The Young Ones

The Young Ones
1962

The-Young-Ones-Original-British-Movie-Quad-Poster

Directed by Sidney J. Furie
Written by Ronald Cass

CAST

Cliff Richard – Nicky Black
Robert Morley- Hamilton Black
Carole Gray- Toni
Jet Harris – self (The Shadows)
Hank B. Marvin – self (The Shadows)
Tony Meehan – self (The Shadows)
Bruce Welch – self (The Shadows)

with
Teddy Green – Chris
Richard O’Sullivan – Ernest
Melvyn Hayes – Jimmy
Annette Robertson – Barbara
Robertson Hare- chauffeur
Sonya Cordeau – Dorinda Morell
Gerald Harper- Watts
Harold Scott- Dench
Sean Sullivan – Eddie, Dorinda’s manager
Rita Webb – woman in market

The 60s Retrospective Series

Release dates: December 1961 UK premiere / January 1962 UK General release. LP release was also 1962.
USA March 1963

See also: Summer Holiday (1963)

This was huge in the UK, in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone in America. Nowadays, if you Google the title, the later TV comedy series (which used the title song) takes the whole of the first page.

The Young Ones and Summer Holiday would only be rivalled by A Hard Day’s Night and Help. It was bigger than any Elvis film in Britain except Blue Hawaii, and they were neck-to-neck around the same time. Like Elvis, you only need one name for Cliff Richard. Just ‘Cliff’ does it for anyone in Britain.

The Young Ones Rita copy

The Young Ones, original 45 release

The single The Young Ones was UK #1 for four weeks from January 1962. It was the 6th best-selling single of 1962. It was also #1 in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, and Spain. Sales of 1.06 million in the UK, 2.6 million worldwide. It had British advance orders of 524,000 copies, and was the first single ever to enter the charts at number one.
The album The Young Ones was #1 for six weeks, and in the Top Ten for forty-two weeks
The EP Hits From The Young Ones was #1 in the EP charts in June 1962 (six months into the film). EPs were important in Britain.
When The Girl In Your Arms Is The Girl in Your Heart was released ahead of the film, in October 1961 and was #3 in the UK.
The Savage by The Shadows was #10 in the chart
While the film was playing, Wonderful Land by The Shadows (which is not in the film) was #1 for nine weeks, outselling The Young Ones. Second best seller of the year.
It was the second-highest grossing UK film of 1962, behind The Guns of Navarone.

The Young Ones.EP.600 copy

The EP: Hits From The Young Ones

Cliff Richard had done films before … Expresso (sic) Bongo and Serious Charge both in 1959. The Shadows hadn’t and it was originally planned for Hank B. Marvin and Jet Harris to play the parts that were eventually played by Melvyn Hayes and Richard O’Sullivan (who both went on to do well.) They decided they needed professional actors, and Bruce Welch’s autobiography suggests that Jet Harris’s alcohol problems were a factor. Using experienced actors as supports was a good choice.

It was designed to be cheap with a budget of £110,000 but it ended up costing £230,000. Director Sidney J. Furie said producer Kenneth Harper accepted it was his fault in miscalculating the costs … and after all, Furie went on to be invited to direct the next two, Summer Holiday and Wonderful Life.

Harper asked for £110,00 and got it. When Leslie Grade later asked him how he knew it would cost £110,000 he said, “I haven’t a clue. It’ll probably cost more but let’s just go for a nice round figure.”
Steve Turner: Cliff Richard: The Biography

The film went on at the cinema forever, it seemed. After six months with queues round the block in major cinemas, it re-appeared in the ultra-cheap News Theatre in Bournemouth and was there on and off for many months, eventually alternating with Summer Holiday. I was fifteen and at youth club. One friend at the youth club eventually claimed to have seen it seventy times. He sewed up his trouser pockets because Cliff did, so as to keep a smooth hip line. Last time I saw him was a dozen years later in an off licence. He was wearing mascara and carrying a handbag. But back in 1962 I’m 100% sure he didn’t know why he loved the film so much. I saw it several times myself as The News Theatre was the cheapest dating place for cold wet winter nights.

