I’m really looking forward to “Stan & Ollie” the new biopic portraying my favourite film comedians, Laurel and Hardy. The film concentrates on the end of their careers, touring the UK and Ireland in 1953-54 as a live act, topping the bill of a variety show. There were health-scares and heartbreaks along the way as these two elderly performers presented a rather surreal new sketch called “Birds of a Feather” around the country, alongside acts like Wonderhorse Tony, Bob Bemand’s Pigeons and a young Harry Worth.

It wasn’t a completely miserable experience as they had a 3 week festive residency at the Nottingham Empire with a sold-out Christmas Show that entranced hundreds of youngsters, sharing a stage with two of their movie heroes.  This tour proved to be the last homecoming of Englishman Stan Laurel, performing at some of the theatres where he’d begun his career in panto and music hall in the 1900s. He was Stan Jefferson then, son of Arthur Jefferson, comedian, playwright and theatre owner. A performer and impresario from infancy as a child he burnt down his first theatre in the attic of his house when a fight-scene (of a play he wrote and directed) got out of hand,  whilst his first professional gig was as one of a pair of golliwogs in a national tour of Sleeping Beauty in 1907. The indefatigable Laurel and Hardy historian A.J. Marriot has uncovered the lines spoken by this first double-act of Stan’s career. The blackface act would be unacceptable today but it contained a song and dance routine probably taught to the youngsters by the established comedy team Graham and Barron who were also in the cast. Marriot quotes Barron’s son, Billy as saying that the very same routine found itself into Laurel and Hardy’s second feature, “Pardon Us” in 1931. But it was in his father’s comic sketches that he first made a real impact including “Home from the Honeymoon” (1908) – remade in Hollywood by Stan as the first Laurel and Hardy short “Duck Soup” 18 years later. More evidence of Stan turning to his past for inspiration when required. Young Stan’s comedic talents soon caught the eye of the Edwardian King of Showbiz, Fred Karno, who recruited him for his vast troupe of “Speechless Comedians”.  A huge army of funnymen (and women) constantly touring the UK, Europe and North America with hilarious and extravagantly staged slapstick sketches.

One of their leading lights was a young Charlie Chaplin, who specialised in drunken characters upsetting the action.Barely with the company a year teenage Stan (above) was surprised and delighted to be cast to replace Chaplin in the lead role of Karno’s new sketch “Jimmy the Fearless” because, as Stan recalled in 1936 “(Karno) didn’t like Charlie’s interpretation of the role. Thereupon Charlie replied that he didn’t like the part anyway”. On April 18th 1910 the show opened at two London theatres: in Ealing, then Willesden, the company had a private bus (see top of the page) to ferry them between venues. By Stan’s own account the sketch was “a massive hit. I took five curtain calls…and felt like a star comedian at last.” Well, there was already a star comedian in the company and he was watching from the stalls. A week later at the Stratford Empire “Chas. Chaplin” is listed as playing Jimmy. I wonder if Stan, now relegated to being an understudy, got any satisfaction from the newspaper review that judged it “a feeble affair”.