Prettyboy Tentringer has shuffled of this mortal coil. The current state of the board doesn’t seem to let me search so in case there’s no other thread…
I saw a load of his one man shows (including a couple which he thought might be better having more than one person). Saw the pigin (all wol won tak) Mackbeth*. He made a couple of excellent TV science series, Reality on the Rocks was one. Douglas Adams wrote the part of HooDoo the priest for him. When they got him in the studio he apparently forgot how to play himself and they had to impersonate him to remind him. He was probably the best Dr Who we never had.
Non British members may not have a clue who I’m on about, you missed a lot.
Ken said if he was in charge he’d have the whole world speaking to each other in twenty minutes.
I saw the pigin (all wol won tak) Mackbeth show at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago - good stuff!
And somewhere I still have the A4 flyer for his 30 hour (iirc) Illuminatus production from the mid-70s… never got along to actually see the show, though
My memory is a bit off; according to the BBC obit “he co-wrote a stage version of the epic work Illuminatus!, a cycle of five plays lasting more than eight hours, later producing The Warp, a 10-play cycle which went on for 22 hours.”
I tended to find him slightly irritating in small doses, but given the expanse and immediacy of a long one-man live show like Jamais Vu he was utterly hilarious. Quite, quite irreplaceable.
Suppose the most likely appearance that non-British members might recognise is his Roger in that episode of Fawlty Towers where Sybil has walked out ahead of the dinner party and Basil has to pretend she’s ill upstairs; he’s the husband taking great delight in annoyingly commenting on the knots Fawlty is tying himself in.
He had a memorable (for me) line in The Secret Policeman’s Ball.
As the emcee for Sylvester McCoy’s unique brand of silliness, he at one point introduced David Rappaport (who you may remember as one of the dwarves from Time Bandits).
In a booming voice: “Not the smallest man in the world…”
Anyone remember how he did the Tomorrow and tomorrow speech? I seem to recall it was printed on a banner, something to do with snails? I have a flyer for that show but not the text.
I remember him describing his experience of drinking the local halucingenic drink on the island where they worship Prince Phillip (Pillip) as causing Jamais Vu of the legs. That may have been delivered with one or more sink plungers stuck on his head, I think that was in that show (or was that the hat-stand shaped one?).
