Barmy, bathetic, boisterous and bawdy – the spirit of music hall is still bubbling away. The spirit of music hall remains embedded in the DNA of our popular culture.

By David Quantick

Like many people whose comedy tastes were formed in the 1970s, via Monty Python and Dave Allen, Porridge and Reginald Perrin, I often found myself watching a very peculiar programme in which people dressed up as the cast of Upstairs, Downstairs and sang mad songs to an audience of pensioners. In between these songs, the father of Manuel from Fawlty Towers would shout out alliterative introductions; these tortuously tautological torments (I’m doing it now) culminated in his banging a gavel and introducing Danny La Rue.

That show was The Good Old Days, a bowdlerised but still entertaining attempt to recreate the music hall that dominated British entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was arguably the last resting place of music hall on television, unless you count – and I do – the occasional bit of Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

Music hall’s absence from television since then is hardly surprising, given that, in its later incarnation as variety, it was finally killed off by television. Which is why it’s wonderful to see Michael Grade (whose father Lew made his name in variety as a dancer and impresario, before moving into television) making a documentary about it for the BBC, and astutely choosing interviewees like Jo Brand and Barry Cryer – Cryer in particular being practically a one-man music hall himself.

I have always loved music hall – which might seem odd, given that I was born in 1961, a year after it was officially buried with the great Max Miller. Miller always claimed music hall would die with him, and he certainly incarnated its greatest attributes, namely cheekiness, singalongs and filth. I won’t quote any of his gags here, save to say that only a brave comic would attempt the one that ends: “‘That’s odd,’ said the optician, ‘Every time I see F, you see K.’”

Yet Miller was only the finale to an extraordinary, decades-long parade of talent, which probably started with Punchinello and la commedia dell’arte – or something equally horrible – in the 18th century, and quickly evolved into the noisy, hilarious, melancholy anarchy of what we now call proper music hall.

What made music hall so great? Well, the songs were often wonderful – from My Old Man (Said Follow the Van) to Champagne Charlie, from A Bird in a Gilded Cage, to I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am, there’s a mixture of sentiment and bawdiness that millions found appealing. The humour may have dated, but I would pay guineas and sovereigns to see Dan Leno in his prime, or Marie Lloyd, or even Fred Karno’s Army, which featured such up-and-coming stars as Stan Laurel or Charlie Chaplin.

And then there were the speciality acts: the acrobats, the jugglers, the magicians, the artistes who did one thing only, but did it for 50 years – or until their legs gave out. The adagio dancers, generally a man and woman, who spectacularly recreated what now we’d call bouts of domestic violence. The comedy pianists. The dog acts. That whole parade of incredibly specialised talents, all wiped out when television demanded that they come up with a new act each week.

What was lost with music hall wasn’t just the joy of watching these performers – it was a sense of true anarchy. A music hall wasn’t a respectable place: it was a place where drinks were ferried around as performers did their acts, and where controlling hecklers was essential. There’s been not just a sanitising of live entertainment over the decades, but a turning down of the volume. In his recent book Listen to This, the New Yorker’s music correspondent Alex Ross points out that, in the bad old days, opera performances and classical music concerts were not the reverential, no-clapping affairs of today, but raucous, slightly deranged affairs where people could walk up and down, talk to their friends and have a pop at the performers. And that’s opera and classical music – a music hall performance must have been like an early Sex Pistols concert, only with better jokes.

It was certainly a mad and lively business. Though possibly sanitised for the masses, Champagne Charlie, the 1944 film starring Tommy Trinder as George Leybourne and Stanley Holloway as The Great Vance, shows some of the unhinged energy of the era. There’s a bit of a rags to riches plot, some romance, and a funny duel, but the best part of the film deals with a “song war” between Vance and Leybourne, in which they compete to sing the most popular ditty about booze. In the end, after a few sallies between Ale, Old Ale and Gin, Gin, Gin, Leybourne wins with Champagne Charlie. It’s absurd, but incredibly lively – a bit like a modern hip-hop battle, in which two rappers challenge each other to a duel of musical skill.

Fortunately, even if music hall itself is dead, it remains part of the DNA of popular entertainment. Matt Lucas and David Walliams continue the transvestite tradition so brilliantly kept up by Danny LaRue (who once bought me a pint – I’ve never been happier). The surrealism of the Crazy Gang continues with the Mighty Boosh. The sentimental songs of The X Factor, and the wilder fringes of Britain’s Got Talent, reflect a public appetite for entertainment not hobbled by notions of “cool”. Even Downton Abbey, the somewhat rigid costume museum currently occupying the place once held by the livelier Upstairs, Downstairs, has daringly featured a concert party at which If You Were the Only Girl in the World was performed (although they could really do with a Max Miller character to goose things up a bit).

When music hall finally vanished from the stages of Britain, John Osborne said that “some of the heart of England has gone; something that once belonged to everyone”. He had a point, although he was also trying to flog his cheerless play The Entertainer at the time. Yet in the end, he was wrong. The spirit of music hall exists everywhere, from stand-ups in comedy arenas to audiences heckling hapless performers on TV talent shows. Even the speciality acts have found a new home: the internet is crammed with people who have the most extraordinary skills, as anyone who’s ever put a phrase like “Amazing trick!” or “Look at this guy!” into the search box on YouTube will know.

You can even see the real thing, if you’re prepared to seek it out. It’s a bit more lively than The Good Old Days, mind. I once spent an evening at Brick Lane music hall, where the compere was introducing a tribute to Gracie Fields. “A wonderful Englishwoman,” he said, then paused. “Was she hell,” he added. “As soon as the war started, she buggered off to Capri.” Kindly leave the stage?  It never will.

Although there may be a passing resemblance, as far as we know, Leonard Sachs, “Your own, your very own” Chairman of The Good Old Days is not, in fact, related to Andrew Sachs, the brilliant Manuel in Fawlty Towers.