One Night: Stan is based on events that took place of the

evening of May 18th 1954. The previous night, Laurel &

Hardy had opened at the Palace Theatre, Plymouth where they

had a week's engagement. It was to have been the penultimate

week of an eight month tour of British variety theatres.

Variety theatres at that time typically presented the same show

thirteen times a week. That is, two shows every night from

Monday to Saturday plus a matinee on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday was given over to moving on to he next town on the

circuit.

The bills for these shows were made up of acts that today we

might tend to label 'Music Hall'. This is not surprising as variety

essentially evolved out of the music halls which, prior to 1912,

had been exempt from the strict licensing requirements of the

so-called 'legitimate' theatre. The price for this exemption was

that, technically, no dialogue was allowed on the halls. Songs,

mime or 'speciality' acts - such as eccentric dancers or

performing animals - only. The patter song was one of the ways

that acts of the time got round this rule, but nonetheless, the

emphasis was always on the physical. This was the theatre that

Stan Laurel knew as a young man - and its influence never left

him.

By 1954, variety had seen the rise of 'stand-up' comics like Max

Miller, and comedy was being transformed by acts as diverse as

Arthur English at the Windmill Theatre and, on radio, The Goons,

whom Stan greatly admired. Laurel's roots though, lay in that

earlier tradition: a tradition that with the boom in TV ownership

that arose from 1953's coronation, seemed in danger of coming

to an end.