Lionel Blair: Scandalously charming
By Kate Copstick
Published: 13/8/2009
Lionel Blair
He was an actor long before he got into dance. Now, at 78, Lionel Blair is turning the clock back, writes Kate Copstick
APOLOGIES in advance, but I am far too much of a fan of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue to miss an opportunity to describe my first glimpse of Lionel Blair in Edinburgh thus: as I rounded the corner into the Hotel du Vin's lovely courtyard, I was delighted to see Lionel Blair, sitting in the sunshine, sucking enthusiastically on a fag.
He is an absolute delight to be with, Mr Blair. A showbiz gentleman with that marvellous ability to meet you once and remember you always. And he is 78, so that is a lot of remembering.
Blair is having a serious amount of fun. "We had our first performance yesterday and Miss Behave, Ella (Kenion) and I were standing in the Courtyard putting our make-up on," he says. "Well, there was no room in the dressing room, you see. It was hysterical! We're passing round the eyeliner and I think the people queuing thought it was part of the show! We even got a round of applause." The Edinburgh Fringe is proving a whole new theatrical world for Blair.
"I am one of these people who likes to get in early to the dressing room, you know, walk around the stage, put up the good-luck cards, lay out the make-up, bring in the kettle… Well there's none of that here!" But he is loving every single sweaty, frantic second.
So how, I ask, does a man I have just watched on YouTube dancing with Sammy Davis Jnr at a Royal Command Performance, which also featured Maurice Chevalier, and who still has in his wallet the inscribed silver dollar given to him by Davis, end up, half-dressed, applying lippie in the Pleasance Courtyard, being giggled at by the hoi polloi?
Contacts, of course. We all know life isn't about what you know but who you know. Blair's son is a musician who happened to be playing back-up for Phil Nichol at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.
Blair went to see the show, and was introduced to Nichol, whose first words were, apparently: "Hello Lionel, would you like to come up to the Edinburgh Fringe and play Sir Peter Teazle in my production of School for Scandal?" To which Lionel replied "Yes". Maybe it's a Canadian rapport thing, both being from the land that said no to Bush.
Now, lest you know only of Lionel Blair as a name on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, let me tell you that this man arrived in England from Canada aged one, the son of a Russian Jewish barber, since when he has clocked up 61 years in showbiz and over 1,000 TV appearances.
Most people know him from Give Us a Clue and Name That Tune, but Blair began as a straight actor – and we are talking as straight as Shakespeare – only turning to dance later. He played a choreographer in A Hard Day's Night, and got the job for real in Peter Sellers's 1969 masterpiece of weird The Magic Christian, where he had to choreograph Yul Brynner, in full drag, singing Noel Coward's Mad About the Boy to Roman Polanski. He has worked with Bob Hope and Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé and Rosemary Clooney (now, sadly, more famous as the aunt of George). He has sat gossiping with Claudette Colbert about Katharine Hepburn. The man is something of a legend.
And now he is at The Pleasance. "It's a new beginning!" beams Blair and lights up another ciggie. He is, and always has been, keen to act and has a long list of parts he'd like to play. He has a theory that producers and directors will look to cast singers and comics before even thinking about a dancer. "I think they think we only work from the waist down," he says, a little sadly.
While on the subject of dance, I feel obliged, of course, to ask the question on everyone's lips. He hears the question before I speak it aloud. "Not right," he declares emphatically. "Absolutely not right." Although Arlene Phillips wasn't "a ballroom person", she really knows about dance, we agree. Replacing her with Alesha Dixon is beyond him.
"What can she say?" he asks, hands opening heavenwards. But then he fails to understand the point of Ruthie Henshall on "that ice dance thing. She is boring on stage and she is boring on TV. If I have to hear her say 'You're just not doing it for me' one more time…" You can't really argue, can you?
He tells me his best friend Anita Harris, as well as being singer/actress/dancer and all-round bubbly personality, was a professional ice dancer. More about Harris, I suspect, in Blair's own show Tap & Chat with Lionel Blair at Sweet Grassmarket. Is he mad? Another show? "Oh it's just me chatting about my life, and doing a couple of numbers and some tap and soft-shoe shuffle," he shrugs.
Perhaps working with Phil Nichol has rubbed off on him. "I'm worried about Phil," he says, placing a perfectly manicured hand on my forearm. "He's doing four shows… and he's producing this one!" Indeed he is.
For the next ten minutes or so, it is surprising that Nichol's ears did not so much burn as spontaneously combust. "He is a beautiful man," says Blair. "I think he has something of Colin Farrell about him." Blair is effusive in his praise of the entire cast, including Cal McCrystal, the director.
"He gives me these wonderful notes," he says. "One day he came up to me after a run through and said, 'That was a bit Buttons today'." He gives a throaty laugh. "I knew exactly what he meant." At which point he widens both eyes, flings his arms wide and says: "Hello children, my name is Buttons, will you be my friends?" Thirty years standing astride the world of panto like a colossus in primary-coloured dungarees have to have had some effect on a man.
But Blair is a smart, talented performer. And, in his plan, this Edinburgh run could be the start of a new phase in his career. "People think, 'Oh, he'd be too expensive'," he says. "Why don't they ask?"
I mention David Babani, producer extraordinaire of the Menier Chocolate Factory successes. "I'd love to play Georges," he says mistily, humming Song on the Sand from La Cage aux Folles. Personally, I think he'd be fabulous.
But now Blair has to go to his own show at Sweet in the Grassmarket. "Is this on The Scotsman?" he asks, gesturing to his empty coffee cup and the crumbs of his pain aux raisins. I say no. He is genuinely horrified.
"Oh, if I'd known I'd never have ordered the Danish," he cries, clasping my shoulder. That is the kind of showbiz gentleman they just don't make any more.
The School for Scandal is at the Pleasance Courtyard, 4pm, until 31 August. Tap & Chat with Lionel Blair is at Sweet Grassmarket, 11:45am, until 30 August.
