The Actor, The Lodgings, The Kipper and Ma

[Riklaa]

The Actor, The Lodgings, The Kipper and Ma Broadcast on Radio 4 on 20041005, repeated 20050327 rebroadcast on BBC7, 20071104 and 20081207 Geoffrey Wheeler presents this documentary about the world of theatrical digs - lost along with the Music Halls and the Variety Circuit - with reminiscences from Bruce Forsyth, Jimmy Cricket and one of the most famous theatrical landladies of them all, Manchester's own Alma McKay. The era of the theatrical landlady opened with the coming of the railways. For the first time, theatre companies were able to tour the country in relative comfort for several months at a time, and wherever they went, they needed cheap and amenable places to stay. Theatrical lodging houses were often run by working-class women whose husbands had died, or who, for some other reason, needed extra income to make ends meet. They offered a 'home away from home', a sympathetic ear and a much-valued privacy to their guests. Most of them were warmly remembered by the many hundreds of people they came to know as regular visitors. A few, though, generated horror stories aplenty - digs where the bedsheets, still damp from the washing line, had frozen stiff in the icy wastes of the bedrooms; lodgings where the food was so bad that the residents took their revenge by nailing a kipper to the bottom of the chest of drawers on the day they left; drunken landladies and inedible breakfasts wrapped in newspaper and hidden in the wardrobe. 128/44; 26 MB; sound quality good (iPlayer encode)

doc 041005 The Actor, The Lodgings, The Kipper and Ma.mp3