href="#litres_trial_promo">37
That was all that was needed to spark another bright idea into life. What the conventional, sober sensibility responds to merely as an embarrassing error or unnecessary imperfection â something to be corrected or edited out and smartly erased from memory â the camp sensibility seizes on with relish, tweaks up a notch or two and then celebrates with a nudge and a wink. This was precisely what Howard did: he took the immensely frustrating experience of being ignored by a pianist who âwas pondering how many meat coupons she had left in her ration-bookâ, and used it as the basis of a brand-new comedy routine: the âdaft situationâ of him being saddled with an accompanist â âMadame Vere-Roper, known to me as Adaâ, or âMadame Blanchie Mooreâ â who appears incapable of providing any accompaniment.38
It would always progress (or, more accurately, fail to progress) along the following uneven lines: switching back and forth between a piercing shriek to make himself heard by his accompanist and the sotto voce tones required to confide two-facedly in his audience, Howard struggled in vain to get started:
I thought tonight, ladies and gentlemen, er, Iâd give you a bit of music, yes, which, er, if my pianist has sobered up, weâll do now. Itâs called âA Night in Old Viennaâ. Yes. Itâs an operatic aaaria. Yes. Itâs lovely, this. Lovely. Here we go. [Madame Vere-Roper, sealed at the piano some distance back, prepares herself to play] N-n-no, no, donât clap â sheâll want money. Iâve told her this is an audition. Yes. No, the thing is, she canât hear very well. No, she canât hear much. And sheâs very bitter with it. Yes, sheâs a real misery guts. She really is. [Turns, with a forced smile on his face, to acknowledge her] Evening. Weâll do the song now. Yes, chilly. âTis, yes. The song. Weâll do the song. I SAID WEâLL DO THE SONG NOW! [Turns back to audience] No. Donât laugh. No. Donât, please. Youâll make trouble. I beg of you. Donât laugh. No, she canât hear, and, oh, sheâs a funny woman, you know! Mind you, sheâs had a terrible life. Oooh, shocking life! Oh, yes, terrible! [Shouts in her direction] IâM TELLING THEM YOUâVE HAD A TERRIBLE LIFE. Yes, it is very chilly tonight! Yes! I know! Chilly! Yes! Thereâs a wind blowing up the passage tonight! Yes! Very chilly tonight! âTis, yes! Think winterâs back! I SAID WINTERâS BACK! Yehss! [Talking to the audience again] Poor old soul! Well, sheâs past it, yâknow â that is, if she ever had it! No, really, no, she should be in bed â¦39
It was what Howard did best: appearing to fail dismally at doing his best.
Over the course of the next half-century, he would use no fewer than eight of these âdeafâ pianists,40 but the nature of the routine never changed. The attempt to produce âa bit of cultureâ produced nothing better than a bit of chaos, and more or less everyone in every British audience, from the nervous young soldiers of the early 1940s to the not-so-nervous young university graduates of the early 1990s, could find something to identify with, and laugh at, in that.
Before Howard could expand and develop his promising act any further, however, he was uprooted once again. Early in 1942, he was posted to a new Army Experimental Station at Penclawdd â a small fishing village on the Gower peninsula near Swansea in South Wales â and assigned an uninspiring but time-consuming office job in Requisitions.
Penclawdd was hardly the most congenial of locations for an aspiring entertainer. The village itself consisted of a tiny, quiet and close-knit community of cockle-gatherers, while, on its outskirts, the Experimental Station amounted to nothing more than a cluster of Nissen huts. There was a small local amateur dramatic society of sorts (which a grateful Howard joined âto keep my hand in, as it wereâ41), but precious little else to stir a performerâs spirits.
Fearing that his ambitions would soon start to atrophy in such sleepily prosaic surroundings, he persuaded his Commanding Officer to allow him to apply to join the cast of Stars in Battledress â the big new Army Welfare concert party (a sort of entertainment âflying squadâ) that had been formed to tour all of the major fighting zones along the Allied Front.42 He expected, bearing in mind all of the recent success he had enjoyed in front of audiences at Southend and Shoeburyness, that his act was now sound enough to assure him of a swift and easy admission. He was in, however, for a shock.
Auditions for Stars in Battledress were usually held in the nearest available cookhouse in front of an interviewing officer (and, invariably, it was only one) who had some kind of experience of show business. When, one dark and rainy morning, Frankie Howard arrived for his, he found himself at one end of a vast hall (still reeking of yesterdayâs soggy vegetables and watery gravy), and, far away at the other end, a stem-faced officer who had worked before the war as a part-time conjuror. Instantly, the old RADA feeling returned.
He suddenly realised just how helpless he was without a proper audience with which to interact. Alone in front of this single distant figure, in a room where every âoohâ, âaahâ, and âerâ was left to die a lingering death of lonely echoes, Howard was beaten before he started. The left knee trembled, the stammer took over, the mouth dried up, the wide eyes glazed over: he conveyed nothing to the interviewing officer apart from the unbearable intensity of his frustration and fear.
He failed. Worse still, he went on to fail no fewer than four auditions in all. When the last of them was over, Howard went back reluctantly to the cockles and corrugated iron of Penclawdd, nursing an ego that had been badly bruised by the realisation that the very men who had been detailed to ferret out fresh talent âdidnât think I was worth ferretingâ.43
He began to feel desperate. After having made so much progress as a performer, here he was, stranded in a rusty little Nissen hut in South Wales, shuffling papers and filling in forms. He had grown up coping stoically with just the lows, but now, after experiencing his first real high, the lows felt worse than ever. At the start of March 1944, following one too many dull and drizzly days, he cracked, and marched off to see his CO: â[C]an I please do something positive for the war effort,â he pleaded, âeven if it [is] my destiny only to get my name in the papers as one of yesterdayâs casualties?â44
The Commanding Officer smiled indulgently â he had grown used to this sort of thing by now â and assured Howard that the problem had already been solved. Earlier that very morning, he revealed, a new batch of orders had arrived on his desk â and one of them (relating to preparations for the imminent Allied invasion of France) entailed, among other things, a new posting for Bombardier F.A. Howard. He was off, without delay, to Plymouth: âFor the big show,â the CO added with the suspicion of a smirk, âand I donât mean telling jokes, what?â45
A Commando course in Devon was not what Howard, in a cool hour, would have requested by way of a radical change, but, like everyone else in the services, he had to accept what he was assigned. It was just a relief to be doing something, anything, other than sitting around an office. Always fitter than he looked, he coped rather well with all of the shinnying up and down ropes and scrambling over assault courses. With neither the time nor the energy for the usual pursuit of stage-based activities, he got on with the job in hand, and the general opinion was that he did it
