The 1985-86 5-part BBC 2 schools drama series Buddy was based on the novel of the same name by Nigel Hinton, published in 1982.
12.Sep.1985 BBC2 ‘Arena: Buddy Holly’
Buddy has a hopeless father who is an ageing rocker, interested only in Elvis and bikes, and living on the fringes of the underworld. When Buddy’s mum walks out, the two manage to strike up some kind of relationship – until Buddy realises that his dad is involved in something more serious than he suspected. A moving, totally convincing account of a boy’s faltering relationship with his father.
Says Hinton:
Buddy is the best selling of all my books for teenagers. When I started writing the story it was about a nine-year-old boy called Stuart who thinks his cousin is a spy! / I realised the story wasn’t working but there were some things about it I liked – the boy following someone around town, black twins whose parents run a taxi firm, a strange boarded up old house… / I took those elements and worked them into a new story about a boy who blames himself when his mum leaves home. Then, when I got the idea that his dad was a teddy-boy who loved rock and roll, I changed Stuart’s name to Buddy, after the 50s rock singer, Buddy Holly.
Hinton is into music, especially 1950s rock’n’roll, rhythm’n’blues and Bob Dylan. This interest is hardly a coincidence as he was born in 1941 and so was a teenager during the mid-to-late 1950s.
Says Hinton:
While I was watching the filming of the BBC TV series of Buddy, I asked the set designer why he’d put an old guitar in Buddy’s bedroom. He explained that he thought Terry might have bought Buddy a guitar; Buddy would have tried to play it and then given up and left it to gather dust in his room. I thought this was terrific thinking on the part of the set designer. Suddenly it occurred to me that when Terry went to prison Buddy would probably learn to play the guitar and send a tape to cheer his dad up. It was the start of Buddy’s Song.
Hinton followed up the televised version with a second novel Buddy’s Song (1987) which became the basis of the film of the same name was released in 1991.
The third in Hinton’s trilogy of Buddy novels was Buddy’s Blues (1995).
www.vicpine.co.uk/Buddys-Song.htm
His hit song The One and Only has turned out to be something of a self-fulfilling prophesy for Chesney Hawkes, for not only has he struggled to repeat its success, but Buddy’s Song is also his only movie of any note at all. And, frankly, you can see why.
Nigel Hinton has done his popular teen novel a major disservice with his clumsy adaptation that failed to convince the younger members of the audience, while boring the pants off their parents. Roger Daltrey (who shone in a BBC Schools version of the book) gives a knowing and willing performance as Buddy’s teddy boy dad, but Sharon Duce and Michael Elphick settle for caricatures.
by Adam Lee Davies 2016
Buddy Clark (Chesney Hawkes). He is so blond, pale and wan that he looks like a working model of Nicholas Lyndhurst made entirely out of lolly sticks and yoghurt pots. Buddy is the young, disenfranchised face of New Europe. Caught up in a holding pattern of arrested adolescence, he spends his days bombing around in shopping trolleys amid the grimy modernist concretia of downtown Slough with his best mate, Mookie – a little black hip-hop kid with a Brooklyn accent and ill-fitting Dallas Cowboys jacket who may or may not be a figment of Buddy’s imagination.
Representing the floundering, self-deluded Old Order is Buddy’s father Terry, played with puppyish incompetence by Roger Daltrey. Very much Del Boy to Buddy’s Rodney, Terry is yesterday’s man. A throwback. A Teddy Boy. A rockabilly relic desperately beating back strange computerised waves of change – symbolised here by a catalogue-bought Yamaha synthesiser. He is armed only with an inexhaustible arsenal of Brylcreem, doo-wop and working class intransigence. But when Terry is sent to jail for some Hamburglar-esque larceny, Buddy must ask himself some hard questions. The answers to which are found in purchasing an acid-yellow keytar, some PVC trousers and writing a clutch of piss-weak electro-yacht-rock no-nos.
JMO in Time Out www.timeout.com/london/film/buddys-song
The usual teenage rock-band incidents pile up alarmingly, but Hawkes greets triumph and disaster alike with the same sullen depressed-adolescent expression (perhaps because the loathsome ‘Lite Rock’ songs he’s been given make him sound like a secular Cliff Richard). Daltrey’s central performance, on the other hand, is fearless and compelling.