In the What do you know? We got a show? musical category it is a classic of the genre. The trouble with the film is the two genres of music. The powers-that-be wanted the old showbiz stuff and the old showbiz medley. The quality of the Cliff & Shadows numbers leapt out, especially The Young Ones. It was written by Sid Tepper & Roy Bennett, both American. I only just found that out, imagining for decades ‘Bennett’ was the later Shadows drummer, Brian Bennett. Cliff had recorded their Travelin’ Light a year earlier. They also wrote When The Girl In Your Arms. Bruce Welch of The Shadows noted that Tepper & Bennett’s previous songs included Twenty Tiny Fingers, Twenty Tiny Toes. They had five songs on the Blue Hawaii soundtrack album. That film had a month’s start on The Young Ones and they were vying for chart positions early in 1962. However the Tepper-Bennett songs (Ito Eats, Slicin’ Sand etc) are all on side two of Blue Hawaii, the side no one played.

Ronald Cass who wrote the screenplay, wrote the other “musical” numbers, with Peter Myers supplying lyrics. Cass and Myers had expected to write the whole thing, but it was decided that American writers were needed.

Ron Cass: Basically we weren’t given a chance to write any of the alleged pop numbers. We were just the work horses who did the vital and more difficult work.
Steve Turner, ‘Cliff Richard: The Biography.”

This was one of many efforts to get American interest in Cliff Richard. The two Tepper-Bennett songs were the best in the film, so the producers were vindicated. For me, The Young Ones still brings a tingle of excitement as it starts, and I would say that Hank B. Marvin’s ringing guitar is an essential part of its appeal. A third song Outsider was recorded for the film, but not used. It ended up on the LP 21 Today. However inexplicably, yet again, the USA didn’t go for Cliff. They also chose a Canadian director, Sidney J. Furie and a Broadway choreographer, Herbert Moss, to maintain a North American connection.

Daniel Kremer’s Sidney J. Furie: A Life in Films recreates the genesis:

KENNETH HARPER: How would you like yo do an MGM musical?
FURIE: What the hell are you talking about? There aren’t any more MGM musicals. They’re gone with the wind.
HARPER Well, we’ve got to do this Cliff Richard and The Shadows picture. The writers I’ve got for it want to do a Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland kind of story and then work Cliff’s pop stuff into it.
FURIE: So it’s actually a rock ‘n’ roll picture?
HARPER: In a way. In another way it’s like Babes in Arms. The kids put on a show to save their youth club from a greedy developer.

They pitched it in the USA as Wonderful To Be Young with a Burt Bacharach song over the titles. Sidney J. Furie later said the alterations to cater for the American market were moronic.

Bruce Welch: We flew to the States on an extensive promotional tour to plug it. It was one of the biggest campaigns ever mounted to launch an unknown British singer to American audiences, despite the fact that we had toured the country before. Quite honestly, our return visit to America was an unmitigated disaster … The movie was shown in selected cinemas across the States, and immediately it was over we came bounding out on stage and gave an hour-long live performance … audience attendance was abysmal. Theatres that could normally have held 2000 people or more were only half full.
Bruce Welch, Rock ‘n’ Roll – I Gave You The Best Years of My Life. 1989

Cliff and The Shadows US tour was over-shadowed (sorry) by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone felt it was the brink of World War Three. A happy-go-lucky show was the last thing audiences wanted to see. In fact, they did better in Canada … #5 in the Toronto chart, #10 in Vancouver. Cliff had to wait until 1976 for a major US hit.

Cliff Richard as Nicky

Cliff Richard later said:

CLIFF RICHARD: For the public, we sort of eased them into it. And it became acceptable to mums and dads. It opened up my career so much. It was like an overnight change. One minute, I was a rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon. The next minute I was an all-round entertainer.

It opened up his career so much? So not in a good way for those of us who liked Cliff up to about Summer Holiday, then went off him! It showed that Cliff was going to follow the conventional showbiz line of moving to an older audience, a line that leads to the horror (to me anyway) of Congratulations. There was good financial reason in that musicals dominated the early 60s album charts. In 1962, the chart was dominated by West Side Story and South Pacific, both eclipsing The Young Ones and Blue Hawaii.

Carole Gray as Toni

There was great fuss over the female lead. Herbert Ross, the choreographer, suggested Barbra Streisand. Ava Gardner was suggested. They chose Rhodesian dancer Carole Gray, then dancing in New York.

Stephen Glynn: It was felt that while she was pretty, she was not an unduly threatening presence to Cliff’s female following and, while talented, she would not upstage the star.
The British Pop Musical: The Beatles and Beyond

That’s what you call a back-handed compliment.

