Cannon and Ball 'rock on' at Windsor

Loveable comedy duo Cannon and Ball are coming to the Theatre Royal Windsor later this month in the show, Big Bad Mouse.

Reporter Francis Batt caught up with the pair ahead of their visit for an interview.

Every successful comedy act takes some knocks before hitting the big time. For Cannon and Ball the worst knock of all came with their first appearance on television. The show was Opportunity Knocks - and it didn't. They came last.
It was 1969 and the extraordinary Hughie Green was still the man in charge.

Tommy Cannon said: "He really was in charge. You called him Mr Green. We had auditioned to be on the show as singers but by the time we got on we were comics.
"Hughie noticed and when we told him we had changed the act he just said 'on your own head be it'. 
"There was another guy on the show called Les Dawson. All we could think was how badly he was playing the piano, we did not even realise that he was doing it deliberately and getting big laughs.
"We came last and the two bookings we had managed to get were cancelled."

Les went on to become a star. Tommy and Bobby Ball were nowhere. 

They had both been welders when they met. Tommy said: "We both sent on the same job - a big one. Bobby was the first man to speak to me out of 500 guys working on that job."
Bobby was already working the clubs of Oldham singing and playing the drums. Tommy used to sing a bit to entertain his mates after football games. They decided to team up and began getting club bookings as singers.

The reason for the switch to comedy? Simple. Bobby said: "You got £3 more if you were a comic. We were told by one manager 'you are not comics you are singers' because we did one joke and two songs. So we swapped it round to get that £3."

It took them more than a decade of touring the clubs after the Opportunity Knocks disaster to get a television break - as regular support act to Bruce Forsyth on Brucie's Big Show. At first it looked like another disaster.

Tommy said: "We were in the show every week of its short run and every week we were cut out before it reached the screens, because the show went on for too long."
Fortunately their work had been noted by Michael Grade - then head of London Weekend Television. He had seen them in clubs and was a fan. They were offered their first series.

At first it looked as if the jinx had struck again. Their first show was followed by a technicians strike which shut ITV down.
Bobby said: "We were nicknamed Cannon and Blackout of course in the papers. But when the strike ended and the show came back people remembered that and we were away."

Their show ran for 12 years and the pair became huge stars. Their live appearances at the Dominion and the London Palladium smashed records, their film Boys in Blue packed cinemas. They were Saturday night television par excellence.
Then it all went wrong. 

Tommy is disarmingly frank. He said: "It is so easy to get carried with your success. We had a driver each, our own entourages, people to book us into hotels.
"It was absolute nonsense. You had two sets of people tittle tattling to us about each other. It was all  'Tommy said this about you Bobby'  and 'guess what Bobby said Tommy'. Instead of talking to each other we believed all this nonsense we were being told and it got quite unpleasant."

It is all very different now. The entourages are long gone and Bobby and Tommy are settled family men. Tommy lives in York with his wife Hazel and five children, Bobby lives in Lytham St Annes with his wife Yvonne, has three children - and eight grandchildren.

They are both scoring a huge personal success in the play Big Bad Mouse which comes to Windsor this month.
Big Bad Mouse is a real departure for them.  The plot concerns a certain Mr Bloom who is bullied relentlessly at work by his overbearing boss Mr Price-Hargreaves. Until one day an incident on Wandsworth Common turns Mr Bloome into the hero of every woman in the office. 

The play became a legandary success in the 1960s when Jimmy Edwards and Eric Sykes improvised their way through it nightly. Its fame was based on the fact that it was different every night.
Cannon and Ball are doing the same.

Tommy said: "We don't discuss with each other what we are going to do each night. We just go out and do it. You have to be careful the audience is with you and that you always leave a lifeline to get you back into the main body of the play. You also have to remember the other actors who have to stay in character as we take off on wild flights of fancy, we even involve the audience directly.
"We are having a wonderful time."

Big Bad Mouse runs at Windsor's Theatre Royal from Monday, July 28 to Saturday, August 2. Box office 01753 853888.