Charing Cross Road, Girls- a West End hit musical comedy with the perfect mixture.

 Charing Cross Road, Girls- a West End hit musical comedy with the perfect mixture.

How we love London and the West End. How I love London and the West End. How we all love London and the West End. We've always loved  London and the West End. London keeps giving and sharing We love its glittering lights, the buzz, the atmosphere, its personality, charm, colour, exuberance, overflowing effervescence, the Shaftesbury Avenue theatres, the art galleries, the museums, the traffic lights, the shops, cafes, its engaging welcome to the rest of the world.

 There's  Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, its edginess, its energy, its character, its craftiness, its cunning, its spellbinding and magical hold on our senses, the way it can transport you to another world with a minimum of effort and then take you on a fascinating fairground ride back to a world of escapism and liveliness. And yet it keeps playing rather like an old 78 record or some ageless steam engine that never stops or pauses for a single second. In fact London has the most remarkable stamina and tireless indefatigability about it that just keeps rolling on and rolling on, moving and moving, breathless and constantly functioning until eventually the last Night Bus turns up at Trafalgar Square and suddenly turns those lights off. Wow how does London do it.

Today my wife and I spent our wedding anniversary in the heart of the West End. We went to  Charing Cross Road, the seething metropolis at its best, a cultural melting pot, a whirlwind whirligig of tourists, observers and window shoppers. But Charing Cross Road is one huge treasure trove of charming book shops, thousands of dusty shelves and  books dating back as far as anybody can remember. It is the home of literature, shelves groaning with leather bound books, hundreds of paperbacks, sturdy reference books of ancient origin and a spectacular array of well thumbed novels and short stories.

But on closer inspection I came across the Charing Cross Road musical instrument shops which weren't hard to miss because they were so gloriously visible and prominent. The one that held my attention was one that may well have been there since the beginning of London's Rock and Roll 1950s infancy when nearby Soho was a superlative row of juke box coffee bars, steaming, frothy coffee and Lonnie Donegan inquiring about the chewing gum losing its flavour on the bedpost which on reflection sounds totally nonsensical but at the time must have been incredibly popular.

Anyway where was I? There was that lovely musical instrument shop with its groovy guitars, yes definitely groovy guitars because Lonny Donegan and Bert Weedon must have plucked their first plectrum there back in the 1950s. These guitars were just handsome, they were guitars with a touch of class, in fact lorry loads of class, style, breeding and quality. They all looked roughly the same as each other with that gorgeous patina of varnish, slightly chipped magnificence but in some cases so expensive that you had to look twice at the price because they were so absurdly dear.

There was also the deeply attractive selection of other musical instruments that covered the whole spectrum of both woodwind and percussion. There were the banjos that George Formby must have smilingly played to the point of repetition in another age, clarinets that looked smart and impossibly glamorous and a whole variety of organs that must have graced many a church or dance hall.

And then in the heart of Charing Cross Road there was that excellent musical comedy Girls at the Phoenix Theatre which seemed to rise from the ashes just for our benefit. Sorry jokes were never my forte or maybe they were. Girls was great fun, a great show, in fact a formidably fabulous show with its tongue firmly lodged in its cheek and oozing with the very essence of the West End. It was fruity, frivolous, clean cut and yet saucily racy and amusingly vulgar. It was one of those delightfully funny shows that restore your faith in human nature because although dark in places, they still make you feel good all over.

Starring Debbie Chazen as Ruth,  Louise Dann as Celia, Michelle Dotrice, once the long suffering Betty, wife of Frank Spencer, in the superb 1970s sitcom 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave Them', now  Jessie in Girls, Marian McLoughlin as Marie, Claire Moore as Chris, James Gaddas as John, Steve Giles as Lawrence, Ben Hunter as Danny and Maxwell Hutcheon as Colin, Girls was a wondrous chocolate box confection of stunning singing that bordered on Sunday gospel choir, dancing that was  impeccably choreographed and those very touching moments that only a West End musical is capable of delivering.

Girls follows the story of a Yorkshire village, its gritty groundedness and very real sense of rooted commonsense, practicality, wholesome working class values and a community who always mucked in together in a crisis. Girls is moving, emotional, poignant, hard hitting, sentimental, at times morbid and mawkish but never depressing. It's the story of every day life, every day events, real people with real feelings, real hopes and real ambitions. In fact Girls is hearteningly real, absolutely genuine with its finger on the pulse of our lives and the way we lead our lives.

Girls in fact is the story of Calendar Girls, that wonderful film adaptation starring Helen Mirren, and now a story that beautifully captured the moment when a wife deals with her terminally ill husband John now sadly confined to a wheelchair before sadly passing away towards the end of the first half of the show, disappearing behind the poetic hills of Yorkshire. And then Girls carries out the brief that it was assigned with and then executed with tear jerking perfection. It could not have gone any better.

Together these tough as teak Yorkshire girls collectively peak as a united, crusading, bold, determined and fizzily feisty band of women with guts, nerve and gallivanting gusto. With daring determination and reckless enthusiasm they all decide that the only way they could celebrate the life of John's memory would be to take their clothes off and pose for the Great British calendar.

Now this was the point of the show when vast swathes of the male audience suddenly harked back to their teenage years and pretended they were 18 again. There was little in the way of reaction more a reluctant acknowledgement that this has always been the way. Everywhere you looked men were closing their eyes, opening their eyes and then turning to look at their wives and girlfriends in search of that knowing smile. But there was surely a point during Girls when even the most worldly of men and women must have thought just they'd seen it all although maybe they hadn't after this enlightening show.

So it was then finally that the Women's Institute revealed its brightest and most outrageous colours. There were the mouth watering jam and cream cakes with mountainous tiers of jam and cream oozing and dripping cholesterol and guilt. Then there were the endless choir practices, village fetes full of country comforts and rose tinted nostalgia. There were the marvellous marrow competitions and last but not least the naughtily revealing Calendar where bra straps were flung off with wild abandon, skirts gleefully whipped off for the delicious delectation of tongue hanging men and iced buns with cherries strategically positioned in heaving, buxom breasts, cleavages that left little to the imagination.

Suddenly I had one of those Barbara Windsor and Sid James Carry On moments when those naughty seaside pier postcards showed rather more than they should have done at the time. But here Girls merely hinted at sex and innuendo contenting itself with a gentle innocence and the merest glimpse of flesh and flirtatiousness, of carefree flightiness and harmless in jokes.

And so my wife and I once again emerged into the heart of the West End, to a now grown up and vibrant Soho, to nearby Denmark Street, the jazzy heart of London with its Tin Pan Alley trumpets and memorable saxophones. Then we found ourselves back in the Charing Cross Road, once filmed for immortality for the movie audience and still renowned for its leather bound books and more books, heavy and light books, books that were witty and thought provoking and stories that must have been well and truly hidden away in dark and obscure corners of Charing Cross Road for decades upon decades.

 But I couldn't take my eye off those electric guitars ready to launch their electrifying tunes and melodies. We returned to Leicester Square Tube station with a spring in our step and a sense that London had done it again. It had pulled off that trick again. It had woven its spell, made us feel as if we truly belonged and invited us back again. As it always has.