The Glasgow Empire on Sauchiehall Street opened in 1897 and was demolished in 1963, and in the 66 years between those dates it acquired a reputation that was passed among variety performers with a mixture of awe and genuine dread. It was not the worst venue in Britain. It was, in many ways, an excellent one: well-appointed, good acoustics, large enough to matter. It was the audience that was the problem.
Glasgow working-class variety audiences of the mid-twentieth century had certain characteristics. They were large – the Empire held nearly 2,000. They were vocal. They had a finely developed sense of what was good and what was not, and no inclination to sit politely through the latter. And they had a particular impatience with performers who came from England and appeared to be under the impression that this made them automatically worth watching.
The Incidents
The stories accumulated over decades and became part of the mythology of British variety. Des O’Connor, who appeared at the Empire early in his career, has said he fainted on stage from nerves on his first appearance and that this – because it produced sympathy rather than contempt – may have been the best strategic decision of his professional life. Tommy Cooper, whose act was built on deliberate incompetence, was bottled. The bottles were not metaphorical.
The most celebrated account involves the double act Mike and Bernie Winters. They walked on stage, got no reaction, struggled through the opening section of their act, got a small laugh from one person somewhere in the upper circle – and then heard someone in the stalls say, in a voice that carried, “Christ, there’s two of them.” The resulting silence, according to everyone who has told this story, was somehow worse than booing.
Morecambe and Wise did well at the Empire. They prepared specifically, adjusted their material, treated the audience as an entity that required respect rather than condescension. The distinction the Glasgow audiences were making was not between English and Scottish performers – Scottish acts could also die at the Empire – but between performers who took the audience seriously and those who did not.
Why Glasgow
The Empire’s reputation was partly a function of the city itself. Glasgow’s working-class culture had a particular quality of directness – a refusal of false sentiment, an impatience with performance that reached for easy emotion – that transferred to its audiences. The city had a long tradition of producing and consuming variety entertainment: pantomime at the Pavilion, music hall at the Britannia, the Empire itself. These were audiences who had seen a great deal of the form and knew what they liked.
There was also the practical matter of geography. English performers playing the variety circuit in the north spent the early part of the week in Manchester or Liverpool, where the audiences were warming up to them. By the time they reached Glasgow for the end of the week, they had been performing material that was working in England. Glasgow decided for itself whether that material was worth watching.
The Demolition
The Empire closed in 1963, a casualty of television and the decline of variety as a mass entertainment form. It was demolished and replaced by a purpose-built bingo hall, which is itself now gone. The site on Sauchiehall Street is a shopping development. There is no marker. The reputation, however, has outlasted the building by more than sixty years, which is its own form of monument.
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