Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

Joy Russell-Smith had decided that, from this moment on, Howerd would alternate on a fortnightly basis with Derek Roy as the show’s top comic and co-compère. Inspired by the long-running mock ‘feud’ on American radio between Jack Benny and Fred Allen – a good-natured battle of wits that had been amusing both stars’ audiences (and fuelling the imaginations of both sets of writers) since 1936 – the idea was for Howerd and Roy to cultivate a similar kind of sparring relationship.7 It worked rather well, not only providing each performer with some welcome additional publicity (plenty of name-checks on the air during those weeks when one or the other of them was off it, as well as the odd mention in the letter pages and the gossip columns), but also furnishing them with an invaluable extra ‘peg’ for new comic material.

The need to keep coming up with fresh material, Howerd soon realised, would prove to be a chronic problem now that he was working in radio. The first few weeks were relatively easy – a combination of tried-and-tested routines, smart prevarications and a sharp rush of adrenalin each Sunday night saw to that – but then, all of a sudden, it felt as if he had run into a brick wall. He had used, and then subtly reused, more than a decade’s worth – in fact, an entire life’s worth – of comic material, and still people wanted, and expected, more.

‘In Music Hall,’ he reflected ruefully, ‘you could use much the same script for the duration of the tour – it appeared new to each town played. But on radio the total audience heard it all at once, so I needed a fresh script for each broadcast.’8 Since (unlike the considerably better-off Derek Roy) he could not yet afford to hire a scriptwriter (or pay, as Roy also did, for regular transcriptions of scripts that had already been used by the stars of top radio shows in the States), he got by, for a while, by studying a pile of joke books, cannibalising their contents and then inserting enough stutters, hesitations and digressions to ensure that every single joke could be relied on to go a long, long way.

Ironically, this craftiness eventually served only to make the problem even worse. So warmly received were his early performances that the BBC decided to reward him with two additional solo spots in each one of his shows – thus stretching his limited resources still further and thinner than ever. He responded by begging and borrowing on what seemed like an ever-increasing scale: Max Bygraves soon became used to his friend’s anxious requests for ‘spare’ material, and never failed to respond with both promptness and generosity; Nosmo King was similarly obliging, even if much of what he offered dated back to shortly before the Great War; mother Edith and sister Betty jotted down dutifully every new joke, anecdote and one-liner they spotted in the papers or heard at the theatres; and Frankie himself spent long afternoons on his own at the movies, trying his best in the darkness to transcribe some of the best of the latest Hollywood bons mots.

The audience remained blissfully ignorant of his routine struggles behind the scenes. After all, they did not tune in each fortnight to listen to his jokes; they tuned in to listen to him.

The content might well have sounded commonplace, but it was the form that fascinated. Howerd’s wonderfully characterful routines, delivered with such an unusual and lively manner, were drawing in as many as twelve million listeners each show, and the critics had started hailing him as ‘the most unusual of all radio discoveries’.9 It was clear that something special was happening. ‘I was considered to be very much the alternative comedian at that time,’ he would recall. ‘I was different to everybody else: my attitude was different.’10 In an era when radio was still Britain’s pre-eminent mass medium, he was well on the way to establishing himself as one of its most popular, distinctive and talked-about young stars.

Those around him with a vested interest were quick to take notice. Both Scruffy Dale and the Jack Payne Organisation, in particular, were keen to exploit their still rather ‘green’ client’s increasingly propitious situation. Dale began urging Howerd to invest (or rather to allow him to invest on Howerd’s behalf) in various stocks, shares and properties, and Jack Payne persuaded him to sign a dubious new ‘rolling’ contract (if things continued to go well, the star was fine, but if things started going downhill, the agency was free to drop him and walk away). Howerd did what he was told – he possessed at that time neither the head nor the disposition for serious business – and returned to his rehearsals.

He just wanted to be true to his ideals. He just wanted to keep sounding real. He had overcome so much to get where he was, and now he was desperate to ensure that he would stay there.

