Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

[The approach] worked, because the ordinary chap whom I was portraying is imprecise. You’ve only to listen to the answer when a TV interviewer asks what someone thinks of the Government: ‘Well … You know … Yes … Well, the Government … Yes, well … What more can I say? …’ People in real life don’t 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 didn’t finish sentences. ‘Of course, mind you …’ trailed away into silence – as again happens in real life.28

It was the perfect post-war comedy persona: a ‘proper’ person, with no airs or graces but plenty of fears and frailties – 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 theatregoers’ special discovery, the unknown performer who inspired them to exclaim at work the next day: ‘You should have seen this act!’ 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 he’d previously spent about two years playing in camp concerts to soldiers, who’d laughed the moment he went on. The reason they’d 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 – where they’re a bloody hard lot anyway – they’d be saying, ‘What’s this bugger doin’ ’ere, ey? Does he not know what he’s about yet?’ 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 – you’ve got to be much faster in the South and much slower in the North, and you’ve got to be impossible in Scotland – and learn to pay far more attention to that kind of detail.29

Grateful for the expert advice, Howerd proceeded to do just that, and, as a consequence, gathered an even greater quantity of praise as the tour progressed. The other two novice professionals on the bill, Max Bygraves and Pam Denton, were also attracting an increasingly positive audience reaction. Both of them, as the tour evolved, would grow increasingly close to Howerd.

The friendship with Bygraves was probably one of the firmest Howerd would ever have. Sharing both a dressing-room and digs throughout the duration of the tour, the two young comedians became each other’s primary advisor, sounding-board, supporter and all-purpose ‘cheerer-upper’.

The first time that Bygraves (a much more traditional type of comedian) saw Howerd in action, he thought him ‘the most nervous performer I’d ever met’.30 The act, however, impressed him – as, indeed, did the high degree of courage it took to do it – and he became very protective of his very talented but horribly anxious new friend. At the end of the tour’s first week, for example, Bygraves discovered that an over-cautious Frank Barnard was attempting to pressure Howerd into cutting out the most audacious aspects of his act. ‘Why don’t you stop bullying him?’ he shouted at the boss. ‘You can see the boy’s a nervous wreck, so why don’t you leave him alone until he gets settled?’31

His intervention was only partially successful – Howerd did have to squeeze into his routine a few things that were more immediately recognisable as jokes – but the gesture, none the less, could hardly have touched the co-performer more deeply. ‘I’ve always been grateful to Max for speaking up for me,’ Howerd later said, ‘and I’ve always admired his guts: after all, like me he’d been in the business just a week, yet there he was arguing the toss with the management and risked being tossed out of the show on his ear.’32

The pair went on to evolve together as performers. ‘We were about the same age, same weight and height,’ Bygraves reflected, ‘and both had the same dreams of making our way in show business.’33 Both certainly benefited from being taken under the wing of the senior pro on the tour, Nosmo King.34

An asthmatic, cigar-puffing stand-up comic in his sixtieth year (whose somewhat ironic stage name had been inspired by a ‘NO SMOKING’ sign he once spied in a railway carriage), King used to stand and watch his two young protégés every night from the wings, and then afterwards, over a cup or two of hot tea in his dressing-room, he would advise them on what they had done well and what he believed they could learn to do better.

One of his most useful tips of the trade concerned the art of voice projection. Sensing that both Howerd and Bygraves, as they began to work the large and noisy halls, were sometimes struggling to make themselves heard (and were therefore vulnerable to heckles of the ‘Oi! We’ve paid out money – don’t keep it a secret!’ variety), King took each of them to the centre of the stage, made them look at the EXIT sign in the middle of the circle, and then said: ‘Now pretend that sign is somebody’s head. Don’t talk like we are talking now. Don’t shout, but throw your voice at that sign.’ The increase in power, clarity and authority was evident, to both, immediately: ‘It worked,’ exclaimed Bygraves gratetfully, ‘it really worked!’35

