The Strange World of Gurney Slade

Our latest podcast attempted to place Anthony Newley and his output in context, but in the time available we inevitably had to focus on his more well-known works and influences, and in some cases skip over things altogether. For example, we only briefly mentioned the importance t o himof the dancer and choreographer John Cranko. Cranko is largely forgotten nowadays, but he was a fascinating and influential figure who amongst other things created the ballet The Prince of Pagodas with Benjamin Britten for Sadler’s Wells, and then when he was prosecuted for homosexuality in the late Fifties, left England and was appointed the director of the Stuttgart Ballet and choreographed a string of successful and innovative works. Tragically, he died of an allergic reaction to a sleeping pill when travelling by air back to Stuttgart after a successful tour of the USA. He was only 45.

Cranko’s influence on Newley came through his 1955 new wave revue Cranks, which combined radical set design with an unusual combination of songs and ballet. At this point, Newley was long past his fame as a child star, and his subsequent brief association with the Rank Organisation. He had steadily continued to act in films, usually in small and unrewarding supporting roles, and although he‘d begun to gain favourable notices for such works as Cockleshell Heroes, he was in a rut and artistically unsatisfied. Then John Cranko cast him in Cranks, and everything changed. The experience fundamentally altered Newley, and he said as much throughout the rest of his career:

“Cranko’s thing never left me. Clear the stage. Let’s get back to the beginning. The only time there was any scenery we brought it on. I can’t think of actors in any other way but that they are scrubbed basics, right down to the beginning. He indelibly left that on me and I worshipped him...He brought out a whole side to me I didn’t know I had.”

The moment that Newley became a star and had some control over his creative output, he began to put his version of Cranko’s aesthetic to work. The first of the Val Parnell’s Saturday Spectacular series Newley helmed begins with a clear stage, and gradually the various performers enter the scene carrying the props and gradually build up to a full-scale song and dance number. As mentioned in the podcast, to modern eyes it’s reminiscent of the Talking Heads’ film Stop Making Sense, but it’s all Cranko. The influence remains evident throughout The Strange World of Gurney Slade, and particularly the second half of the series which begins with a rudimentary, black-walled basic set representing a court room, and ends with the bare bones of a television studio representing…a television studio.

After the disastrous public response to The Strange World of Gurney Slade, Newley, with a new writing partner Leslie Bricusse, wasted no time moping and instead stormed into musical theatre with the show Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. This 1961 production deployed Newley’s now characteristic Cranko-influenced minimalist staging, with the actors as “scrubbed basics” performing multiple roles in a highly stylized Seven Ages of Man framing structure with Newley’s character Littlechap periodically halting the action with a cry of “Stop the World!”  The show was a big success in the West End and on Broadway, with many of its songs becoming hit singles for artists such as Matt Monro and Sammy Davis Jr, and as a result Newley and Bricusse left the UK for Hollywood and a life of fame and fortune. But just before the two of them departed, they produced a one-off television show for the BBC that was a natural companion piece to The Strange World of Gurney Slade, and just as ambitious.

BBC Television aired The Johnny Darling Show on 12^th November 1961 at 9.30pm. In an accompanying article in the Radio Times, Newley described how the show begins “It opens after dark…you see a poster. A heart-throb ‘pop’ singer is lined up for a television show. There’s a commentator – an Alan Whicker type – so you think everything’s fine. Then - like the Marie Celeste – the singer vanishes without trace.” This is accurate enough, but more specifically the commentator – actually a Cliff Michelmore parody - in the show’s framing device describes Johnny Darling’s disappearance and then proceeds to offer up the show as evidence so the viewing audience can see for themselves what happened to the eponymous singer. Initially, the show within the show looks remarkably similar to one of Newley’s ATV Saturday Spectaculars, until after two songs (including Newley’s then current single) Angel hears a disembodied voice telling him that the world is going to end in February, and that “there isn’t much time” which becomes a regular refrain.

The rest of the programme features Newley wandering around the stage taking part in a number of vignettes, often involving him acting out different scenes from his life so far. We learn that Angel’s real name is Herbert Nebbish, a man preoccupied with the feeling that his pop stardom is waning - “Born as a star 1961, destroyed 1962” - and he is anxious about the competition from other artists. Eventually he ends up on trial, and although the case is dismissed, and he returns to the beginning of the show to complete the song, he breaks off unable to finish, starts muttering “there isn’t much time,” and walks away never to be found again. When the commentator reappears, he describes the 40-minute show the audience has just watched as “two songs in just five minutes and not much to go on.” However, then the commentator also finds himself plagued by the disembodied voice and panics as the credits roll.

It's a shame that The Johnny Darling Show could not be included in The Strange World of Gurney Slade blu-ray release as it’s just as much as a companion piece to the series as the Saturday Spectaculars, and more remarkable in terms of what it tries to do in a Sunday night slot in the schedules. Fortunately, it is available to view, albeit in the wrong aspect ratio, so you can make up your own mind about it. If anything, the critics liked it even more than Gurney Slade. The Sunday People said that “Newley is a brave pioneer in the hard search for an entirely new type of TV light entertainment,” while The Stage stated that “it will be most surprising if this show does not win one of next year’s TV Guild awards for Light Entertainment…” Maurice Wiggin of the Sunday Times – not an easy critic to please – was delighted and suggested that “in this strange, defiantly original and highly intelligent half-hour Anthony Newley redeemed the promise made, but not fulfilled, in his ‘Gurney Slade’ series on ITV. Pure television, unthinkable in any other medium,” while Frederick Laws of The Listener demanded a rapid repeat and not only said that it was “the most brilliant satirical parody of the whole show-business myth it has been my pleasure to see” but also later chose it as one of the best shows of 1961.

In response to critical if not public demand, there was a repeat of The Johnny Darling Show on Sunday 20^th October 1962, following the only transmission of David Mercer’s acclaimed, and now lost play A Suitable Case for Treatment. It’s not known how either Bricusse or Newley responded to the critical success of The Johnny Darling Show, and if indeed they have ever said anything about it at all outside of Newley’s comments in the Radio Times. But their later stage musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crown ploughed the same Cranko-inspired furrow, as did Newley’s almost indescribable cinematic suicide note Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

It is also worth contemplating how many other creative artists were influenced similarly, either directly by Cranko, or indirectly via Newley. As we mentioned more than once in the podcast, Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner bears a remarkable number of similarities to The Strange World of Gurney Slade, but the really striking instance is the penultimate episode Once Upon a Time. In it, the main action consists of two actors in a set consisting of minimalist representations of school, work, a courtroom, with one actor portraying multiple characters from the protagonist’s life, as they go through the “seven ages of man.” The episode is often described as owing an influence to Samuel Beckett, and even NF Simpson, but surely Cranko via Newley looms just as large? Pop Goes the Weasel.

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Sources in chronological order: 

Kenneth Baily, TV Guide, Sunday People, 12 November 1961, p4

Unknown, A Hit for Newley, The Stage, 16 November 1961, p12

Maurice Wiggin, The Rules of the Game, Sunday Times, 19 November 1961, p44

Frederick Laws, Critic on the Hearth: Drama, The Listener, 23 November 1961, p886

Garth Bardsley, Stop the World: The Biography of Anthony Newley, Oberon Books, 2003