Roamer: Author exercised ponies that pulled Cinderella’s coach

He was on this page last year, sharing his evocative drawings and describing his seagull sculptures adorning the roundabout near his Bushmills home.

He also recounted his on-going search for ancient, invisible ‘ley lines’ using coat hangers, metal dowsing rods and more recently, a helicopter.

Brian’s interest in stage design began when he was a teenager in Wimborne, Dorset, and continued when he joined the Air Force at RAF Colerne, Wiltshire. He kept painting scenery in his spare time when he joined the BBC and came to Belfast, and continued when he retired as a TV producer. Aged 87 and living in Bushmills, he’s still painting, and writing books - ‘Painting Scenery for the Amateur Stage’ is his sixth!

Wearing his paint-splashed, well-weathered overalls (see ‘depths of winter’ below) Brian introduced the book (170 pages and over 100 cartoons) to the cast and crew of Sleeping Beauty and invited guests.

It was an absolutely perfect setting - on a stage surrounded with the author’s magnificent scenery - with the actors and invited guests all in pantomime costumes, and Brian’s original design for the fairytale castle with turrets and towers on his easel.

“I have painted nearly 700 sets in my time,” he admits in the book aimed at “the amateur scenery painter who dabbles in painting in the village or school hall. It’s also for teachers in schools.”

There are 12 chapters and appendices, beginning with “read the script!” and ending with some of Brian’s “more unusual commissions” like his 58ft by 14ft plywood Giant’s Causeway which he painted for an international football tournament.

He says he has put “all the tricks” he has learnt into the book. His top three? “Not tricks, but mantras,” he began. “First, don’t fiddle! You’re wasting your time doing small stuff because your audience is 20, 30 or 40 feet away so they can’t see detail. Secondly, don’t forget the shadows. And third - thickness. I’m fed up with seeing windows and arches painted so that they are just flat when they’re three dimensional!”

Brian left school at 16 and worked in the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. “I was props,” he told me, “it was a work experience job. I cycled 10 miles to the theatre and then 10 miles back in the winter - it was at pantomime time! I worked with a very famous film star - Jean Kent - and also several Tiller girls. And I used to help exercise the six Shetland ponies on Bournemouth beach - they pulled Cinderella’s coach!”

Another of his duties was mixing the custard for the custard pie in the face act. “In those days it was made of shaving soap!”

The book is an entertaining, comprehensive, chronological guide to scenery painting including the initial production meetings and first sketches, through all the different design processes involving perspective, scale and colour, to tools, materials and even reusing the scenery when the show ends.

Does he get a kick out of the first-night curtain-up? “Yes, for a few minutes, and then it’s all over. The doing of it is far more interesting and enjoyable than the end product” - confirmed by the book’s countless anecdotes!

He has worked in every kind of venue - school halls, theatres, churches, barns, ware houses and department stores. In the depths of winter he was painting scenery for Oklahoma - outside, in a car park!

“There was no ‘sun as high as an elephant’s eye’ during that work, I can tell you” he writes on page 33. Brian’s handy hints for requisitioning painting equipment from here, there and everywhere, are ingenious - ice cream trays for paint; butchers’ ‘S’ hooks for hanging buckets; dog bowls for nails, kitchen blenders for mixing paint! “A broken sponge is also useful for putting in clouds,” hilariously illustrated with a cartoon of himself in a hot bath on page 81!

The book is available from [email protected]

And a final word from the author - “I’m already working on the scenery for next Christmas’s panto, Aladdin at the Riverside.”