Today we start a seven part interview with Canadian Ventriloquist Neale Bacon.
Video Transcript:
Hello Neale Bacon
How long have you been a ventriloquist?
Well, officially since I was 13. I’d been interested in it since I was about five, but I took the Maher Course when I was 13. I had an advantage. The town I was living in at the time had a minister who used ventriloquism in his ministry. What he did was order about 20 copies of the Maher Course and then teach it as a night school class. So you got the benefit of the Maher Course, but you also got the benefit of actually having an instructor. That was kind of handy.
Very cool. And who was this ventriloquist?
His name was Reverend Ken Miller. Unfortunately, he’s passed away, but Reverend Miller worked all through Northern British Columbia.
Okay, and what exactly got you interested in ventriloquism?
Well, we had a local kids’ show. As you know, those of us who grew up in the 60s—every market had their own local guy. Ours was a fellow by the name of Peter Rolston, and he had a show called Pete’s Place, which I watched all the time.
You could write into Peter’s show, and he sort of had the “peanut gallery” idea. You could go down and watch them do the show. I was going to say film, but it was actually all done live back in those days. You got to go down and watch them do the show, and I got hooked on watching him.
He was a ventriloquist and a magician. I loved his show, loved his characters. I met Peter again when I was in my 20s, when I first started performing again, and we just kind of hit it off. Peter became my mentor, my teacher, and one of my best friends until he passed away in 2006.
That’s great. That’s great. So you benefited from basically a gentleman who taught you ventriloquism and then also Peter. Not very many people get those mentors. What was it like learning from them? What kind of advice did they give you?
Well, Peter was an interesting guy because he would never give lessons. Peter considered that creating other ventriloquists created competition—it took food off his own plate. Let’s just say Peter was a thrifty fellow and didn’t want to lose shows.
But if I went over to Peter’s house on a Saturday afternoon, we would talk about show business. He taught me everything—from character development and scriptwriting to how to promote yourself, market yourself, and how to treat your fans. I learned some very valuable lessons from him that way.
From Reverend Miller, I learned a lot about the basics and the techniques (of ventriloquism). But also, since working in churches is one of the markets I do, I learned a lot from him on that end too: how to write routines, how to take a story that everybody knows from the Bible, but find the humor in it to make it something that people are going to want to listen to and learn from.
Next Article: An Interview With Neale Bacon – Part 2
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