Night Out memories revived

Launched in 1971, the show featured the cream of the area's comedy scene, including Harry Harrison, Dolly Allen, Tommy Mundon and Aynuk and Ayli.

It also had comedian Tommy Edwards, Ernest Stringer playing the matchbox, Charlie Knowles playing the spoons, and folk singers Brian Clift and Jon Raven.

The show spawned albums, made household names out of its stars and introduced the Black Country's famous humour to audiences around the world.

It played to packed audiences here and even went to Spain's Costa Brava in 1978 and enjoyed a sell-out 10-nights in Vancouver the next year. The idea was first suggested by Harry to long-time friend and landlord of the Robin Hood pub, Quarry Bank, Ray Hingley, as they had a pint in 1971.

When Harry said he needed to organise a charity night, Ray jumped at the chance to get some more customers through the door.

Word spread and within months coach parties arrived for shows in the pub's function room and the pub struggled to keep up with demand for 'faggots and paes' suppers.

Ray said Harry's death this week brought memories flooding back.

He said: "When Harry first suggested it, I never thought it would work, but for some reason or other it just did, people loved it, and it just kept running and running," he says. "The first show played to a full house, but I still thought it would only last for a couple of years. How wrong I was – it ran for another 20 years."

"The memories that really stand out were when we took it to the Costa Brava in 1978 and we played to more than 400 people and then to Canada the next year. We took two planes over – one from Birmingham and one from Manchester – and there were even some Spanish people in the audience even though they probably couldn't understand a word we were saying.

"After that we started to do some recordings and we started to receive letters from people living in British Columbia in Canada telling us how much they liked the records.

"We decided to do 10 shows over 14 nights in Vancouver, but when we got there we found we'd only sold about 65 tickets because there had been no publicity because of an eight-month newspaper strike.

"We were invited to appear on the Gary Bannerman radio show to publicise the show and within five minutes the lines were jammed by people wanting to know where they could see us.

"They were fantastic times and every other week there was someone from Australia at the Robin Hood begging us to go take the show to Australia because there were a lot of people from the Black Country living in Perth and Melbourne. "They were wonderful times, really magical, and we had 20 great years," he adds.

Although not part of the original line-up, legendary double act Aynuk and Ayli also made several guest appearances.

The name Black Country Night Out was resurrected a few years by promoter Brian Yates Associates and still tours the area, albeit with a different line-up.