The Cool Mikado

Summer Holiday

Just for Fun

It’s All Happening

Take Me Over

A Place to Go

What a Crazy World

Live It Up

Farewell Performance

It’s All Over Town

January

In welcoming Frankie Howerd to Shepperton for the filming of The Cool Mikado, director Michael Winner told him, ‘You must remember that I’m a genius.’ We must bear this in mind when considering this by turn tasteless, unintelligible, deeply irritating, amateurish, luridly colourful, disorganised, sexist adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. In writing of Howerd’s involvement, his biographers describe Winner’s production as ‘an insult to the intelligence of any self-respecting film fan’ and ‘a movie bad enough to make the most ardent moviegoer contemplate staying at home’. We suspect that Maurice Browning, modestly fêted as the librettist of a little British musical of the fifties, Twenty Minutes South, regretted that Winner’s ramshackle screenplay was credited as being ‘based on an adaptation by Maurice Browning’ of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most celebrated opera, with further intervention by Lew Schwartz and Phyllis and Robert White. Mr Browning was surely not responsible for such exchanges as that between Judge Mikado and a female witness:

We may yet be fascinated by so gory a spectacle involving some notable names, the most prominent being Howerd as Ko-Ko, Tommy Cooper as Pooh-Bah, and Stubby Kaye as Judge Mikado. These at least retain some dignity, with the patently non-singing Howerd steering his own comic path through the mire. The patience of saints is required for the all-too-frequent manifestations of Mike and Bernie Winters (their billing matter on the halls had once been ‘Just Nuts’) and the choreography and dancing of Lionel Blair and his all-female troupe, whose work is never helped by his joining in.