‘Feather your
Nest’ (1937) is an early George Formby film.
As is usual there are a couple of musical interludes in the story. The main interlude, one that is repeated
through the film, is the enduringly famous “Leaning on a Lampost”. George also sings “When we Feather our Nest”
which is an incredibly cheeky song for the time – I can’t quite believe that he
got away with those lyrics!
Much of the
film is set in a gramophone record factory.
This is a fascinating window on the early popular music industry,
showing us how songs were recorded and transferred to a disk for the mass
market. Viewed from the digital age,
it’s quite staggering to see how primitive it all used to be. It appears that this was such a fragile
medium too. The recordings were
initially put onto a wax disk. Like the
shellac records that these were then transferred onto, one clumsy slip and the
recording was lost forever. The
equipment too was easily broken. I don’t
know if this is just me, but this seems to be the opposite of the modern
problem, when it seems virtually impossible to lose a piece of music that you
have purchased.
George plays a
very clumsy factory dogsbody – every time the factory hooter goes off he drops
whatever he happens to be holding (sounds hackneyed but is actually very funny
in George’s professional hands). His butterfingers are disastrous for him, as
he is in the process of buying and furnishing his first home with fiancée Polly
Ward.
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| Cheeky Formby by @aitchteee |
Their new
home, which they call The Nest, is the sort of house that I’ve always fancied
living in. It’s one of those 1930s
suburban semi-detached semi-timbered jobs with the stained glass sunrise over
the front door. Unfortunately, I live with a new house fanatic and since giving
up my own little Victorian terrace I have been railroaded into living in new
builds. He says that they are easier to
maintain. I despair of the fact that I never have any storage or a decent sized
garden. Modern houses are not built to
be actually lived in, I find. They are
built to fill the smallest possible plot and bring in maximum returns for the
minimum outlay. Everything fails to work after a while. We once had a house where it was impossible
to clean the bedroom window. I have
nowhere to store my sewing collection and projects – it all lies around on the
floor in baskets. In our current house,
we have had to convert the integral garage into a big cupboard, so that there
is somewhere to keep the hoover, the wellies and the fruit and veg. My two-up-two-down terrace was better than
that. I had a lovely walk-in pantry
under the stairs and floor-to-ceiling cupboards next to the chimney breasts. I always thought that one of those 1930s semis
would also have been built with more care for those that lived in them. That shoddy homes were yet another sign of
our modern gradual slide back into Medieval living standards. Surely if 1930s
builders thought enough to add stained glass and nice arched porches, then the
insides would be good too.
However, one
of my favourite twentieth century architecture fans loathed these types of
houses. John Betjeman was scathing of these developments and this has always
puzzled and saddened me. Why didn’t he
like them? In his 1937 “Town Tours” which he recorded for the BBC he calls
them:
Ill-shaped brick horrors
A potential slum that will cost them more
in repairs than it ever did in instalments
Sham-Tudor
Jerry-built
He despaired
of how they were dumped into the landscape with little thought to the
surrounding area. I just thought that
maybe he would have been more kind to them if he saw what was to come at the
end of the century.
‘Feather your
Nest’ supports some of Betjeman’s views however. George and his fiancée’s new home has been
thrown up by a speculator and it does look to be on the verge of falling down
again. The front door knob falls off and bedroom window falls out before
they’ve even moved in. All kinds of things go wrong. The builder is depicted as
a shady character, concerned only with money and not with building a decent
home. As I have said before, the comedy
in these scenes must reflect reality as the audience will laugh at what is
familiar to them. So Betjeman was
right. These houses were often badly
built with little concern for anything but profit. Both mine and George’s illusions were
shattered.
Still. I would like to try living in one, just to
see for myself. Maybe one day I will get
my own little Tudorbethan paradise.
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