Words and music - an evening with Tim Rice

I’ll get to the point of this post, eventually. But first, podcasts.

The handful I have listened to have generally been overlong and in desperate need of a skilful editor to cut the unwanted verbiage.

In my view very few podcasts should be more than 30 minutes unless the subject demands it, like the 45-minute episodes of Radio 4’s In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.

In Our Time features experts who are knowledgeable and succinct - or edited to appear so, and the programme benefits enormously.

Unfortunately far too many podcasters seem to equate quantity (minutes) with quality. Either that or they love the sound of their own voice or have been seduced by sad sack listeners tweeting to tell them how wonderful they are, and they start to believe their own fan mail.

Either way, podcasts that last one or, God forbid, two hours are generally unlistenable to my ears and, although I’m a fairly sedentary person, even I haven’t got that many hours to waste.

The only two-hour podcast I made an exception for featured the comedians Elis James and John Robins that was also broadcast weekly on Five Live on Friday afternoons from 2.00-4.00pm.

To be fair, it took me a while to ‘get’ it. At first I thought it was mindlessly idiotic - albeit no more so than the BBC’s banter driven sports coverage on Five Live, but I persisted until, eventually, I bought into the world of Elis and Robins and found it calming, as well as amusing.

My wife disagrees and thinks it’s juvenile and self-indulgent, but she’s only heard one or two episodes when we’ve been in the car together, so I can empathise with her view because I shared it, initially.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, the BBC announced that a second episode of the Elis and Robins podcast would be streamed on BBC Sounds every week with the Five Live version inexplicably reduced to just one hour, broadcast at lunchtime on Friday.

Much as I enjoyed the podcast, two episodes a week seemed to be stretching things. But the version broadcast on Five Live feels too short because the world of Robins and James is an unhurried one that ebbs and flows and needs time to breathe.

The same can’t be said of most podcasts that are in excess of 30 minutes, which brings me (at last!) to the Tim Rice podcast, Get Onto My Cloud, that generally clocks in at 20 minutes.

Launched in April 2020 during the first Covid lockdown, there are currently 72 episodes online (the last ‘dropped’ in June 2023). Each one covers a small part of Rice’s long career from the mid Sixties, when he hoped to become a pop star, to his continuing success as a lyricist well into his seventies.

I must confess that I’ve always had a soft spot for Tim Rice that has less to do with his career in musical theatre (I’m not a huge fan of musicals, as I wrote here), and more to do with his urbane air, self-deprecating wit, and the appearance, at least, of a laidback and somewhat leisurely attitude to life, although I’m not sure how true that is in reality.

Anyway, the podcast appears to have inspired a show, Tim Rice: My Life In Musicals - I Know Him So Well, that is currently touring regional theatres throughout the UK.

Last night it arrived at the Norwich Theatre in, er, Norwich, and I was there.

Performed by a four-piece band and four singers, the two-and-a-half show featured a dozen or so songs that Rice wrote with the likes of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Mike Batt, Elton John, and others.

Two songs I hadn’t heard before were among the ones I liked best. One, written with Stuart Brayson (no, me neither), was composed for the musical From Here To Eternity.

Another, written with Gary Barlow, was commissioned for a famous Taiwanese singer. (Famous, that is, in Taiwan and the Far East.)

The glue that held the show together was, of course, Rice himself who introduced each song and told many of the stories that appeared in his autobiography and podcast.

Although most were therefore familiar to me, he nevertheless told them with his trademark wit, so the evening was an easy-listening canter through his greatest hits (and a few deep cuts), culminating in a genuinely spine tingling version of ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’ from Evita, a show I saw in the West End shortly after I graduated and moved to London.

Modest he may be, but a running gag was the appearance on stage of some of the many awards Rice has won - notably an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony, and an Oscar. (Three Oscars, to be precise.)

He insisted, however, that his proudest achievement was the award he won for winning an edition of Pointless, his favourite TV programme, with fellow lyricist Don Black.

And yes, the Pointless trophy made an appearance too.

Norwich is a 90-minute drive from where we live and with a large multi-storey car park directly opposite the theatre it was very easy to get to.

My wife now wants to book tickets to see Ian McKellen at the same venue but the last I heard he was playing Falstaff in an abbreviated but still four-hour version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV (parts one and two).

Four hours, you say? No way. I’d rather listen to a two-hour podcast.

Below: The Norwich Theatre stage shortly before the start of last night’s show