MEMORIES showed the front page of The Northern Echo from May 10, 1940, which carried an advert for Vermouth Martini.
The drink was endorsed by famous entertainers of the day, “Big Hearted” Arthur Askey and Richard “Stinker”
Murdoch. It is said that a few glasses represented “the gay way to health”.
The advert states that Askey and Murdoch are to star in the film Band Waggon at the Court Kinema. This cinema, in Skinnergate, Darlington, was destroyed by a fire in 1947.
I remember Arthur Askey from the twilight days of musichall in the 1950s and found him to be amusing rather than side splitting. In the 1940s, however, he was at the height of his fame and in 1941 appeared in the film Ghost Train, adapted from a play written in 1923 by Arnold Ridley, later to star as Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army.
V J Connor, Bishop Auckland.
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