Hi diddle dee dee, an actor’s life for me...

SIX decades in the business, Kenneth Alan Taylor

MARTYN MEETS...Doyen of Oldham theatre practitioners, Kenneth Alan Taylor
SOMETIME towards the end of January next year a curtain will fall on a career extraordinaire spanning six decades.

Kenneth Alan Taylor will remove his make-up for the last time and his fellow members of the cast at the pantomime at the Nottingham Playhouse - which he has written, produced and directed for the past 30 years - will heave a huge, collective sigh of relief.

Relief that once again, none of them has collected on their jokingly morbid bet that Oldham’s acting legend has again made it to the end of the run.

For apart from everything else, 76-year-old Kenneth — he had to take stock and work out his age when I gently raised the subject — also plays his part, literally, this year as Dame Daisy in the Jack and the Beanstalk story he scripted last year.

In the true break-a-leg, black humour tradition of pro theatre, his acting and production colleagues have a yearly sweepstake on whether this serene septuagenarian will actually make it to the end of the run.

Doubtless he will - and upon his return from his three-month stint in the legendary land of Robin Hood he will take to his keyboard at the home in Springhead he shares with his actress wife Judith Barker, sit down... and write the pantomime for 2016.

Yep, that’s right, 2016 — he has already written 2015: “I’m always a year ahead, I like to be prepared. I just sit down and out it comes. Always does. I don’t where it comes from but, thank goodness, it just does.”

But next time there won’t be a part for the man himself: Kenneth has decided to hang up his pantomime hat for the last time after this season and will instead only produce and direct the show through its epic 90-show run.

Kenneth is truly a local legend in his own lifetime, certainly in theatre circles. He has been involved in the theatre since childhood, never set foot anywhere near a recognised drama school, yet his stature is huge, based on experience, professionalism and sheer weight of years.

Kenneth has spent a lifetime treading the boards. When he left school in East London — he was born a Cockney — he took a job with an international coffee importer in the City.

“It was a fascinating job, I loved every minute and I learned so much. But I only took the job because I knew I would have to do my National Service at 18 and there was little point landing any roles in the theatre.”

His love of performing was nurtured by his mother: “We would visit the East Ham Palace every week and also go to the pictures once a week. We saw everything. The first play I ever saw was ‘No Room at the Inn’ about war evacuees. I got the bug.”

These were the World War Two years and Kenneth, an only child, was at home with his mother while his father was away fighting.

Riding the school bus home one day he saw the local YMCA Players were performing and that five children would be in the production. “So I marched in and asked for a part, just like that.”

The precocious young Kenneth was gently sent on his way but encouraged to come back and join the society. The next production was Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” and the young lad was cast as Biondello. A career was born...

He joined other amateur dramatic societies and was a voracious student of all things dramatic

Then came his call up for National Service: “I decided I wanted to be in the RAF because I liked the uniform better, even though it was for three years, not two like the Army.”

He joined the queue with other teenagers for the “obligatory cough and tap on the chest” but was told to stand to one side with a couple of others.

The young Kenneth was diagnosed later with a hole in the heart, and that he wouldn’t be accepted for the military

“It was wonderful news,” he smiles. “It meant I could go home and become and actor!”

He returned to the coffee importer and promptly resigned. “He was a brilliant employer. He asked what I was going to do next and gently suggested that I stay on until I actually landed a job.”

Kenneth began applying for jobs the length and breadth of the country and landed a job in North Shields, Tynemouth, as an actor in a production of “Fly Away Peter”.

“I remember making my first entrance and the audience applauded. I thought, ‘I’ve arrived!’”

And so it proved to be. A career was launched and almost 60 years on, Kenneth is still strutting his stuff.

His real training came on a stint in a touring theatre in Scotland with veteran Mary Kinloch and Henry Parker.

“They were in fit-up companies; the travelling troupe would perform a different play each evening in a village hall or whatever. Henry played the lead in every play but never rehearsed - he didn’t need to, he knew all the parts.

“When he forgot his lines — and because he got roaring drunk during every performance, this was a common occurrence — we had to ad lib. But the audience never knew.”

By now Kenneth’s memories were flooding back; happy recollections from a profession that seems to live on such stories.

A smile of satisfaction creased his face as he recalled the happy days when, if he didn’t get exit applause, he took a trick from the sozzled Henry and with his back to the audience, started clapping, which the audience would then take up.

Kenneth recalls having to put on his own entrance music, in the wings on a gramophone before he took to the stage, and when he left he would play his exit music, too.

“They were extraordinary days.” he mused, thumb and fingers clasped to his forehead to recall long-lost memories. “The plays were weird, too, almost exclusively about Scottish legends.”

Before the performances the touring troupe would perform songs and sketches as a warm up, or sometimes a short play ahead of the main production.

He recalled one time when he had rehearsed alone all day as the doctor, a main character, for the play “Smiling Through”.

“Henry duly arrived back at the theatre and asked what we were doing that night and I told the great man and was promptly told to take off my make up, because he said he couldn’t do the play with me in it”

Devastated, Kenneth stood down ... though he was allowed to play the role a few weeks later, when Henry, now sober, realised the doctor was actually crucial to the play.

Kenneth was paid £3 a week, 30 shillings of which went on his board and lodgings, By the end of his stint in Scotland, he had saved up £20. So as a grounding in the theatre - and his bank balance - his time north of the border was priceless.

But his real education came when he boarded a train at Kings Cross in London and headed for what was to become his spiritual and actual home - Oldham.


Next week, Kenneth reveals those early days and that first phone call to his mother as he got off the train at Mumps...