Now listen, brethren. Before we begin the eisteddfod, Iâd like to make an appeal â¦
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 (âMake meself comfy â¦â), and then he started: âI just met this woman â no, oh no, donât, please, donât laugh. No. Liss-en!â 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 âcharacterâ nor too obvious a âturnâ, 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 â any old clown can do that â 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: âIâve had a shocking week. Shocking. Whatâs today? Tuesday. It was last Monday then. The phone rang, and it was, er, yâknow, um, the bloke who runs the BBC. Whatsisname? You know: âThingâ. Yeah. Anyway, he was on the phone, you see. So I accepted the charge â¦â
He also complained about his ill-fitting stage clothes: âOoh, my trousers are sticking to me tonight! Are yours, madam? Then wriggle. Thereâs nothing worse than sitting in agony.â Similarly, he never hesitated to express the full extent of his resentment at being saddled with such an ancient and incompetent accompanist: âNo, donât laugh. Poor soul. No, donât â it might be one of your own. [To accompanist] It is chilly! Yehss, âtis! [To audience] Chilly? Iâm sweating like a pig!â He also always made a point of acknowledging the poverty of his material: âWhat do you expect at this time of night? Wit?â
He never, in short, left his audience in the slightest doubt that he would have much preferred to have been doing something â anything â else. âOh,â he would cry, âI wish I could win the pools!â
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 â no, look, donât mess about, I donât feel in the mood. No. I want to tell you â Iâve had a terrible time of it this week, and, er, I havenât been able to get much for you â so donât expect too much, will you? No, but I always try to do my best, as you know, but, oh, this week â itâs been too much. Still, Iâve managed to knock up something â Iâll do my best, I know you want to laugh â but, oh, the time Iâve had this week! Still, I wonât bother you with it â I know youâve got your own troubles and â mind you, it was my own fault â¦
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.
Howerd, however, was the one who set the fresh trend. His decision to adopt such an extraordinarily âordinaryâ pose and persona back in the considerably less flexible show-business world of the mid-twentieth-century took real wit, imagination and guts. While his contemporaries remained content to step back and soak up the applause, he chose to step forward and make a connection.
That was his real achievement, his great achievement. Frankie Howerd really did make a difference. He was so much more than the casually patronised âcultâ figure, âcampâ icon and Carry On fellow-traveller who, according to far too many of the predictably trivial posthumous tributes and all of the tiresome tabloid nudges and winks, bequeathed us little more than a handful of over-familiar sketch shows and sitcoms, a few quaintly hoary catchphrases (all of which, thanks to their increasingly robotic repetition, have long since calcifìed into mirthless cliché) and a dubious fund of dusty double entendres.3
Frankie Howerd â the real Frankie Howerd â was truly special. A brilliantly original, highly skilful and wonderfully funny stand-up comedian â whose talent and impact were as prodigious and profound, in their own way, as those of Bob Hope, Jack Benny or any of the other internationally recognised greats â he deserves to be remembered, respected and celebrated as such.
Consider the extraordinary career: stretching all the way from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, and encompassing everything from the demise of music-hall and the rise of radio to the supremacy of television and the emergence of home video. Howerd stamped his signature upon each one of the media he mastered.
Consider,