Bruce Welch: Carole Gray had been brought in as a replacement for British actress Anne Robinson. She was a friend of the producer. She was not much of a singer and another voice had to be dubbed on to the soundtrack.
Bruce Welch, Rock ‘n’ Roll – I Gave You The Best Years of My Life. 1989

A ‘friend of the producer’ is a phrase that everyone in the film business will read more into. Her singing voice was over-dubbed by Grazina Frame.

Melvyn Hayes: They never got Cliff the right leading ladies. In The Young Ones he had a girl who looked as if she could have been his mother.
Cliff Richard: The Biography

Is that fair? Carole Gray looks alright to me. It’s not so much a case of her looking old (she looks mid-twenties) but of Cliff looking young. As he still does for his age. She had a slight Southern African accent. I’ve often wondered why Zimbabweans have a similar accent to South Africans. I’d assumed the Dutch Boer influence had created the accent, and Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) was settled much later with no Boer influence. Her subsequent career led her into horror films.

As in any major film, Bruce Welch and Melvyn Hayes will not have been present for the long dance numbers which she leads, and it’s obvious that the “MGM Musicals” concept necessitated casting a star dancer as lead. She was a star dancer. Singing ability was unimportant … easily dubbed.

Robert Morley as Hamilton Black

They added Robert Morley, a long-established screen star as Cliff’s screen father. Cliff was somewhat scared of Morley but found him kind and considerate, taking the blame for any fluffs in their dialogue.

Sidney J. Furie: Cliff brought enormous energy to the screen. And there was a great innocence about all of the action. There was absolutely no sex, in fact I think there was scarcely a kiss. But there was a truth about the acting and the writing that we were all impressed by. It’s a film very much of its time, but decades later it’s still enjoyable and entertaining. I’m proud of that movie. It was just a dream I had to bring some colour because everything seemed so grey in London.
Tim Ewbank, Stafford Hildred: Cliff: An Intimate Portrait of A Living Legend 2008

THE PLOT

The beginning is an exciting pastiche of West Side Story musically. Friday Night is a Myers-Cass song, with Stanley Black orchestrating the Mike Smmes Singers. No, it’s not rock. In fact The Young Ones came out in the cinemas a few weeks before West Side Story, but the stage version had dated from 1957 in the USA, 1958 in the UK. Our music teacher enthused about West Side Story, as the greatest musical work of the 20th Century, though he also loved El Paso by Marty Robbins. Anyway, they’d been listening to a lot of Leonard Bernstein. There’s the lads dancing in the street, leaping on buses, the girls at a ballet class. The sequence takes them to the youth club and includes a split screen collage of the kids getting ready for the night out, with a vertical blind effect. Stanley Black’s orchestra is pumping it out too. This made me think as I rewatched, ‘Wow! I hadn’t realized the direction was this innovative and good!’ But it is never this good again.

We see everyone racing towards the youth club, which is the oddly named “Simpkin’s Youth Club”. Where I came from youth clubs were generally known as Victoria Park Methodist Youth Club or Winton Congregational Youth Club. The few non-church ones could be scary (Pokesdown, The Wheelhouse) but none of them had people’s names in their title. (Also having met several Simpkins but never a Simpkin, that should be Simpkins’ not Simpkin’s. Just saying.) The audience also seem eighteen plus and driving cars, where to me, youth clubs were mainly 14 to 16 or 17. As in other 60s pop exploitation films, there is an inexplicable number of vintage cars on show (possibly the studio had a garage full of them), but I do like the bubble car and Lambretta scooter.

Friday Night

Once we get inside, everyone is dancing … mainly jiving, and the band are … Cliff Richard and The Shadows with Got A Funny Feeling.

Got A Funny Feeling

Then we get the announcement that their lease will not be renewed. Looks like this is a co-operative of some kind, then. Everybody’s feeling depressed and Nicky (Cliff Richard) hasn’t said a word yet. So Nicky dances with Toni, (Carole Gray) to a few seconds of The Shadows playing Peace Pipe. I wondered if the set filling with smoke at this point was a reference to the song title, or to the habit of chain-smoking in the age group in 1961, but I think it was smoke machine atmospherics.

Peace Pipe. What else would you call a tune when your biggest hit was Apache? Smoky stuff.

