her husband to do what he really did well – the cooking. This culinary talent proved useful in later years. After one of Sam’s delicious meals, theatrical booking agents were put in a good mood, and Minnie was able to extract favourable deals from them when getting jobs for her boys on the stage.

Each son had a nickname, earned when they were grown up. In order of age, Leonard was Chico; Arthur, Harpo; Julius, Groucho; Milton, Gummo and Herbert, Zeppo.

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