Advent Calendar 2021 Day 22: Play Away, 1975

The 300th video we've featured on the various types of Advent Calendar on this blog and we're in the domain of Cant once more for the only Play Away special that went out on the 25th. A classic A-team too - Derek Griffiths, Toni Arthur (a return visit to this year's Advent Calendar), Chloe Ashcroft, Lionel Morton and a Play Away band full of jazz and folk lifers, which Derek briefly joins on clarinet. Indeed Spike Heatley, who had only just recently been playing with Alexis Korner and John McLaughlin, is at one stage commandeered to throw balls into everyone's paper hats. Still entirely studio-based before an audience was brought in in later years the wonders of a full studio to play with and a world of imagination, some via Julia Donaldson, are in their grasp. The one-liners, coin tricks, hats, cardboard boxes, jousts, illustrated story (presumably by the credited Charles Front, Rubber Soul cover designer and Rebecca's dad) and CSO fun are all well within the wheelhouse; rather more unexpected is Arthur and Morton duetting on Your Song. In researching this, incidentally, we were heartened and slightly moist-eyed at learning that at Cant's memorial service Arthur and Cohen led the congregation in a rendition of the Play Away theme.