Much of 2025 is being taken up with setting lyrics by Chris Lowe as cantatas for schools and choirs. The website First Note Music Tunes has most of the material, and the aim is to provide accessible and singable stuff for young and old and in between. The take-up has been encouraging and performances have been happening with, on the whole, good results. Chris and I have attended many workshops throughout the year to help the choir leaders and singers. The material is all free and downloadable.
Drama Studio in Ealing has been very loyal to me, hiring me for postgrad classes working on repertoire. Later in the year I’ve been teaching back at East 15, covering 1st year classes, as well as doing a workshop with their MA Directors. This was on the relationship between director, musical director and choreographer. The Working Men’s College in Camden asked me to cover some singing classes – again, repertoire-building – and to repeat the playing-for-silent-films workshop I did last July. It was a challenge teaching people who don’t have an end view to the classes, unlike drama students who of course are looking to a future in the acting profession.
The silent film playing continues, and I’ve been given some gems to accompany. In January the Kennington Bioscope (their calendar is on the Cinema Museum website) invited me to play for the 1920 John Barrymore ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (directed by John S. Robertson), which inspired every gothic-horror phrase I could dream up. Kennington Bioscope has continued to use my services throughout the year so far, including on Silent Weekends like the one in April, at which among other films I accompanied a sequence of clips entitled ‘Nasty Women’. Enough said. I had a particularly enjoyable time playing for ‘Au bonheur des dames’ in May, which is essentially a Zola story updated to the 1920s (directed by Julien Duvivier, 1929). Brilliant piece. In October I was back at the Bioscope to play a couple of comedy shorts, the first one a spoof of ‘The Iron Horse’ (about the building of US railways) named ‘The Iron Mule’. Manic stuff to play, but good fun, with a Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’-type loco.
I’ve also continued to take silent comedies along to Denville Hall, where the residents greatly enjoy the films and my attempts to play along. There are a large number of film buffs at Denville, not surprisingly. I did a silent cinema St Valentine’s Day programme for them of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (a much abbreviated version of Shakespeare’s original) and one of Chaplin’s comedy-romance shorts, ‘The Pawnshop’. I was back in May to play for Lupino Lane’s ‘Goodnight, Nurse’ and Chaplin’s ‘A Woman’. Lupino Lane, to my surprise, was a big comedy film star here, and I’ve found his work a very rewarding watch. Also in May I visited Barry Cryer’s widow, Terry, in her care home in Haywards Heath, where I played for more silent comedies and also played some songs the residents knew. Very good to see Terry, as always.
The ’Trial & Error’ charity performances in Court No. 1 of the Old Bailey took place for five performances in March as ever, at which I provided appropriate songs (and re-written songs) and I also accompanied. This is always a fun event: this year the trials chosen were of a more serious nature than in the past, and the show was all the better for this.
At the end of March I was asked to spend a day at Westminster Choir School (via a contact who was a parent of two of the boys, she being an ex-student of mine). We worked with wind, brass and stringed instruments on accompanying silent film. I chose two sequences which the boys found stimulating, and they produced excellent work after much discussion. There was a performance for the whole school at the end of the day.
‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ has proceeded as normal, with strong teams, and Adrian Edmonson proving to be a considerable asset. The spring recordings went fine, and we’re now into the autumn series. BBC Radio 4’s ‘Broadcasting House’, Paddy O’Connell’s Sunday morning programme, invited me on to speak about being involved in ‘Clue’ for half a century. A friend had told them – it isn’t something I’ve made anything of. But, as it happens, yes, I did join the show in 1975.
I was part of the ‘Remembering Philip’ tribute to Philip Hedley at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in June. It was a special pleasure and privilege to accompany Clark Peters, as well as my old-young friend Anthony Corriette. And it was good to see so many chums from the past. But it was a very long afternoon, despite Kate Williams warning us all to keep to our timings…
Colin Sell 