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Quick summary
- Price
- Pay As You Feel (£3/£5/£7)
- Running time
- 1 hour 30 minutes
Event description
A screening of two films about two North East comedy legends – Bobby Thompson and Scarlet O’Hara – and their lives and careers during the 70’s club scene.
Lifestyle: The Little Waster Makes Good (1973)
The Little Waster’s monologues are spiced with reference to a past that ‘only the north east fully experienced.’ With his trademark tatty woollen gansey, flat cap and Woodbine tab, Bobby Thompson pedalled a comedy of debt, dole and marital war in perfect pitmatic dialect. This insightful TV portrait reveals the roots of his sparkling northern wit, from early life in a Durham pit village to show biz stardom. But the comic genius of this stand-up legend failed to travel south.
Northern Scene: Laughing At Life (1981)
A young Pauline Petty’s Sunday dinner used to be sage and onion stuffing sandwiches, but in the 1980s she topped the bill at her own nightclub in Whitley Bay as popular Geordie raconteur, Scarlet O’Hara. The comedian reminisces about nit nurses, husbands, debt, and growing up poor on the West End streets of Newcastle in a Tyne Tees TV documentary, which captures the impeccable timing of her stand-up comedy at working men’s clubs that could make or break stars in the past.
We will also be joined stand up comedian Lee Kyle as he takes you on a journey through some of the odder characters and stories of North East comedy history. The comedian who didn’t want to be funny, the Human Anvil and the Sunderland links to the Kennedy assassination.. and that’s just the obvious stuff!
Heritage Reels
This screening is part of our Heritage Reels programme – a curated programme of talks
alongside archive films and heritage themed documentaries.
Art Centre Washington’s film programme is supported by Film Hub North with National Lottery funding on behalf of the BFI Film Audience Network.
