who’s the greatest living ventriloquist?
Again, I am afraid I am the wrong person to ask. My problem is that I grew up watching ventriloquism on the TV, where the close-ups make it perfectly clear that it just can never be done as well as people want to believe it can. I am fond of a joke which illustrates this rather well. A young man entertaining his elderly aunt up in London decides to take her to a ventriloquist performance. Remembering too late that she is very deaf, he is very embarrassed, and, as they are leaving the performance, offers his apologies for being so insensitive to her infirmity. ‘Oh, that is quite all right’, she replies. ‘I enjoyed the show immensely. You forget – I can lip read’. So I am not much of a fan of contemporary ventriloquist performers. I once alleged in an interview that there can only be around half a dozen working ventriloquists left, which provoked an indignant response from all the working ventriloquists in the UK (about six of them, as it turned out). I was summoned on to radio programme
