Hi so I’m going to go slightly off topic today
to tell you about a huge project I’ve been working on - for over 20 years - and I’ve
just completed it.
And I want you to know about it, I have an odd professional life in that I
double as a financial writer and a comedian.
It seems to work.
I specialise in unacceptable songs; you’re bound to have stumbled across one of them
at some point.
Apparently, I’m Nigel Farage’s favourite comic.
I’ve just made what many would consider a comical investment, putting more mone, time
and effort than I care to think about into a theatrical venture on which I am almost
certainly going to lose my shirt.
It’s got a cast of over 50, a 15-piece orchestra and more.
But I don’t care, because this is more important than money.
My father, Terence Frisby, had a full and successful life.
His play There’s A Girl In My Soup was, for a time, the longest-running comedy in
the history of the West End and a worldwide hit with runs on Broadway and across Europe
(in Paris with Gérard Depardieu, in Rome with Domenico Modugno).
It was made into a film with Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, and my father won the Writer’s
Guild Award for the screenplay.
His sitcom Lucky Feller, starring David Jason as one of two working-class brothers living
in a council flat in south-east London (sound familiar?) was one of ITV’s most successful
series of the 1970s, and another, That’s Love, would become one of their most successful
of the 1980s.
He made fortunes, lost fortunes, won awards, had a string of high-profile court cases and
beautiful girlfriends, a glamorous wife (my mum) – for a bit – and plenty of fresh
air.
But there was one thing that nagged away at him constantly, like squirrels in the attic
of his mind.
It was that he never saw the best thing he ever wrote on the West End stage or on screen.
That thing is Kisses on a Postcard.
Kisses began in 1988 as a radio play, Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair And Don’t
Be Late, a series of reminiscences about Dad’s experiences as an evacuee during World War
Two.
BBC Radio broadcast the play ten times, creating some sort of record, and it received the biggest
audience response that anyone in the BBC Radio Drama department could remember.
It won the Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play and was mentioned critically in the same
breath as Under Milk Wood and Cider With Rosie.
It was then optioned to be a film, where it got stuck in development hell for fifteen
years, and the film was never made.
Dad’s close friend Jeremy James Taylor, founder of the National Youth Musical Theatre,
meanwhile, had been nagging him to turn it into a stage musical and a chance encounter
on a golf course in 2002 was the catalyst.
Having had the theatre thrust upon me since an early age, I’m not as crazy about it
as some.
My view is that theatre disappeared up its own backside in somewhere around 1974, never
to return – certainly the subsidised stuff, anyway.
I’ve had the theatre shoved down my throat since an early age, but against all expectation
this tiny community theatre project at the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple, North Devon,
with mostly amateur performers, and a little known Welsh actor by the name of Derek Crewe
in the main role, was the best thing I ever saw in the theatre.
Suddenly, I understood why Dad loved the theatre so much and what a brilliant medium it can
be.
It became one of my lifetime missions to get Kisses on.
It the reasons I became a financial writer - I was trying to figure out how to make enough
money to put it on.
We tried for many years to raise the three million pounds we needed to bring it to the
West End, but then ran into the global financial crisis.
I remember giving a presentation one evening in Mayfair at a billionaire’s club.
There were more than 20 billionaires in the room.
It was 6th of October 2008, the day the Icelandic banks went down.
It was hard to secure their interest.
My father died in April 2020: probably not a bad time to shuffle off this mortal coil,
given what was going on at the time.
As I was going through his things, I came across the script of Kisses.
I took it home and stuck it on the shelf, to be dealt with at some later stage.
But then, every day, as I looked up from my desk, it would catch my eye and look at me
longingly, like a dog wanting a walk.
After several months, I couldn’t take it any more.
“I can’t let this die.
It’s too good to be just a script gathering dust on a shelf.
If I don’t do something about it, no one will.”
To turn Kisses into a film or a West End show would require millions and, more crucially,
powerful allies, neither of which I have.
But, having spent a large chunk of my adult life in a sound studio – I do a lot of voiceovers
as well as the financial writing and the comedy – I did have the means to make some kind
of audio-drama-podcast thing out of it.
Like a 1970s concept album, re-formatted for the internet.
It needed a lot of re-writing; I could do that.
But the music still wasn’t right – Gordon Clyde, the original composer, had died in
2008, and Dad had turned to various others to fill the gaps.
Each did their bit beautifully, but the overall result was a bit disjointed, and needed unifying.
I turned to one of my occasional collaborators, Martin Wheatley, a genius who has somehow
managed to remain undiscovered his whole life.
By coincidence, or as I call it, fate, Martin’s father had also been evacuated to Cornwall.
We set to work, composed about ten new songs as well as unearthing and re-versioning a
load of Cornish folk gems that only Martin and about three other people have ever heard
of.
We have been dogged with good luck ever since.
John Owen Jones, voted the best-ever Valjean in Les Mis, and the longest-running phantom
in you can guess what – would play the lead role of Uncle Jack, the man who became stand-in
father to my dad and uncle.
Uncle Jack was a Welsh former coal-miner, now a platelayer on the Great Western Railway;
fierce, humorous, passionately anti-war and anti-establishment.
When I first spoke to John – I’m still not sure who was auditioning who – he said,
“Les Mis, Jesus Christ Superstar - they all started as concept albums.
If you were doing it any other way, I’d tell you to do it as a concept album first.
It’s how great things start.”
We got the most brilliant kids.
A brilliant cast - everyone was available cos of Covid - Marcia Warren who is the Queen
Mother in the Crown, double Olivier award winner, Rosie Cavaliero from Wurzel Gummidge,
Katy Secombe from Lew Mis, Evelyn Hoskins, Ian Virgo, Simon Thomas,
We were all set to record with an orchestra at a London studio, but that started to break
my balls over Covid regulations.
I phoned round the other studios at the last minute, and Abbey Road had just had a cancellation.
We recorded it at Abbey Road Studios!
Another stroke of fortune.
The result is this concept album/musical about an extraordinary time in British history.
Kisses on a Postcard tells the story of Dad and his brother, two boys evacuated from the
family in London down to Cornwall in the war, those two boys, the other kids and the tiny
Cornish village during the war, with its conflicts, kindness, pettiness, generosity and gossip,
turned on its head first by the arrival of so many children, then by the arrival of American
soldiers, prior to D-Day – a whole regiment of black GIs.
No one in the village had ever seen a black man.
You get the whole story of the war
from the evacuation of Dunkirk through to D-Day and the invasion of Italy
Those who were evacuated in 1940 will be in their late 80s and 90s now, if they are still
with us at all.
In many ways, Kisses is a farewell to that generation.
If you know anyone who was evacuated.
Please play this to them.
They will thank you.
But I played it to some friends in the car last month, and during the evacuation scenes
they all said: “That’s exactly what’s happening now in Ukraine.”
The story remains so pertinent.
Dad said he used to get letters from people in Germany who had been evacuated to escape
Allied bombs.
If you are anything like me, this story will disarm you in the most unexpected ways.
I hope you will find yourself laughing and weeping, as I did, at just what wonderful
things the kindest of human beings can be.
Please listen to it.
Share it.
It’s available via kissesonapostcard.com - you can either order a CD, or listen to
it as a podcast - I’ll put all the links in the comments.
There’s a four hour version - a bit like an audiobook, and a shorter 2 hour version.
It’s worth taking the trouble to listen to the full four hour version which you can
get at kissesonapostcard.bandcamp.com And if you know anyone who was evacuated - please
get them to listen to it.
They will thank you.
kissesonapostcard.com