How to become an Albanian superstar

In 1995, 80-year-old British comedian Norman Wisdom stepped off the plane in Albania for the first time, to a crowd of cheering fans. Over four days he was swarmed in the streets, men came up to kiss him, and he met the president. Today, producer Adair Sheppard tells Matt the story how Wisdom became one of the most famous people in Albania without knowing it. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

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  Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis, the host of Politics Now. And throughout the week on the podcast, I'm joined by the brightest political minds at the ABC to wade through the political spin and bring you the analysis you need to know. We go beyond the headlines, digging into the key political stories of the day and making sure we have a little bit of fun along the way. I don't think it's just rogue. I don't think it's just temporary. I think politics is being smashed and anyone who thinks that it's just a passing thing is completely deluded.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Delulu, you reckon?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Delulu. It's called Politics Now and you can find it on ABC Listen.

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  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal and Gadigal people.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is if you're listening. In Thursday's episode, we talked about Albania's very strange media environment during the Cold War under the Stalinist dictator Enver Hordja, which led to generations of Albanians learning Italian. From watching Italian TV broadcasts, they picked up on giant wobbly homemade aerials. Basically, Albania wasn't producing any entertainment programming whatsoever, so if they wanted to be entertained with their TVs, they needed to pick up Italian broadcasts. The Italians had no idea they were doing this. Today, we're talking about a man who was, without knowing it, one of the most famous

• 1:37Speaker 02

  people in Albania and how attempts by governments to control the media consumed by their citizens can have unexpected consequences. I do not know this story. Adair Shepherd does. She's our producer and she's here to tell me. G'day, Adair.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Hello.

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  I also found out when we were talking about this episode that we have an unexpectedly high viewership in the Philippines.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, particularly on YouTube. YouTube is particularly good at finding us new audiences in other countries. Often, we find that when we talk about a particular country, a lot of the people in that country will watch our episode, you know? We did an episode about Canada and a lot of Canadians watched it.

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  Yeah, yeah.

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  We also did an episode about Solomon Islands. And from what I can tell, I think every single person in the Solomon Islands must have watched

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  that episode. But people in the Philippines seem to watch us no matter what we're talking about, whether we're talking about them or not.

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  Hopefully, we cracked the Albanian market with this one. So this story starts in Tirana in 2001.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  So Tirana, that's the capital of Albania.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  The capital of Albania. In 2001, with a training session ahead of two England versus Albania qualifying matches for the men's FIFA World Cup.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Can you identify the two people in this video?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  That's David Beckham, I can identify him.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you know who the other person is?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  The older man?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  No, I don't know that man, no.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Okay. In 2001, Beckham was the captain of the England team. He'd just married Posh Bice. It was pretty peak fame. He was a massive deal.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

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  But apparently, when they walked out onto the pitch, that man, who was 80 years old, he drew massive applause from the audience and a far larger reaction than Beckham did.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Than Beckham?

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Yes. He's a comedian called Norman Wisdom. Do you know who that is?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  I've never heard of this man, no.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Well, could you describe that picture?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  He looks like he's having an incredible time.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  He's very excited.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  He always does look like that.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  He is wearing a jersey that appears to be the Albanian national team's jersey and the England national team's jersey sewn together.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yes. So he is actually 86 in this photo. And he went to these qualifying matches. It was only the second time he'd ever been in Albania, but he still wore the half-half jersey because he is a massive cult figure in Albania.

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  David Wisdom.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Norman Wisdom.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Norman, I don't even remember his name. Norman Wisdom, okay.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  And when he walked out onto the pitch, he tripped over and apparently the crowd absolutely erupted.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  He tripped over?

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Did he trip over because he actually tripped over or did he trip over because that's a thing that he does?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got it.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  He is a slapstick comedian.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  An octogenarian slapstick comedian, hamming it up at a football game, okay?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  He was from England.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  And in the 1950s, he was a pretty big deal, like he made 19 films. Charlie Chaplin, according to the BBC, said he was his favourite clown.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Clown's clown.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  A clown's clown, exactly. And he had this character called Norman Pitkin, who was like kind of a hapless underdog who would always be pissing off his boss, Mr. Grimsdale, you know, very classic British slapstick comedy. He would always be playing this character and there would be in different scenarios, like there's one where he's like running a shop, there's one where he's a window cleaner, there's one where he's in the army or he's a policeman.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  So it was quite hard to find a clip that was good for audio.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Slapstick comedy, not great on podcasts, but let's have a look. All right, we've got a trailer for something called On the Beat.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yes. He's playing this character Pitkin, who's impersonating like a kind of posh, bad guy Napolitani. And then he's also playing Napolitani and they're confronting each other in this clip.

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  See the rigorous riotous training that makes Norman into the undercover agent who impersonates the elegant Napolitani.

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  I am Police Constable Pitkin of Scotland Yard and I warn you that anything you say will be taken down and used in evidence.

