REVIEWS - SPEND SPEND SPEND 2010

Daily Post North Wales - Oct 14 2010
The Lowry, Salford Quays
By Malcolm Handley

It was comedy genius Spike Milligan who summed up sudden, unexpected wealth with the prophetic: "Money can't buy you friends but you can get a better class of enemy," - it proved just so for Viv and Keith Nicholson's following the now infamous 1961 pools win.

It was Viv who courted fame and some animosity when, holding the £152,319 cheque, she uttered the now legendry mantra that she would, "Spend, spend, spend" - by which she meant she would spend, spend, spend her husband's winnings - they were his selections and his name on the cheque.

Still, that was perhaps her cavalier translation of that famous Yorkshire saying; "What's mine is mine and what's your's is ours," an integral part of this rags-to riches-to rags tale.

This latest, award-winning, telling of their story - The Watermill company's musical based on Viv's book and directed and choreographed by Strictly judge Craig Revel Horwood - is a lively piece of stage theatre, a helter-skelter ride of emotions with some fine performances by a cast who seemed determined to enjoy every minute and party their way through the evening. Great fun.

It is a warts 'n' all telling and does not dodge Viv's main weaknesses - crass style of clothes, wrong style of men and any style of booze. It shows her pre-winnings life as a merry-go-round of men and drink, more often that not in the local pub where often she or some other woman would, before the end of the night, end up on the wrong end of a good, booze-fuelled slapping, from husband or boyfriend. All the ingredients for, "a right good night out", in 1960s Castleford.

Karen Mann and Kirsty Hoiles are excellent as the older and young Viv, so too is Graham Kent as her father but this is an all round cast with numerous roles and numerous instruments to play and the result is a highly entertaining show full of energy, fun, enthusiasm and talent.

The musical also shows that while it might be easy to judge Viv as an incredibly stupid woman who rode and ruined her luck but in a world of back-to-back housing with outside toilets and no gardens, it is perhaps easy to see why spending and drinking were aspirations - the win was the equivalent of around £5 million in today's money and they had been scraping by on less than £14 a week.