It’s tempting to type out the long detailed synopsis on the LP cover. It’s the longest I’ve seen on an LP cover. I will:

Nicky (CLIFF RICHARD) is a twentieth-century youngster who loves tight jeans and hot music. He is the leader of a Youth Club in the Paddington area of London, which has its headquarters in a rather dilapidated hut, but Nicky, his girlfriend Toni (CAROLE GRAY), and the rest of the boys and girls are happy there. It gives them a chance to let off steam with their rock ‘n’ roll music and also acts as a retreat where they can escape the narrow and disapproving world of the adult.

Unknown to the others, Nicky’s father is Hamilton Black (ROBERT MORLEY), a millionaire property owner, who specializes in buying up areas of land and erecting huge modern office blocks.

Nicky has never had cause to reveal his father’s identity to the other club members and has shied from doing so because they would never accept him as one of them. But matters come to a head when it is discovered that Black is intending to buy up the area in which the Youth Club is situated and demolishing it before building grand new offices on the site.

~~So, basically Nicky wants to be one of them, and he’s worried about his father’s erections.~~

Nothing’s Impossible … “when those trumpets hit that rock ‘n’ roll beat'”

The next number is introduced … It’ll be impossible to save the youth club, wails Toni, Nothing’s impossible … replies Nicky and we’re into the duet. Two things are apparent. First, that Carole Gray was cast on her dancing ability, because she is highly accomplished. Secondly, that having heard the song Nothing’s Impossible by Myers-Cass, the producers were absolutely right to go elsewhere (Tepper-Bennett) for the pop material. It’s a retro stage musical filler number.

They said around the Earth
A man could never spin
Ever heard of Major Gag-arin.
You see, nothing is impossible …

It’s on the studio’s “Soho set” which was modified and re-appeared in The Small World of Sammy Lee. Cecil Gee’s boutique must have had a product placement deal. At the end of the duet, Nicky leaps up and disappears into thin air. After all, nothing is impossible.

We see Nicky at his palatial home with his dad, Hamilton Black (Robert Morley) with the model of the office block he wants to build on the youth club site. The neo-classical Parthenon top adds to the joke, as Morley fiddles with extra bits trying to decide whether to make it taller.

As dad hits the whisky and soda, the cunning Nicky finds out there is an extra clause in the lease which their lawyer will know about.

Let us not go into the morality of taking advantage of an elderly relative in a state of inebriation here. To add to it all, Nicky phones dad’s lawyer imitating his fruity tones to discover more.

This is Hamilton Black …

Having got the information, Nicky visits Ernest (Richard O’Sullivan) who conveniently works for the lawyer with the files. Nicky wears a bowler hat (jauntily placed) and carries an umbrella. This is meant to be funny.

Cliff with bowler hat

Richard O’Sullivan as Ernest

Ernest and Toni are present to hear Hamilton Black outlining his scheme to replace the youth club.

The London skyline was a lot lower.

I’ll carry on quoting the LP sleeve, though I’m dubious about capital letters for Youth Club:

Through one of the club members it is learned that there is an escape clause in the lease of the property, but when the club members tackle Black on this he tells them they can have the land- if they can find five years rent in advance, a matter of fifteen hundred pounds. By this time Black has discovered that his son is one of the club members, and though he admires his offspring for putting up a fight, tells him that he has no chance of retaining the property.

Something like ‘I admire you for putting up a fight but you have no chance of retaining the property.’

Nicky and Toni drive off to Ruislip Lido in a 1950s highly desirable MG. This is the setting for the title song The Young Ones. Is it the mix? It sounds muted, much softer than the single. I’d say slower. At this point in the film it sounds surprisingly weak. I checked the LP which sounds just like the single mix … long for 1962 though at over three minutes. And brilliant.

The Young Ones

It’s not helped by the decision to surround the courting couple with younger kids who are at the Lido. By the end Cliff is like the Pied Piper. When he sings:

And some day
When the years have flown
Darling, then we’ll teach the young ones
Of our own

I loved the way Toni looks demurely at the ground at such a crude and racy suggestion. What a thing to say! Didn’t he realize that ‘having young ones of our own’ implies sexual intercourse?

The song on film ends with a shout from the kids, and skips the Hank B. Marvin guitar outro which is one of the best bits of the song. The song reappears over the credits and the strings seem higher in the mix, and the band lower.

