The Wonderful World of Captain Beaky and His Band – review

"Britain caught up in Beaky-mania", ran the headlines 30 years ago. Truly, the past is another country. This tribute night to Jeremy Lloyd's Captain Beaky poems made them seem positively Edwardian – or at least, hard to credit as a phenomenon of the Thatcher, Sid Vicious and the ZX Spectrum era. Given a stately, Royal Variety style performance, the patrician tweeness of the poems (read and sung by celebrities and stars of musical theatre, to music conducted by David Firman) took a bit of getting used to – especially to those of us who missed Beaky-mania first time around. By the end of the evening, though, I had fallen for their understated charm and dotty appeal to the childish imagination. There are moments when the event (in aid of Unicef ) was as weird as it was wonderful: the National Youth Ballet gambolling around as snails and bumblebees to the sound of verses recited by Alan Titchmarsh and, er, Duncan Bannatyne ; Roger Moore whipping off his trousers, Bucks Fizz-style, to reveal green grasshopper legs. All the while, Lloyd (also the creator of Are You Being Served? ) sat in an upstage armchair like an avuncular version of Moore's old foe Blofeld, chortling and dispensing thanks. Lloyd reserved for himself the most sentimental number, Teddy's Tea-Time , which jerked this viewer's tears. Other highlights included the close harmony quartet Cantabile's take on Wendell the Worm , Ricardo Afonso's pop-eyed Franglais on Jacques, a Penniless French Mouse, and Joanna Lumley joyously hamming up the tale of Dilys the dancing dachshund. The good-natured innocence of it all was finally rather winning. The sight of 81-year-old Lloyd (and the original Beaky, Keith Michell, in the stalls) being celebrated for this eccentric labour-of-love from half a lifetime ago, was enough to provoke a sentimental sniff from even the hardest beak.