JUNE IS BUSTIN' OUT ALL OVER

A celebration of Stripey Pipey and other unsung stars of stage and screen

June is a month beloved of poets and songwriters. It rhymes, or half rhymes, so easily. Even I can forge a simple rhyme.

In the glorious month of June,

I stand on a seaside sand-dune.

A choir of chimps and baboons,

Are to sing in an opera quite soon.

They will make the audience swoon,

In the Last Operetta Saloon.

From a bag I retrieve a long spoon,

My baton for Verdi’s best tune,

As a chimp begins her soft croon.

But then upon the lagoon,

In the light of a crescent moon,

Appears a grim portent of doom -

Fierce winds, strong waves - a monsoon!

We flee without singing the tune.

June is a short month but it packs so much promise within its thirty days. Warmer weather (in the northern hemisphere at any rate) longer days, picnics by the river, the hum of insects, the song of birds, the stirrings of first love.

Of course, if you are still at school, June may be blighted by examinations but even so, they will end, they really will, and the salad days of summer will be hot on their heels.

My favourite paean to June is from the 1956 musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The film is a very mixed bag indeed. A carasouel barker by the somewhat Freudian name of Billy Bigelow abuses his wife Julie who loves him A LOT. He dies while taking part in a burglary and spends the next fifteen years in purgatory. Serves him right.

Their daughter spends these years being taunted because of her ne're do well father. Billy Boy is sent back to earth to try to make amends.

True to form, he first steals a star from heaven and when he appears to his daughter, tries to give it to her. She is frightened and refuses it. So, what does the loving father do? He slaps her, that’s what. However, she tells her mother that it felt like a kiss. It didn’t look like one to me.

Anyway, Billy pleads with an angel to allow him to go to his daughter’s high school graduation and he invisibly gives his daughter and wife confidence. Then comes the song, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ I think they’re better off alone than with him. However, the violent misogynist is allowed to leave purgatory and enter heaven.

It’s not a film I would ever watch again. I do, however, enjoy the exuberant song ‘June is Bustin Out All Over.’

To my mind, it’s one of the best dances ever seen on the big screen, a joyful nine minute long celebration of summer. We all know the great dancers of Hollywood: Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller, Cyd Charisse and many more. This film is packed with astonishingly skilful dancers, most of whom will never be more than a name on the screen. Perhaps not even that.

It includes female dancers dancing on a roof which looks very scary to me. And there is a marvellous battle of the toes between tough fishermen and a bunch of, shall we call them, incredibly flamboyant sailors.

For me, the star of the show is one of the fishermen who I call Stripey Pipey. He has a beard, wears a black cap, fawn trousers and striped shirt. He makes his first appearance by taking a fish from the basket, happily shaking it to amuse a friend before it slips from his grasp and back into the sea.

In his subsequent appearances he usually manages to steal the scene. He is often in the centre of the shot, distinguished by his striped shirt and the fact that he can remove his boots, dance bare-footed and put his boots back on in the twinkling of an eye. And, distinguised even more, by the flourishes he adds to every move.

The sailors arrive with broad smiles. They camp it up, stripping off their shirts to reveal the torsos and tattoos. This does not go down well with the fisherman. Our hero has now got a pipe in his mouth and blows smoke over one of the sailors before joining his chums to prove that fishermen are indeed lords of the dance. And he does this with his pipe in his mouth.

Stripey Pipey finishes this dance with a move seeming to cast aspersions on the sailors’ masculinity before slapping his thigh with tremendous vigour and finally helping knock them back into the sea.

I often wonder who Stripey Pipey was. Not quite Gene Kelly but one of my favourite dancers.