Who’s Next Is Released
Out at the beginning of August 1971 in America and at the end of it in the UK, Who’s Next contains nine songs from the band’s stymied, sci-fi, multi-media epic Lifehouse sans its fearsome, protean bulk and its narrative context. While some of the surviving tracks sit easily outside their original fantastical setting, others remain inescapably science fiction. Townshend’s pioneering use of electronics on rock foundation-stones like Won’t Get Fooled Again and Baba O’Reily only serves to accentuate their futuristic essence. In those songs in particular, Who’s Next took a starring role in the dystopic urban fantasy of the early Seventies. Whatever the nuances of Lifehouse, the album presents us with a core of songs that are (still) immensely powerful and apparently straightforward: wasted youth, back-to-the-land utopias, the perhaps-hopeless longing for an exodus, rebels and rebellions and counter-revolutions, absolute political corruption, overwhelming despair and a huge degree of anger. At these moments, it is, despite Townshend’s broader intent, a furious album for a furious time. A furious tomorrow for a furious today.
TV’s Avengers Return, But Only Briefly
The above advert appeared in the Entertainment listings of August 10th 1971’s London Evening Standard. If readers were to trust to the pull quotes, the stage play of The Avengers was the greatest night out on the capital’s stages. Sadly, reality and hype weren’t in agreement. Despite an investment fund of £35 000, a substantial cast, an impressive and innovative stage set complete with car and helicopter, and a script co-written by TV series scribe Brian Clemens, the play was dead in the water in just another ten days. In today’s money, that was £444 000 down the pan after less than five week’s performances.
A 10 day run-in in the previous month in Birmingham had begun with what reads like the premiere from hell. Kate O’Hara, playing Madame Gerda, the piece’s villain, had been climbing up to the prop helicopter when the rope ladder came loose and she fell heavily to the stage. It was a night of disasters. The performance didn’t even end properly, with the curtain being prematurely lowered. Reviewers wrote about a script that was considerably more farcical than its source material and filled with painful puns and jarring innuendoes.
The Avengers at the Prince Of Wales theatre appears to disappear from the listings on August 20th. It’s possible that it was only scheduled to run for three weeks in London. Yet that £35 000 investment suggests otherwise. What’s more, in July 16th’s Walsall Observer, Simon Oates, who played Steed, was described as wondering whether the show’s prospective success would prevent him returning to TV’s eco-thriller Doomwatch.
On September 14th, the Prince Of Wales hosted another London premiere. Famous comics Eric Sykes and Jimmy Edwards led the cast in the farce Big Bad Mouse. It would run until the end of January 1972. It was a return to the West End for a well-grooved and successful production that had played there years before, and which had travelled the provinces too. There were, from what I can find, no crushing costs, no substantial problems with staging, and no problems attracting audiences. In the following year, ITV even aired a performance they’d filmed in the Prince of Wales. As for The Avengers, there remains, as fan-sites insist, no surviving script and no film.
The Day’s Fantastical TV & Radio in the UK.
BBC Radio 4 – 8.45am – Day Of The Triffids
“They are plants. They stand over seven feet high. They can walk and ‘talk’ and their sting can kill. When a world-wide disaster disables most of the human race, they seem to sense that their day has come. The novel by John Wyndham abridged for radio. Read by Gabriel Woolf.
First of 15 instalments.” (Radio Times)
BBC Radio 4 – 3.30pm – The Twelve Maidens: Black Midsummer 4/6
“A (sci-fi) serial for radio in six parts by Stewart Farrar (starring) Martin Jarvis and Patricia Gallimore.” (Radio Times)
BBC Radio 3 – 7.00pm – The Proms: Wagner – Siegfried
“The Scottish National Orchestra, led by Clive Thomas (and) conductor Alexander Gibson, from the Royal Albert Hall London.”
The Almanac Of The Fantastical will return tomorrow …
The Almanac Of The Fantastical 