David and Caroline Stafford
Omnibus £19.95
Lionel Bart, writer and composer of Oliver!, was as dominating a presence in the world of British musicals in the 1960s as was Andrew Lloyd Webber in the '80s and '90s. And yet he was, like Lloyd Webber, somewhat a figure of fun, regarded by many as a lightweight talent. There was a question mark over his artistic credentials - he penned his own lyrics, for sure, but there were doubts about how his hummed tunes wound up as fully transcribed melodies, ready for the stage, with rumours that there was a greater reliance on his more formally skilled collaborators than was imagined. The subtext of all this was, how could this nice but largely musically uneducated Jewish boy from East London possibly be capable of creating a musical masterpiece to match the American giants of the form, the Rodgers and Harts and Sondheims, without having outside assistance?
Actually, the nice Jewish boy was a self-styled "homosexual Jewish junkie Commie" - the authors of Fings Ain't Wot They Used To Be (titled after a Bart song and play) pull few punches in their portrayal of the man born Lionel Begleiter in Stepney, in 1930.
Yes, he made a name for himself writing hits for Tommy Steele, giving Cliff Richard his first number one, composing the first James Bond song, advising The Rolling Stones in their early years and Judy Garland in her later ones. But he was also an "irascible, egotistical, infuriating, competitive, jealous, lying" loudmouth who arguably never recovered from his early-to-mid-'60s moment in the sun and spent the next two decades in a drink and drug-fuelled haze haphazardly trying to recapture his glory days.
