A Queen of Puddings - Carrying on a sad life: reviewing 'High Spirits' by Joan Sims (Partridge, £16.99)

 

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Joan Sims is a national treasure. Not, perhaps, a treasure on the scale of Dora Bryan, but the two women share what might, without unkindness, be called The Common Touch. Now, in a book hopefully entitled High Spirits, Miss Sims gives her account of a career that, largely through the extraordinary success of the Carry On films, has earned her a place as a favourite of the British public. Through it all, she has remained a distant figure, one of us but strangely apart, and - until this book - almost completely private.

What emerges most strongly from her account is a sense of isolation and unhappiness that no amount of commercial success has been able to assuage. There was a happy childhood, but her relationship with her parents was seriously threatened when Sims decided to live with a man. Ultimately, the relationship with her parents survived and it was the man who - the first of several - went away. On a personal level, Sims has been unlucky in coping with life. A serious addiction to alcohol and increasing weight are two obstacles that have had to be overcome, while the romantic side of things has never worked out terribly well. Having Kenneth Williams propose marriage to her can't have been much of a help. Somehow the discomfort of this woman comes across in these pages. What are we to make of someone who seems (by the number of times such things crop up) almost fixated by the less glamorous bodily functions?

But we turn aside from the 'real' aspects of her life to the theatrical ingredients. There is no doubt that, if she hadn't been taken in by the British film industry, Sims would have gone on to accumulate a considerable career in theatre. Revue was always her medium. Her appeal was broader than that of many of the expert practitioners of that genre - she lacked the sophistication of the likes of Joan Heal and Moyra Fraser - but she could fire off a point number as well as most. Her ability to play revue happily coincided with the upsurge of Peter Myers, that most prolific writer for the intimate revue.

 

Like Sims, Myers lacked a rapier wit, but he too could score bulls-eyes, and Sims made a series of appearances in a list of Myers revues in the early 1950s. Most of the material (almost all of it unrecorded) has vanished into that territory where old revue items go, but there is pleasure still in recalling such numbers as 'Siren Song' in which Sims's seductively-voiced British Rail announcer made male passengers go weak at the knees as she announced the next train to 'Woking'

 

'It's more the way I say it than the actual things I say
They may be great big business men but in my hands they're clay
That's why city gents all faint when I say 'There's a slight delay'
They're the victims of the Golden Voice.'

 

Revue was more or less left behind after starring in Intimacy at 8.30 in 1954, although there was a late stab at getting more out of a rapidly tiring medium in Peter Myers's The Lord Chamberlain Regrets at the Saville in 1961, in which Sims starred opposite Millicent Martin and Ronnie Stevens. Disappointingly, Sims doesn't have anything especially interesting to say about revue or the writers or performers she worked with. Or musicals. But then there was nothing very interesting about her only major effort, Instant Marriage, at the Piccadilly in 1964. The public kept it running despite a critical roasting. Sims gives the impression that the show was a misunderstood master-work. Another musical, Good Time Johnny, got no further than a season at Birmingham.

 

A little more happiness

 

Through it all Sims has survived, and most of what she has done is dutifully (if blandly) mentioned. There is the suspicion that much of the information she regurgitates has been scribbled for her by friends on the back of postcards, and there are some heavy clangers. She seems proud of the fact that Arnold Ridley (of Dad's Army fame) directed her first film, Meet Mr Lucifer. He didn't, of course - he wrote the play on which the script was based. She speaks fondly of a revue artist called Gabrielle Broom, a name that might not have looked too good in lights. Gabrielle Brune might have expected a fellow artist at least to remember her not altogether undistinguished name.

 

We shouldn't be ungrateful for a book that at least inhabits much of the world of revue, but there is something unrounded about this life and career. It might have been more satisfactory if Sims had had a little more uncluttered happiness. Even her status as a gay icon - she talks of herself as a 'queen of puddings ' - seems a bit groundless. Having largely forsaken the theatre for the cinema, she somehow ensured herself a place in the footnotes of its history, but there is no reason why the affection of her public should ever weaken. There is, though, no love lost on her fellow Carry On compatriot Barbara Windsor. An index entry reads: Windsor, Barbara - moaner, page 150.

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