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  Shut your mouth.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  I slit your throat from ear to ear. I feel it's only fair to warn you that to slit a policeman's throat from ear to ear, definitely illegal.

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  All right, very expressive, he's doing an Italian accent, classic British comedy from the 50s, very Tony Hancock.

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  His peak in the UK was like 1950s and 60s, but like by the kind of end of the 60s, he had a couple of flops. And then in the 80s and 90s, he was kind of just doing guest spots.

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  He would have been 60.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I mean, he would have been 60, 70, you know?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  He was semi-retired.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair enough.

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  In 1995, he was 80 and his agent got a phone call from a businessman who'd been working in the newly opened Albania, which had opened up in 1991.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  And he said he was going to arrange an all expenses paid trip to Albania.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Then when he landed in Albania, he stepped off the plane, a massive cheering crowd was waiting for him. And his agent compared his reception to Beatlemania.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  And he was crowded in the streets, men and women would come up and kiss him. He had like a four day tour where he met the president. He was made an honorary citizen.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Okay, why? I mean, he seems fine, but you know, I feel like a fair few comedians of that era would have played pretty well anywhere.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. It's all to do with this unique media environment that we discussed in the episode under Hordja. Do you want to like recap what you learned researching it?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically, Enver Hordja was the Albanian dictator from 1944 until his death in 1985, so more than four decades in power. And he was an extremist, a communist extremist, really. He kind of looked at other communists like Mao, Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev as, you know, liberal traitors to the communist cause, allowing too much modernity into the communist system. Anybody who thinks Mao is too liberal is really something.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  He, at various points, attempted to make connections with these other communist states, but always found that they weren't communist enough for him and so would cut off ties with them. And so Albania was isolated, really isolated, even among communist states for most of those 40 years. And he was really of the opinion that any kind of entertainment was not true to the communist ideals. And in the Soviet Union, they recognized the need for entertainment. Now, they wouldn't necessarily allow sort of capitalist Western entertainment in, but they would, you know, make entertainment of their own.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  They'd have variety shows on TV, they'd have dancing, they'd have talent contests and all that kind of thing. Whereas Hordja said, absolutely not, you know, it is dour, classical music is about as interesting as it can get and propaganda for the entire day of broadcasting, which was only like two hours.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  They only fired up the TV broadcaster for about two hours a day. And so there was really nothing to watch on TV in Albania. And so that was why Albanians set up these big TV aerials in order to reach across the Adriatic Sea and try and pick up stuff from Italy.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  I read that there were some spots where you could only pick up Yugoslav or Greek television. So there's some like slight dialectical, if you lived in really specific places, then you didn't learn Italian, you learned Greek or something.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  The other interesting thing that I learned that we didn't put in the episode, Hordja himself and his government kind of felt like they needed to understand what was going on in the West. And so they set up a repeater.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Basically, it has an aerial that picks up a weak signal from somewhere far away and then it rebroadcasts that with an increased amount of power. And they were doing this for Italian television so that the government could monitor what was on Italian television in Tirana.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  And so people in Tirana could pick up quite a strong signal of Italian television because Hordja was trying to spy on Italy.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely backfired and eventually he ripped it down, but they kind of made it easier for the people to watch Italian TV for a little while.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that was the environment that this was in. How do you think that people might have come across Norman Wisdom?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Well, was he on Italian TV?

• 10:16Speaker 03

  No, he was on Albanian TV.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  He was one of the very, very rare Western things that for some reason, Hordja decided was let through the senses. There's a few different explanations for this. This is Norman's explanation.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  Well, in Albania, the dictator, Hexum, he wouldn't allow any films with bad language or sex, you know, murders and car crashes and all that sort of, and so all my films were allowed to go in there, all the lot of them.

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  We've got a clip of you.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  Have you?

• 10:50Speaker 06

  In Albania, you didn't know this. Got a clip of you doing the wonderful work you do with the children. Just a few months ago, these children all lived on the streets. They're surprised.

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  Visitors shared the happiness and warmth of a hostel provided by Child Hope UK. Oh, he's so sweet. Oh, okay. So first of all, he obviously doesn't know the name of the dictator. That's quite funny. Basically, he was so bland and vanilla that Hexum was happy to have him on.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Well, that is his explanation. A lot of other people say it's something different. So Bill Hamilton, who was a BBC correspondent, he was one of the first people let back into Albania when it opened up in the 90s. He says that it was because Hordja saw a communist parable, that it was this downtrodden worker, and he was always fighting against this Mr. Grimshaw character. So it was probably that. It was probably that it's reasonably bland and non-offensive, and there is kind of this undercurrent of, he's the underdog, and he's always fighting aristocrats.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  He's working class fighting against the aristocrats. Yeah, all right, yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Some people said that it was played like weekly, like it was played for 50 years.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Oh, fantastic.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Over and over and over again. And so generations and generations were exposed to this. And he just didn't have any way of knowing because it's not like they were paying him royalties or like reporting box office. He didn't know. And, you know, they were closed off. He just slowly got this massive following to the point that there was one Albanian source I looked at that said that pitkin kind of became a word in the Albanian language where it meant like a clumsy fool, like a muppet. You call someone a pitkin.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Like Mr. Bean, you know, yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. He kind of really embraced this. You saw him there with the children. He did a lot of charity work in Albania, and he even released a song which charted in Albania.

