EVEN if you're one of the very few people in Britain who haven't seen that gloriously funny film Trouble in Store, you'll certainly have heard that at last we have a new comedian - a comedian in the grand tradition. A worthy successor to Robey, Field, Chaplin.

The name's Wisdom. Norman Wisdom.
Hearing the other day that Norman was busy shooting his new film 'One Good Turn at Pinewood', Preview, ever zealous of its readers' interests, went down to say 'hullo'.

Comedians are apt to be wise men-even if they aren't actually called wisdom. We were anxious to have the man who created that awkward, unfortunate, simple and shy, but infinitely endearing, character 'The Gump', tell us what he thought about Life. We wanted him to say what his views are on films, actresses, the stage, and what it feels like to be famous and rich (income tax permitting) after all those years of struggle and hardship.

Here was a man who had climbed the ladder from the bottom rung. A man who as a youth roamed the streets of Paddington, glad to find an apple in the gutter; who had been an errand boy at 10/- a week; a page-boy, a cabin-boy, a kitchen-boy - so poor (but not downcast) that an out-of-work Dickensian character living off the bowl of soup given him each night by a warm-hearted coffee-stall owner, advised him to: 'Join the Army, me lad.” Which, back in the nineteen-thirties was considered a pretty drastic thing to do!

Nevertheless, Norman did it. And thereby vastly increased his experience of that thing called Life we were so eager to question him about. It was while he was in the Army that Norman acquired the reputation of being a barrack-room clown. Yet, he left the Army without realising, oddly enough, that that was where the future lay. Many people find it difficult to imagine that anyone should want to pay them for doing what comes naturally.

Well, Norman joined the Army again when the War broke out in 1939. When he came out he remembered how an entertainments officer had once seen him larking about with an old shadow-boxing routine, and had put him in his next show. All right, why not try show business? He did. With the results we know. Everbody knows.

Such a man, we felt, would be able to offer the readers of Preview a message. Learned books have been written about Charlie Chaplin. We would write a learned article about Norman Wisdom.

So we arrived at Pinewood. We met Mr. Wisdom. He was kind—he was affability itself.

But Norman is a man of few words. Words, he thinks, get in the way of ‘understanding, they obscure essential meanings.

But then he doesn't need words. His face - that wonderfully expressive face-can speak volumes. So we gave up the idea of our learned article and were content to let the photographer record Norman's answers. And here they are.

Taken from the 1955 Preview Film Annual.