With the two performers having a combined age of 158 – and the aggregate age of some rows of theatregoers potentially running into the thousands – there was some unease in advance about whether everyone involved would get through Des O’Connor & Jimmy Tarbuck: Together for the Very First Time at the London Palladium on Sunday night.
But the biggest health risk, as it turned out, might have been to any current BBC or Channel 4 comedy commissioners or recent Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy award winners in the audience. Surtitled “Sunday Night at the London Palladium”, in honour of a show last seen regularly on TV in the 70s, the acts included gags about how long it takes “ladies” to get dressed, the accents of the Japanese when speaking English, and at least two Tarbuck punchlines referring to a woman as a “bitch”.
The convention – properly, in my opinion – is that formal criticism is suspended in these circumstances because the performers are donating their services for a good cause; in this case, the Royal Variety Charity. But – attending on a paid ticket rather than a press comp – I was fascinated by the evening as a cultural phenomenon: one of the last hurrahs of a generation – also including that other Palladium stalwart, Sir Bruce Forsyth – that encompasses decades of theatrical tradition and anecdote. When O’Connor introduces a story with the words, “When I was starting out in this business, it was towards the final days of music hall”, it feels like the showbiz equivalent of meeting one of the last survivors of the 1914-18 conflict.
The billing suggesting that this is the first time O’Connor and Tarbuck have co-starred is mildly misleading. They are shown together on TV in 1971 in one of the old film clips that are shown on a screen above the stage and allow the veterans to catch their breath or gulp down water. Their collaborative debut relates only to the Palladium, where their previous performances, many immortalised in youthful promo photos on the framed bills that line the walls, have always been on separate nights. And even this time, they weren’t strictly a double act, briefly combining only in the opening and closing moments of a show consisting of a first-half of Tarbuck standup, followed by some songs and stories from O’Connor.
Apart from those few performers who are remembered as “legends”, the greatest tribute that can be paid to singers and comedians of the old school is that they were a “pro”. And although I belong to the generation raised on alternative comedy and Spitting Image, for whom “Tarby” was the gap-toothed antichrist who had led Liverpool culturally downhill after the Beatles, there was no doubting, during his 45-minute set, his professionalism, expertise at working an audience, and construction and timing of gags of an old-fashioned kind.
Admittedly, there was some internal evidence that he had used this material before. One joke depended on remembering the days when cars had manual choke valves, and another on there being only two terminals at Heathrow airport: a situation that has not existed since 1961.
There was some concession to the passage of time in a riff about Saga standing for “Sex Annually Generally August”, but the sexual politics were generally pre-70s, as was the vocabulary. Tarby probably won’t listen to criticism from the Guardian about use of the words “rape”, “tits” and “bitch”, but he might consider that, certainly where I was sitting, the terms seemed to provoke a general chill in women in the audience, including those of his own age or older. A technically adept comic, he might usefully examine if his act could function without such language.
At 75, Tarbuck is the junior of the duo and the 83-year-old O’Connor betrayed his extra mileage by the presence of a stagehand to guide him into his spotlight, the fact that he opted for sit-down rather than standup comedy, and an occasional waver in his spoken tones – although not, as is often the case, his singing voice.
While O’Connor lamented that he “hates this PC humour” now required of entertainers, his own set was much more gentle and decorous than Tarbuck’s. This may be because O’Connor remained a TV regular until very recently – his chat was generously illustrated with clips from Today with Des and Mel and Countdown – and he may have absorbed inoffensiveness by osmosis. Essentially a crooner rather than a comic, he cannily manages to match Tarby’s biggest laughs by reading out some choice viewer emails from his TV days.
Their acts overlapped with anecdotes about Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper, and while this reiterates the evening’s location in the past (those performers both died in 1984), it may also reflect a thankfulness from Tarbuck and O’Connor for their longevity, and even a humble acknowledgement that they themselves will never be in the league of those giants.
Even so, it is a tribute to the sustained appeal of these showbiz survivors that they more or less filled all three tiers of the 2,286-seat London Palladium on an October Sunday night.
Under the protocols of reporting charity performances, this review doesn’t have a star-rating. But there were two proper stars on the Palladium stage and, finding myself in the unusual position these days of being by far one of the youngest members of an audience, I was thrilled to see this little piece of theatre history.
