It’s probably easier to point out great lyricists who weren’t Jewish

Lyricists often get overlooked in the great canon of song-writing, as the great wordsmith Don Black, a dear friend of mine, pointed out during his revue From the Heart. We saw and loved it on its two Sunday excursions at the Fortune theatre. Five great singers, including Clive Rowe, Sydnie Christmas and Caroline O’Connor, more than did his witty lyrics proud and his wistful, poignant songs about the loss of his beloved wife Shirley had the theatre in tears… “I’d go to bed earlier than I do/ if I knew I’d dream of you”… tears which came straight “from our hearts”.

So many of the greatest lyricists from Irving Berlin through to the tragic Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy Fields, Betty Comden, Stephen Sondheim down through to Carole King, Yip Harburg and Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan and my own favourites, Dory Previn and Leonard Cohen, all have the same ethnicity. In fact, it’s probably quicker and easier to point out which great lyricists weren’t Jewish… er… Noel Coward and Cole Porter?

I’m exaggerating… please don’t write in.

Still, the art of revue has not been seen on these shores since Cowardy Custard and Side by Side by Sondheim, although these shows were more compilation tribute shows than actual revues, which in the Forties and Fifties were a series of sketches and songs written by a team of writers and composers, called things such as Tonight at Eight or Pieces of Eight. I tried to google “revue in London’s West End” and it appeared not to know the difference between bad reviews and great revues.

I have been in the odd forgotten revue myself and my strongest memory is of the order of numbers being changed every night in the hope of switching the audience’s response. Every night lyrics were changed, songs switched acts so that the order of numbers had to be pinned on every door frame and written on limp wrists as the performers struggled to remember whether they were now a milkmaid or a mortician.

Jonathan Miller, he who coined the phrase “I’m Jew…ish”, triumphed in the early Sixties alongside Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in the revue Beyond the Fringe in the West End and on Broadway, yet their searing satire was never equalled again until the Python team emerged in the early 1970s, this time on television. By then, revue was a spent force, considered twee and old hat as the Kitchen Sink overflowed all over St Martin’s Lane and Ken Tynan drawled the F word on telly. How amuse bouche’d he’d be to see his terrible shocker was now the most popular adjective on screen.

Maggie Smith made her name in the revue Share my Lettuce, and indeed her delivery was often more the camp overtones and nasal flare of Kenneth Williams’ than the classically trained ones of Sybil Thorndike or Peggy Ashcroft. (Incidentally, and I apologise for relentlessly nudnicking, but, although she was brought up in a secular household, Ashcroft’s mother, Violette Maud, was German/Danish Jewish. Nobody knew that because it simply wasn’t the sort of thing which came up in interviews or theatre programmes back in the day.)

I never thought about it, but when I started my career in 1967, I talked passionately about my Jewish roots from my first interview on Parkinson. I never questioned the suitability of so doing. On reflection, it was unusual at that time to be upfront about one’s ethnicity. I must have felt pretty safe and very secure in my own skin.

As I contemplate whether to stand outside the wretched Forum, on Saturday night – where the talent-free Bob Vylan raises his pathetic profile on the backs of IDF soldiers – holding up a placard saying: “Unesco admits there was never any starvation in Gaza.” I can only sigh the deep sigh of those who have, as Simon Schama would have it, “paranoia, confirmed by history”.

So. Harking back to songs about wine, Don Black wrote a song for Bing Crosby called Come Share the Wine. Adele, wrote I Drink Wine, Loretta Lynn breezed through Wine Women and Song. I guess wine is a divine line with which to define a rhyme. Days of Wine and Roses song scored the great film of that name with Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, when the voice of Sinatra was the only possible voice to conceive to.

Incidentally, one week ago, I had a glass of red wine from a bottle costing 1,100 Swiss francs. It was nice. But then again, I didn’t drink red wine for 40 years under the mistaken belief that it gave me migraine… so what do I know?

“Ooh I hate wine,’’ said my late lamented mother Zelma. “It makes my eyes go small.” She was referring to Palwin No.10 and there are very few good reviews for that. As with almost everything she uttered, she had no idea why everyone in the room fell about laughing.