A fine time with Fontayne

Richard Matthewman, Oldham Coliseum
I’D like to urge you all to get round to the Coliseum for this wholly delightful — and for Oldham, unusual — view of local favourite panto dame, Fine Time Fontayne.

But I can’t: seeing him in ordinary jacket and jeans was a one-night-only thing, part of the theatre’s enterprising “Shake It Up” festival, which has young members of the theatre’s various extra-curricular companies running things for the week.

And before we go further, let me disabuse you of the idea that the show features someone called Richard Matthewman.

The eponymous hero is a fictional character at the centre of over two dozen semi-autobiographical stories by Barnsley Bard Ian McMillan and Martyn WIley, about growing up in a South Yorkshire pit town. The stories, performed by Fontayne, have been popular on BBC radio for years.

Here the actor — who was sent the original stories by the writers without their realising one of the people they immortalised was one of Fontayne’s relatives — chooses six representative tales, rich in lovely details of place and period. The period in question being Matthewman’s childhood in the early Sixties, up to the birth of his first child.

In between these events the boy suffers an ignominious 1966 World Cup final day, gets a summer job, becomes a probationary teacher and gets married.

Even in an hour and a half or so, Fontayne’s well-practised retelling of the stories — it’s just him and a microphone — reveals a clear love of them and of the people they depict, from school victim Colin Foster — left behind at Leicester Services during a school trip; to 23-stone Uncle Bill, whose back goes out on Richard’s wedding day and whose crippled bulk prevents vital use of the bathroom.

There are tales of being dragged off to get his grammar school uniform one quiet Saturday — quiet because everyone is watching the England v Germany 1966 final, which Richard was hoping to do too; tales of a giant spot, of a summer council job that required scrubbing 10,000 plant pots, and much more.

Fontayne’s delivery — despite the mammoth task — is precise and relaxed, with easy dropping in and out of characters and voices. The stories are charming and rather old-fashioned — and you’ll just have to make sure you see them next time...