Guess Who Gets Roped In...

Wednesday 30 January 2002. Later that night we boarded the coach again to head to a Tyrolean Evening in a nearby large hostelry. The singing on the way there was making Jock howl in the driving seat...!

Yes, it's your actual Austrian hands, knees and bumps-a-daisy traditional evening with music, folk dancing, bell ringing and hammering in the silver mine!

Here all the little handbells are arranged on the table for the tune known as the Glockenplattler. It's usually the ladies of the troupe who play the bells interspersed with much hand slapping and knee slapping.

And these nights never pass without a certain amount of audience participation... Now admit it, yes, come on, you did expect this didn't you? I did - if there's any danger of being involved in a show it is always me... "Mug" written all over me!

There's only one way to deal with this and that is to enter the spirit of the thing with gusto and do your best to out-do the rest of the troupe!

In particular when it came to the yodelling yell, I filled my lungs and made sure my yell went on for longer than anybody else's - even the guy holding the mic! Then pulled off a few elaborate bows to get the audience well and truly on my side! I got a huge roar from the audience and as I made my way back to the table, one of the Americans on the table in front of ours stood to shake my hand! To quote a certain Mr Punch: "That's the way to do it!"

And there we go, the end of the holiday. It just remained for one of the lads in the folk troupe to get very worried as he climbed up onto our table to dance, because all the women were trying to squint up the legs of his rather short lederhosen... Tomorrow and the day after will be spent travelling north back to and across the Channel and then back to good old Blackpool and home.

Return to Austria Winter Holiday 2002 Index

Austrian Folk Evening

Wednesday 19 August 2003. We had spent the day going up and down the High Alpine Road and after our evening meal are bussed down to the Schonnchien Hotel for an evening's entertainment.

These nights are great fun. There are several traditional tunes and dances, some of which involve the ringing of hand bells - Glockenplattler and the mining-related Knappentanz which involves beating chime bars with hammers, followed by a small but loud explosion!

At some point they will probably come out into the audience and select suitable candidates and some unsuitable candidates for comic value. I came upon the latter experience in 2002 and (being an entertainer myself and almost impossible to embarrass on stage) made sure I got the audience on my side and in fact walked back to my seat afterwards to a standing ovation!

Expect lots of hand, foot and thigh slapping, shrieking, and a blooming good night!

Return to Austrian Tyrol 2003 Index

Austrian Folk Dancing from the Easthope Postcard Collection

A couple of years ago I was given a huge collection of postcards and at intervals I have been digging them out and scanning them. So far I have scanned almost 600 of them and indexed them. Some have appeared already on this blog, notably the series about A. Edgar Pedley who served in the Somme and afterwards in World War One. I still have 160 to scan and then I can finally send the promised CD of scanned images! It's taken a while (blush).

Today I feature a postcard bought by or sent to Hayley Easthope's family from abroad. This has brought some of my own memories to the surface and - yes... I'm going to subject you to them!

This is an unsent postcard, bought as a souvenir in Austria and it shows one of those folk bands that are a feature of every week's stay in a hotel in the Tyrol. It's a night of knee, foot and hand slapping, bell ringing, wood chopping and iron bar hammering.

If you are drunk enough or daft enough to look them in the eye, this happens... Before you know it you are up on stage with your trouser legs rolled up, the butt of jokes delivered in German. There is only one thing to do...

You out-do the dancers, you yodel at the top of your voice, and you ham it up until the audience belong to you. This was 2001 and as I came off the stage it took ages to walk back to my seat and the hysterical laughter of Miss Franny because at every table I passed someone got up to shake my hand... The rest of our party (we were on a coach trip) were still mentioning the night on our way home at the end of the week...

The postcard was unsent because whoever bought it also must have had a great night and they got the group to autograph the reverse of the card.