Grace, Beauty and Banjos: Peculiar Lives and Strange Times of Music Hall and Variety Artistes

This book is bit of a "first" for me because it is the first time I have ordered a book from Amazon which is so obviously over- priced that I actually considered sending it BACK to Amazon because really, it's just not worth 19.99. The text is printed on cheap paper, almost of "newsprint" quality and the whole thing just screams "Bargain books" at you. Eventually that's where you will find this publication- in a bin at "Bargain Books" with a 3.99 sticker on it, and you'll be able to congratulate yourself on having saved sixteen quid.Having got over my intial anger at being ripped off, I found it to be not a bad little book at all. It does contain some interesting vignettes of Variety entertainers. I hadn't previously heard of Mr. Kilgarriff but he is an entertaining ( if somewhat waspishly opinionated) writer whose style of prose is eccentric, to say the least. For instance he constantly refers to himself as "We"....as in " We are honour bound to record that we always found this entry smug and creepily unctuous".Mister Kilgarriff doesn't mind slippimg into "creepily unctuous" territory himself, on occasion. His sycophantic entry for Roy Hudd is one of the most spectacular pieces of brown-nosing I have ever seen in print!The book contains some nice photographs, all in black and white of course because that's the genre. There's also a foreword by the creepily unctuous Sir Harry Secombe, accompanied by a 1950 photo of mister Secombe dedicated to "Ray and Sidney"...So there we have it. I'd say that Mister Kilgarriff really knows his stuff and it's a fine book. His comments on some of the entertainers are quite scathing and he has an acid wit. The book is just not worth 19.99, that's all.

Not read as present

The lack of detail was the most frustrating thing about this book, detail that the author hints at but never embellishes; Marie Lloyd had her teeth knocked out by her husband, Sam Mayo was thrice bankrupt, George Robey was a cantankerous sod; does Mr. Kilgariff elaborate on these prepositions? No. He gives his opinion- sometimes digressing to inform the reader of an insignificant date he- or presumptuously referring to himself as 'we', once played 'early in our career, don't cha' know darling?' A sweeping description of the artist, with no insight and nothing new to inform anything but the casual scholar. Beset with opinion and conjecture, very little history. Even in terms of anecdote it is thin. On the whole, very shallow. And a great disappointment as I felt the author had so much more to tell and should have done so much better. Instead all he has produced is a directory for dead music hall comedians riddled with his own, unwanted, irritating, opinions and boasting. Bad show., Very bad show.

Broadly, I had one use for this book - to confirm something I already knew about a past relative in musical hall.Whilst there is some merit in the book there are a lot of errors and omissions! Though I know how difficult it can be to research people in this era and business I'm not the one writing and book and selling it.Disappointed.

The book is bsically an encyclopedia listing Music Hall acts with a brief description of what they did and where they worked. I was hoping for more insight and description of the lifestyle.

I thought this would be more narrative but it is essentially a biographical chronology of music hall artists. Not as interesting as I'd hoped.

Covers an era in popular entertainment when professionalism, hard work and variety rated higher than present day boring banality and it is written with the same ethos. I can smell the grease paint, cheap perfume and the limes burning in their trays.

Was great fun to read and discover some of our lost entertainment heritage. Didn't know so much live veriety entertainment has been lost.