The Treasure Of Hula Hula
PS
This was one of those I seem to have expunged from my memory. It wasn’t until I dug out the script again for possible inclusion on this website that I discovered I had played a cat called Piers. I literally have no recollection of anything I said or did on stage. I can certainly no longer remember the tune of the duet I sang with Polly. The extended lines in the second half of each verse suggest I had been given the music first and then added the lyrics later – I can’t imagine I would have been daring enough on my own to vary the rhythm quite so radically without some outside influence.
Certainly some of the comic crosstalk is very much of its time and leaves a lot to be desired:
MOLLIE: You put any more in, you’ll start looking like this palm tree. Long brown streak of misery with a cabbage on top.
MILLIE: What about you? You look like a salami eating a carrot.
MOLLIE: Fish face.
MILLIE: Pudding head.
MOLLIE: Abba fan.
MILLIE: Oo! Wash your mouth out.
MOLLIE: Shan’t.
MILLIE: Won’t let you stroke my Michael Jackson poster.
MOLLIE: All right, I take it back.
In those days I thought that was how you talked to kids. Some of it is simply crass:
MADEIRA: But Jack, I put her there as a punishment. She’s a very naughty girl.
JACK: That’s what I was hoping when I untied her.
The stuff about hurricanes is not so funny anymore as these days there are so many of them and we get to see in real time how destructive they can be, plus there’s a lot of talk about death, which is a bit grim for a children’s show.
Worst of all, the reference to Jim’ll Fix It, the once popular children’s request show presided over by the now notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile, is beyond the pale. But nobody knew at the time, or if they did they weren’t saying. Further aged references which date it firmly to the mid-80s include Russell Harty, a rather acquired-taste chat-show host, and Cecil Parkinson, an adulterous Tory MP.
The frequent mentions of “We’re all together and that’s the only way to be” refer to a running gag from an earlier show where that deliberately cloying refrain kept coming up, and the idea was to give faithful members of the audience a moment of fond remembrance. A vain hope; I think at one iteration, the vicar who owned the church hall we were performing in actually booed.
What else is wrong with it? Well, Jack talks of the dodo due to go extinct “around four thirty tomorrow afternoon” but the show is set in 1685. Dodos were actually extinct by 1681, but pre-Google this wasn’t the sort of factoid one could quickly check. And what did it really matter anyway? I might fiddle with the figures if I were writing it today, but I was probably less anal back then.
There are some bright spots amidst the dross, mostly the stuff I stole:
CAP’N: What’s this starter, Mrs Chief?
BERYL: Oh, it’s bean soup.
CAP’N: I can believe it’s bean soup, but what it is now?
I think that was Spike Milligan. And some of the staging was effective, like the cast all following Hurricane Annie’s progress with their eyes as she whirled around the back of the auditorium, as it were, to the SL wing and then Madeira comes on SR behind them, making them jump as one. And there’s a rudimentary sexual equality at work: the women have all the power, certainly in both couples, and Gemma is the sexually aggressive one in her pursuit of Jack. (I see their love song repurposes one of my few successful melodies, the one that backs Janus.)
Other than this, one looks in vain for signs of better things to come. This was very much a rather obvious and rickety first effort. But things improved the following year, I think, when we reduced the cast list to just twelve, 6m, 6f, and I started writing better jokes into a stronger plot. Swords and Sorcery featured a lost daughter motif again, I’m afraid, but you can’t have everything.