With Christmas fast approaching, it seemed a good opportunity to take up Edward (Ed) Shreeve’s offer of a trip down memory lane, 50 years in fact, to a show held on Christmas Eve on Das Island in 1973. Ed, along with his wife, performed in the show and kindly provided an outline of the programme, together with the photos shown here.
Ed, now living in Peterhead, Scotland, was originally from Great Yarmouth and joined BP in late 1967. At the start, he worked in the West Sole field but was transferred to Das in November 1972. In June 1973 he was moved to the offshore production team which meant he could take up an apartment in Abu Dhabi. His wife joined him there in the September.
Looking back to the show’s cast, Ed writes: ‘We were, to the best of my memory, all part of the offshore production department. We rehearsed our sketches sufficiently enough, or so we thought, and flew to Das from Abu Dhabi for the Christmas Eve show. The compere was Jim Brydon, a very popular person in the team. The dancing girls were all wives of the participants and included my first wife Stephanie.’
Ed was clearly an enthusiastic performer as he appears in many of the skits in a variety of guises.
The acts reflected popular shows from the early 1970s, including Monty Python, and Bill Tidy’s cartoon characters, ‘The Cloggies’. The Cloggies appeared in Private Eye from 1967 to 1981 and were, according to the subtitle, ‘an everyday story of clog-dancing folk’. The main objective seemed to be crippling the opposition with gracefully executed knee and foot moves before repairing to the nearest pub.
You can easily imagine that a good night was had by everyone – Ed, the rest of the cast and, of course, the audience. If you were a cast member 50 years ago or part of the audience, we’d love to hear your memories of the show. Ed is particularly keen to catch up with Jim Brydon. So, if Jim is reading this or you know Jim, let’s try to get him together with Ed. Please contact the bp society.
Ed left BP in 1977 to work for Flopetrol. His last Flopetrol assignment was project co-ordinator for the construction, commissioning and operation of a 30K BPD early production facility on the Zapata jack up rig Heron, on contract to Gulf Oil, who had the offshore Ras al Khaimah Saleh Field concession. In 1985 Ed resigned from Flopetrol and joined the Government of Ras al Khaimah, responsible for offshore/onshore operations, where he remained until retiring in 2007.
