THE SECRET OF ITMA
By LIONEL HALE THE English love their institutions ; and lima, after more than three hundred Thursday nights, had become as much an institution as, say, Queen Victoria in the last twenty years of her reign. The death of Tommy Handley, which is the end of Itma, might be compared with the fire that burned down the Crystal Palace ; a landmark, a familiar feature of the landscape, is gone. (It is understandable that Itma's permanence, in a flighty world, drives one to Victorian parallels.) As you did not need to be an admirer of the towers of the Crystal Palace, so you need not have greatly admired (as I did) Itma, to mourn the passing of an institution. What is of more interest is to speculate why Itma became an institution ; it was not simply, one hazards, by growing like a tree.
It is the easiest and most obvious thing to say, and certainly the most true, that Irma succeeded on the radio by making the simple and unwavering decision to be radio. I decline to be jockeyed into any discussion about whether radio may be classified as an art, which would mean befuddling the page with highly debatable definitions. If radio is an art, Irma was an art. If it was not, lima was not. What seems to me remarkable (and it seems to me also to suggest the limitations of radio) is that less than twenty years from its inception at Savoy Hill, radio reached so pure an expression. (I use the word " pure " in the technical, or Pickwickian, sense.) It severely dis- countenanced all the nods and becks and wreathed smiles of the stage. Handley himself rode with severe self-discipline over the laughs from his studio audiences which he felt would not be shared by the fireside listener ; his script-writers created their characters for the ear alone. Its slogan really was "Vox et praeterea nihil"— although I can well imagine how Frisby Dyke would receive this piece of information. Somehow its cast was trained to see in a microphone the gladdening, the inspiring, frieze of faces of the music-hall circle and gallery. Somehow, its listener learned to catch, while enjoying the bliss of solitude, some communicated companion- ship.
Technically, Irma used a variety of simple, brazen, well-proved tricks. It revived, for instance, the Victorian catch-words of Toole. No one shall tell me that Mr. Kavanagh and his team of writers did not calculatingly choose for their characters phrases that would fit happily into everyday affairs, and bring Irma into the fish-queue and the tennis club. These phrases inserted themselves neatly, as they were meant to, into the little occasions of life. A general bonhomie was fostered by " I don't mind if I do " ; small disasters could be met by the philosophical Cockney wail of " It's being so cheerful as keeps me going " ; the dentist's waiting-room was enlivened by the " After you, Claude " of a fellow-sufferer. And many a suggested domestic chore was turned aside by " What, me ? In my state of health ? " It was interesting to watch the progress of these phrases, to obsenie how Mr. Kavanagh would plant them in a programme, would weed them out remorselessly if some private Mass Observation of his own did not detect their public growth, and would lovingly cherish the successful blossoms into full flower.
These iterations of phrase, as the iterations of character, were soundly based on our love of the familiar, and on the maxim that the English do not so much know what they like as like what they know. Familiarity with us has always been more affection than contempt. Half of these islands would sit waiting on a Thursday night for Sophie Tuckshop's glissando giggle and that long word of Handley's that was the entrance cue for that enchanting, earnest Liverpudlian, all adenoids and enquiry. And now all, all are gone, these old familiai voices. They will be heard again, all but one, in different disguises ; but it was these particular disguises that had, for us, taken on the truth and the reality. For, if what you say three times is true, how much more true is it if you say it three hundred times!
Tommy Handley himself had no disguise, but was himself. Among the eccentrics of lima, he was the norm. It was as himself that he was affectionately welcomed in the homes of the English. The B.B.C. made a horrible mistake in its announcement of his death- " Mr. Thomas Handley," indeed!—as if he were some public servant, and not a private friend ; but it recovered itself later in tributes of the right kind of dignity and warmth. Much has been said since his death to the effect that he largely owed hig popularity to the war, and to the fact that his Merseyside I-won't-be-pushed-around spirit typified the feeling of Great Britain in 1939 and 1940. This, I think, is well-meaning but shallow stuff ; I know of no time when the combination of his talents and Mr. Kavanagh's would not have won the same favour. He had the quality that Chesterton found in Trabb's boy—bounce. He was the eternal irrepressible. If I thought that it needed a war to make my fellow-countrymen relish this quality, I should emigrate. But, best of all, he found in radio and in Mr. Kavanagh the right medium and the right partner for talents all of his own. I recall him, down the somewhat misty years, as a music-hall comedian in his sketch, The Disorderly Room. Memory fails to sort him out with any distinctness from any other North- Country comedians, all brusque and brash and bonhomous. He alone, however, had some kind of genius for ecstatic word-spinning ; and he happened to find, at the right time in his career, an object which lives by words—which we call a microphone. As at the same time he found Mr. Kavanagh, or Mr. Kavanagh found him, or (as I surmise) Providence arranged a meeting, the result was a foregone conclusion ; a riot of words, a sort of comic euphuism, seized the microphone and shook it till it, and our ribs, rattled. It only wanted Lamb and Hood, and reason would have tottered under a profligacy of puns.
He is dead now, much loved. What a power radio is ! Johnson's phrase on Garrick's death, " eclipsing the gaiety of nations," has been quoted ; this superb exaggeration on a comedian seen only in severely limited urban circles has been nearly enough that of a Fomedian brought by radio into croft and valley and highland. An artist can now be a household word from Land's End to John o' Groats, and never move half a mile from Oxford Circus. A year's broadcasting assures a comedian, a singer, or a dance-band a five- year success on the music-halls, whither (alas!) each carries that artificial enlargement of his talents, the microphone. And, if this is true of mere entertainment, how shall we judge the power of radio in other matters? But this is too grave a business to intrude into these scattered valedictory notes on the passing of Irma.
Previous page