While all of this comic bonding was going on, it appears that Howerd was also forming a far less predictable romantic attachment to the female third of the tour’s troupe of youngsters: Pam Denton. How real (and how intimate) this relationship actually was remains unclear – he would make no mention of it in his memoirs, and she would subsequently disappear without a trace from public life – but, according to Max Bygraves, Denton was one woman with whom Howerd became ‘totally enamoured’.36

He certainly liked her, and liked spending time with her, and she, in turn, appears to have enjoyed being with him. He had always been fascinated by speciality acts (he would be joined on a subsequent tour by strongwoman Joan ‘The Mighty Mannequin’ Rhodes), and had been drawn right from the start of the tour to Denton’s carefully choreographed on-stage contortions. He also warmed to her calm, down-to-earth and friendly personality – and, like any other comedian, he loved the fact that she laughed so long and so loudly at so many of his jokes.

Tall and thin with an engagingly open face and a bright, gap-toothed grin, he had, in those days, a far from unpleasant physical presence, and, when his spirits were high, he was quite capable of exuding a considerable amount of charm. His problem, however, was that while it took something extraordinary to lift his spirits up, it only took something trivial to drag them down to the floor. As Bill Lyon-Shaw recalled:

Poor Frank was very shy, very introverted, and terrified of everybody – especially women. I think the main reason for this was that he’d been turned down by a lot of the girls of the ATS – let’s face it, he was no oil painting! – and I gather that they’d been rather cruel to him. So that was the thing that had made him so frightened of women.37

Denton, however, was different. She admired his talent, and was touched by his vulnerability; whether she wanted ultimately to make love to him or merely to mother him, she certainly wanted to share many of her spare hours with him. He was gentle, attentive and very, very funny, and, in her eyes, he made even the toughest times of the tour seem tolerable.

He dubbed it ‘Our Tour of the Empire – The Empire Sheffield, Wigan, Huddersfield, Glasgow …’38 When things had gone well for both of them, he would relax, sit back, and entertain her with a selection of dialogue and one-liners he had memorised from the movies of W.C. Fields. When things had gone badly for her, he would put an arm around her shoulder, mock her critics and make her laugh. When things had gone badly for him, he would slump down, hold his head in his hands, and explain, in his inimitable gabbling manner, what he believed had actually happened – which often made her laugh even more.

Neither Denton nor Bygraves, for all of their deep affinity for their friend and fellow-performer, could ever quite fathom the full reason why a man so marked by self-contradictions soldiered on with such faith and fortitude. One day it was all about carpe diem: he would lecture all and sundry on the importance of making one’s own luck, staying true to one’s ambitions and never, ever, giving up. The next day it was all about embracing one’s fate: fancying himself as a serious reader of palms, he would often grab Bygraves’ hand, gaze at it for a moment and then assure him solemnly that he could look forward to one day becoming a millionaire (‘Frank,’ Bygraves would always say with a world-weary sigh, ‘I think you’ve got your wires crossed’).39

There seemed to be something equally contradictory about his attitude to his audience. He dreaded rejection, but, whenever he sensed that it might be about to happen, he appeared to actively invite it. If ever a routine or a gag threatened to fall flat, the heart would duly pound, the sweat would seep and the clothes would stick to his flesh, but there was never a wave of a white flag. ‘What are you,’ he would snarl into the darkness, ‘deaf or something?’40 He was a vulnerable man who dared to live dangerously.

‘Frank would go out and bait his audience,’ Max Bygraves recalled with a mixture of admiration and incredulity. ‘He was living on a knife-edge on that stage. Don’t forget we were all unknown. He’d insult them, pretend to forget his lines – then miraculously remember them just before it got embarrassing. When it worked it was great. I’ve seen him tear the place up, and it was wonderful to watch. Other times …’41

There were quite a few of those ‘other times’. One of them came at Sunderland.

