Graham McCann - Frankie Howerd - Stand-Up Comic

Frankie Howerd

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

First published by Fourth Estate 2004

Copyright © Graham McCann 2004

Graham McCann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781841153117

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007369249 Version: 2016-02-08

For Mic,

who believed I could write it, and

Vera and Silvana, who believed I could complete it.

I don’t go for this business of the broken-hearted clown.

Because I think a broken-hearted clown would be a damn sight more broken-hearted if he wasn’t a clown.

FRANKIE HOWERD

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

THE PROLOGUE

ACT I: FRANCIS

1 St Francis

2 A Stuttering Start

3 Army Camp

ACT II: FRANKIE

4 Meet Scruffy Dale

5 Variety Bandbox

6 The One-Man Situational Comedy

INTERMISSION: THE YEARS OF DARKNESS

7 Ever-Decreasing Circles

8 Dennis

9 The Breakdown

ACT III: THE COMEBACK

10 Re. Establishment

11 Musicals

12 Movies

ACT IV: THE CULT

13 Carry On, Plautus

14 The Closeted Life

15 Cult Status

THE EPILOGUE

Keep Reading

List of Performances

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Now listen, brethren. Before we begin the eisteddfod, I’d like to make an appeal …

Now, er, Ladies and Gentlemen. Harken. Now, ah, no: harken.

Listen, now. Harr-ken. Harr-ever-so-ken! 1

It was not so much the look of someone who did not belong. It was more the look of someone who did not belong up there.

He looked as if he belonged in the audience. He looked as if he had strayed on to the stage by mistake. He fiddled with the fraying fringe of his chestnut-brown hairpiece, fidgeted with the folds of his chocolate-brown suit (‘Make meself comfy …’), and then he started: ‘I just met this woman – no, oh no, don’t, please, don’t laugh. No. Liss-en! ’ He did not sound as if he was performing under a proscenium arch. He sounded as if he was gossiping over a garden wall.

That was Frankie Howerd. He did not seem like the other stand-up comedians. He seemed more like one of us.

The other stand-up comics of his and previous eras came across as either super-bright or super-dim. 2 Most of them, like Max Miller, were peacocks: slick and smart and salesman-sharp, they were happy to appear far more experienced, more assured and more articulate than any of those who were seated down in the stalls. The odd one or two, such as Tom Foy, were strange little sparrows: slow, fey and almost painfully gauche, they were the kind of grotesque, cartoon-like fools to whom even fools could feel superior.

No stand-up, until Howerd, came over as recognisably real : neither too arch a ‘character’ nor too obvious a ‘turn’, but almost as believably unrehearsed, untailored, unshowy, unsure and undeniably imperfect as the rest of us. Frankie Howerd, when he arrived, was genuinely different. He was the first British stand-up to resemble a real person, rather than just a performer.

He became, as a result, the most subversive clown in the country. What made him so subversive was not the fact that he dared to make a mockery of himself – any old clown can do that – but rather the fact that he dared to make a mockery of his own profession. He was the clown who made a joke out of the job of clowning.

Everything about the vocation, he suggested, was onerous, absurd, unrewarding and unbearably demeaning. He bemoaned, for example, the routine maltreatment meted out by the management: ‘I’ve had a shocking week. Shocking. What’s today? Tuesday. It was last Monday then. The phone rang, and it was, er, y’know, um, the bloke who runs the BBC. Whatsisname? You know: “Thing”. Yeah. Anyway, he was on the phone, you see. So I accepted the charge …’

He also complained about his ill-fitting stage clothes: ‘Ooh, my trousers are sticking to me tonight! Are yours, madam? Then wriggle. There’s nothing worse than sitting in agony.’ Similarly, he never hesitated to express the full extent of his resentment at being saddled with such an ancient and incompetent accompanist: ‘No, don’t laugh. Poor soul. No, don’t – it might be one of your own. [ To accompanist ] It is chilly! Yehss, ’tis! [ To audience ] Chilly? I’m sweating like a pig!’ He also always made a point of acknowledging the poverty of his material: ‘What do you expect at this time of night? Wit?’

He never, in short, left his audience in the slightest doubt that he would have much preferred to have been doing something – anything – else. ‘Oh,’ he would cry, ‘I wish I could win the pools!’

He did not even bother to turn up with, in any conventional sense of the term, an act. His act was all about his lack of an act, his artlessness the slyest sign of his art:

Now, Ladies and Gentle- men – no, look, don’t mess about, I don’t feel in the mood. No. I want to tell you – I’ve had a terrible time of it this week, and, er, I haven’t been able to get much for you – so don’t expect too much, will you? No, but I always try to do my best, as you know, but, oh, this week – it’s been too much. Still, I’ve managed to knock up something – I’ll do my best, I know you want to laugh – but, oh , the time I’ve had this week! Still, I won’t bother you with it – I know you’ve got your own troubles and – mind you, it was my own fault …

These rambling perambulations revolutionised the medium of the stand-up comedian. They turned it into something much more intimate, intriguing and naturalistic, having less to do with the telling of gags and more to do with the sharing of stories.

So great has been his influence that nowadays, more than a decade after his death, the approach seems more like the norm than the exception. We have come to warm most readily to those who convey the core of their humour through character and context, while we have cooled on those who continue to rely on the creaky old conveyor belt of patently contrived one-liners.