A review from 1979

The Innes Book of Records, Wednesday 10.30 BBC2   Introducing Nick Cabaret, the outrageous master of ceremonies, Nobby Normal, the sad suburban man, Bob Nylon, the harmonica-playing 60s protest singer, and other assorted characters... Neil Innes plays them all in his new series of 'songs and pictures about people and things' which begins this week. Guy Bellamy writes here.

  No one has ever done a show of his own in the way that Neil Innes is going to do his series of six programmes that start this week. For a start, there is no dialogue. "It's songs and pictures about people and things,' he says. 'For the sake of change, it is worth trying. Any new programme is a risk, and it would be a lot easier to stick to a format-type show.'

Innes, 33, has written hundreds of songs since "'I'm The Urban Spaceman' became a hit with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Some he sang with The Rutles, others with Monty Python, and he has made several albums. He has now written five new ones for each show. His specialty is parodying other singers. He sent up Elton John and the lyrics of Bernie Taupin on Rutland Weekend Television.

In the new series, it's Bob Dylan's turn. He will also be introducing us to Nick Cabaret, a singer and nightclub MC, and Nobby Normal, the man on the commuter train.

'It is not intended to be up front comedy,' he says. 'It's not anarchic in any way, nor is it particularly satirical. It's literally trying to compose pictures with sound, taking both elements and making them work together. I'm always looking for a visual angle to a sing, something complementary.'

In a rare nod to convention he will have guests, but not the usual ones. John Betjeman will read a poem, Ralph Steadman will draw a picture and Jack Thackery will sing a song. Other guest include the chef of the hotel in Bristol where the programmes were made. He delivers a short lecture on how to fry fish and chips. An even less likely guest is a man who was introduced to Innes in a pub. With very little persuasion he revealed a remarkable penchant for concealing lighted cigarettes in his mouth while he drank a pint of beer. When the mug was empty, he produced the cigarette, still alight, from his mouth. They had signed him up by closing time.  

Innes himself, a former Norwich art student who's says the he arrived in show business by accident, will be playing so many roles that the real Neil will be scarcely visible. As a dreamy cowboy he sings an existentialist blue grass number which begins 'I've got my hand up the skirt of Mother Nastier'. As a politician representing the Apathy Party he takes to the streets to sing a song called 'Lie Down and Be Counted'. To sing 'Shangri-La' he dresses up as Superman.

'He just seems right for the song' says Neil. 'He's a pretty over the top character. everything goes right for him-super strength, x-ray vision.'

In contrast, he appears as a flower to deliver another new song - with plenty of bird noise offscreen which turn out to be coming from Percy Edwards. For 'Singing a Song is Easy' he is joined by 2,000 holidaymakers at Butlin's at Minehead.

There is also the plastic duck the Neil wore on his head on stage in the Monty Python shows which has not so far been seen on television. Along with gold and silver fitted dungarees, he wears it to sing 'How Sweet To Be An Idiot'. 'I saw the duck at Woolworth', he says. 'I thought, if I cut the wheels off it would make a hat. Later, when we took Monty Python to New York there were two people waiting for me at the stage door who were wearing them'.        

   

Bob Nylon, protest singer, L-plate philosopher and universal grumbler, is a product of the 60s, when the younger generation were first allowed to express themselves. Bob expresses himself all over the place, with a mouth-organ and a guitar, hitching from one folk club to the next in the hope of being hailed as the sage of his time. He studied general science at college which may account for his maladroit use of words, but once he gets away from the scientific answers which add up to something, he is lost. he sings about his need for a leader, and about there being 'something to be said for having something to say'.     You struggle like a poodle     Being stuffed into a suitcase are two of his better lines. Folk club audiences are traditionally polite, although Bob has been known to lose a few to the bar. Others have fallen asleep. Influenced by Dylan, Cohen, and other miseries, he is dim when he is trying to be clever, British when he is trying to be American, and rightly obscure when he is struggling ineffectually for fame. He does all right for girls, though - earnest girls with long hair, sack dresses, and bare feet. No one has told him that the 60s were a long time ago, and the 80s are less than a year away.

Nick Cabaret is a man with a mask that nobody has seen behind. When he comes on stage in his outrageous makeup you are in the presence of a true professional, but to what seedy lodgings he drags himself when the makeup comes off can only be imagined. Like Joel Grey's MC in the film Cabaret, he seems to be sexually ambivalent. He is master of the soft sell and would probably make a better living as a salesman except that anything he tried to sell you would immediately look suspect.

Nobby Normal is not a happy man. Trapped in his semi-detached in the suburbs, he is approaching 50 and still waiting for his life to start. Every morning he catches the train to work, a shoe factory where is a supervisor.He ponders about God, worries about his health, and thinks about the girls on the train, but never carnally. Nobby is too innocent for that. He did his national service in the army; it was the last interesting thing to happen to him. Once, in a uncharacteristic burst of enterprise, he started his own business, a mushroom farm. But it failed, and the failure still hurts. He had children once but they have left home. Now he lives with his wife whose loneliness he hardly notices.

Thanks to Neil McDonald for sending us this!