Band Waggon

Directed by Marcel Varnel and starring Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Patricia Kirkwood and Moore Marriott, Band Waggon is based on the hugely popular BBC radio show of the same name. Band Waggon is very much a British throwback to a time when comedy was almost chaotic in execution, where malarkey ruled the wave. To that end the film is a sure fire hit, performances are hitting the right notes and direction from the fabulous Varnel is suitably breezy. Within the running time of under 85 minutes, film is chocked full of enough set-ups to fill out another movie as well, there is no doubting the value for money given to British cinema goers back in 1940. Sample songs, shenanigans, spies and spirits along the way, and film closes with an elongated song and show routine as a time bomb cheerily ticks down to potential detonation.

It's hardly great comedy and it's far from being Askey's best film, but it has some solid laughs and it remains eternally silly for all the right cinematic reasons. 6/10

This is one of the earliest spin offs this time of the 1939 radio programme.The plot such as it is is concocted around of all things a TV broadcast.The original show was a combination of sketches stand up routines and music hall turns,and the film rather adheres to that.I suppose whether or not you like this film will to a certain extent depend on how much you like Arthur Askey.It has to be said that there is an awful lot of him in this film.Probably far too much.His stooge is Richard "Stinker"Murdoch.I have no idea how he got his nickname.There are a lot of musical numbers which are pleasant but fairly undistinguished.Moore Marriot and Pat Kirkwood are in support.This would be one of the last appearances of Jack Hylton before he would take on his entrepreneurial role in the West End.

Arthur Askey's films must have a lot of sentimental value, but his comedy hasn't aged well. In fact, he's very irritating in most of his films. What makes The Band Waggon interesting, is the only opportunity to see the greatest British dance band leader Jack Hylton and his orchestra in their only screen performance. It's a pity they didn't do more films. The songs aren't great hits, but solid good material. The other thing that makes this film interesting is its fascination with the television. It's one of the very first films, where TV is the leading character. Sure, the process is shown in a fantastic manner which is very far from the reality, but it's great fun to watch the final sequence. The overblown showstopper Melody Maker Man - dozens of performers busting their arses while the only member of the audience fails to utterly notice the goings-on around him - is an often used gimmick, but very funny indeed. Be sure to watch the proper DVD release and not a bootleg copy.

A very early example of that English vein of odd ball humour that led to so much classic TV. And in fact the BBC pre ww2 TV service forms the basis of the plot. There are even some examples of the the first EMI vidicon cameras!

Arthur Askey was a comic star of the stage, radio - and later on TV. As a live performer he was hilarious, but his zany antics and anarchic behaviour on stage didn't translate well to the screen. The jokes were excruciating and the dialogue was simply unfunny and infantile. The storyline of Askey and sidekick Murdoch, ending up in a castle in Sussex, which housed German agents was an opportunity to trot out the usual banal, tiresome and inane jokes about the enemy. The romantic duet between Murdoch and Kirkwood was strictly lack lustre and amateurish. I imagine the public needed laughs at the cinema to lift the mood and spirit of the nation in 1940, but this film simply showed that the British film industry couldn't seem to produce films which combined comedy and song. This film was in a essence a series of cobbled together daft sketches which were tedious and third rate.