'Death On A Stick' - by Richard Riding

Another character at Ewart Studios was one Vi Derbyshire who made nocturnal regular visits to the studio in an effort to clean up after a day’s shooting. Vi was way past her sell-by date and was probably born before records of births were kept. She lived in a Pickwickian-style tenement block at the aptly named World’s End. I once gave Vi a lift back to her coven – I think her broomstick had packed up, and I recall being appalled and somewhat unnerved by the place. I can’t remember the name of the block, something like Peabody Buildings, or maybe Mau Mau Mansions. The place was so dark and damp it gave me the creeps and probably a lot more besides. I gather the landlord had been promising gas lighting since the turn of the century; the nearby Thames caused the damp. I politely refused Vi’s invitation to stop for a bowl of toad spawn because I couldn’t swim, particularly in the dark.

Vi Derbyshire was nearly 5ft tall and had barely sufficient skin to cover her wiry frame. She wore glasses with lenses made from milk bottles and had traded in her teeth for some unnatural sexual favours with a blind docker at the time of the General Strike. I can only liken her to a female version of Steptoe senior! Her vocabulary would have made even a Glaswegian ship welder’s mate blush and her frail looking sinewy body somehow contained extraordinary strength. I discovered this after making some snide comment about her aesthetic beauty. She squared up to me with her favourite broomstick, using it deftly like a stave like something out of Robin Hood. After threatening to shove it ‘where the bristles wouldn’t show’ she then attacked me. Even more terrifying was her cackling laugh; the deafening noise made by the joints in her elbows and knees I can only liken to a thousand castanets in full flood.

As I said, Vi used to appear at the studio each evening as shooting for the day ended, when there was always a mad rush to dismantle the day’s set, constructed the night before by Bert Beach’s merry men. The studio had to be cleared up so that he could build the next set for the following day’s shooting. Depending on what product had been the subject of the day’s filming Vi had a Herculean task each evening. After a day’s shooting the studio often resembled the aftermath of a riot in an abattoir. Sometimes there would be a hundred weight of jelly or a couple dozen chicken carcasses to clear up. In addition there could be several dozen half-eaten offal sandwiches trodden into the studio floor, or a baby nailed to a table. Armed with various brushes, shovels, cleaning fluids and a pick-axe Vi would attack everything with great relish, her toothless gums clacking every obscenity under the sun as she cursed the perpetrators of the chaos that surrounded her. She accused everyone of being ‘effing animals’ or ‘effing bastards’. In fact every sentence ever uttered by Vi was preceded with the word ‘effing’. She also threatened to castrate ‘Keef Ewit’ and every member of the studio, her gums slavering at the thought.

At the end of her shift she used to pop back her teeth, if she could find them, give everyone a V-sign and, mouthing yet more obscenities, slip out into the night and back to the horrors of World’s End.


May 18, 2003