The death of variety has been greatly exaggerated

If you’re a fan of variety, circus, music hall and all that kind of beautifully low-grade theatrical malarkey, then TV has been good to you lately.

There’s been plenty of excellent documentaries about music hall, the Palladium, light entertainment stars etc which have provided valuable opportunities to see some gorgeous old archive footage of some of the great, eccentric, thrilling and downright bizarre acts that audiences of your grandparents’ generations would enjoy every Saturday night at their local hall of wonders.

Mat Ricardo is a variety performer

Of course, as a professional variety artist, I’ve enjoyed these shows as much as anyone, and probably more than most, but there was something in them that irked me. A basic fact that they all got wrong. At the end of every documentary about music hall or variety, the narrator will always start talking about the death of variety in the UK. What killed it? Was it TV? Rock & roll? How did an entire artform get taken out behind the barn and shot?

The simple fact is – it didn’t. Variety didn’t die, and it’s lazy and shortsighted to think it did. Sure, there was a point at which the people who owned the music halls realised that they could save a bunch of money and capitalise on the lucrative new teenage audience by booking a couple of rock & roll bands instead of a bill full of a dozen or so different acts and an orchestra, but that only put the nails in the coffins of the venues – not the artform.

The truth is, in the intervening decades, the variety arts shrunk a little, but by no means died. The performers just changed venues – found new places to work. Someone once said to me “If you can do a backflip, you’ll always eat”, and these people could do backflips. So instead of spending their lives travelling from hall to hall, they worked in circuses, or in cabaret clubs, or in holiday camps, or in working men’s clubs, or in panto, or in a dozen other places where family audiences still wanted to be entertained. Sure, it became harder to find work, and sometimes you had to make your own, and yes, a lot of acts chucked it all in, but the artform survived. Every decade threw up its own new place for variety artists to work.

In the 1980s, when I started my career, it was the street.

Of course, there had always been buskers – one man bands who worked the cinema queues in London’s West End, escapologists who’d get chained up, then wait until enough money had been thrown in the hat before escaping – but in the 80s the Greater London Council renovated Covent Garden market and licensed it for outdoor performances, and unknowingly created a place for a whole new generation of performers to learn their stuff. I arrived there in the late 80s and immediately knew I’d found something special. A gang of people who had decided to be street performers not because it’s easy money (it’s not, it’s the hardest I’ve ever had to work, often for the lowest return), but because they had an idea for something funny, or spectacular, or silly, and knew that if they worked hard they could find an audience for it there.

There was, and remains, no pecking order, no hirearchy, everyone is equal, and everyone gets an equal shot at pulling an audience, keeping them entertained and separating them from their money. And everyone dies on their arse sometimes. It’s part of the job, just as it was in the glory days of music hall. In my years there I found myself attacked my knife-wielding maniacs, heckled by very drunk celebrities (who shall remain nameless), had my shows destroyed by everything from coach parties of French tourists to blizzards – everything that ever happens on a street in London has happened to some poor street performer.

Remember the poll tax riots in the early 90s, where thousands of protestors went on the rampage in the West End? Guess who was doing a street show when a squad of mounted police chased 10,000 of them through Covent Garden? Yep, me.
The thing about street performing is, you have to hold that audience through thick and thin, so you’d best shy away from anything that won’t appeal to as wide an audience as possible. That’s to it’s credit, and it breeds performers who can entertain anyone anywhere, but in my years as a busker, I sometimes found myself wanting to be a little more subtle, a little less chainsaw juggling and a little more razor sharp wit.

And then, a few years ago, something cool started happening. I started getting calls from new little cabaret clubs. Cool basement venues where people were putting on shows containing burlesque performers, cabaret singers, character comedians, circus performers… in short – variety.

It started small, but grew quickly – drawing on a talent pool of people like me who had been around the block enough times to have the performing chops, but who were hungry for a new place to do their thing. And these days I don’t work on the street at all, I perform most nights of the week in the network of cabaret venues that have spread across London, some of them having survived from the glory days of variety. I get to work stages that have been graced by Frank Sinatra, Noel Coward and Judy Garland, and I don’t forget how lucky I am for a second. I’ve played everywhere else – I’ve worked Butlins, entertained the queues at Madame Tussauds, done kids parties, performed for theatres full of old age pensioners (great audiences, by the way), kept hundreds of American tourists amused on cruise ships, held my own in the roughest comedy clubs – and whenever I’ve worked I’ve carried two things with me – the stagecraft I learned while a street performer, and the knowledge that I’m part of a variety legacy. That I’m a member of a huge, sprawling extended family of people who can do backflips, or something similar, stretching back hundreds of years into the past, and into the future too.

That’s why my new monthly live show Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties will have, as well as the best variety line-ups in London, a section where I interview a great from the world of variety or comedy on stage. I want to pick the brains of my peers – the performers who influenced me and my generation – and get a few of the great anecdotes that are usually saved for the bar after the show. Because variety didn’t die, it just moved around a bit to survive, it ducked and dived like the shrewd creature it is, until the time was right to start coming back.

And you know what? The time is right.

Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties happens monthly, starting Thursday, February 9, at the Bethnal Green Working Mens Club. Doors 7.30pm, show 8pm sharp.

Full information about Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties, and ticket booking information can be found here.

The interview section of the show will be recorded as a podcast.

Find out more about Mat Ricardo at www.MatRicardo.com, and follow him on Twitter @MatRicardo