Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 1 di 13 Home Newspaper Cuttings This page contains cuttings relating to Flanders and Swann from a number of newspapers. The text is copywrite its respective owner. To get back to the article list, click on the 'year' button on the left. 1957 At the Drop of a Hat - Theatre Notice - The Times, 00-01-57 1975 Michael Flanders - Obituary - The Times, 00-00-75 1993 Time for a chorus of glorious mud - The Peterborough column - The Daily Telegraph, 19- 06-93 1994 Donald Swann dies aged 70 - The Times, 25-03-94 Donald Swann - Obituary - The Daily Telegraph, 25-03-94 Obituary: Donald Swann - The Independent, 25-03-94 Donald Swann; Obituary - The Times, 25-03-94 Revue revival gives witty Swann songs a new voice - An article about the revival of the musical revue - The Sunday Telegraph, 27-03-94 Joined at the hippo - From 'The Highwayman' column in The Times - 09-04-94 Swann songs - One of Swann's last ventures - The Daily Telegraph, 25-05-94 Wills - The Independent, 14-06-94 Latest Wills - The Times, 29-06-94 Follow me, follow down to the hollow - A review of 'Under their Hats', a Flanders and Swann retrospective show. The Times, 10-08-94 Under Their Hats - Arts news (excerpt), as above - The Sunday Telegraph, 14-08-94 Swann song - The Peterborough column - The Daily Telegraph, 26-08-94 2000 Alexander H. Cohen - Obituary of the American Producer of Hat - The Times, 24-4-00 FORTUNE THEATRE - "AT THE DROP OF A HAT" The Times, London, January 1957 It does something to explain the continued popularity of their two-man revue that Mr. Michael Flanders and Mr. Donald Swann did not mark the fact of yesterday evening's being its first anniversary in the West End, till they had gone right through the show, ensuring its success, like that of any previous show during the run, entirely on its own merits. They made no concession to the festive occasion till, a second encore was asked for after the statutory 19 items. Then indeed Mr. Flanders, in his wheeled chair became a grandmother claiming angrily to be 104 years old, with Mr. Swann at the piano telling him that he had overcounted. Otherwise for both of them it was business as usual: business - highly unusual in itself - as they have been doing it for the past 12 months, with Mr. Swann's piano as the only accessory to the exercise of their joint inventiveness and wit. Each of them, by being and remaining himself, offsets the other beatitifully. We http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 2 di 13 continue looking from Mr. Flander's side of the stage to Mr. Swann's as persistently as Mr. Flanders himself, as the Wimbledon umpire, looks from the invisible left-hand court to the invisible right-hand one. And this match is a good deal liveiler than that umpire will admit his to be. back to the top Mr. Michael Flanders The Times (London), 1975 Obituary Michael Flanders, the actor and lyric-writer, who has died at the age of 53, was long familiar on the London stage, particularly in the two-man entertainment with Donald Swann where he described himself as "the big one with the beard who writes all the words and does most of the talking" (both of them, he said, "for want of a better word", sang). Since a severe attack of Poliomyelitis while serving in the RNVR during 1943 he had been confined permanently to a wheelchair. Born in London, in March, 1922 and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, (where he read History), he directed and acted for University societies and began as a professional at the Oxford Playhouse in l941 as Valentine in You Never Can Tell . Later he served as an able seaman in a destroyer on convoys to Russia and Malta, and after his ship was torpedoed during the African landings as an officer in Coastal Forces. Now, he contracted polio; at last, when out of hospital, he became a writer, and later a broadcaster. Donald Swann, a light composer and accompanist, had been with Flanders at Westminster (they put on a revue there in 1940) and the pair started a professional collaboration with material for various intimate revues, particularly for three devised by Laurier Lister - Penny Plain , (St. Martin's, 1951), to which, among other things, they contributed "Surly Girls" with decor by Ronald Searle, and "Prehistoric Complaint"; Airs on a Shoestring (Royal Court, 1953) for which they were the principal writers (and in which Max Adrian sang " Excelsior" and the company