one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street â as though into a pub, or just home from work. And Iâd emphasise the calculated amateurishness of my presence and dress with a reference to the rest of the acts on the bill: âIâm not with this lot ⦠Ooh no, Iâm on me own!ââ23
With all of this, he was almost ready: an unusually informal, ordinary-looking, everyday kind of clown with a plausibly flawed personality, a deceptively artful style of delivery and a rare gift for engaging an audience. There was just one further thing, he felt, that still needed to be done: he needed to change his name. He knew that he was stuck with âFrankieâ, but he decided, none the less, to alter the spelling ofâHowardâ. There were, he was convinced, simply too many other, far more famous, Howards about.
It was, in fact, an erroneous belief: in the absence of both Leslie (the London-bom Hollywood actor who had perished during the war) and Sydney (the portly Yorkshire comedian who had just died in June 1946), there was arguably only one notable Howard present in British show business at this time whose name had truly impinged on the public consciousness â and that was the actor Trevor Howard, who had only recently shot to stardom after playing the romantic lead in the 1945 movie, Brief Encounter.
Even one solitary Trevor, however, appeared to be one too many for Frankie, who proceeded to change the spelling of his surname from âHowardâ to âHowerdâ. Showing himself to be a surprisingly shrewd (if somewhat over-analytical) self-promoter, he reasoned that the minor alteration, aside from helping to distinguish him from the odd stem-feced matinée idol, would have âthe added advantage of making people look twice because they assumed it to be a misprintâ.24
Along with the name change came the invention of what in those days was called âbill matterâ (the slogan that accompanied the name displayed on the poster). There were plenty of examples to study: Max Miller was âThe Cheeky Chappieâ; Albert Modley âLancashireâs Favourite Yorkshiremanâ: Vera Lynn âThe Forcesâ Sweetheartâ; Donald Peers âRadioâs Cavalier of Songâ; Robb Wilton âThe Confidential Comedianâ; and Sid Field âThe Destroyer of Gloomâ. Frankie Howerd, after much careful thought, came up with an epithet all of his own: âThe Borderline Caseâ.25
Now, at last, everything really was well and truly in place. The professional career could commence.
It began in his native Yorkshire, at the massive and Moorish Empire Theatre in Sheffield, on the night of Wednesday, 31 July 1946. Even though he was placed right down at the base of the bill, the act that was âFrankie Howerd: The Borderline Caseâ proved impossible to miss. It was not just that he was different. It was also that he broke every rule in the book â literally.
In How to Become a Comedian (a compact little manual that had been published in 1945), the veteran music-hall star Lupino Lane had spelled out the conventional code of conduct to be followed by any fledgling stand-up comic. Typical of his schoolmasterly instructions were the following sober decrees: âAny inclination to fidget and lack âstage reposeâ should be immediately controlled. This can often cause great annoyance to the audience and result in a point being missed. Bad, too, is the continual use of phrases such as: âYou see?,â âYou know!â, âOf courseâ, etc. These things are most annoying to the listener.â26 Even if some people, at the time, might have resented the intolerant tone, no one really questioned the general advice. No one, that is, except Frankie Howerd.
For all of his myriad insecurities, powerful bouts of crippling self-doubt and near-paralysing second thoughts, when it came to the true heart of his art, Howerd always knew exactly what he was doing â and what he was doing, on that first and on subsequent nights, was walking out in front of as many as 3,000 people and redefining the very nature of what being a stand-up was all about. He made it seem real. He made it into an act that no longer appeared to be an act. He pumped some blood through its veins.
What made the newly professional Frankie Howerd so impressively sui generis as a performer was the very thing that made him seem, as a character, so very much like âone of usâ. He stood out as a stand-up by refusing to stand out from the crowd. For all of his many influences, the thing that really made him special was his willingness to be himself.
âIn those days,â he would recall, âcomics were very precise: they were word-perfect, as though reading their jokes from a script, and to fluff a line was something of a major disaster.â27 Howerd, in contrast, told these same jokes just like the average member of the audience would have told these jokes: badly. He shook up the old patter from within, via a carefully rehearsed sequence of increasingly well-timed stutters, sidetracks and slip-ups, until, eventually, the whole polished package was scratched and then shattered â leaving people to laugh not so much at the jokes as at the person who was trying to tell the jokes.
No audience, back in 1946, had anticipated such an approach, but, when it was witnessed, it worked. It worked, explained Howerd, because, unlike the conventional comedy style, the approach invited identification rather than mere admiration. By daring to appear imprecise, he brought his art to life:
[The approach] worked, because the ordinary chap whom I was portraying is imprecise. Youâve only to listen to the answer when a TV interviewer asks what someone thinks of the Government: âWell ⦠You know ⦠Yes ⦠Well, the Government ⦠Yes, well ⦠What more can I say? â¦â People in real life donât talk precisely as though from scripts, and neither did I attempt to on stage. My act sounded almost like a stream of consciousness, which is why I often didnât finish sentences. âOf course, mind you â¦â trailed away into silence â as again happens in real life.28
It was the perfect post-war comedy persona: a âproperâ person, with no airs or graces but plenty of fears and frailties â just like the vast majority of the people he was entertaining.
Right from the start of his nine-month run in For the Fun of It, he was rated a performer of rare potential. Semi-hidden in the small print at the bottom of the bill, he soon became many theatregoersâ special discovery, the unknown performer who inspired them to exclaim at work the next day: âYou should have seen this act!â He soon started winning even more admirers once Bill Lyon-Shaw had coached him in the craft of commanding, as a professional, an ever-changing audience:
He was actually a very poor timer in the earliest days of the tour, and this was simply because heâd previously spent about two years playing in camp concerts to soldiers, whoâd laughed the moment he went on. The reason theyâd laughed was that they knew him, and they knew that he was going to take the mickey out of the Major, and the General, and send-up the Sergeant-Major. So they were a dead-cert audience to start with. Whereas once he went into Civvy Street, it was a different matter. When he got up North, for example, and into Yorkshire â where theyâre a bloody hard lot anyway â theyâd be saying, âWhatâs this bugger doinâ âere, ey? Does he not know what heâs about yet?â He had all of that carry on. And so he had to learn timing, and learn to adjust his pace to the audience he was playing â youâve got to be much faster in the South and much slower in the North, and youâve got to be impossible in Scotland â and learn to pay far more attention to that kind of detail.29
