This is the audio and script of a sketch from the English Teaching Theatre, written by Doug Case and me back in the 1970s. The ETT was a group of actors, teachers and musicians who toured a stage show for learners of English all over the world. What started out as a six-month experiment at International House in London in 1973, turned into a permanent touring company that continued working for 29 years. The ETT did more than 250 tours to 55 different countries, performing to an estimated million students of English. The last tour was to China in March 2002. More than a hundred actors, teachers and musicians worked for the company during that time.
Sketches from the show were first published by Heinemann ELT in two books, Off-Stage (1979) and Further Off-Stage! (1984), and then re-published as photo-copiables, English Sketches 1 and English Sketches 2 in the 1990s.
The photo from the stage show (below) is from Off-Stage. It shows me as the passenger and John Colclough as the ticket inspector. The script pages are from English Sketches 1.
The audio tapes for the first book were recorded by members of the BBC English repertory group of actors, so the voices you will hear in the tape of this sketch were not actually ETT performers. By the time we recorded the second book, we had managed to persuade Heinemann to let actors who had actually performed the sketches on-stage record them.
Feel free to download the audio and the script. I hope you enjoy listening to it and eventually using it with your students.
