Jimmy Clitheroe Collection : Theatre Shows

From the Jimmy Clitheroe collection . Recordings of live theatre shows from the 1960s. These are from the collection of open reel tapes in the personal collection recorded in the 1950s and 1960s by professional English comedian Jimmy Clitheroe. It's unclear whether he himself was involved in these performances, but they are (or seem to be) recordings of live shows, made in the theatre, not taped off the tv; so it is possible that he was in these shows. In regard to the item We're Frying Tonight , this was a Summer Season show which Jimmy starred in two years running during the 1960s, so that particular recording is definitely from one of his shows. His co-stars are Mollie Sugden and Peter Butterworth. As a direct result of playing his mother in this production, Mollie was cast as his mother in the ITV television series Just Jimmy , which then ran for 5 years. Recordings of stage shows inevitably have some distortion, as the tape recorder relies on its own microphone, and these were often pretty cheap and low-fi in the 1960s. The microphone must capture the sound from the theatre's tannoy speakers, that relay the sound of the action on-stage into the backstage dressing rooms. Theatres often had horribly cheap tannoy systems, with poor quality loudspeakers. All these factors made getting a good quality recording pretty much impossible. In the 1950s Jimmy Clitheroe bought one of the newly invented tape recorders which were sold to the public from 1955 onwards. He used this mainly in order to record his stage act. But he also used it as a hobby, and recorded items in which he was interested from radio, television and records. Jimmy Clitheroe lived in Blackpool, Lancashire, the Mecca of British showbusiness, and appeared professionally in the Variety theatres, in the Cinema, on BBC Radio and on ITV Television doing a cheeky schoolboy act. He is most famous as the star of the radio comedy series The Clitheroe Kid which ran from 1956 until 1972.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.