W.C. Fields


 * William Claude Dukenfield (January 29, 1880 – December 25, 1946), better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler and writer. Fields was known for his comic persona as a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his snarling contempt for dogs, children and women... (Read more at Wikipedia)
 * Interest in Fields revived in the late 1960s, a period when Hollywood, already struggling with declining cinema attendance due to the rise of television, was trying to come to terms with the rise of 1960s pop music and the youth culture. While Hollywood, its stars and glossy '60s films seemed increasingly irrelevant to young people, television screenings of older films, especially those of the years before 1934 when the Hays Code of censorship was introduced, created a curiosity which was taken up by rock venues like UFO and the Fillmore, which showed old films between musicians' sets, and by repertory cinemas (like the Electric Cinema, Notting Hill Gate) which appealed to a young, hippyish audience. Thus, artists such as the Marx Brothers, James Cagney, Greta Garbo and W.C. Fields became cult favourites, and Busby Berkeley musicals were admired for their surreal, extravagant sets, which struck some viewers as "psychedelic". Fields, a non-conformist in his way, was seen as an anti-establishment figure and even appeared among the faces on the cover of the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

Links to Peel
The works of W.C. Fields played an important role in cementing the friendship between John Peel and producer John Walters. As Walters told John Tobler in Zigzag 24 (1972):

""When I first got onto Top Gear, Peely disliked me intensely - because to him I represented a form of cynicism and commercialism from the [Jimmy] Savile era (in his early days at Radio 1, Walters had for a short period produced the show "Savile's Travels")....But eventually we broke it down, had a couple of lunches together, and found that we had a lot more in common than we thought, because we tended to laugh at the same things. I ''think the turning point came when I noticed that there was a W.C. Fields festival on at somewhere like the Baker St. Times Cinema, and he wasn't keen to go until I told him what was on; he'd been an admirer of W.C. Fields for years, and so we went. We went back to his flat for coffee, and we suddenly realised that we were concerned in some ways about the quality of the rock scene.....''

tbc



Sessions

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Other Shows Played
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