Rock ‘n’ roll was the only thing I ever wanted to get into.’ Something Roger did get into in a big way at school was mischief — at every opportunity. Instead of turning up in the uniform of grey flannels and blue blazer, Roger presented himself in Teddy-boy outfit of drainpipe trousers, bum-freezer jacket, winklepicker shoes …
He got his first electric guitar in 1959, got in trouble in school, and was expelled. Pete Townshend recalled of his friend that “Roger has been a good pupil. Then he heard Elvis and transmogrified into a Teddy Boy with an electric guitar and a dress-sneer.
born March 1944, so was 14 in 1958.
In 1960 John Entwistle (born Oct 1944) aware of Daltrey’s reputation as a teddy boy which preceded him from the year above at Acton County School
in p.18 of Andy Neill & Matt Kent’s Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who 1958-1978.
Fred Hauptfuhrer & Jim Jerome. 1975. ‘Who is no longer the question’. In People 1975.Dec.15 (US magazine)
He grew up in working-class West London, destined to embody rock’s rebel spirit. “I was an incredibly violent character,” he says, flashing his 1,000-watt blue-eyed stare. “My father sold toilets. We were just a bunch of hoods.” At 15, he was expelled for “assorted naughtiness” from the Acton Grammar School and “knew then that rock’n’roll was going to be my life.” / John Entwistle, a schoolmate who was to become The Who bassist, recalls Daltrey as a “peroxide teddy boy, the sort of person you’d prefer to stay on the other side of the street from.” Roger wielded a bike chain attached to a ball with a six-inch nail through it. The duo joined up with guitarist Pete Townshend, a would-be street fighter jealous of Daltrey’s swagger, and later to emerge as the creative force behind The Who and composer of Tommy. Pete, says Roger now, “was a very mixed-up guy. You do need a lot of hang-ups and frustrations to do really good writing, and to me he is the best rock writer there has ever been.” Finally, a few group names and images later, the three pub musicians picked up prankster Keith Moon on drums, learned some Chicago Blues music, and hit the road as The Who, or The ‘oo, as they pronounced it.
His contribution was to be the coarse, visceral interpreter of Townshend’s highly inventive material. The group nearly broke up in 1966 when Roger vehemently protested their use of “purple hearts,” a mild form of speed. “I acted the only way I knew,” he recalls. “I punched Moon in the nose and threw away his pills so they threw me out of the band. But cooler managerial heads prevailed. I learned to control my violence problem. But we hardly spoke for two years.”
Saltrey’s 1st band The Detours was skiffle
Personal life
Daltrey has been married twice. In 1964, he married the former Jacqueline “Jackie” Rickman, and had one child, born in 1964, Simon. The couple divorced in 1968. In 1967, Daltrey’s son Mathias was born, the result of an affair with Swedish model Elisabeth Aronsson. In 1968, he met the American Heather Taylor, his current wife whom he married in 1971. Together, they have three children, Rosie Lea (born in 1972), Willow Amber (born in 1975) and Jamie (born in 1981). He also has five granddaughters, Lily, Lola, Ramona, Scarlet and Winter; and two grandsons, Liam and Jonjo. He also has three other children from relationships during the 1960s.
Daltrey owns a farm at Holmshurst Manor, a country estate near Burwash, Sussex, built in 1610, as well as his parents’ old home in London. He designed and built Lakedown Trout Fishery near Burwash, documented in the film Underwater World of Trout, Vol. 1. He bought a home in Los Angeles in the early 2000s. Daltrey also owns a house in Sturminster Newton, which appeared on the popular television series Grand Designs.
Daltrey is a supporter of Arsenal F.C..
Daltrey claims to have never tried hard drugs and unlike his band mates, has stayed straight and free from addiction problems.
A tribute from Sandy Ford. ‘Mad Rat Magazine’ 2007 n.23 p.20
The Rock’n’Roll circuit has lost one of its most highly respected Teds. Alan Flockhart, fondly known as Al, has sadly passed away. Al was one of the few remaining original Teds from the fifties. He was a successful businessman who had his own HGV driving school and yard where The Flying Saucers used to record and rehearse.
Everybody remembers him for his generosity, especially when it came to buying everyone in the pub a drink at every gig. It was Al who provided the Flying Saucers a coach for their fan club to go to the Saucers gigs from The Burnell Arms, East ham, and at another time a red double decker bus like the one in the film ‘Summer Holiday’. Talking about films, Al can be seen as the singer of The High-Tones in the film Buddys Song so he will be remembered forever on the silver screen as a latter day Gene Vincent look alike. However friends will remember him more for his harmonica playing.
A happy go lucky generous Scot, Al will be sadly missed by his friends and family.
POSTED December 2017.
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