Back to the Youth Club (or youth club):

Toni: I’ve got an idea! Suppose we do a show!

I thought she’d never ask. All are united to sing All for One. Cliff is accompanied by the Mike Sammes Singers with the whole cast miming. It is an extended dance piece with a long section where Toni and Chris (Teddy Green, in the red shirt) lead the dancing.

The casting of two experienced musical dancers is getting clearer. This is the MGM Musical style at its peak. Karen noted the “full skirt dancing” as the epitome of the style. The lyrics by Myers-Cass are as forced and convoluted as so many of the genre:

You’ve heard of those Three Musketeers
Immortalized by Alexander Dumas
– Yeah, we’ve heard rumors
And Arthur and his Guinevere’s adventures
At the Table Round at Camelot
– Why yeah, so what
Call them square and oblong, acidly
Nevertheless it’s true
That the Mavericks and Hop-along Cassidy’s
Say the same thing, too

It gets them all united in a common cause. It’s a few years too early for We Shall Overcome, or We Shall Not Be Moved.

L to R: Carole Gray, Teddy Green (Chris), Anette Robertson (Barbara), Cliff Richard, Richard O’Sullicn (Ernest)

What with Toni’s plaid pattern frock and Chris’s cowboy boots, you half expect them to go into Oklahoma.

Nicky: Listen, Barbara, I know you went to Drama School, but can you direct?

Of course she can! That’s alright then. They meet and plot their next move. They need a venue. Back to the club:

Lessons in Love: Bruce Welch on acoustic guitar. Jet Harris on bass. Let’s assume that’s the two of them playing everything we hear.

Nicky: Hey, Bruce, do you know the chords to Lessons in Love?

Guess which song that leads into. (C – Bb – C – Bb (intro) then C – Am – F – G- F – G). Bruce being the rhythm guitarist will need to know the chords. Hank, being the lead guitarist, will need to be able to pick out the melody. Division of labour. This is the first time any of The Shadows are integrated into the plot. And the last time. Nicky sings the song lovingly to Toni.

Dorinda Morell (Sonya Cordeau) and Eddie (Sean Sullivan)

Problem. American star Dorinda Morell (Sonya Cordeau) has heard about the show, rolls up in her Roller, and offers her services as a publicity stunt, prompted by her manager Eddie (Sean Sullivan). We know immediately she’s no lady as (a) she’s a redhead and (b) she applies lipstick in front of a man and (c) her breasts are falling out of her dress. These are 1950s film codes.

Cliff appears to have a fear of cleavage.

They meet to discuss it in a café- one of the only shots of the main “gang” together.

L to R: Chris, Nicky, Barbara, Toni, Ernest, Jimmy (Melvyn Hayes)

Lessons in love: Take two with Nicky (plus Bruce Welch, Jet Harris, Hank B. Marvin)

Dorinda has sold a million records, we hear (must have been working at Woolworths record counter for a few years, a friend muttered back in 1962). So she must take Toni’s role. Lessons in Love gets three goes in the film.

Lessons in Love: Take three. Nicky does not appear deeply thrilled by Dorinda’s attentions. Jet Harris couldn’t care less. The bass part remains the same.

We keep cross-cutting to Toni, and finally she is there with great gobbets of glycerine running down her cheeks. Seems like a natural cue for a song, and it is! Toni sings (or rather Grazina Frame sings and Nicky mimes) No One For Me But Nicky, another Myers-Cass song. She is surrounded by a red glow. Could be the fires of passion or just a heart effect.

No One For Me But Nicky

Back to the LP sleeve:

Nicky and the others have their own ideas though. They rent a theatre and decide to put on a show to bring in the money they need, but at the last minute, a beaming Hamilton Black tells them he has bought the theatre in question and that they certainly cannot put on a show there.

The news arrives at the club. It is an invitation to meet Hamilton Black. At this point we’re beginning to see The Shadows often enough that we almost expect them to get lines in the script. But they don’t. Good background reaction though.

Barbara, Toni, Jet, Nicky, Hank, Dorinda

Hamilton Black announces his victory to Barbara, Toni and Ernest:

Hamilton: I have happened to purchase it this afternoon- lock, stock and barrel … Your show, young woman, is off!

