- BRIAN REECE
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- 'Oh my Sunday helmet!' …he is really a rather nice
man
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- Brian Reece sang a number in Tough at the Top called 'I'm
Really a Rather Nice Man', and I suspect that he was. He always
came over that way, trustworthy and a decent British chap. He
must have been agreeable or the same writers and producers wouldn't
have kept on using him. He looked like a slightly starved uncle
that one might meet once a year at a family Christmas gathering.
He seemed an unlikely candidate for a musical leading man, or
even - as he frequently was - the second leading man.
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Brian Reece (third from
left) with his fellow stars in Tough at the Top |
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- He was born in Cheshire in 1913 and started to make his way
in milk marketing, but he was drawn to the theatre and at the
age of eighteen he made his professional debut at Liverpool Playhouse.
It was clear from the beginning that his place would be in light
theatrical parts, frolicsome rather than penetrating. During
the war he joined ENSA and in 1947 was cast as the dubious and
untruthful Thomas Trout in the A. P. Herbert - Vivian Ellis hit
Bless The Bride.
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- It was at a radio recording of the show (blissfully now available
on CD) that the producer Vernon Harris noticed that while the
rest of the Bless The Bride company simply repeated their stage
performances, Reece displayed a superb microphone technique,
scaling down his contribution to a more intimate tone. This so
impressed Harris that he gave Reece the role of P. C. 49 in the
new BBC radio series, and for the rest of his life Reece would
be identified as the charming, beat-plodding Constable Archibald
Berkeley-Willoughby, a role he also put on film. His catch-phrases,
including his commendably understated 'Oh my Sunday helmet!',
achieved wide popularity.
- Harris wasn't the only person to be impressed. The producers
of Bless The Bride clearly warmed to their second, comic, leading
man, and in 1949 they put him into the new Ellis-Herbert piece,
Tough at the Top, as Count Victor of Plusch, again at the Adelphi
Theatre. This time Reece was also given some substantial numbers,
but the show didn't last long. His next musical was Ivor Novello
and Alan Melville's musical farce for Cicely Courtneidge, Gay's
The Word, at the Saville Theatre, in which he took over from
Thorley Walters in the role of Peter Lynton. He was rewarded
with one of the show's best efforts, 'A Matter of Minutes', one
of the most captivating songs that Novello wrote.
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- The following year he shared top billing with Arthur Askey
in another Alan Melville show, Bet Your Life, at the Hippodrome,
but although it had a good run it never established itself as
a real success. There was one more musical from Vivian Ellis,
when his adaptation of Wilde's most loved comedy was transformed
into Half in Earnest, staged for the opening of the Belgrade
Theatre, Coventry in March 1958. Reece was praised for his playing
of John Worthing, but the show closed after two weeks without
a threat of it moving to the West End. In 1958 Reece was seen
in a TV edition of the Eric Maschwitz operetta, Carissima, a
show that scarcely deserved such a revival of interest.
- There was a final irony to the fact that this most pleasing
of light comedians had for so much of his working life been known
by a number. It came to have a more sinister connotation, for
he was only 49 when he died in 1962.
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- Discography
- Original cast recordings of:
Bless the Bride
Tough at the Top
Bet Your Life
RETURN TO STOUT-HEARTED MEN
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