order to ensure that all of its employees understood what this âdoubtful materialâ might be, the manual proceeded to spell it out in sobering detail. There must, it said, be no vulgarity, no âcrudities, coarseness and innuendoâ, which meant âan absolute ban on the followingâ: â
Jokes about â
Lavatories
Effeminacy in men
Immorality of any kind
Suggestive references to â
Honeymoon couples
Chambermaids
Fig leaves
Prostitution
Ladiesâ underwear, e.g. winter draws on
Animal habits, e.g. rabbits
Lodgers
Commercial travellers
Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to or jokes about â
Pre-natal influences (e.g. âHis mother was frightened
by a donkeyâ)
Marital infidelity8
As if that was not enough to completely obliterate the average red-nosed comedianâs act, there was more: no advertising; no American material or âAmericanismsâ; no derogatory remarks about any profession, class, race, region or religion; no jokes about such âembarrassing disabilitiesâ as bow-legs, cross-eyes or (a particular blow this for Howerd) stammering; and, last but by no means least, no expletives (which not only meant no âGodâ, âHellâ, âBloodyâ, âDamnâ or âRuddyâ, but also not even the odd âGorblimeyâ). Writers and performers were also urged to keep the jokes about alcohol and its effects to an absolute minimum.
Just in case these commandments had left any dubious comic spirits still standing inside the Corporation, the manual went on to strike one final blow for decency. All performers were warned that on no account must there be any attempt to impersonate Winston Churchill, Vera Lynn or Gracie Fields.9
The response of Frankie Howerd to these potentially suffocating restrictions was ingenious. He simply took whatever the censors had left and then proceeded to corrupt it.
Unlike most other comedians of the time, who remained prisoners of their patter (and whose patter consisted of most if not all of those topics that radio had now declared taboo), Howerd was not dependent on gags, and therefore found it much easier, during the course of his wireless ramblings, to slip in some of his own brand of sauciness just under the radar. Max Millerâs over-reliance on his so-called âBlue Bookâ had already earned him a five-year ban from the BBC during an earlier, slightly more tolerant, era; now, in the age of âThe Green Bookâ, the incorrigible directness of his material â (e.g. âI was walking along this narrow mountain pass â so narrow that nobody else could pass you â when I saw a beautiful blonde walking towards me. A beautiful blonde with not a stitch on â yes, not a stitch on, lady! Cor blimey, I didnât know whether to toss meself off or block her passage!â) â ensured that radio would render him speechless. Frankie Howerd, on the other hand, was able to survive by implying that it was the listeners, and not him, who were the ones with the ditty minds.
What he did was to make the audience â via the use of a remarkably wide range of verbal idiosyncrasies in his delivery â hear the sort of meanings in certain innocent words that no English dictionary would ever confirm. âTo say âIâm going to do you,ââ he later explained by way of an example, âwas considered very naughty, yet I got away with the catchphrase: âThere are those among us tonight whom I shall do-o-o-oâ.â Howerd would also respond more censoriously than the censors whenever one of his stooges, such as the showâs band leader Billy Ternent, made a supposedly ambiguous remark: âHeâd say something like: âIâve just been orchestrated,â and Iâd reply: âDirty old devil!ââ10
It all added up to a real mastery of the medium. Howerdâs performances improved, and his popularity began, once again, to increase. The early crisis in his radio career was over.
As if to acknowledge this fact, the next BBC Year Book, in an article that hailed radio comedyâs coming of age, included Howerd in an elite group of young British performers who had now earned the right to be considered âtrue men of broadcastingâ.11 The turnaround was also recognised by the producers of variety Bandbox, who responded to Howerdâs soaring appreciation figures by promptly adding to the amount of airtime they apportioned to his act.
Howerd himself, however, was in no mood to rest on his laurels. He knew that he still needed â and now more urgently than ever â to find a way to start improving the quality of his scripts.
By this stage, he had started buying a few scraps of comic material from a man named Dink Eldridge. Each week, a sheet of about twenty or so one-liners would arrive from Eldridge, and Howerd would study them, pick the one that sounded least like it had been transcribed from short-wave radio, and then proceed to stretch it out into a full-length routine. It was not an arrangement that could be allowed to continue. With more time to fill, and his first summer season coming up in Clacton, it was obvious that he needed to hire a proper, full-time comedy writer.
By now, he could just about afford it. For the Fun of It may recently have finished, but he was now earning a sum (£20 per show) from radio that for the time was a reasonable wage (equivalent to about £500 in 2004), and he was ready to invest some of it in his act. Finding an available writer blessed with both the right type and degree of ability, however, was another matter, and Howerd spent much of the rest of 1947 trying in vain to track him down.
Finally, at the end of November, shortly before he travelled up to the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield to star (as Simple Simon) in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk, he came up with a suitable candidate. Casting his mind back to his days touring Germany with The Waggoners shortly after the end of the war, he recalled seeing â and admiring â a young fellow-comedian who was appearing in Schleswig-Holstein at the time in another CSE revue entitled Strictly Off the Record.
The comedianâs name was Eric Sykes. Aged twenty-four, from Oldham in Lancashire, he was now struggling to make a living as a straight actor in repertory at Warminster. He was still, however, hopeful of one day resuming his comedy career (as a performer rather than a writer), and took great delight in tuning in his wireless each fortnight to catch the latest broadcast by one of his great contemporary heroes, a stand-up comic who, coincidentally, happened to be none other than Frankie Howerd.
After making a number of casual enquiries, Howerd found that he and Sykes had a mutual friend: the comedian Vic Gordon. When Gordon called Sykes to tell him how keen Howerd was for the two of them to meet up, Sykes could not have felt more thrilled: âIt was as if,â he recalled, âthe King had contacted me for a game of skittles at Buckingham Palace.â12 He did not actually know what Howerd looked like â he only
