Last Night Love arts Leeds had an Audience With David Nobbs at Holy Trinity Church and we asked Nigel Stone to go along for us – Review City Arizona! …
I was 12 years old when the BBC first broadcast “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin”. I was in my 30s, when I inadvertently called my ex mother-in-law a hippopotamus. Something about the mid life crisis, of a middle class, middle aged, middle manager had obviously struck a chord, with this pre-teen boy, growing up on a council estate, on the outskirts of Leeds.
It is for this reason, that I leapt at the chance to review “An Evening With David Nobbs”, at The Holy Trinity church; part of the Love Arts festival in Leeds.
A reasonably sized crowd sat in the church pews, while Nobbs stood at the alter, proclaiming his love for Yorkshire (and his inability to do a Yorkshire accent), and sharing a few jokes about his surname.
He never spent more than 3 minutes on a subject; recalling his early days in the army, where he was mistaken for an entire regiment; telling the audience about the time he was picked out of a police ID line up, because the picker outer mistook him for a man who’d flashed his knob at her.
Realising he needed more than knob jokes, Nobbs moved on to the subject of his first experiences in TV.
Names were dropped; David Frost sending taxis to pick up Nobbs’ sketches, Peter Cook slicing into writer’s egos with his tongue, Graham Chapman smashing up a particularly annoying shelf behind a bar.
This is all good stuff, thought I, but what about Reggie Perrin? Eventually he got onto the subject.
What I liked about Nobbs, was his willingness to acknowledge his mistakes and limitations; he’d wanted Ronnie Barker to play Reggie Perrin (TV politics put a stop to that, apparently/thankfully); he knew less about Perrin, than the woman who’d chosen the show, as her specialist subject on Mastermind (she got 16 questions right; Nobbs a mere 7), and he was in two minds about the recent remake (as a self confessed Doctor Who fanatic, I was intrigued by Nobbs’ suggestion that David Tennant would have made a good Perrin).
After Nobbs had delighted an appreciative audience of fans, with a trip down his memory lane, there was a Q&A session; and this being Love Arts, the subject of mental health came up. It was during this part of the evening, where I found out why Reggie Perrin had struck such a chord with the 12 year old me. Yes, the man had uncontrollable visions of a hippopotamus, whenever he thought of his mother-in-law, and yes, he’d stripped naked on a beach, in order to fake his own death. But no, Reggie Perrin didn’t suffer from mental illness; it was the rest of the world that was mad.
Nobbs occasionally misquoted his own book titles, and every now and then, he would take out a timer; in order to check he wasn’t outstaying his welcome, or his allotted talk time.
Eventually, Nobbs stopped talking, and started to plug, sell and sign his books.
If the names Les Dawson, Barry Cryer, or Leonard Rossitter mean anything to you, I recommend going to see “An Evening With David Nobbs”. If these names mean nothing to you, I recommend spending an evening with a warm, amusing story teller, who has more than a few knob jokes up his sleeve.