6.8 /10 1 Votes
Language English Pages 224 pp Dewey Decimal 823/.9/14 Country United Kingdom | 3.4/5 Goodreads Publication date 1974 ISBN 0-903895-23-4 Originally published 1974 Genre Humorous Fiction OCLC 3074314 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Similar Strawberries and Cheam, Nurgla's Magic Tear, Harry Secombe's Zoo Loo, Arias & Raspberries: The Auto, An Entertaining Life | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Twice Brightly is a 1974 comic novel by Harry Secombe, fictionalising his experiences as a recently demobbed Welsh serviceman and army comic returning from the battlefields of North Africa and Italy and struggling to make a living in the British Variety Theatres after the Second World War. The lead character is a Welsh comic called Larry Gower, Secombe's alter ego. The title is a pun on the phrase "twice nightly".
Contents
Plot summary
For young servicemen who had spent six years fighting fascism, postwar Britain was a drab, oppressive place. For a young and untried army comic keen on the Marx brothers and Jimmy Cagney, a Yorkshire Variety theatre in February was a vision of Hell itself.
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
It was dramatised as a 60 minute Radio 4 radio play by Harry's son David Secombe in 2006, first broadcast that year and repeated on Saturday 19 May 2007. This ended with Gower as a success, leaving for London to take part in "Crazy People", a play by his fellow ex-soldier and comic Jim Moriarty - this is a fictionalisation of the initial stages of the Goon Show, and Moriarty (deriving his name from the Goon character Count Jim Moriarty) is a fictionalised Spike Milligan.