A brave British attempt to make a big comedy musical, but the (American) GOLDIGGERS OF 1933 or any Busby Berkeley film it isn't, besides I mainly wanted to watch it for the star Will Hay, who was not playing it so much for laughs this time, but a grumpy Director General of the NBG (No Bloody Good) radio station - surely a dig at the sober BBC , which was losing out with its staid boring programming. Blah de blah the staff take over and make it a success - that's enough of that!
The acts were shown (literally) as they devised a system to televise their radio show via a fleet of vans with big screens on the back, around the city - remarkable (!) and certainly ahead of its time!!
There were some good comedy acts of the day, and some dire ones! A lady impersonator was awfully toe-curling, but there were a couple of men doing a comedy card trick, which I did burst out laughing at.
A 29-year-old Ted Ray played a fantastic comic violin piece, which showed he could actually play it, unlike Jack Benny! And an odd musical number had a black woman singing about her being seen as a sinner because she had black skin - my goodness!! What were they thinking of and where did that come from as it bore absolutely no relationship to the story, so was it ever shown in the USA? I doubt it, with that sequence - such a weird thing to open the big final routine at the end of a film with, it also being remarkable as it was all shown in colour, albeit a very dodgy colour.
I was also interested in watching this, because it said the colour photography was done by Claude Friese-Greene, who was a pioneer of the moving picture, using in this instance Dufaycolor, which was a revolution at the time!
There is an excellent film on ups and downs of the tragic life of one of the pioneers of cinemaphotography Friese-Greene, with Robert Donat playing him in "The Magic Box"
