ABSTRACT
A Bit of a Laugh, a Bit of Glamour Can anything be said about light entertainment except that, more or less predictably, it happens? I have sometimes thought so, often at just those moments when I have been most entertained. If it is watched from outside, without sympathy, in what is supposed (wrongly) to be a critical state of mind, it can indeed be sombre. It can be like watching mixed doubles of male and female impersonators, or desperate men on one-wheeled bicycles, or an elephant prodded into a waltz. An itch for the grotesque has been traditionally served by entertainment, but surely belongs elsewhere. Yet the prettiest, lightest things can be sombre, if the mood is wrong. I remember a theatre in Bayeux, in 1944, when we had come back from a tank battle and got Ivor Novello" singing "We'll gather lilacs in the spring again". In accordance with the notices we refrained from spitting.
