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        Pete Atkin >> Words >> "How beautiful they are"
        
(Message started by: Simon Reap on Today at 23:36)

Title: "How beautiful they are"
Post by Simon Reap on Today at 23:36

Just listened to HR (Radio 4, Series 5, Episode 2) and one of the characters quoted "How beautiful they are, the trains you miss". Did the author (Nigel Williams) get this from "The magic wasn't there" or from the original "the poet who once said..."?

Simon

Title: Re: "How beautiful they are"
Post by Pete Atkin on 12.03.14 at 13:15

Well, there is a connection, vague-ish but actual. In 1969, the Oxford & Cambridge Shakespeare Company had a plan to raise money for its first tour of the USA by staging and filming a joint Oxford and Cambridge recent-graduate revue at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. The Cambridge contingent of the revue included Julie Covington, Rob Buckman, Jonathan James-Moore, and self, and Oxford was represented by Diana Quick, Michael Rosen, and Nigel Williams. I'm pretty certain that Julie would have sung The Magic Wasn't There in the show, so there you have it. Possibly. Or even probably.

(The joint revue played for a week at the Arts, directed by Richard Cottrell, and was indeed filmed, directed by the legendary Jack Cardiff, but I think only one reel was ever developed and even that was lost. In the end it proved simpler to take a more compact Cambridge Footlights-only late-night revue to the States as a postscript to the main production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.)