h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, maybe not exactly fortunes, but maybe priorities.

I watched a film I haven't seen for years - Sparrows Can't Sing - over the weekend. It was directed by Joan Littlewood, and starred/featured several of her company of actors (at the time) from the Theatre Workshop, based at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. I suppose you could say they were the Comic Strip of their time - new, brash, cutting edge, left-wing, anti-establishment, although focused more on drama and satire than comedy. And the comparison doesn't end there (more of that later).

Although the Theatre Workshop wasn't a comedy outfit, the cast list of Sparrows Can't Sing reads like a Who's Who of British comic actors of the 60s and 70s, and this is what interests me. The Workshop was such a serious and intense group of people, and yet so many of them went on to become well known in what you couldn't really call highbrow productions.

Barbara Windsor made her name in the Carry On films as the busty blonde.
Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy both went on to star in sitcoms, both of them ending up in Man About the House and then its spinoff, George and Mildred.
Stephen Lewis, who wrote the play Sparrows Can't Sing was based on as well as the screenplay for the film, became famous as Blakey from On the Buses.
Also in On the Buses, although having a part so small in Sparrows Can't Sing that you'd miss it if you blinked, was Bob Grant (Reg Varney's conductor).
Arthur Mullard and Queenie Watts, both in the film although I'm not sure for certain if they were members of the Workshop, starred in two sitcoms - Romany Jones and Yus My Dear.

All the sitcoms in that list are the sort we look back on now with a degree of, well, not exactly embarrassment, but they're not what you might call quality fare, relying as most of them did on stereotypes, innuendo, double entendres, cheap laughs and stock situations. Young women were sex objects. Older women were either battleaxes or sex-starved maneaters. Husbands were henpecked. Any young or unmarried man was only after one thing.

Which brings me to the Comic Strip. Or, more specifically, Ade Edmondson. Now, I have to say here that I love Ade to bits and I don't intend any criticism - I'm only making an observation. His work with Rik Mayall as 20th Century Coyote and the Dangerous Brothers has always had me in stitches. I much prefer Bottom to The Young Ones because it gave both he and Rik far more scope to be their own comic selves, plus Ben Elton was out of the picture as writer. And indeed, in The Young Ones Vivyan is easily my favourite character.

In recent years I've noticed that Ade has turned into a sort of professional quaint English eccentric. I've seen (and enjoyed) all 20 episodes of the first series of Ade in Britain, and I've seen the first four or five of the second series.

They're in that genre of programme that seems to have sprung up in the past three or four years - bung a celebrity in an interesting vehicle and wheel them around the country looking for oddballs, old crafts and customs, strange businesses and shops, grand houses and mansions, buildings with macabre histories, and British traditions that everyone (except the people who take part in them) thought had died out.

But mostly they get the celebrity to try their hand at one of these old crafts or customs, inevitably looking very silly.

There's been Ade in Britain (followed by Ade at Sea, which I haven't yet seen) going around the country in his Mini towing that odd little caravan, Rory Bremner's Great British Views (in a Morgan), Robbie Coltrane's B-Road Britain (in a beautiful old Jaguar ), Richard Wilson in Britain's Best Drives (in a different vehicle each episode, to whit a VW minibus, a 1957 Ford Zodiac, a Morris Traveller, a Triumph TR3, a 1958 Austin Cambridge and a 1952 Bentley Mark 6), and Griff Rhys Jones in Britain's Lost Routes (mostly on foot, but also on a Thames barge, and in one episode in a beautiful Rolls Royce limousine).

And we mustn't forget Clare Balding on her bike, or Timothy Spall and wife sailing around the UK in their coastal barge

Clare, to her eternal credit, kept things on a serious level and didn't look a fool by trying to make clogs, spin sugar or Morris dance, and there wasn't much that Timothy and Shane could find to try their hand at while two miles off the coast, except having the occasional barney and trying not to drown.

I won't include Oz and James Drink to Britain because that was more of a specialist programme in that it dealt specifically with booze, but it's in the same vicinity, particularly since they were in a Roller towing a crappy old caravan, thus satisfying the wacky vehicle rule

Any road up. It strikes me as interesting that people who spend their youth being so apparently anti-establishment will sometimes end up being such a part of it.

By the way, if you're interested in this sort of thing (and I am), the film was shot around Limehouse and Stepney. some of the locations are still there, mostly they aren't http://www.reelstreets.com/index.php/component/films_online/?task=view&id=943&film_ref=sparrows_cant_sing

(If you mouse over the images that *don't* have a red border you should see a shot of the same place as it looks today).

I spend a great deal of time on that website It's far more more interesting than Buzzfeed, especially when you add Google Streetview into the mix.