Victoria Palace Theatre, Victoria Street, SW1
The Victoria Palace Theatre was home for many years to the bizarre, and now thankfully defunct, Black and White Minstrel Show. It’s at the Palace that Bongo Herbert (Cliff Richard) gets his break on The Dixie Collins Show in music biz satire Expresso Bongo.
“It’s not generally known that I’m a deeply religious boy”, intones Herbert, in Wolf Mankowitz’s sharply cynical script, before serenading his Mum with the disturbingly saccharine The Shrine on the Second Floor. How times do change. At the Palace’s stage door on Allington Street he accepts an invitation to go back to Dixie’s place for drinks, which turns out to be an extended stay at the Dorchester.
Trivia: the gilded ballet dancer topping the building is a tribute to ballerina Anna Pavlova. It’s a replica, replacing the original, which was taken down for safety reasons at the start of WWII and then – um – lost.
Expresso Bongo (1959, dir: Val Guest)
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