Richard Lester (1962)
It’s Trad, Dad! is the first film I remember seeing at the cinema – the Tower Cinema in New Street in York. (The place was demolished in 1966.) What do I remember about the visit? I think it was a Friday afternoon, perhaps during the Whitsun or summer holidays, in 1962. I’m pretty sure that my sister, who would have been fourteen then, took me and that one of her friends came too. I guess I wanted to see the film because I had a thing about Helen Shapiro, whom It’s Trad, Dad! introduces to the screen. (According to IMDB, she never acted again until the mid-1980s, when she appeared in a few episodes of a short-lived Granada television soap called Albion Market.) The previous year was Shapiro’s annus mirabilis in terms of chart success. After reaching number three with ‘Don’t Treat Me Like a Child’, she had number ones with both ‘You Don’t Know’ and ‘Walkin’ Back To Happiness’ in the space of a few weeks in the late summer and autumn of 1961 – and her fifteenth birthday in between. Her last Top Ten hit, ‘Little Miss Lonely’, was the first ‘proper’ single I ever owned (as distinct from the scarlet-coloured record of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ sung by Burl Ives). I remember that playing ‘Little Miss Lonely’ (on my sister’s record player) was offered by my parents as a desperate inducement to me to swallow a tablet, already concealed in jam, when I was ill with tonsillitis or similar – not sure if that was before or after I’d seen It’s Trad, Dad! Just about all I recalled of the film itself was a moment when Helen Shapiro looks through a round window in the door of a recording studio and murmurs, in dazed disbelief, ‘It’s John Leyton!’ (I also have an idea that my sister, when we got home, did a scornful imitation of this highlight.) Fifty-two years later, the golden anniversary re-release of A Hard Day’s Night has brought It’s Trad, Dad! a tiny bit of renewed publicity: a BFI display cabinet last month included a copy of the poster for what was Richard (in those days credited as Dick) Lester’s first feature, following the short, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, in 1960. You can watch It’s Trad, Dad! in its entirety on YouTube but I was keen to try and get hold of a DVD and managed to buy an American version of Ring-a-Ding Rhythm, as the film was called in the US.
I didn’t expect a work of art but wasn’t prepared for quite how primitive It’s Trad, Dad! is. Most of it isn’t even as photographically lively as you might hope from Lester – or from the picture’s prologue, which locates the story in an anonymous English new town and sets up the tensions between the teenagers who hang out in a local coffee bar, listening to rock songs on the jukebox and watching a trad jazz programme on television, and their elders. These comprise (a) the kids’ dully respectable parents (who are scarcely seen again) and (b) the pompous killjoy Lord Mayor (Felix Felton) and his cronies on the town council. The Mayor has the coffee bar’s entertainment licence revoked and the jukebox and TV outlawed. The teen leaders – Craig (Craig Douglas) and Helen (Shapiro) – plan a jazz festival to take their place. They travel to London, to the studios of ‘television centre’, hoping to solicit the help of leading disc jockeys of the day – Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Pete Murray. Neither Freeman nor Jacobs is helpful to start with but Craig and Helen work on Murray and he then gets the other two involved. In nostalgic hindsight, these DJs are a very agreeable trio (and not only because their moral reputations remain more or less unsullied, a half-century on). The plot of the film (the screenplay was by Milton Subotsky, who also produced) is perfunctory, to put it mildly, and, of course, completely predictable. The story is merely the bits between the songs: It’s Trad, Dad! is a kind of jukebox musical before the genre existed. The DVD cover for Ring-a-Ding Rhythm describes the film as ‘A jazzed-up, mixed-up musical that’s got trad, Dad!’, and this is right enough: Helen, Craig and the other kids appear to enjoy all the music, traditional jazz or otherwise, indiscriminately.
What’s disappointing – perhaps the result of copyright issues – is that hardly any of the well-known performers do their best-known songs. As well as Craig Douglas, Helen Shapiro and John Leyton, the line-up includes (to name a few) Chubby Checker, Del Shannon and Gene Vincent; the jazz is supplied by, among others, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and The Temperance Seven; but you don’t hear many of the hits these performers had already had. (Leyton and Shapiro had minor chart success subsequently with songs they sang in It’s Trad, Dad!). One of the most enjoyable numbers is Terry Lightfoot and His New Orleans Jazz Band doing ‘Tavern in the Town’. It’s enjoyable partly because it’s well performed – Lightfoot’s vocal is good – but also partly because, with due respect to them, there’s nothing you particularly expect from the Lightfoot band, whereas you want Acker Bilk to do ‘Stranger on the Shore’ or Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen to play ‘Midnight in Moscow’. To be fair to Helen Shapiro: although it’s no surprise that film studios didn’t queue up to cast her in another dramatic role, it’s hard not to be impressed by her huge, effortless singing voice. The more experienced actors include Arthur Mullard (a police chief!), Timothy Bateson (the coffee shop owner), Derek Nimmo (a snooty waiter), Frank Thornton and Ronnie Stevens (both television directors – Stevens is particularly good) and Hugh Lloyd (a truculent doorman). I wouldn’t have guessed that the voice of the story’s narrator was Deryck Guyler’s. The distance between what Richard Lester does here and the visual invention of A Hard Day’s Night is huge, even though the latter was made only two years later. In even less time than that, the Beatles – who, in late 1962, began their first national tour as a supporting act on a line-up headed by Helen Shapiro – had led a revolution which turned the culture of It’s Trad, Dad!, and much of the pop music it features, into things of a somehow remote past.
4 August 2014
