ComicBitsOnline.com

Lally & Brown

A5

black and white

16pp

£3.00 [details on ordering to follow]

I keep wondering what Donald Hamilton would think of this were he still alive? After my preview of this book the other week writer Peter Lally informed me that Hamilton had died later than I thought.

So,today I met up with Paul Ashley Brown the artist of this zine.  With him was a box containing the fresh-off-the-presses Donald Hamilton.  I have to say that the paper stock and reproduction on this book is as good as always [Minuteman Press if you are interested]. Lovely crisp black on good quality paper stock.

I’m guessing Mr Brown will be using the same stock for Browner Knowle 5 which should be out in a week and no doubt all sold out within the month -a batch of these Donald Hamiltons are pre-ordered as it is claimed by some to be the Small Press book of 2010!

Everyone seems to think “live on air” specials only started happening with BBC TV 4 and 3 in recent years.  Before taping,of course,most TV was live as anyone who knows anything about TV will know. I mention this because former writer,Darron Northall was bleating that a live broadcast “goes against the internal logic of the story”.  What an ass -and Donald saw it.

As we know,Hamilton’s TV career faded somewhat until Mind Your Manners. He’d had a bit part in a Dad’s Army episode as well as in one of the  On The Buses films.  Hamilton had been an under study to Laurence Olivier  and was once called “the next Olivier”.  A contemporary,Denholm Elliott actually became far better known after appearing as the boss of Indiana Jones in the movies -a job Hamilton was supposed to be short-listed for but a hushed up scandal prior to the interview for the part saw him lose out.

Hamilton was,like many great TV and stage actors,very fond of a little “tipple” but was always able to perform superbly so that no one realised he was drunk -apart from studio hands and fellow actors.

The American film actor Tyrone Power famously,according to the late Bob Monkhouse,”nearly raped me!” and it was with Power that Hamilton famously went on a drinking binge and was later cautioned by police following “an incident” on Hampstead Heath.  It is claimed that Hamilton even had a “very close” relationship with the late comedian Frankie Howard.

Amongst fellow theatricals Hamilton’s behaviour was tolerated.  But as times changed he found it difficult to keep tabloids hushed up about his private affairs. And it was the live broadcast of Mind Your Manners that saw Hamilton ruined with stories in most tabloids.

This is a quite bitter-funny look at that last show and Lally and Brown kept to the facts -the other person involved in the “incident” was never seen and his identity well covered up –leading to much speculation that it was someone who later rose to a very high position in the BBC.

Sadly,the BBC archive would not provide a copy of the Radio Times with Donald Hamilton on the cover as his Mind Your Manners character.  The reasons don’t hold much water but it seems the BBC still wishes to expunge all reference and ties to it and Hamilton.

If Howard,Kenneth Williams and other dead British comedians can get bio tv plays made about their troubled lives then Hamilton is well deserving of the same!

I would highly recommend this zine which is well written and wonderfully drawn.

Highly recommended.