. . .
ISSUE NUMBER 38 APRIL 2003
Here it is – the long-awaited next issue of The Hats Life!! Our next meeting is only a matter of days or hours away! The last meeting on 26 March was a bit low on numbers, due to two possible reasons. As we are now meeting every month, I am not able to send out newsletters in between each meeting, so some of you may have forgotten. I was able to remind those of you who receive this by email, so, again, if you have an email address, please let me know so that I can add you to the emailing list. Another reason why the attendance was not as good as February is that you may not have wanted to watch Atoll K – Laurel and Hardy’s last film. However, the film is really not that bad. It managed to get some laughs anyway.
As I mentioned in a recent issue, changes were planned in the running of The Pastures. This has now led to an increase in the room hire. Ordinarily, the big function room would cost £50 to hire for the night, while the smaller one would be £30. However, as we are regular visitors, we are able to pay £25 per month for whichever room we use. This is an increase of £10 on what we have been paying. I did not really want to put the admission charge up, but from the May meeting, I have decided to increase it to £2 and very much hope you do not object to this. Apart from the room hire, there are other costs such as postage, envelopes etc. I realise that the raffle helps towards this, but the raffle prizes also have to be paid for! Also, any ‘spare’ cash goes towards subsidising our now annual meeting at Derbyshire County Cricket Club, which left me out of pocket last year. I will have to send a deposit of £100 in the next few months for this year’s booking. I hope you understand this decision.
NEXT MEETING
Now to our next meeting – Wednesday 16 April – and I apologise for the lateness of this newsletter. As I mentioned in March, as we have now finished watching the post-Hal Roach features in sequence, I thought it would be an idea to start showing the features made by Stan and Ollie at the Hal Roach Studios – again, in sequence. Therefore, the main film this month will be Pardon Us. Member Darrell Buxton (he will also appear later in this issue) suggested that we could have ‘themed’ meetings tying in with the feature film. As Pardon Us is set in a prison, the other two films will also be prison-linked. See if you can guess which two!
L&H ON BBC2
On the day of our next meeting, Their First Mistake and The Chimp are showing on BBC2 starting at 12.35pm, while Laughing Gravy is on Friday 18 April (Good Friday) at 12.45pm.
SALES ITEMS
I still have 2 of our Tent t-shirts for sale at £10 each. One is large and the other is medium. I also have six videos, each featuring just 1 L&H short, at only £2 each!! Now there’s a bargain if ever I saw one!! The films are One Good Turn, Men O’War, Night Owls, Our Wife, Berth Marks and Below Zero. Two other videos for sale are called On The Trail of the Comedy Mine and Before The Bowler. The first one “traces the early days of this inimitable pair from the start of their careers before they teamed up, until they eventually got together.” Before The Bowler is “a potted pictorial biography of Stan Laurel prior to his teaming up with Oliver Hardy.” These two videos are £5 each. Last, but not least, is one of the German Kinowelt DVDs featuring Men O’War, Any Old Port, Towed in a Hole and Why Girls Love Sailors. This can be yours for just £10. I will bring these items to the meetings, but if you wish to reserve one – or all!- of them, please let me know.
I will now pass the next few paragraphs over to Darrell Buxton.
TALL OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS GROW
A friendly chat at the end of February’s tent meeting developed into a brief discussion about how some of us first became interested in Laurel and Hardy, and the suggestion was made that this might make a nice regular feature for the tent newsletter. Not to mention filling in a bit of space and saving Howard a bit of time and effort! Anyway, I volunteered to kick things off. For me, it all really began while I was doing a course in (Big?) Business Studies at Wilmorton College in 1980, aged 17. Prior to that, I’d been quite a fan of vintage comedy during the seventies - while everyone else was dressing in tank tops, eating Spangles and cracking open cans of Watney’s Red, my formative years saw me glued to the regular Abbott & Costello movies which used to appear on afternoon television. (My keen interest in horror movies and classic film monsters probably stems from the fact that Bud & Lou often confronted vampires, wolfmen and all kinds of villainy in these pictures).
Later, my dad introduced me to the delights of the Marx Brothers, and I tried to catch ‘Duck Soup’ or ‘A Day At The Races’ every time they popped up on the box. I had seen the occasional Laurel & Hardy short, but it wasn’t until 1980-81 that the BBC gave the opportunity for my generation to see the boys’ films en masse. I’m sure many of you have fond memories of sitting down at 5.40 p.m. on weeknights to view their antics! (The alternative offered by other channels consisted of the main evening news bulletins - who wouldn’t want to watch Laurel & Hardy rather than Reginald Bosanquet?).
Anyhow, I was hooked - and during lunch-breaks between college lectures, I discovered that two pals, Duncan Bull and John Smith, were huge fans of the boys too. So much so that we often animatedly discussed the previous night’s films, even acting out the dialogue and mannerisms at times - Duncan did a mean Stan Laurel impersonation! The course ended after a couple of years, but my love of Stan and Babe remained and continues to this day. John is still a good mate of mine - and worships the Marx Brothers even more than I do - but I lost touch with Mr. Bull years ago. I do hope he’s still out there somewhere, crying and ruffling his hair like Stan and spreading the word.
Darrell Buxton
Thank you Darrell. I, too, well remember watching the films on BBC2 while having my tea, back in the early 80’s. Well, if you want to share how or why you first became interested in Stan and Ollie, please jot down a few lines/paragraphs and it will appear here in due course.
I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday 16 April – even though it clashes with a Derby County home match! The meeting after that is on Wednesday 21 May when the feature film will be Pack Up Your Troubles.
HOWARD PARKER
