Another Voice

26 September 2009

I’m thrilled to the core by the magnificent tribe whose talents shine the world over

There’s something about a flesh-and-blood entertainer doing his nut in front of a flesh-and-blood audience that thrills me to the core. I’ve no idea why. Maybe because my great-grandfather was a pantomime dame. Maybe because I’m a far-flung twig on the Littler family tree — the dynasty that includes Emile and Prince Littler, impresarios who dominated music hall and pantomime in the first half of the last century.

Whatever the reason, and despite (perhaps because of?) the fact that I have not the ghost of a talent myself at standing up to entertain, I see in the man or woman who can walk out in front of a sceptical crowd and make them laugh, or cry, or gasp, a heroism higher than that of the hot-blooded warrior. I’ve watched high-wire acts in travelling circuses in the steamy towns of the Bolivian Amazon, men eating fluorescent tubes for a living in Cuzco, Peru, and card-sharps on the Ramblas in Barcelona, and felt them to be, every one of them, part of the same magnificent tribe. They are the brotherhood, and sisterhood, whose art has not at its core changed very much over the millennia and changes little from continent to continent. They always have, of course, their particular skills, sometimes to a high degree, sometimes more homely; but the skill they all have is the talent to warm their audience up and win them over from a standing start — sometimes on the streets, or gathering a crowd in a market place, or captivating the children in a village hall, or competing with the buzz of conversation after a grand dinner. They are their own fanfare, their own roll on the kettle-drums, their own whipper-in.

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