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What Exactly Did Les Dawson See Re. Sid James' Ghost?

Vardoger said:
Has anyone else seen what they believed to be Sid James' ghost in the theatre?

Edit: Someone actually claim to have captured his ghost (or rather orb like light) on photo.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/theatre-lover-catches-ghost-sid-11498050
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Well, Sid was rather fond of orbs during his career but I don't think he expected to come back as one
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stu neville said:
Sorry to back-pedal a minute.

As Davies' cited piece says though, it's all about the background. I love Melly's autobiographies: he treated them as confessionals, so as you say they are brutally honest and people who knew him all said they were pretty much verbatim accounts, albeit occasionally embellished, but Melly never seeks to put himself in a good light. Being a jazz freak and a lover of good writing I have read them all repeatedly (I especially recommend "Owning Up", both hilarious and vivid) and George's mother was quite Bohemian, had a quasi-theatrical background, and as a result Melly's early life was often in the company of show-people where high-camp was the order of the day, and then went to Stowe where homosexuality - or at least homosexual sex - was endemic, so his whole attitude was one of complete acceptance. Williams had the permanent dichotomy of feeling repulsed by his own urges.

Anyway, back to the thread.
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Ooh we once sat near him on a bus in London (No 25? I think?). With my ex who was Babs' second cousin! Small world.
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Just spotted this - I wonder if your very elderly friend ever worked any of the same clubs my dad did?

My late dad was a taxman by day and moonlighted (without telling he taxman) as a musician at night and on the weekends, when I was a kid.:D
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I don't know if my mate ever played Scarborough. He did all the WMC in the North, and some of the very big gigs. Apparently everyone was drunk all of the time, but he does speak well of Bob Monkhouse.
 
catseye said:
I don't know if my mate ever played Scarborough. He did all the WMC in the North, and some of the very big gigs. Apparently everyone was drunk all of the time, but he does speak well of Bob Monkhouse.
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The punters used to line up beers for my dad along the top of the piano to thank him for playing. He didn't drink beer. But yes, drinks were always flowing. I'd often be perched on a stool at the bar so a kindly barmaid could keep an eye on me whilst my dad played (he was an accompanist not an act but also played in lulls between bingo/acts - he used it as time to practice his Beethoven or whatever. Was his USP that he worked in the clubs playing classical music.

I recall many nights I was plied with lager and lime because in the 60s lager was a kiddies' drink... And I can remember sometimes watching a tiny TV someone had behind the bar in one club. It was boozy but largely good-natured, or maybe I was sheltered from it - but my mum was pretty straight-laced and even she wasn't bothered by me going to WMCs. He'd get asked to play weddings as well, because folk would see him a club and want to book him. Once or twice he also played the village church organ but as an agnostic, wasn't his scene. He'd play anything, anywhere, for money. (Taxmen weren't paid much in the 60s or 70s. Like now, I guess!)

If your mate was around in the 60s and 70s they may well have bumped into him or at least heard of him. In the 50s, he played in a big band in Leeds and he was always in demand because he could play without rehearsal and accompany anyone, playing to their style. There were certain WMCs in part of the West Riding who would have, for years, listened to Chopin and Rachmaninov every weekend, before the bingo! I wish he'd still played the clubs when I was older, as I'd have even more memories and might have understood more of what was going on. Like all musicians, he'd gossip about the acts - who was a pisshead, who was great, etc. He was probably the only stone cold sober person in any club by around 10PM. He just used it to practice in-between acts and bingo - the audience was incidental.

He loved Les Dawson - found the piano thing the funniest of all because he got it.

ETA: I might have said before, but one act I do remember seeing in the clubs was Freddie Starr (just pre-TV fame). They were always pre- or post-. Anyway, given how much musicians gossip - I got to say I never heard/overheard a bad word about him and his act must have been good because I remember him and not many of the others. My dad said Diana Dors (who I love - in fact, that film she was in based on Ruth Ellis is one of my favourite movies of all time) had to have a crate of booze in the dressing room - but that sounded like stage fright (amazingly for someone so well known and who had a shot at Hollywood, I think?) I remember just feeling sad about it, when he mentioned it. She was by no means the only one, just one of the ones I remember. I still think she was an underrated actor (given we're talking the 70s, probably two reasons for that).
 
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Bigphoot2 said:
Well, Sid was rather fond of orbs during his career but I don't think he expected to come back as one
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:( I just went on Google to find out more about Margret Nolan (and who knows, maybe, ahem, check out a few pictures ) only to find that she passed away two weeks ago.
 
