Street Theatre, Princess Margaret and The Ball Debacle, Keele, 10 December 1980

In our first term at Keele, Simon Jacobs and I signed up for a drama workshop thing, run by Brian Rawlins. Brian helped make drama great fun and gave us a great deal of freedom to do what we wanted to do in this extra-curricular group.

I’m not entirely sure who else was part of the group, other than Jonathan (Jon) Rees whose name helpfully appears in my diary and on the single relic I have from the experience.

That first term of ours also coincided with a big debacle over Princess Margaret’s invitation (or lack of invitation) to the students’ union ball. We decided to parody that debacle with a piece of street theatre as our contribution to the debate and as the culmination of our term’s drama work-shopping spree.

My memory of the whole thing is fairly hazy, but the diary and relic provide some help. Here are the relevant extracts from the diary:

11 November – decided to write play

13 November – met Simon and Jonathan in evening to write play

18 November – drama rehearsal good fun

25 November – rehearsed skit in evening – good fun

2 December – easyish evening – drama rehearsal

…and there the references cease. I know the intention was to perform the skit in front of the union on the day of the ball, but my diary is entirely silent on the matter so I wonder whether our skit was scuppered at the last minute. Simon might remember and I am due to see him very soon indeed at the time of writing (April 2016) and so shall update if his memory adds anything to the pile.

Meanwhile it seems from the relic that it was Jon who preserved a copy of (most of) the script and ensured that I had a copy in my memory box. The hand-written skit itself looks like Simon’s writing if my memory serves.

It reads as juvenilia, which is what it is – heck we were all just 18 at the time – but looking back I think we were quite plucky in our first term tackling this particular political debacle head on in this way.

Intriguing also, for me, how it foreshadows some of my subsequent students’ union activity, including my press battle with Nigel Dempster over Princess Margaret.

Anyway, here’s the script. You can drill into the pages to make them bigger/legible size. Unlike my handwriting, this stuff is actually legible. I should add that the character Katy is Katy Turner, the President of the student’s union that year, Mike is Mike Stevens, the Union Secretary that year.

Street Theatre Script Page OneStreet Theatre Script Page Two

Street Theatre Script Page Three Street Theatre Script Page Four Street Theatre Script Envelope Front Street Theatre Script Envelope Back

In The Absence Of Glittering Prizes…Stardust Memories, Keele Freshers Week, 12 To 18 October 1980


AVROCC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t hang around long after getting to Keele and enjoying my first few days.

I was still on the National Executive of BBYO and spent my first weekend in Glasgow. Travelling to and from Glasgow from Keele for the weekend is not a brilliant idea but according to the diary I got back to Keele early enough on the Sunday evening to show up at the Union bar. Yes, really that is what the Sunday entry (below) says.

Monday 13 October – First lectures – OK. Went to Union in evening. Quiet day.

Tuesday 14 October – Lectures OK, Politics OK. Went to drama workshop in eve – good.

I was doing the Foundation Year (FY). In those days most Keele undergraduates did four year courses, starting with FY. It is was a wonderful course which helped me to learn how to learn and also enabled me to decide what to study for my degree. Politics was one of my two sessional courses (the other was History).

Simon Jacobs did a three year degree without FY. Simon and I threw ourselves into the drama workshop in our first term.

Simon Jacobs throwing himself into something, 1979

The brains behind that drama workshop group was Brian Rawlins, whose picture and cv nearly 40 years later can be found through this web link…

…or, if anything ever goes awry with the above Wirral Festival link, click here for a scrape thereof.

Several of us who had enjoyed doing drama at school wanted to do a bit of performance stuff without getting involved in the formalities of the drama society and full scale productions. This group proved to be just the ticket for us. We were very lucky to be led by someone of Brian Rawlins’s quality for such a group. That story ends with this piece of street theatre…

…but I’m getting way ahead of myself there.

Wednesday 15 October 1980 – dull lectures today. (??) Pleasent [sic] afternoon. Went to J-Soc & Freshers Ball till very very late.

Didn’t take long for the novelty of foundation year lectures to wear off, did it?

Our Freshers Ball was supposed to be headlined by Gary Glitter, but apparently he fell ill, so Alvin Stardust was wheeled out at the last minute as a replacement. This event was long before Gary Glitter’s infamy as a child sex offender, of course. Indeed Glitter did show up at one of the balls I attended some time later in my Keele journey. Unlike Glitter, there was nothing edgy about Alvin Stardust, neither in performance nor, as far as we know, in real life.

There are two Concourse pieces about the Freshers Ball. The first one a damning news piece with no byline…

…the second a rather more upbeat music review by Dave Lee. Do you know who wrote the first piece, Dave? If so, do tell.

Dave Lee talks highly of Glass Torpedoes. I certainly recall enjoying the warm up act more than the Alvin gig. Embedded below is the Glass Torpedoes Peel Session from earlier that year:

Dave Lee also talks up the Tour de Force gig in Room 14 upstairs, which I also vaguely recall enjoying more than Alvin. I have managed to find some interesting material on the former, including a rare recording on the following embedded vid.

Thursday 16 October 1980 – V tired today. Law v good. Got some letters written, received some letters as well. Went to bar with Simon in evening.

Law was a four week topic with Michael Whincup. We needed to do several such topics during FY. So inspired by that law topic was I, that ended up switching to study law (along with economics) as my degree the following three years.

Going to the bar with Simon in those early weeks/months of Keele not only included beer drinking but invariably a few games of table football. I have no pictures of me playing table football with Simon, sadly, but more than a quarter of a century later, when visiting Jinka in the South Omo Region of Ethiopia, I learnt that I hadn’t mis-spent that aspect of my youth at all; I was able to call on the skills acquired in those all-too-frequent games in the Keele Students’ Union to great effect:

Friday 17 October 1980 – Not bad lectures today. Disco in eve, bad.

Saturday 18 October 1980 – Easy day. Went to disco in eve, good.

How was I assessing the discos in those days? I doubt if I was doing the “disco aficionado” thing at that stage. Admittedly, I had experienced an Ian Levine special at Mecca in Blackpool by then…and a few good ones in London no doubt. But my guess is that “bad” and “good” would have been determined by the extent to which I had managed to perk up any interest among the female freshers who were still in the market by the Friday and Saturday of that week.

Not that I had really worked out what to do about it when I got a bit lucky. As much as anything else, I was committed to traipsing up and down the country for the rest of that term still. I do recall getting friendly that week with a pretty girl with a turned up nose from the North-East named Jo. Her father was a vicar and she was even more shy with that sort of stuff than I was. We didn’t get far. I think we went back to her place for a cup of coffee and had…coffee. But we remained smiling, nodding acquaintances for several years at Keele. Bless. That pleasing non-event might well have been after the “good” disco.