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Well on November 16,you lucky people in the US get a whole afternoon of George Formby films on TCM.
Eeh that's champion.

I'll wait with bated breath, and my little stick of Blackpool rock, to see if they air them in Canada. UK films almost always seem to get replaced with other (usually PD) stuff due to Commonwealth rights issues...

Quite some decades ago I bought a TV sales directory from USA and it listed countless films(TV series were in separate volumes) and told you where to get them for your TV station. If a film was unavailable, like MGM's 1930 Good News, it said unavailable negative deteriorated meaning the final reel which was in 2-strip(they did not say this. However, they listed a lot of British films including films of Gracie Fields which were only available for transmission in Canada. I guess if you lived in Detroit, for example, you could see them on CKLW CH9 in Windsor if they screened them.
In Australia many of the early films like Formby & Fields did not screen at the time but later Ealing Formbys did in very clean prints all of which I have on DVD along with the 6 Wartime Columbias(his last films before TV appearances in the 1950s) and his two earliest known features(Off the Dole, and, Boots, Boots) and extras. Of course, the Carry On films played infinitum(not a bad thing for my family) but often heavily censored for language such as "bloody". We knew the censor and he agonised over these films when they screened on a Friday night at 7.30pm and in the end he just chopped the section out and that was that. Even in the record field they chopped some dialogue out of the Tony Hancock tapes before remastering for local consumption so the British original discs were more valuable to the collector.

Formby may be an acquired taste, but he has an appealing "common Joe" persona and his uke playing is even better than Cliff Edwards'.

There's a bit in the excellent TV movie Margery and Gladys (2003) where Penelope Keith and June Brown travel to Blackpool on a train filled with impersonators. They are all Elvis Presley and George Formby impersonators and it's quite a scene and we hear Formby's hit songs "Leaning on a Lamp Post" and "My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock."

Just the other day, we were at our local beer garden and two women sat at our table, and I immediately spotted a Northern accent. She was a young woman from Wigan, in Lancashire, so I immediately made a George Formby reference and she got it right away (it was either that or George Orwell, but she took care of that one for me).

She was even mildly impressed when I mentioned that Formby played a benefit for Red Cross Red River Flood relief in the early 1950s at the old Halifax Forum just a couple of blocks away. Somewhere in the depths of our newspaper's archive, there's a photo of Formby handing over the check from the proceeds to the Red Cross representative. I guess he was well-enough known that he packed the place, his films used to play local theatres that were part of the British-owned Odeon circuit.

George Formby was Britain's biggest box office star before 1941 and earned an incredible £35,000 per film. In 1939 alone he made three movies, which meant his salary was approx £100,000 - a huge sum for those days.

I estimate it would be well over £1 million today.

His records sold very well too and unusually, he was as popular in London as he was in the North of England.

However he never 'cracked' the US so I am quite surprised that his films may now be shown on TV in America.

I wonder how some of his more colloqial expressions will be understood by the audiences there;

eg: 'you're a bit previous aren't you?" or ' eee, by gum ...that's champion!"

The George Formby Society flourishes to this day and has an excellent website:

http://www.georgeformby.co.uk/

Always loved Peter Sellers' tribute to The Wigan Nightingale, The All-England George Formby Finals.

"He was well known for his innuendos, but he never resorted to filth."

I enjoy his films,those at Ealing in particular.However I did wonder how American viewers would cope with such dialogue such as
Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs
Cheeky fast cat
He was one of the top attractions in Soviet Russia during the war.
Also the stories about his wife Beryl are legion.