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  Of course he did.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  He really just was like, these people love me, I'm gonna love them back.

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  Okay, here's the song.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  It's really catchy. I've had it stuck in my head.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Fantastic.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  He like made this as part of a TV show, basically. This guy called Tony Hawkes, not the skater, was trying to, that would be amazing if it was Tony Hawk the skater.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Sorry, I just wish it was Tony Hawk. Inver Hordja was like, yes, no, skateboarding is unacceptable communist pastime. We can have this silly cloud man and skateboarding. Those are the forms of entertainment we allow in Albania.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Sadly, no. It was kind of a bet. He wanted to chart somewhere in the world. And so he was like, well, if I get Norman to record it, we could probably chart in Albania.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  And they did.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Of course they did.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  And then they went on a tour.

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  In Albania, everybody loves Norman. It was like a scene for Take That, but with an 87-year-old man. It was extraordinary.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  He got lost on at least two occasions, but always turned up. We just looked for a big crowd and there he was. And the little shepherds and all these fellas with donkeys up the hill would say, ah, Pitkinny, Pitkinny. Ah, we love you, we love you. And he was getting kissed by men, kids, boys, girls, all sorts of people. They just loved him.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  He carried on the work with Albanian orphanages and children's charities for a long time. And he like retired on the Isle of Man eventually.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  It's a shame that he didn't go and live on Cezanne Island, the island that Jared and Ivanka are trying to buy off the coast of Albania.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  And then he died in 2010. There was big outpourings of support and the Prime Minister, Barisha, sent a statement and said that the country was mourning.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  That's very sweet.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  And that's the Norman Wisdom story.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  I love that. It's fascinating because there's something about the exportability of that particular style of British comedy.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  But I mean, Mr. Bean is the perfect example of this. Rowan Atkinson is famous in every country, basically.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  He recently told a story on, you know, one of the British talk shows where he said, when they made Mr. Bean and they started to syndicate it to other countries, he was happy for them to syndicate it to other countries, but not Italy. Do not syndicate it to Italy because he wanted to go on holidays to Italy.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Oh, that's so funny.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  And he didn't want to be recognized. And so throughout the 90s, he was mobbed in every country that he went to, except Italy, where he could have a perfectly normal holiday and nobody would know who he was. But then the Mr. Bean, the movie came out, the Bean movie, possibly slightly before your time.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  No, I've seen it.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Oh, you have seen that?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I've seen every episode of Mr. Bean.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  We all have. Yeah. But basically the distribution company said, hang on, are you saying we can't put this out in Italy? That seems ridiculous. I'm sorry. But and he eventually caved in and said, okay, fine, you can put the movie out in Italy. And now he's constantly recognized in Italy. He's really annoyed about it. But, you know, I'm sure Faulty Towers has been syndicated all over the world. And a lot of these shows, the comedy is very universal.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  I mean, that's part of the reason Chaplin was so massive, right? He was just everywhere because they didn't need to translate it to understand it. So he was in Soviet Russia and China and everywhere.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yes. There's a very interesting story of Norman Wisdom. It reminds me of the documentary that came out in 2012. It's called Searching for Sugar Man. Have you come across this? Yeah, of course. Yes.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Incredible documentary about the incredible fame of the American musician Sixto Rodriguez in apartheid South Africa, and that he was not particularly successful or popular musician in the United States, but wildly popular in South Africa. And it wasn't until, you know, the end of the apartheid boycotts and travel to and from South Africa increased, that he sort of realized this incredible success that he'd had through bootlegged tapes being circulated through South Africa.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  In Iran, apparently Japanese and Korean dramas are massive because they won't play Western dramas. Like there's this Korean drama series, I think it's called Jamong. It did so much better in Iran than it ever did in Korea. And this actor was so shocked, very similarly, that he just didn't know that any of this fame existed, that he got off the plane in Iran and was like a mega star.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, in our episode that we talked about the Iran nuclear deal that was struck under the Obama administration, we had the very strange scene of the Iranian delegation during the negotiations in Vienna, just announcing one day, oh yes, we're going off on a Sound of Music sing-along tour to Salzburg.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  And the Americans going, what are you talking about? And they're like, oh, we love Sound of Music. Sound of Music is enormous in Iran. And we're like, oh, okay, okay. Have fun.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  All right, Adia, thank you very much. What an interesting story.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  We'll be back on Thursday, not talking about Albania. We'll be talking about Nigel Farage. His by-election is coming up soon, and we're going to be having a look into the interesting characters that he surrounds himself with and that he gets his funding from. That's coming up on Thursday. See you then.