Band Waggon

Arthur Askey was a comic star of the stage, radio - and later on TV. As a live performer he was hilarious, but his zany antics and anarchic behaviour on stage didn't translate well to the screen. The jokes were excruciating and the dialogue was simply unfunny and infantile. The storyline of Askey and sidekick Murdoch, ending up in a castle in Sussex, which housed German agents was an opportunity to trot out the usual banal, tiresome and inane jokes about the enemy. The romantic duet between Murdoch and Kirkwood was strictly lack lustre and amateurish. I imagine the public needed laughs at the cinema to lift the mood and spirit of the nation in 1940, but this film simply showed that the British film industry couldn't seem to produce films which combined comedy and song. This film was in a essence a series of cobbled together daft sketches which were tedious and third rate.