Sounds (a bit) Like...

'Gabrielle Drake and Kelly Monteith'

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/42 x 30cm (A3)

Continuing the Seventies project and particularly the drawing aspect of, upon which I most definitely seem to be concentrating, quiet a pleasurable turn of events after largely neglecting this area of practice over the last 3 - 4 years in favour of oil painting.
The subject on this occasion represents what might be considered a curious byway but one that nonetheless forms a distinct recollection from the decade, at its cusp with the following one, and which came to mind from a tenuous word-association with a recently-featured figure. From Kenny Dalglish, the name of Kelly Monteith suggested itself, dredged-up from the idiosyncratic reserves of the memory bank and it is the latter personage who is represented as the right-hand aspect of this double portrait, his female companion being the actress Gabrielle Drake, publicising as they would be in the original photograph from which the drawing was processed the BBC TV series ‘The Kelly Monteith Show’, which was first broadcast in 1979. Kelly Monteith was (is) an American comedian who first appeared on UK screens as a guest on the ‘Des O’Connor Show’, wise-cracking his way through a short stand-up routine, before progressing to playing a fictionalised version of himself, an American comedian living in London, sharing a home with his wife Suzanne (Drake), in the eponymous sitcom, flickering briefly across the British consciousness (or some of ours, at least) before disappearing, in the early Eighties, wherever. I do seem to recall something about the show featuring Monteith addressing the audience directly during the course of the programme, as an observer-commentator of/on the narrative, and although this could have been during stand-up segments of any given episode, research seems to suggest that there was an element of ‘fourth wall’-acknowledging to the production that might well have granted a certain ground-breaking aspect to it. A curiosity all-told, but clearly something registered sufficiently for the name at least to have lodged. At the time, of course, I would have had no idea that Gabrielle Drake had had a brother, Nick, who had passed away five years before her co-starring role in the Monteith show and whose music I would come to discover in the later Eighties and love ever since, or, indeed, did not realise that she had featured as a character in numerous episodes of one of my favourite television shows from the beginning of the 1970s, Gerry Anderson’s ‘UFO’...