What a surprise to discover a love story by John Major in my New Year reading-list.

The love-story is Major's guide to the rise, success and fall of Music Hall as a popular entertainment genre. Writing against type and expectation, this former prime minister of the United Kingdom has produced a work which is both knowledgeable and heartfelt.

Major's personal history of Music Hall is book-ended by the career of his father, Tom, and Tom's professional partner and later wife, Kitty, and we learn of their stagecraft and that of many hundreds of performers, all duly and properly referenced, like them.

With the exception of a single chapter on overseas Music Hall and a few sparse references to the provinces, this book is mainly London-centric, which some may say makes its sub-title of "a personal history" appropriate.

Nevertheless, it is still an impressive work, full of social history, anecdotes and references, and is told with an interest and a passion which belies the author's past as a world-famous politician.

John Major has written about Music Hall with love and affection. This was a very pleasant read. ( )

The subtitle of this book gives a very clear indication of the approach taken by John Major in this history. Major's parents were music hall stars (albeit in the twilight of that genre) who spent their whole working lives travelling the circuits. In an interesting and entertaining history of music hall Major revels in the stars and gives them all the same respect he feels for and believes is due to his own parents. He shows how big the big stars really were in Victorian times, how they conquered the world and how they appealed to and were loved by the lower layers of society (although not exclusively so). Music hall was live entertainment, driven by the immediacy and intimacy between the artiste and the audience. This makes it difficult to get a flavour of the top acts as even those few that were recorded sound stale and flat in the isolation of the recording studio. Not necessarily a rigorously academic history, this is nevertheless an entertaining tale and the heartfelt enthusiasm of the author comes through very strongly. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2044946.html

This is a detailed and yet very readable survey of the British music hall, from early days in the 1850s to death by competition from cinema and broadcasting after the first world war. I had not fully realised just how rooted British popular culture is in music hall, even today. It was the source of many well-known catch-phrases. Harry Champion sang "Any Old Iron", "Boiled Beef and Carrots", and "I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am". Harry Clifton wrote "Paddle Your Own Canoe", "Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel", "Up With the Lark", and "Where There's a Will, There's a Way". Major credits Dan Leno, "the Funniest Man in the World", with inspiring the surreal stream-of-consciousness humour of the Goons and Monty Python. Basically all later twentieth-century and twenty-first century British comedy draws from this well.

The book is neatly structured, looking at the origins of music hall from pleasure garden, glee clubs and legislative attempts at social control; then at the development of music hall culture, with particular focus on the most celebrated performers (Marie Lloyd gets a chapter to herself, Dan Leno and Little Tich share one), and he looks thematically also at female cross-dressers, comedians, blackface and various other styles of performance. At the end he devotes a short chapter to the career of his own father, who was half of a celebrated double act in the early twentieth century, until his co-star, also his first wife, died as the result of a scenery accident. The book movingly starts and finishes with the death in 1962 of 83-year-old Tom Major, his son and second wife at his side, also surrounded by the shades of his past in spirit and occasionally in body.

Major comments ruefully that "Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children, the talent to entertain was not among them... although I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business." It is more than twenty years ago that he rose without trace to become prime minister of the United Kingdom, and served seven forgettable years in the job. Yet I always felt that he was probably the only British prime minister of my lifetime who would be genuinely pleasant company in person. and on the evidence of this book he is too modest about his own ability to entertain. It's a nice little gem of cultural history. ( )