Following the text

“I can’t believe that none of us spotted it.”

I read online this comment from the writer of an excellent book I got for Christmas. He was referring to a mistake that he saw as soon as the book was published. I know that reaction so well. You can re-read till your eyes are sore and still see what you meant to put, rather than what you actually did put.

When editing theatre programmes, I have been grateful for the method employed for productions at the Gatehouse Theatre in London. Rather than ending up with boxfulls of unsold programmes as you so often do, they print them in-house as the run goes along, enough for the show later that day. This allows every opportunity for correcting any mistakes spotted.

Scripts of course are as likely to contain typos as programmes. When I was in “Oliver Twist” at Barrow, my first rep, I was intrigued by something Fagin said when he realises that young Oliver his ‘new recruit’ has seen him gloating over his valuables. He used to shrill out “What are you doing, eh? What have you seens, eh?” ‘Seens’ for ‘seen’ was not an idiom I had come across, Hebraic or East End or any other kind. I looked at the script. Yes, that was exactly what it said. But I’m sure that our excellent leading actor had memorised a typing error.

In “Dracula” at the Playhouse in Barry, Mrs Westenra the heroine’s mother used to say of her afflicted girl, “I left Lucy sleeping. She is indeed restless.” It sounded all right, but we realised from the way the scene continued that the second sentence was supposed to have been a (fussy) stage direction referring to the mother rather than the daughter. This one shows that layout is important as well as correct wording.

So is choice of spellings. When I auditioned for “The Bill”, the long-running police series, I read from a script already transmitted — it was not the part I subsequently played. I found myself saying that a certain gang member was not a major player — he was just a gopher. A lovely image, of a gopher rather than a go-fer, arose in my mind, but luckily did not crack me up. I wasn’t surprised that the little furry animal wasn’t an important member of the gang — he’d have been much too noticeable.

Perhaps mistakes were even commoner in past times, before modern printing techniques etc. The orginal collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays was the First Folio of 1623. In “Richard II” when Scroop breaks it to the King that people of all kinds have risen against him, he includes elderly subjects with the words “White-beards have armed their thin and hairless scalps against thy majesty.” Which got printed in the Folio as “White bears have …” Another appealing animal picture.

And in the 1630s the publishers of a reprint of the Bible were fined punitively for issuing volumes which included in the Ten Commandments the directive “Thou shalt commit adultery”. They could hardly have goofed in a more unfortunate place.

Sometimes you have to guess whether it’s a typing or a reading error, thinking of a couple of examples from radio drama. I remember hearing “Mother doesn’t want us to come [for Christmas]. Oh, she didn’t put it as badly as that, but …” The word must have been ‘baldly’, but whether it was wrong in her script or in her delivery of it ….

The most unfortunate one of this kind comes in the last episode of the BBC radio serialisation of “The Murder at the Vicarage” (available to buy.) Leonard the vicar has been tormented by his young wife’s apparent attraction to Lawrence the artist. At the end she assures him that she has quite got over these feelings — and anyway she has important news to give her husband. Of course we know that it’s maternal news, and of course poor Leonard doesn’t. “Oh, Lawrence,” she cries affectionately, “you are so hopeless!”. I would suggest that this name gaffe might, if it were a ‘Freudian slip’ in real life, have produced another Murder at the Vicarage. As it is, it’s a staggering case of ‘You can’t believe no one spotted it’ — the reaction I started with.

That’s enough typos! I’d better re-read this a few dozen times before I post it, hadn’t I? And even then …