Cannon without ball comes to Wellingborough

Not many people in their 80th year will try something new. But then many are not Tommy Cannon.
Tommy CannonTommy Cannon
Tommy Cannon

Best known for being part of the double act Cannon and Ball, Tommy will make his solo acting debut in this brand new musical Seriously Dead coming to Wellingborough at the beginning of next month.

He said: “A stage play means learning lines, for a start, - lots of them - and, of course, sticking to them. You can’t wing it and go off-course. The rest of the cast would never forgive you!

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"It’s been written by a lass called Leah Bell, who – full credits to her – is also in the cast, and who has written it, and produces it. In fact, I’d be hard put to it to think of what Leah hasn’t done! We met, years back, in Jersey, when we were all doing summer season together. Those days, a summer season would go on for twenty and more weeks, playing to good houses all the time.

"Then you’d have a few weeks of variety, or some clubs somewhere, and after that there would be at least two months of pantomime. Your year was planned out in advance.

*That doesn’t happen now, more’s the pity, but Leah and Bob and I got on like a house on fire, and we always kept in touch. Then, earlier in the year, and out of the blue, I got a call from her, and I thought ‘It’s new, it’s a great script,and people love it, so…..let’s go for it!” He’s playing the small-time crook and ladies’ man Albert Blunderstone, who, says Tommy, “is best summed up as a bit of a northern Del Boy”.

Asked if he was apprehensive about acting in this new venture without Bobby Ball, Tommy said, “I’ll have a crack at anything, as long as the offers keep on coming. You know the two saddest words in the English language? They are ‘if only’. When someone gets to a certain age, and they look back and they sigh and say ‘If only I’d done this….or that’.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"Of course everyone makes mistakes, but you have to learn from them. That’s the way forward.”

All this from a man who, incredibly, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday in June this year.

“I know”, he laughs, “I can’t believe it either. But it’s true, and I am very blessed, I know that all too well!”

Tommy Derbyshire met Bobby Ball (born Robert Harper) “more years ago than either of us care to recall. We were both working for a manufacturing firm over in Oldham, and I was the new boy – I turned up, and about five hundred blokes walked past me without a word. Until this little guy went across, and he said ‘Hello, cock, ‘ow are you?’ The only one who actually spoke to me! And that was it. We became mates,

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Cannon and Ball’s act was forged in the working men’s clubs of the day, “and we very much learned ‘on the hoof’. It was tough, but it was a brilliant way to learn your craft, what worked and what didn’t. I remember very early on we played a north-east audience, Sunderland way, and we were paid off.

"We were so broke that we actually picked the dog ends out of the ashtrays as we left. We stopped the car a few miles down the road, and we looked at each other and we thought over what had happened. We said to each other ‘Look, we have three more gigs left, we’ll do those, and if they are disasters, we’ll throw in the towel, call it a day. What happens? We stormed every one of them, they couldn’t get enough of us!”

Their big break came just as the seventies slid in to the eighties. “It’s an indicator of how tastes change”, says Tommy, “because one minute, every town of any note had at least one decent cabaret club that was thriving, and the big names played them all, and then, almost overnight, the audiences were deserting them, and they were closing. Just as that happened, we were offered a three-year contract by London Weekend……and we stayed for many years more! Fate was with us, and we couldn’t have timed it better.”

Today, Tommy and Bobby both these days go their own ways for parts of the year. They always meet up for a Christmas panto – for the last couple of years it has been at Crewe, and that’s the case for this year as well. There are many other gigs together. But it hasn’t always been calm sailing. There were three years when the lads were barely speaking to each other. Tommy said: "You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It was awful. I won’t say that we hated each other, it was just that there was…..an unpleasantness. And neither of us, looking back, knows what brought it on. My own feeling is that we were each surrounded by our own little entourage, and instead of me talking to Bobby, or Bobby talking to me, communications broke down, and it was all through third parties. And that wasn’t helpful at all. But…..we resolved things. That’s what matters”.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Seriously Dead tells the hilarious tale of Thelma Henderson deceased who cannot gain entry through The Pearly Gates as the system has gone digitalised and she has the incorrect paperwork.

Thelma is told to wait by the scrapyard gates until the issue can be resolved but she finds herself a rather reluctant Guardian Angel watching over her school friend and the one true love of her life, Billy

Blenkinsopp.

Tickets cost from £20. To book visit www.castletheatre.co.uk or 01933 270007