TV review

Philip Saville (1970)

The Long Distance Piano Player and Starmaker made up a ‘Ray Davies on TV’ double bill at BFI, coinciding with Davies’ ‘Meltdown’ performances on the South Bank.  He came along to NFT1 to introduce the screening.  I’m usually impatient for the people prefacing films at BFI to get on with it and off the stage but not here.  The Kinks’ songs, and Ray Davies especially, meant something to me in the 1960s and still do.  (X-Ray is one of my favourite autobiographies.)  Talking to the audience, Davies was witty and charming, and likeably sheepish about his acting ability:  ‘Worst thing you can say to a non-actor is be yourself … I don’t know who I am anyway’.  Watching the two pieces made me nostalgic about TV drama too.

The Long Distance Piano Player by Alan Sharp (Dean Spanley) was screened as a Play for Today a few months after the cinema release of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  Compared with what goes on in the Santa Monica ballroom, the marathon piano playing, in an unadorned working men’s club in northern England, isn’t much of a show.  The tunes from Pete (Davies) seem to give out quickly – he’s barely keeping going from an early stage (and doesn’t get the short breaks the dancers get in Sydney Pollack’s film).  The audience that Pete’s manager promises will be flocking in don’t – they seem barely curious, unimpressed by either the piano playing or Pete’s physical state:  a sequence in which a few pensioners call out for him to play particular numbers is perfunctory.  Whether this reflects a limited budget or a limited script isn’t clear, but it deflates the existential aspect of the play – shots of a fox running free in a field during the closing credits are required to remind you of that aspect.   The characterisations aren’t great but all four of the main players have some kind of reality – particularly Lois Daine (in the BFI audience for the screening, and whom Davies introduced to the rest of us), as Pete’s wife, and James Hazeldine, as a kind of second to Pete – a touchingly, almost mysteriously awkward young man.  Norman Rossington, as Pete’s manager, has an American accent so insecure you’re nervous at first – then it turns out (Pete says) that this is the voice he puts on as a manager: the layers of inauthenticity make for quite a rich impasto.  Only Ken Hutchison, as a thug who keeps having a go at Pete, is bad (he stayed bad as Heathcliff in the BBC’s Wuthering Heights in 1978 – the same year as the Kate Bush single).   I was only fourteen when I watched the original broadcast of The Long Distance Piano Player and I recall that I thought even at the time that Ray Davies wasn’t too good.  It was a pleasure to find him better than I remembered:  he has a sweet-natured, dreamy ruefulness – when he tries to shape a line it’s awkward but he’s often expressive.  He wrote two nice songs for the piece.

Davies is more remarkable, though, in Starmaker, which he also wrote.  This short, studio-based musical play was recorded in front of a live audience, who are implicated in it.  Davies was thirty by this time but he’s spectacularly thin and very amusing as he goes through his several costume changes – from glam-rock star silver lamé suit and platform heels to pyjamas to a zip-up (at the back) business suit, in which he still looks a dedicated follower of fashion.   The piece is a two-pronged self-satire – of being a star and of being attracted to ‘ordinary’ people as subject matter for songs.   ‘Norman’, according to his wife (June Ritchie), wanted to be a footballer, then an artist, now a rock star – the same sequence as in Ray Davies’ own life.  The tension between being a normal Norman and being ‘… Not Like Everybody Else’ is absorbing – because Davies comes over as both.  It seems improbable and is now very pleasing that Starmaker got commissioned by Granada (it went out late on a Sunday evening) – that people who probably wanted just to see Ray Davies the Kink came along to the studio, and experienced a performer who is truly polymorphous.  At the end, the Davies character simply merges into the audience.  The other Kinks are the onstage backing group and Dougie Squires – the Young Generation etc choreographer – staged the numbers.   June Ritchie is very appealing: she creates a caricature with a lot of individuality (and sex appeal going to waste).   Davies, of course, wrote the words and music:  I find some of the melodising by this stage of his career a bit constricted in its wry charm but he delivers a great variety of song types here – in only thirty-seven minutes.

18 June 2011