Yet again, Nicky manages to avoid these meetings because no one knows he’s Hamilton’s son. Just to add insult to injury, he plans to turn the theatre into a Bingo Hall. That was happening a great deal with cinemas and theatres in that era.

The LP:

Even this doesn’t defeat the youngsters. They find a broken down theatre which hasn’t beenin business for years, contact an old lady in Glasgow who owns the lease and obtain her permission to decorate the theatre and put on their show there.

A theatre which hasn’t been used for years? I fear there’ll be a street full of them in Covent Garden in a few years time. This one is the Finsbury Park Empire. Off they go to inspect it in a vintage car which drives along the street we’ve seen several times before. It’s odd that they never noticed a large abandoned theatre just at the end.

Nine people get it into the car. I’m surprised the engine can handle the weight. Sitting on the back of over-crowded open top cars was popular in 60s movies.

The theatre is in rough condition. Either that or it’s in good condition but set for The Phantom of The Opera. But rise to the challenge! How many times have youngsters found an old theatre, refurbished it and put on a show! Fortunately the place is full of costumes and backdrops, as they discover.

This leads into the long sequence of rehearsing a vaudeville / variety show with all these lights, backdrops and costumes to the strains of What D’you Know? We’ve Got A Show, and it’s another Myers-Cass song, with bits of medley interspersed. To me it was the creakiest part of the film by a mile.

I fear this might be a routine I did lights on for twelve shows a week some five years later. I didn’t even find it funny the first time I heard it, which was sometime before 1962:

A: My wife has gone on holiday to the West Indies.
B: Jamaica?
A: No, she went of her own accord.

OK, it is meant to be really cheesy. It’s gorgonzola cheesy.

Piccadilly Johnny

Gin, gin, gin, ginjah. With pith helmets. Taking the pith?

It is awful. Sorry. It leads into the boys being taught ballet by Toni.

When The Girl In Your Arms

What the lads do is record “The Mystery Singer” doing When The Girl In Your Arms. They find an old radio transmitter for thirty bob (£1.50) which is powerful enough to block BBC and ITV wavelengths, thus interrupting all programmes with the warbling Nicky – it is the other Tepper-Bennett song in the film. It does sound suspiciously like an Elvis Presley reject … and you can imagine him singing it between Are You Lonesome Tonight? and It’s Now or Never. Given their writing for Elvis, that may be its origin. Elvis should have taken it … it’s way better than Wooden Heart or much other dross he recorded. Whatever, it was the hit single released to trail the film three months ahead, and it’s the song which is supposed to create all the interest in “the mystery singer.”

At high speed they begin getting the theatre ready and in the meantime set up an old radio transmitter and broadcast the revised date of their show over the television network. Nicky is billed as “the mystery singer” and immediately becomes a great success. This of course brings in the police and an hilarious search begins with a detector van attempting to trace the source of the broadcast.

A green TV Detector van. Dark green was the Post Office Telephones standard livery, and they ran the vans. We’ve seen this street before. It’s next to the youth club, the theatre and Scotland Yard conveniently.

The visit of TV detector vans to an area were announced on TV frequently in 1961 and 1962. The purpose was to ensure that everyone paid their annual TV Licence Fee to the government. The announcements would declare that “Detector vans are in your area” and informed us that they could detect a TV tubes for hours after it was switched off. You would be fined heavily if you had a TV without a license.

Melvyn Hayes as Jimmy declining to sell fruit to Rita Webb.

What the lads do is hide the radio transmitter in a market fruit stall which they can push around to various locations. They have a problem when a lady (Rita Webb) insists on buying fruit.

High tech Scotland Yard tracing the pirate transmitter

However, the result is that Scotland Yard, trying to trace the “pirate radio” (a few years before pirate radio started offshore in the UK) keeps finding it in the wrong place … finally in Scotland Yard itself, which happens to be in the same street as the Cecil Gee shop we’ve seen. Hamilton is at home when the pirate station interrupts the TV. He rails against pop music, until Nicky points out that the star of the show, Dorinda, has sold a million records.

Once the old bastard hears that Dorinda has sold a million records, he decides to recruit her for his theatre too. Loss of star to the youth club show. I don’t expect Toni minds. I did wonder what Dorinda’s role would be in a Bingo Hall. Calling the numbers?

Hamilton takes Dorinda away.

A meeting. A reprise of All for One, One For All. They will go with focussing entirely on “The mystery singer” as the new star of the show.