I've possibly already mentioned this, but a few years ago I was sitting at a bar when I noticed that there was a quote written up on the wall - a Les Dawson quote.

Nothing so I unusual in that, maybe. Except, I was in Budapest!

I know stardom can be a worldwide thing, but I never had Les down as quite so international.
 
NomDeGuerre said:
This has always been one of my pet mysteries, but one that we’ll never get a definite answer too.

Les being a highly prolific romance novelist is a fantastic detail to his career (and didn’t he also pen some speculative sci-fi at one point, too?)
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Yes, there was a forum piece about Les's apocalypse novel in the FT magazine. Apparently it's barely coherent! And very expensive second hand.
 
I'm really trying to get my mate to write his memoirs about his time working the clubs. He was extremely well paid back in the day for doing his stand up act, Trouble is that he really cannot see the value in capturing that time in words, much like many of us, I suppose, he sees those times as too recent to be worth recording. I've got him as far as writing a script (he is obsessed with writing everything as 'scripts' but then insisting on putting in practically his entire stand up act, which I keep trying to tell him neither moves the story forward nor builds character, so would be the first things to come out). But what I have got out of him was that practically every act was so drunk that it was a wonder they could get on stage, never mind do an act. He has tales of having to go to dressing rooms to drag people up onto stage, having poured coffee down them until they could stand...
 
catseye said:
I'm really trying to get my mate to write his memoirs about his time working the clubs. He was extremely well paid back in the day for doing his stand up act, Trouble is that he really cannot see the value in capturing that time in words, much like many of us, I suppose, he sees those times as too recent to be worth recording. I've got him as far as writing a script (he is obsessed with writing everything as 'scripts' but then insisting on putting in practically his entire stand up act, which I keep trying to tell him neither moves the story forward nor builds character, so would be the first things to come out). But what I have got out of him was that practically every act was so drunk that it was a wonder they could get on stage, never mind do an act. He has tales of having to go to dressing rooms to drag people up onto stage, having poured coffee down them until they could stand...
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LOL. My dad was just the accompaniest not an act as such, so he carried on playing and would leave it to someone else to drag them out of the dressing room... I think he'd have carried on playing even if chairs were flying over his head, and bottles. Like the piano players in Wild West saloons... They rarely if ever, rehearsed - I have no idea, in retrospect, how he even knew which key to hit. But he was in demand because he could play for anyone, to suit their style. I'm guessing if they didn't appear onstage, he'd have just carried on doing his piano practice, which was what it really was to him.

Keep encouraging him to write. It is a lost, never-to-return world. So many of them are already long gone. I had this weird childhood in that I got to see that as a 7 year old, from the inside, and suspect if I'd been an adult it would have been even more interesting.
 
I'm honestly trying, Ghost! He just really cannot see any value in his stories. But the script he's writing is set in an actors' boarding house in the seventies with a mix of 'turns'. He's horrendously unPC but may get away with it by setting it in the seventies....

I love listening to his stories about names that were household when I was young but which my children would struggle to recognise. The stories nearly all seem to go 'oh, XXXXX used to drink a bottle of whisky a night and go home and beat his wife but he was demon on the golf course, even with a hangover.'
 
GNC said:
Yes, there was a forum piece about Les's apocalypse novel in the FT magazine. Apparently it's barely coherent! And very expensive second hand.
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Much as I like Les Dawson, what I've seen of his writing does not really give me much hope for the rest. There was a documentary some time back which included some of his poetry - which was, quite frankly, awful adolescent dirge. Possibly there is better stuff in the archive – but I’m not holding my breath.

Sorry, Les. Love you, man.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Much as I like Les Dawson, what I've seen of his writing does not really give me much hope for the rest. There was a documentary some time back which included some of his poetry - which was, quite frankly, awful adolescent dirge. Possibly there is better stuff in the archive – but I’m not holding my breath.

Sorry, Les. Love you, man.
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I think the key is as a person and a stand up he was willing to try different things and that should be applauded.
 
One that might interest anyone from the FT publishing team: the current edition of Psychic News (dated August 2023) has sort of covered the Sid James ghost story.

I say "sort of" covered, as their article, on page 52 and attributed to "John West", appears to have lifted wholesale from the original coverage in Fortean Times and just seems to be an abbreviated version of the FT story. I know this is hard to prove and on a previous incident where an FT story appeared to have been pirated for a national newspaper (as opposed to syndicated with permission), one of the FT staffers who post here just sighed with deep resignation and said "it's one of those things", as if this goes on a lot and isn't worth pursuing. But as I said then... it'd be really nice, as well as courteous, if they at least acknowledged the source!
 
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