Dabber Davis

Much as I love the story about a young Des O'Connor pretending to faint on stage at the Glasgow Empire in 1969 rather than risk further exposure to the toweringly unsentimental crowd, there's a cynical part of me which wonders if the yarn hasn't been a wee bit embroidered.

I didn't expect Michael Grade's The Story Of Variety to rubbish it, and sure enough we got the director's cut (special edition).

Des continued with the ruse backstage, said Grade, so the stage manager carted him off to Glasgow Royal Infirmary where the nurses where persuaded to wield extra-sharp scalpels. That quickly brought him round and he was back on stage for the second house.

But this was a smashing show. Hoofers and troupers and agents with great names like Dabber Davis shuffled into the warmth to reminisce about a showbiz tradition born after WW2 as a more respectable version of music hall - then killed off by TV and a desperate lurch into nudity.

Liverpool alone boasted 25 variety theatres, according to Ken Dodd, who evoked the roar of the greasepaint like this: "Lovely darkened rooms, lovely smell of oranges and cigars - then that lovely rumpty-tumpty sound." But just as many anecdotes related to life away from the proscenium arch: on the road, Aberdeen one night and Plymouth the next, never seeing home for 18 months, not actually having a fixed address, the big meet-up on the railway platforms of Crewe - the digs!

Some landladies were "Artists only - no straight people". Some put out tablecloths for actors but not for "twice-nightlies", as variety acts were known. Roy Hudd recalled the Christmas Eve he hoped for respite from what had been a tyranny of baked beans: "Beans again, but with one chipolata buried in them."

Another variety veteran, Scott Saunders, remembered a landlady who was more obliging: "I got back to the digs late and the pianist Semprini was shagging her on the kitchen table. 'Oh Mr Saunders, what must you think of me?' she said, and just carried on."

Aidan Smith, The Scotsman, 8th March 2011