Good moaning Germany

12:39pm Wednesday 19th March 2008

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Hello readers and welcome once again to a potpourri from that business we call show.

I hear the classic TV series 'Allo, 'Allo! has at last been sold by the BBC to Germany. It was a worldwide success during its 85-episode run from 1982 to 1992.

Don't expect me to remember everything as it is 70 years ago I was starring in films at Elstree

Actress Googie Withers

However, German TV has until now resisted buying it, partly due to that old saying "don't mention the war". Nowadays, apparently only one in six Germans were alive during the war, so the new generation does not feel as sensitive.

As one German TV commentator remarked: "After all, it is only in fun. The Germans don't come out very well but then again the English are portrayed as idiots and the French as incompetent, so it all evens out in the spirit of humour."

During the late Eighties, episodes of the series were shot at the BBC Elstree Centre and the town council decided to stage an 'Allo, 'Allo! fancy-dress evening at Fairway Hall as part of the town festival.

I invited Gordon Kaye, who played René, and Carmen Silvera, who played his wife, Edith. A long-running gag in the series was her out-of-tune song renditions in the café to entertain the patrons.

In real life, Carmen was a good singer who deliberately sang off key, so I invited her to sing a song. The problem was, we had engaged a very elderly local band at our event and when she started singing she realised they were already out of key. It is very difficult as a good singer to sing out of key with an out-of-key band, but she rose to the occasion.

The series was really a spoof of a popular Seventies BBC hit show called Secret Army, which I recently watched again on satellite TV. It made it very difficult to watch as a serious drama when you kept expecting the resistance lady wearing a beret to say, "Listen very carefully, I will say zis only once".

The other night I phoned Australia to speak to probably Elstree's oldest surviving star, Googie Withers, who is now in her 91st year and recently celebrated 60 years of marriage to 91-year-old actor John McCullum.

They were both in fine form, but Googie exclaimed: "Don't expect me to remember everything as it is 70 years ago I was starring in films at Elstree."

Googie recalled happy days filming in a relatively rural Borehamwood with Jack Buchanan. She said: "In one movie, he insisted I played his wife, although he was many years older. I was never under contract but it was where my screen career really began."

John recalled: "I did a film at Elstree in the mid-Fifties with Orson Welles who spent hours having a false nose fitted. He hated his own nose and liked a different one for each role.

"The film was directed by Herbert Wilcox, who was a lovely man but not the greatest director. His long-suffering cameraman would look at the way he had set a scene and then tactfully find a technical reason to have to alter it."

They both worked at Elstree in the all-star film The Magic Box in 1951, for the Festival of Britain.

Googie said: "It was a cameo with John, myself and our real-life baby daughter acting as portrait sitters for Robert Donat in one scene."

They are a lovely couple and, amazingly, it was only three or four years ago they were starring in a play in the West End, although Googie admitted: "Due to our age they may have been our swansong, but then again, actors never retire."

The couple have lived mainly in Australia for many years and were enjoying morning coffee and sunshine when I phoned at 11pm on a cold, wet night.