It happened at the start of the week’s run, right in the middle of Howerd’s act. Just after his last ‘um’, and just before his next ‘er’, a loud cracking sound – like an axe cutting into a steel pipe – came up suddenly from the stage. It shook him and stalled the routine, and, even though Howerd soon recovered, he could barely wait to finish and leave. Once the curtain came down, someone found the cause of the noise: a ship’s rivet, thrown down from the ‘gods’ by a distinctly unimpressed docker, had missed the top of the comedian’s head by a whisker and left a large dent in the stage floor. ‘Obviously they can’t afford tomatoes up ’ere!’ Howerd remarked once he was safely backstage, trying hard to laugh the incident off, but Max Bygraves could see that, beneath the show of defiance, the reaction had rendered him ‘a nervous wreck’: ‘He was terrified of an audience like that.’42

Another one of those ‘other times’ occurred at the Glasgow Empire – the deservedly legendary ‘graveyard of English comics’ – where any performer not bedecked from top to toe in tartan could expect to be sent rushing back to the wings with the cry of ‘Away hame and bile yer heid!’ ringing in their ears. Howerd knew all about the venue’s terrifying reputation – indeed, as soon as he arrived at Sauchiehall Street, he felt an urgent need to find and make use of the nearest backstage lavatory – but he was determined to see all of the next six nights through.

He managed it, but only just. A combination of him stammering rather more speedily than usual, and the Glasgow crowd (bemused by the unconventionality of his act) summoning up its antiquated anti-English bile a little more slowly than usual, contrived to buy him some time, but, by the arrival of the dreaded second-house on the climactic Friday night, the customised ‘screwtaps’ (the sharpened metal tops from the bottles of beer) were being hurled at the stage with all of their customary velocity and venom. The conductor – hairless and blameless – was hit on the head, and was carried, bleeding profusely, from the orchestra pit, but Howerd survived, more or less, unscathed.

It was quite the opposite of the proverbial ‘water off a duck’s back’: Howerd absorbed every single drop of negativity. It was just that he kept on going regardless of how much it hurt. Even when he seemed to lose faith in himself, he never lost faith in his act.

He also took comfort from the knowledge that, beyond the confines of the tour, there were people working hard on the advancement of his career. Apart from his sister, Betty, who (fresh out of the ATS) was now acting as his unofficial manager, script advisor and cheerleader, there was also Stanley Dale. Dale, in his own inscrutable, uniquely post-prandial way, was up to all kinds of schemes and tricks to enhance his client’s profile. Contacts were nurtured, sympathetic critics were cultivated and – even though Howerd was only earning a paltry £l3 10s per week – investments started being made in his (and Dale’s) name. Whenever the comedian’s spirits started to sag, Dale would invariably intervene, either in person or via the telephone, to reassure him that all was still going to plan.

To be fair to Dale, he did, through one means or another, get results. While Howerd was on tour, Dale called him with some extraordinarily exciting news: he had been sent an invitation, via the Jack Payne Organisation, from the producer Joy Russell-Smith (one of the most knowledgeable and perceptive judges of comic potential to be found in those days in British broadcasting) to audition for variety Bandbox, the top entertainment radio show on the BBC.

There has been, in the past, some confusion as to the timing of this call. Howerd would remember it arriving a mere ‘six weeks’ into his professional career, which would have placed the date in mid-September.43 It really happened, in fact, about three weeks after that.

Early on the morning of Wednesday 9 October 1946, Frankie Howerd travelled down to London and went straight to the BBC’s Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street. It was grey and damp outside, and it was grey and damp inside as well. He found himself in a large empty room with a battered microphone in one corner, a pile of sandbags strewn around all four of the walls, and a dull plate of glass that passed for an audience. He struggled to suppress a squeal of horror: it was, after all, yet another audition without anyone with whom to play, and the atmosphere could not have felt more flat. This, however, was an audition for the BBC, and the show it was for was Variety Bandbox, and so he took a deep breath and went ahead: ‘Now, Ladies and Gentle-men, I, ah, no …’

The act itself was something of a dog’s dinner: some of the material had been taken straight from For the Fun of It, some had been invented expressly for the occasion and some had been ‘borrowed’ from other comics and tailored to suit his needs. It was rough around the edges, the timing was slightly off, but the impact was still there. At the end of the performance, the studio door opened, Joy Russell-Smith emerged, stretched out a hand and congratulated Howerd with a remark that showed him just how well she understood what he had been up to: ‘A completely new art form’.44

The following day, Russell-Smith submitted her formal internal report:

FRANKIE HOWARD [sic] (Auditioned 9.10.46)

c/o Scruffy Dale.

