Chris Somerville (1939 – 2023)

Chris Somerville was known to so many here and abroad as puppeteer and director of the Harlequin Puppet Theatre and to the wider public in North Wales, North West and the West Midlands as Punch and Judy professor and magician; Mr BimBamBoozle.

Born in Sheffield in 1939 Chris’s earliest years were quite turbulent due to the outbreak of World War II. Not long after he was born his father, George, was called up for military service. When he returned after the war he got a job with a bakery who had a depot in Bradford to where he commuted daily, eventually the family moved to Bradford to save Chris’s father having to travel.

Whilst in Bradford, Chris’s mother would get very bad congestion and it was identified that one of the likely causes was wool dust in the air, with Bradford having several woollen mills. Her doctor said the North Wales coast was a good area for such sufferers and as a result in 1954 Chris’s father applied for a transfer to the bakeries base in North Wales and the family moved again.

At the time of the move Chris was 14 years old and he had already developed interests in magic and puppetry and he read on each subject extensively. Although he was encouraged by family and in school it was meeting local puppeteers Ron and Kath Warriner that took his interest to the next level, therefore the move to Wales was coupled with sadness having to leave his friends and mentors behind. His first puppet given to him when very young, was a pot head Mr Punch, crudely cast and painted, it was with this puppet that Chris put on his first show. Other puppets followed including a Pelham disjointing Skeleton, an act that Chris would, 50 years later, become very well known for!

Chris’s father had a keen interest in theatre himself, ultimately writing several puppet plays that were performed at the Harlequin, and it was that interest that led him one summer to Erias park, Colwyn Bay to see the puppet show performed there in the bandstand. The puppeteer of this show was Eric Bramall and upon returning home Chris’s father encouraged his son to see the show for himself.

Chris became a regular audience member and after each show you could, for a small extra charge, visit backstage and be given a short talk and look round a small room of puppet exhibits. It was these backstage visits which gave Chris his introduction to Eric, and the beginning of lasting friendship and professional partnership.

Eventually Eric left Erias Park and in 1958 he decided to build the Harlequin Puppet Theatre at the end of Cayley Promenade in Rhos on Sea. Chris was completing his two-year compulsory military service so was not around for the building or opening of the theatre, however once he was discharged in late 1958 he immediately joined the small team that had formed there. Despite the immediate success of the theatre it was still seasonal work and Eric made it clear that he could not sustain Chris outside of the run of shows. Chris therefore embarked on his first career, as an art teacher in a school in Rhyl. The call of performing however ensured he developed his own cabaret magic and puppet act, and to differentiate from his work at the Harlequin, he took on the stage name of ‘Tony Dexter’ performing regularly throughout North Wales and northern England with Eric often helping him to secure bookings.

Chris’s sense of performance and his technical and artistic eye for staging would enable him to have insight that others could not see in themselves. Eric knew deep down that he would not find another collaborator like Chris, and though troubling at the first their differences proved to be an asset with Chris frequently providing the technical and practical support, with Eric giving each show the artistic flair and incredible marionette manipulation.

In later years Chris would say “Eric was always generous in his praise. He was never critical and put up with a very arrogant and precocious youngster because he recognised the ability beneath. Our relationship matured over the years to a partnership of great mutual affection and almost telepathic rapport in performance”.

In the early 1960’s as the pull of the Harlequin and his own independent cabaret career intensified Chris made the decision to quit his teaching role and become a full-time entertainer. It was at this same time that the lure of cheaper package holidays started to entice families away from the British coastal towns to those holiday destinations abroad. This change however was coupled with the increase in another form of entertainment, Television. Eric was already established on Welsh TV performing items from his cabaret and some abridged versions of Harlequin Shows, but it was as TV specifically aimed at children became more popular that the desire for shows written and performed with television in mind became far more desirable. Seizing the opportunity Eric and Chris began working for both the BBC and the ITV network. They performed on television frequently for the next twenty-five years and featured in over a thousand programmes. Chris wrote the scripts for several hundred of these shows and was responsible for much of the technical planning for them all.

In 1976 Chris’s agent approached him with an opportunity to perform cabaret for three months cruising the Mediterranean on the Greek cruise ship, Daphne. This was outside of the Harlequin Theatre season, so Chris accepted. The shows were a great success and lead to offers of further similar work. Chris and Eric, who up to then had separate cabaret acts, came up with a joint show geared for an international audience and capable of being presented under the difficult conditions aboard ship. Throughout the late 1970’s and early 1980’s as Chris would say “they spent a couple of months of every year seeing the world and being paid for it!”.

As the seaside resorts continued to decline in the 1980’s and 1990’s Chris knew that both he and Eric could not rely on box office income alone, so he began to develop other parts of his repertoire to ensure steady income. This of course included his Punch and Judy show, an aspect of performing he always loved and a genre of puppetry that he was immensely interested in both technically and historically. As a result of this interest, he developed one of the first websites on Punch and Judy that was extensively used by this community and is still talked about to this day. Chris, already having been a games developer in his spare time for commodore and spectrum, taught himself the coding and began to offer this web site creation service to puppeteers and local businesses.

When Eric died suddenly in 1996 Chris was determined to keep the theatre going. Chris, now in his late 50’s, was facing his first season of shows with just himself. Undeterred he adapted some of the Harlequin’s repertoire for one puppeteer, edited the music and rehearsed and rehearsed until he was happy that he was performing to the standard he wanted to the audience to see. Not only did he perform a full show on the stage, followed by magic and his famous marionette cabaret. He also manned the box office, sold the ice creams in the interval and was back in the foyer at the end to thank everyone for coming and chat to those who wanted to know more.

In 2010 Chris gave an interview for the Telegraph magazine and to conclude he said “I’m one of the lucky ones; if you’ve got some way of being creative then it’s the most satisfying thing in life. I get the same thrill out of this as I got when I was a kid playing with toys – I’ll have to grow up one day”.