Gil Hates Everything

This show channels a considerable amount of English nostalgia, and comparisons with “Oliver!” are appropriate as they both source from Dickens and date from the sixties. But “Pickwick” is far more successfully defined by its title role, which in turn was defined by Harry Secombe, of The Goon Show and a subsequent metric tonnage of albums. Secombe has a uniquely big and characterful voice and pretty much personifies likeability. Whereas “Oliver!” combines a couple of standout songs with some headbangingly awful mawkishness, “Pickwick” has one entertaining and one admirably selfish adult lead, so I can spend somewhat less of the time wanting to kill everyone.

It’s unfortunate that the soundtrack has a slow-burning start, with horrible Cockneyisms and gruesome sentimentality a-go-go in “Talk” and “That’s What I’d Like For Christmas”, until we hit “The Pickwickians” which is a fun if somewhat literal introduction to some of the main characters, and the chirpy “A Bit Of A Character”, where we meet the annoying but charismatic Jingle. The music takes off here, and boy, does this remind me that I miss good use of horns in musicals. It’s usually all violins if you want emotions, but the orchestra in this show is properly English, with a ton of brass. OK fine, nostalgia buttons are being pressed, but still, it sounds good, and not particularly forty-seven years old.

Happily, unlike “Oliver!”, “Pickwick” can mock itself. Jingle is a chancer who wants to do every skirt he meets, particularly the rich ones, but he also has taste, so listening to him gritting his teeth as he croons to a wealthy but utterly characterless heiress in “There’s Something About You” is a hoot.

Scrupulousness (and my frighteningly low tolerance for fun-loving chirpy Cockneys) means that I can’t just hand out full marks for this show and call it a job done; songs like “You’ve never Met A Fella Like Me” teeter on the brink, and “Learn A Little Something” goes right off the deep end. And no matter how much I love his voice, Secombe doesn’t particularly rescue “Look Into Your Heart” or “Do As You Would Be Done By”. But as we get into the second half of the show, there’s an excellent sequence of songs starting with Jingle’s chirpily blackmailing “Very”, and the court scene where Pickwick is found guilty of breaking a contract and refuses to pay the damages (“British Justice” contains the immortal lyric “Britannia waives the rules”).

And of course there’s no song in “Oliver!” – or in most other places – to compare with “If I Ruled The World”. This is one of English musical theatre’s high points, a truly wonderful song which never fails to break me. This has been covered by people from Tony Bennett to Jamie Cullum, but Secombe’s version is definitive. Beware if you go looking for it on YouTube: Secombe’s album version has an iffy easy-listening backing track, whereas the soundtrack sounds much more natural and relaxed.

As with “Phantom” and its theme, this show gets six out of ten just for “If I Ruled The World”, and as with “Phantom”, it also scores for general effort and its average entertainment value. It’s uneven enough to not rate much higher, but I should note that the instrumental music is consistently very good, and I can’t deny that if I was somehow reviewing a live performance of it with the now-dead Secombe then I would drop all pretense at objectivity and give it ten out of ten just for his godlike charisma and character. As it is, I know this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a show which has lasted better than many of its age. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s like a favourite warm old blanket and does exactly what it says on the tin, with some effective and witty high points to compensate for the Cockney-U-Like nature of its low points.

Random Panda therefore awards “Pickwick” seven pieces of bamboo out of ten, and will be over here sobbing a little thanks to the reprise of “If I Ruled The World” which of course they have to end the show with, for fuck’s sake.

(originally posted 2009)