HOW ironic that Dan Crawford who struggled as a one-man band to keep alive his beloved fringe theatre, the King’s Head in Islington, should have died just as its most successful ever production started!
Wherever he is, he would be smiling at the thought that the cheeky romp Who’s the Daddy, a knockabout satire on the sexy antics of David Blunkett and, among others, Boris Johnson, the Spectator editor, is coining it in.
It’s making such a pile of cash – more than any fringe show would ever bring in or more than most West End theatres – that the King’s Head manager Ninon Jerome must be, for the first time in years, laughing all the way to the bank.
The 119 seater theatre is fully booked up solid for the six-week run until August 28. If you take into account that seats go for £22 while supper for two dozen or more costs another £14, I reckon that the show will bring in around £100,000 by the end of its run – at the rate of well over £15,000 a week.
Nothing has been planned so far but with rave reviews the show is almost certainly heading for the West End.
If this happens, the theatre will then receive a royalty of about one per cent on West End takings.
Naturally, the theatre’s general manager Ninon Jerome was over the moon when I spoke to her this week. She said Who’s the Daddy? was a wonderful tribute to Dan who had read the script and loved the idea from the word go.
“It’s such a shame he is not here to see the wonderful contribution the show is making to the theatre’s fighting fund,” she told me.
Speaking from his holiday home in Tuscany in Tuscany Toby Young said he personally hadn’t made a fortune out of the show and his royalty would be split three ways.
“It’s not a great deal of money from my point of view but I have enjoyed writing the show,” he said.
“And when you tot up the dinners and bar takings it won’t have hurt the King’s Head.”
I got to know Dan Crawford, an American who fell in love with London theatre, sometime in the mid-1990s and knew only too well how he would rattle the can before each show to raise money to keep the theatre alive.
Stars of the theatre world would chip-in but he was always fairly skint.
Once, the theatre had been given a grant by the London Arts Council but then it withdrew it after some of its members decided the theatre’s productions were too way-out.
It galled Dan – and surprised me – that while the King’s Head was considered taboo by the London arts establishment, a regular annual grant of several hundred thousand pounds always found its way to Hampstead Theatre.
But then diffident Dan wasn’t the smooth PR-type that a money raiser for a theatre needed to be.
Once I lobbied Chris Smith, the then Minister of Culture, on Dan’s behalf – but the government minister, who wanted me to know that he was a friend and supporter of the theatre, said he was powerless to act!
One of my favourite satirists Auberon Waugh once wrote that when he died he would take one of his columns to St Peter guarding the pearly gates of heaven and ask: “Is this good enough?” I wonder if Dan Crawford has been asking the same question about Who’s the Daddy?

Hospital staff unaware they are looking after the ‘professor of peace’ Rotblat

I HAVE done quite a few things in journalism but this week I did something I have never done before. I made a protective phone call on Monday for a man whom I have got to know and greatly admire – the Nobel prizewinner in physics 96-year-old Professor Joseph Rotblat (pictured) who has been admitted to a Camden hospital with a heart condition.
A hospital source had called me over the weekend suggesting that the medical staff in his ward didn’t really know who he was. To them, he was probably just another patient. A staff member had heard he had been some kind of a scientist but that was about all.
To make sure the hospital high-ups knew who had been admitted as one of their patients, I gave them a brief biography of the great man.
I know all patients should be treated equally. But I also knew that because of staffing shortage chronically-ill elderly patients are rarely fed by nurses but simply left with a tray of food at the end of the bed that often goes untouched.
A recent survey found that many elderly patients become malnourished in hospital.
And I didn’t want that to happen to a man who had worked on the Manhattan atom-bomb project in the US in the 1940s, and then later, almost single-handedly, inspired scientists to join him in opposition to nuclear proliferation. Recently, I wrote about complaints from friends of Miss Cecily Manktelow – a retired 82-year-old teacher at Parliament Hill school – that she had lost considerable weight in hospital and become malnourished because the nursing staff hadn’t fed her properly. Later, she died from an infection caused by the hospital super-bug MRSA.
My call on Monday was passed onto the hospital’s chief executive who rang me back. I explained again that Professor Rotblat was a world-recognised scientist, and that while he may not be known to those running his ward, he was certainly known to the outside world.
I got the impression from the chief executive that until my earlier call the hospital had not known who they were treating.
Professor Rotblat, who lives in West Hampstead, and is a Freeman of the Borough, remains in hospital – and I can report is making slow progress.

Demo of the week

WHEN is a demonstration not a demonstration?
Last night (Wednesday) about 10 women from the Crossroads Women’s Centre in Kentish Town went to Parliament Square for their weekly demonstration in support of that extraordinary eccentric one-man peace protestor, Brian Haw (pictured), who has been camping out in the square since 2003 in protest against the Iraq war.
But something happened on Friday in the High Court when Brian Haw won a challenge to exempt him from a new law banning all demonstrations in the square – a law that had been primarily aimed at silencing him. But does that mean that only Brian Haw can now demonstrate in the square?
Well, er, not exactly.
The Kentish Town women were told by the police that they couldn’t demonstrate.
But they weren’t arrested under the new law. Instead, they were allowed to hold a meeting.

Tim – always the bridesmaid

THE bruising scramble for selection in the Labour Party may be over but the final results haven’t pleased everyone, I gather.
While organisers may be pleased with themselves that constituencies were eventually found for Councillors Roger Robinson and Abdul Quadir, a long-term hopeful is furious to have missed out.
My sources inside the party tell me that Tim Hadley, who dreamed about standing for Camden Town and Primrose Hill, resigned from the party soon after not being chosen to fight the ward.
As far back as last summer, Hadley was telling friends that he intended to move into politics.
But he is now unlikely to be doing that at the Town Hall anytime soon.
“He took it badly,” my source tells me. “He gave a good presentation but it wasn’t to be. He resigned the next day.”
Friends in the party were this week trying to convince him to come back and help Quadir and fellow candidates Pat Callaghan and Jake Sumner to beat off rivals from the Liberal Democrats and the Respect Party who are eyeing the Camden Town ward.