Monday 24 October 2016

523 Stanley Baxter Picture Show / Stanley Baxter Series


First  viewed  :  Uncertain

Stanley  was  always  the  most  enigmatic  of  the  big  entertainers  of  the  seventies. He  was  a  Christmas  fixture  who  flitted  between  BBC  and  ITV  but  the  rubber-faced  Scot  was  hard  to  define, somewhere  between  an  impressionist  ( most  famously  of  the  Queen ) and  a  comic  actor. Though  still  alive  at  90,  he  seems  half-forgotten , never  celebrated  on  those  boring  comedy  great  docs  with  Barry  Cryer  droning  on  about  him.

I  include  him  here  because  he  had  a  regular  Monday  night  series  on  ITV  in  the  autumn  of  1981  though  I'd  probably  caught  one  or  two  of  his  Christmas  specials  before  that.

The  only  sketch  I  can  clearly  remember  is  Stan  playing  a  crusty  old  buffer  of  the  Raj  who  goes  to  a  fortune  teller  and  is  appalled  by  the  prospect  of  Asian  shops  on  every  street  corner  of  England.

Baxter  more  or  less  retired  from  television  in  the  mid-eighties  as  the  bean  counters  grumbled  at  the  cost  of  his  Christmas  specials  but  made  a  major  comeback  on  radio  in  the  mid-nineties  with  a  show  on  Radio  Four  until  as  recently  as  2014.

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