By miracle of the BBC, I received free tickets yesterday to go see Stan Freberg at The Comedy Store in London.

I’ll be honest and say that I had no idea into what I was getting, because the tickets were a pseudorandom draw and my scant research had indicated that Freberg was (a) old and (b) formerly notorious, but that was the limit of my knowledge. PJ and I met in Piccadilly at 7ish and walked to the gig via Pret for some emergency sandwiches, which we immediately wolfed (or wolved?).

Sloping past the bouncers we descended to the basement and took station at the bar; this was a good choice especially for PJ who could spend the pre-show appraising and scoring talent amongst the audience; I instead was watching the small crowd of crumblies that were accruing in the snug, and my hopes for the evening were considerably raised when I spied Barry Cryer being clapped on the back and variously luvvied by similar folk making state with each other. (Mwah, mwah!)

A half of bitter for me, a couple of pints and a falafel and chips chaser for PJ, and an hour spent trying not to get close to the extremely bearded and shaggy six-foot-something chap, his shirt split open past his copious beergut, walking around the venue with the aid of a tall staff. We’re not quite sure whether he was meant to be funny, or just weird, or possibly his appearance reflected a life lived in labyrinth of secret tunnels amongst the treeroots beneath Leicester Square, but in any case we didn’t fancy sharing a seatrow with him.

The audience definitely were a mix of fans and randoms such as we; one of the former enthused “It’s great to see! I had no idea so many young people would know who Stan is!” and the sheer admiration in his voice squelched any thought of explaining mine and PJ’s presence, and hence the likely reason why the room was full-to-bursting.

Mark Thomas served as host and warm-up act, the show being recorded for eventual broadcast on Radio4. He reverently noted – presumably referring to the aforesaid band of crumblies – that several retired comedians had come with copies of Freberg’s old albums wanting to get them signed. I wished I had gotten a better look at some of them, though I am not convinced of my ability to recognise many others from that era.

Then Freberg himself arrived – jowly, bespectacled, in a blue knit sweater with a large American flag-motif; fortunately he’d dumped the perm which is pictured on his largest fansite and looked rather distinguished as a result.

The show was a pastiche of his career: without introduction kicking-off into the positively risque (for 1950) “John and Marsha” skit, the invention of “funny” radio commercials – another great innovation of the time – and advertising about radio:

Imagine Lake Michigan, drained and re-filled with hot chocolate, topped with a mountain of whipped cream, and finished off with a 10-ton maraschino cherry flown-in by a Royal Canadian Air Force plane to the cheers of 25,000 extras.

Ok, let’s do that: [a long and plausible string of sound effects ensues]

Now: let’s see you do that on television!

He sang – well – to the various song he’d written 50 years ago, including Elderley Man River, spoofing his programme’s own censor and predating rise of and backlash against “political correctness” by several decades. About halfway through the show I found the proper mindset to be in – like listening to “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” mingled with Tom Lehrer. The comedy was gentler – far from innocent, rather satirical, but knowing and understated rather than blatant and modern. By the end of it – especially with the “Take an Indian to Lunch” story – he’d won-over the entire crowd of all generations, and had people whooping for more.

In lieu of an encore we had BBC-mandated retakes of some bits, mostly due to errors on their part:-

Freberg: “Errors? … Did you push the [RECORD] button? … Don’t worry, this is radio, we can tighten it up a bit, later…”

There are a few audio snippets on Amazon from various of his albums [1] [2] [3] but I shall keep an ear open for the broadcast, and try to post a link.