When you’re a comedian, nervously standing in the wings, trying to remember your first gag (and the one after that!), you don’t want to be distracted by the compere/club secretary mangling your introduction.
It’s happened to me.
“Please welcome a young comedian making his first appearance here. Put your hands together for . . . Bill Evans!”
I learned quickly it’s useless (and humiliating) shouting out, “Excuse me! It’s Phil Evans!” because the compere won’t hear you, even over half-hearted applause.
So, before I introduce a comedian or speakers, I always ensure they’re happy with what I’ll be saying.
Singer Ronnie Hilton was a big TV and recording star in the 1950s, but like many ‘crooners’, his career faltered with the arrival of ‘beat groups’ in the early 60s. However, he had a hit with “Windmill In Old Amsterdam” in 1965, worked in cabaret and social clubs and had a show on BBC Radio 2.
Later in his career, he took a booking at a social club in the south Wales valleys, for not a lot of money, where the ‘seen it all before’ club secretary asked him “How d’yer want to be introduced?”
Ronnie replied, as he must have many times before, “He’s had five No1 records. And appeared on three Royal Variety Performances. This man has done it all!”
The club secretary, bursting to show he wasn’t impressed by such achievements, asked, cockily, “So, what you doin’ h’yer, then?”
Ronnie’s reply isn’t on record.
But I’ve got a good idea what I would have said.
When Jimmy Tarbuck hosted “Sunday Night At The London Palladium”, after he’d quickly changed into a Musketeer’s costume during a commercial break, in readiness for a comedy sketch, he was told the sketch had been dropped because the show was over-running.
So, he had to introduce the top of the bill while dressed, for no apparent reason, as The One Musketeer!
Flustered, young Tarby forgot the name of the star, so said, “Please welcome a lady who needs no introduction!”
After the show, the lady in question (Petula Clark) said, “Jimmy. That was the loveliest introduction I’ve ever had!”