joined in "Guide To Britten "); and Fresh Airs (Comedy, 1956) where again, most of the work was their own. Presently - and this was the zenith of their association - they became performers themselves. On New Year's Eve, 1956, they put on a new show At The Drop of a Hat , described as an " after-dinner farrago", and modestly-presented and wittily filled out; it opened on the bare stage of the little New Lindsey Theatre at Notting Hill Gate but went on at once to the West End and a run of 759 performances. It was then that London heard "Tried bv the Centre Court", "The Hippopotamus" ("Mud, mud, glorious mud"), and "The Honeysuckle and Bindweed", "Misalliance", and other songs that enabled Flanders and Swann to hold a theatre on their own. They would sustain the entertainment, in various forms and in many places. Thus, they played, for example, throughout the United States (New York, 1959) and in Australia and New Zealand (1964); Flanders was married in New York to an American girl, Claudia Davis. The show developed into its second programme At The Drop of Another Hat in 1963; this had two London scenes - at the Haymarket and the Globe - and from it came such things as "Slow Train", "Armadillo Idyll", and what a critic called the celebration of old brass bedsteads in any normal English pond. Flanders, in his difficult circumstances, kept an unchallenged warmth and urbanity. During his career he made innumerable broadcasts of all kinds on radio and television; at one stage he was chairman of The Brains Trust. He wrote the libretti of two operas; translated (with Kitty Black) Stravinskv's The Soldier's Tale - and in 1962 appeared as The Storyteller in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Aldwych, London. In 1964 he received the OBE. back to the top Time for a chorus of glorious mud The Daily Telegraph, 19th June 1993 The Peterborough column By Quentin Letts DEATH stares Donald Swann in the eye. Swann, composer, pianist and former partner of the late Michael Flanders, has been struck by cancer. With typical self-effacement he has http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 3 di 13 decided to go public with his condition. He tells the story well, so well that one curses the disease that has put this peaceful, thoughtful man on a life expectancy of weeks. 'It is rather haunting,' admits Swann, in the Sixties half of one of the best-known comic turns in the world. 'The idea that you do not know how much time is left gives life a new intensity, so I have a feeling that, as well as sleeping and resting a lot, I am also racing around.' Swann, 69, first noticed something was wrong last year on a trip to Russia, where he had terrible backache. Tests found cancer of the prostate gland, spine and pancreas. He describes his battle since then in a coda to a new edition of his autobiography, Swann's Way, to be published later this month by Arthur James. There came, first, a spell in a hospice, where one day he performed a concert with one of the nursing staff. Within minutes everyone was joining in a chorus of 'Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud'. Slowly he learned to face up to his disease, and to 'riding downhill' to the next world. Despite the sensation of 'letting go, letting go', he has already lived beyond his doctors' prediction of three months. He felt well enough to travel to the tiny Greek island of Kasos. At the airport he used a wheelchair, just like his old partner Flanders. Swann recalls: 'I thought 'from this position he wrote all the lyrics which enabled me to pay for this holiday'. It heartened me to think that again he had touched my life. Once more, Flanders, I tip my cap to you' back to the top Donald Swann dies aged 70 The Times, London, 25th March 1994 Front page Donald Swann, the comedy songwriter and performer, has died, aged 70. Swann, who died in Trinity Hospice, Clapham, two years after cancer was diagnosed, became a household name in the 1950s through his partnership with Michael Flanders. back to the top Donald Swann He could play the fool at the drop of a hat - Composer whose famous partnership with Michael Flanders put the melody into mud, mud glorious mud The Daily Telegraph, 25th March 1994 Obituary DONALD SWANN, the composer and entertainer who has died aged 70, was the musical and comedy partner of the late Michael Flanders; in their revues they epitomised English nonsense humour in the good-natured tradition of Punch.