Nothing but Noel

In a barnlike recording studio in London, a trim, middle-aged actor in a fawn-colored Savile Row suit sat down last week before a microphone. Adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses, he spoke to a technician in the crisp Mayfair accent that is known to theatergoers the world over: "All I want is lots and lots of water to drink and to have a frightful fuss made over me." Noel Coward, 47, was taking his first serious crack at radio.

For the last 36 years Coward has been getting impressive applause and profits in almost every other form of show business; he has been a successful playwright, stage & screen star, composer, director, producer, librettist, sometime song-&-dance man. Occasionally he has been a guest on U.S. radio shows. But the BBC normally pays only pittances to its performers, and Noel Coward, a commercial showman to his talented, tapered finger tips, works for no pittance.

Two months ago Coward ran into a bright young radioman with a paying plan. Why not transcribe a Coward show, and send it to places where it would pull down handsomer rates than BBC can afford? The notion looked sound: for some months, effervescent, 26-year-old Harry Allen Towers has been cutting transcriptions featuring top British artists. The transcriptions have blank spots for commercials and are distributed to sponsors throughout the Empire.

The price (a well-guarded secret) looked adequate to Coward. The series of 13 transcriptions, each a half-hour in length, features nothing but Noel. Writing, song selection, announcing, and some of the singing are all his. Orchestrations and the trickier songs are left to hand-picked members of the Coward stage companies. The show is a straight, undeviating parade of old Coward scores, broken only by the composer's comments ("Listeners. This is a program of my own music. Songs and lyrics that I have composed over the past 25 years. I do hope that you will enjoy them and that a few of you will even remember them"). The appeal is frankly aimed at the middle-aged who want to recall the first time they heard such tunes as I'll See You Again. Coward's appraisal: "It ought to be a good program for selling a luxury car."

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