The transmitter is moving around, and Hamilton finds the police turning up at his apartment to search for the transmitter!

Perhaps the police think these new-fangled transistors are small enough to hide a radio transmitter in a book.

The show starts with a long dance routine, Just Dance by Myers-Cass, mixed with Mood Mambo by Stanley Black. Toni leads throughout.

Just Dance / Mood Mambo

Poor Nicky is getting nervous about his starring role. Toni manages to lose the bowler hat and suit and comfort him.

One of those tricky shots with mirrors that take an inordinate amount of time to film

Hamilton phones from Glasgow. He has bought the theatre from the old lady who owns it. He is on his way to stop the show.

The sleeve synopsis:

Meanwhile Hamilton Black has got wind of the club’s latest move and hurries to Scotland to try and buy the theatre and return with the documents before the show gets under way. Some of the club members go off to waylay him and prevent him from getting to the theatre until the show is over and when Nicky hears this, he is forced to reveal to his pals that he is Black’s son and goes off to save his father from attack.

Hamilton is kidnapped on the way in from the airport. They stopped his Rolls-Royce and grabbed him.

Meanwhile, back at the theatre, The Shadows are regaling a happy audience with The Savage complete with all their famed stage move – standing in line raising guitars, the Shadows walk, etc. Simpkins has lost its errant apostrophe.

The Savage: Tony Meehan, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris, Hank B. Marvin

Nicky goes to the club where his father has been taken and helps him fight it out with the kidnappers.

Indeed he does. His father urges him to use the judo he’s learned, and it appears that Hamilton is an accomplished martial arts man himself. They beat the kidnappers. Hamilton politely enquires if any are needed for the show. Just the one. So they help him to the car. Hamilton has arranged for his lawyer to meet him with the police to stop the show. He has changed his mind! The show must go on …

Hamilton and Nicky (with wounded kidnapper) arrive.

At this point the audience is chanting for the Mystery Singer then demanding their money back and pelting the compere, poor Ernest, with fruit. I had not realized that the 5 fruit and veg a day campaign was in existence nearly 60 years ago, so that people went to the theatre with a handbag full of fruit.

So Nicky goes on as the Mystery Singer. We hear him finishing off When The Girl In Your Arms before belting out We Say Yeah.

We Say Yeah

We Say Yeah was the B-side of The Young Ones single, and an indication for the future … written by Gormley, Marvin, Welch. I think we can guess that Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch wrote it. Peter Gormley was their manager, and such credits were common. EMI producer Norrie Paramor is credited with the Shadows tracks, The Savage and Peace Pipe. OK. Willing suspension of disbelief.

It had never struck me that the song is:

Cliff: We say yeah …
Backing: Yeah … Yeah …

So … Yeah, Yeah, Yeah a good eighteen months before She Loves You. At the same time The Beatles were recording their pastiche Cry For A Shadow in Hamburg.

Then they hasten to the theatre and get there just as the audience is beginning to demand “the mystery singer”. Nicky immediately goes on stage and his singing quells the noise. As he finishes to great applause, Nicky comes off stage to find his father offering to build them all a big new youth club.

The offer is accepted and Nicky returns to the clamouring audience with the whole Company for the grand finale.

The finale is What D’You Know, We’ve Got A Show. Robert Morley even gets to sing a line.

OVERALL

We both enjoyed it and were glad we had rewatched it. Karen was particularly impressed by Carole Gray’s dancing, but felt the choreographer had seen West Side Story for some bits and too many mid-50s musicals for the others. The choreography could have been much sharper and more original. Cliff was appealing. Some songs were appalling. It’s not meant to be Citizen Kane.

DVD

Something of a bargain in that Sing-A-Long with Cliff contains three films, The Young Ones, Summer Holiday and A Wonderful Life. It’s a good bright transfer. Supposedly you can switch the song words off, but they mainly appear in the black margin under the image so are not obtrusive. Whatever, we selected “off” but still got them. There are no other subtitles as far as I could see.

SOUNDTRACK

It’s been described above adequately. I’ve got the mono LP (and the single and the EP). I was playing it while writing this and the sound is still superb, 58 years on. It’s a good original “green label” Parlophone pressing. You can see why Myers-Cass were booked to write Summer Holiday but didn’t get the pop songs on that either.