Very funny, original patter and song.

Eric Spear and John Hooper present and agree. Seeded.45

It was brief but immensely encouraging: this time, without the chance to interact with a ‘proper’ audience, Howerd had managed to win the approval of not only the redoubtable Russell-Smith but also Eric Spear (an experienced producer and composer who would later be responsible for, among other things, the theme tune of Coronation Street) and John Hooper (another broadcaster with a sure sense of what it took to make any form of entertainment truly popular). As a consequence, he could now look forward to playing a part in the next, crucial, stage of the selection process – a recorded, ‘seeded’ audition in the form of a private ‘show’ before a special board of BBC producers.46

Howerd duly returned to Studio 1 at Aeolian Hall on the morning of Friday, 25 October, nursing a bad migraine but otherwise feeling – for him – fairly hopeful. Rehearsals took place at 9 a.m., followed at 3.00 p.m. by the recording itself. He only had five minutes to show what he could do, but he enjoyed being back on a proper stage, playing to what was admittedly a very special, but none the less reassuringly audible, studio audience, and he left believing that he had acquitted himself rather well.

He was soon proven right. Just over a fortnight later, a telegram arrived: ‘YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN’.47His career in radio was about to begin.

CHAPTER 5

Variety Bandbox

Liss-en!

The average listener, perusing a copy of Radio Times at the end of November 1946, would not have known quite what to expect. It was obvious enough that this new man, Frankie Howerd, was probably going to be something rather special, because the magazine described him as ‘a comedian who is really different in that he doesn’t tell a single gag!’ It was not at all clear, however, what this difference would actually mean or amount to, because the magazine proceeded to reveal nothing more than the fact that Joy Russell-Smith ‘wouldn’t let us into the secret of Frankie Howerd’s humour because it might take some of the surprise from the first show’.1

There was a real sense of anticipation, therefore, when, at 6 p.m. on Sunday 1 December, the latest edition of Variety Bandbox began on the BBC’s Light Programme. Topping the bill that week at the grandly cavernous Camberwell Palace was the very popular singer, dancer and actor Jessie Matthews, supported by novelty comic monologist Harry Hemsley, singers Hella Toros and Edward Reach, jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, comedy double-act Johnnie Riscoe and Violet Terry, Morton Fraser ‘and his Harmonica Rascals’, and, right down at the bottom of the bill, the mysterious young debutant, Frankie Howerd.

Bottom of the bill he might have been, but Howerd could not have found a more high-profile British programme in which to make his broadcasting debut. Established in 1944, Variety Bandbox had soon become the radio show on which every popular entertainer in the country craved to be heard. ‘Presenting the people of Variety to a variety of people,’ it was the most-listened-to programme of its type – overheard coming out from most of the houses in most of the streets in Britain each Sunday night, and discussed in countless workplaces each Monday morning. If ever there was an audition before the nation, then this, Howerd realised, was it.

As he readied himself in the wings before walking out to perform his first seven-minute spot, he thought of everyone who might be listening, somewhere, out there at home: certainly his devoted mother and his sister, and perhaps even his brother (although Sidney was never a great comedy fan) and innumerable other friends, acquaintances and relations; undoubtedly, from his agency and his touring company, Scruffy Dale, Jack Payne, Frank Barnard, Bill Lyon-Shaw, Nosmo King, Max Bygraves and Pam Denton would all be within hearing distance of the wireless; possibly, if the rumours that he had heard were right, such personal heroes as Jimmy James, Max Miller and Sid Field would also be tuning in; and, in addition to all of them, well, a frighteningly high proportion, it seemed, of the rest of the world and his wife. He felt nauseous – more so than usual – and his legs felt like lead, but, when the cue came, he puffed the air out from his mouth, clenched and unclenched his fists, took one last deep breath and then, with the help of a studio assistant, he pushed himself on to the stage to the sound of his new, aptly-titled signature tune: ‘You Can’t Have Everything’.

