shutt press

After a decade of touring, Shuttleworth takes his final bow

Stephanie Merritt
Observer

Sunday April 8, 2001

John Shuttleworth: One Foot in the Gravy, City Varieties, Leeds

It's been more than 10 years now since South Yorkshire's versatile singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth first went on the road with his Yamaha and his pertinent social comment on matters such as carveries and all-weather garments, but One Foot in the Gravy, this year's 40-date tour, will sadly be his last excursion - at least for the near future.

While Shuttleworth goes into temporary retirement, however, his creator Graham Fellows will be directing his impressive energies into developing the character of Brian Appleton, aggrieved rock musicologist, who has been given a brief guest slot in Shuttleworth's two-hour show to ease the transition.

'I wanted to bring Brian in gradually,' says Fellows, who looks surprisingly young without Shuttleworth's hair-oil and thick-rimmed glasses (and is surprisingly young, when you remember that he was only 18 in 1978 when, as Jilted John, he recorded the anthem that spoke for a generation). 'But I prefer to concentrate on one character at a time. I'm not like Steve Coogan, I don't like to play several parts in one show. Brian's in this to introduce him to John's fans, but I don't plan to have them appearing together in the future. They don't really belong - Brian's world is much more seedy.'(Brian drops in a reference to smoking dope - a world apart from Shuttleworth's staple topics of camping and pigeons.)

Certainly Shuttleworth's enduring appeal is in the gentleness of his humour, which has more in common with Victoria Wood's style of character comedy than Coogan's, which has a crueller edge. One Foot in the Gravy works as an extended monologue of tangentially related anecdotes and songs, linked this time with the topical hook of natural disasters plaguing the country.

'The show's not really about gravy,' Shuttleworth announces at the beginning, and goes on to point out that foot and mouth will shortly make gravy redundant - 'except for chips and gravy for students'. Then there are the difficulties with rail travel - 'because there have been some terrible crashes lately. And it makes it worse because they don't do leaf tea any more, do they?' But his main preoccupation is the imminent return of the floods, to which end he produced a series of useful diagrams showing how his car porch can be transformed into a jetty, and which lead into a series of phone calls that allow Fellows to bring in some of the other characters familiar from the radio series - John's wife Mary and his agent, Ken Worthington (he of the famous Cuban heels).

Interacting on stage with pre-recorded material presents its own hazards, but technical kinks seemed to have been ironed out by the first night of the tour; there are one or two moments where Fellows appears to forget the lyrics to his own songs, but you can never quite be sure - the Shuttleworth mannerisms offer a very good cover for line fluffing.

'A lot of the material I don't even write,' Fellows explains. 'They're just stories people tell me, or things I overhear my children saying, or observations from the small town where I live in Lincoln. But when I give them to John and set them in Sheffield, it makes Sheffield sound quainter, more small-town than it really is.'

Brian Appleton, who will have his own Radio 4 series in September after a three-week run at Edinburgh, opens the second half with a Morrissey pastiche entitled 'It's My Turn to be Poorly'. Fellows explains that he's using Brian in this show partly to try out new songs. Brian gets the laughs, but with a certain amount of caution; it's apparent that the audience, clearly part of Shuttleworth's extensive cult following, will take some converting when you witness the applause that greets the favourite songs they can sing along to: 'Austin Ambassador Y Reg', or Shuttleworth's Eurovision entry, 'Pigeons in Flight'.

Alongside Alan Partridge, Shuttleworth is contemporary character comedy at its finest. Though Brian Appleton may inherit Shuttleworth's fans, you can't help feeling he will be hard to replace. Since his valedictory tour is already selling out fast, you'd be well advised to see him before he morphs into Brian Appleton for good.