‘Ladies and Gentle-men,’ he began. They laughed. ‘No … Ah, no … Now listen.’ They laughed a little louder. ‘No … No, don’t laugh …’ They kept on laughing. ‘Oh, no, um, no, please, liss-en …’ He was off and running.

He did the usual routine, more or less, but this was the first time that it had been heard by the British public at large, and it went down extremely well. He seemed so new, so fresh, so ordinary, and, therefore, so odd. Instead of sounding like the 1,001st comic to come on and rattle off yet more of the same old gags – maybe a little faster, or slower, or louder, or quieter than the last one, but otherwise very much the same – Frankie Howerd lived up to his pre-publicity by coming over as a genuinely unusual comedian. He thought, at the end, that he had been ‘far too twitchy to be good’, but he had been good enough to impress most of those who had been listening both in the theatre and gathered around the radio at home.2

Some of them might have caught the odd comic novelty on the wireless before – such as the old Sheffield-born stand-up Stainless Stephen,3 who had intrigued a small but loyal audience during the late 1920s and early 1930s with his downright peculiar brand of ‘punctuated patter’ (e.g. ‘Somebody once said inverted commas comedians are born not made semi-colon’) – but never, before now, had any of them encountered the sound of someone so original in the context of a prime-time mainstream show. What people had heard on this particular night had genuinely taken them by surprise.

Howerd could not have sounded less like the regular, rather more established, young stand-up associated with the show, Derek Roy. Later dismissed by an embittered Spike Milligan (who toiled for a spell as one of his many underpaid writers) as ‘the world’s unfunniest comedian’,4 Roy was a singer (nicknamed ‘The Melody Boy’) who had metamorphosed into a relatively slick but essentially old-fashioned teller of jokes. He was technically not much better than mediocre, but he was certainly full of cheek: if he doubted his ability to deliver a certain punchline, he would not hesitate to resort to donning a silly wig or a wacky hat in order to amuse the studio audience and thus ensure that the radio waves still registered the requisite laugh.5

His material revolved around a predictable cluster of comedy clichés: the shrewish wife; the dragon-like mother-in-law; the attractive but vacuous girlfriend; the bumptious boss; the slow-witted neighbour or acquaintance; and the latest celebrity sex symbol. ‘Anyone here played Jane Russell pontoon?’ went a far livelier than usual Derek Roy joke. ‘It’s the same as ordinary pontoon but you need thirty-eight to bust!’ His style was somewhat Americanised – a kind of ‘Bob Hope Lite’ – and possessed all of the personality of a typed and unsigned letter.

With the memory of Roy’s last stale routine still fresh in the mind, no listener would have failed to have been struck by Howerd’s astonishing originality. It was like suddenly hearing modern jazz after a lifetime of tolerating trad: innovative, unpredictable and supremely individual.

The BBC had only booked Howerd for a three-week probationary period (paying him a paltry £18 per show), but a delighted Joy Russell-Smith wasted no time, after witnessing that truly remarkable debut appearance, in signing him up to the show as a regular. The residency would last for two-and-a-half extraordinarily memorable years.

Bill Lyon-Shaw, who was still responsible for Howerd on tour, was perfectly happy to share his energies with the BBC:

[variety Bandbox] was good for him, good for the tour, and it wasn’t like he was going to tire himself out. Frank was a young man, he’d been trained in the Army, and he was quite tough. It didn’t take that much out of him to do our show [For the Fun of It], because he was only doing his own act – he wasn’t doing any of the sketches or anything extra like that. So, twice nightly, it didn’t take a lot out of him. And he’d just go off on either the Saturday night or the Sunday morning to London, to wherever the theatre was, and do his radio programme, and then he’d come back to us, wherever we were, on the Monday afternoon. So I don’t think combining the two affected him much at all. But, I must say, he did start spending more and more time in the dressing-room preparing for the weekend. He used to sit there for hours on his own, making faces, and going, ‘Ooooh! Aaaah! Yes! No! Missus! Ooooh!’ I mean, he worked very, very hard at it. It wasn’t natural. That was acting. Off-stage, Frank was usually a very quiet and introverted person, and his stage presence was foreign, it really was an act in the true sense of the word.6