Preparation for the next show always began straight after the last. There were no boozy parties, no relaxing evenings out at restaurants, no lazy mornings in at home lapping up all of the positive reviews: there was just work. Plagued by doubts, the famously fastidious Howerd would spend hours walking up and down lonely country roads and wandering around local churchyards and cemeteries, mumbling to himself his lines and trying out all of his countless ‘ums’, ‘oohs’, ‘ahs’ and ‘oh nos’, in the manner of a text-book obsessive-compulsive. Each joke, monologue, sketch and supposedly throwaway remark was shaped and then repeatedly reshaped (often as many as seventy times) until every single element – the structure, the rhythm, the pace, the humour, the tone – sounded as good and as true as it could.

‘The great paradox of show-business,’ Howerd observed, ‘is that you have one of the most insecure professions in the world attracting the most insecure people. In my case I was a nervous wreck with tremendous determination.’11 The accuracy of this candid self-description was never more painfully evident than during these early days in radio. On tour, he said, when there was only one script for him to memorise, ‘I could be relatively relaxed once I’d got over the terror of opening night.’ On radio, however, where the script was always new, ‘every broadcast was an opening night’: ‘I worked so hard on my material, and was so bedevilled by nervous insecurity, that after every Variety Bandbox I’d go home with a dreadful migraine.’12

Howerd was hard on himself, but then he was hard on his colleagues, too. Having worked so diligently on every detail of his act, he expected others to display the same high levels of professionalism, discipline and commitment – and he could be startingly blunt and rude to anyone who (in his opinion) fell short of those exacting standards. Most of his angry outbursts soon blew over, and were followed more or less immediately by a completely sincere expression of remorse, but, none the less, not many of them were very easily forgotten. Working with Frankie Howerd was invariably a fairly tense affair.

What normally made all of the fussing and fretting undeniably worthwhile – both for him and for them – was the finished product. At his best, the production team appreciated, Frankie Howerd really was worth it, and most of the rows, they realised, only came about because he always wanted so badly to be at his best.

By March 1947, however, a degree of fatigue was creeping in. Drained by the strain of having to continue to combine his touring commitments as a member of For the Fun of It with his current radio duties as an employee of the BBC, he began to sound a little stale. While millions of listeners remained happily captivated by the vibrant originality of his style, a slightly more knowledgeable minority had started to hear, just beneath all of those surface ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’, the sound of someone scraping at the bottom of a barrel.

Howerd was running out of ideas. With no reliable supply of first-rate comedy material, he was gradually being forced into a number of bad habits: too many verbal tics, too few strong stories, too much waffle and far too many return visits to the well-trodden boop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem-choo territory of ‘Three Little Fishes’. The whole thing was getting to sound a little bit robotic.

It was not that he had stopped trying so hard. He was trying harder than ever. It was just that he now had less than ever with which to work.

He did what he could. The rehearsals grew longer, the rows louder and the recordings more manic, but the act still seemed to lack some of its old joyful brio.

Things came to a head at Easter. Howerd was performing in For the Fun of It at a theatre in Peterborough, and also preparing for his next trip up to London to record another edition of Variety Bandbox (which by this time was moving its broadcasting base back and forth between the Camberwell Palace, the Kilburn Empire and the People’s Palace in the Mile End Road). While he was resting in his dressing-room, an urgent message came from Jack Payne: the BBC, he was told, had recently conducted another one of its routine audience surveys, and the results contained bad news for Howerd. It seemed that, while Derek Roy’s popularity (rated out of 100) was still, somewhat improbably, hovering just above the 70 mark, Howerd’s had suddenly plummeted all the way down to the 30s.13 According to Payne’s unidentified contacts within the Corporation, the performer (and, more pertinently, his scripts) would have to improve, and soon, or else he risked being removed from the show for good.

‘The news would have shaken even the most hearty extrovert,’ recalled Howerd, who was patently anything but; ‘I nearly collapsed on the spot.’14 He had, deep down, been half-expecting the arrival of some sort of negative news like this, but nothing remotely as bad as this, and, now that it was here, he felt lost. Something had to change, he acknowledged, but the big question now was: what?

CHAPTER 6

The One-Man Situational Comedy

In a way, desperation forced me into some small measure of originality.

If Frankie Howerd had merely been a fighter, he might well have fallen and remained floored on that bleak day at Easter. The bad news that he received could easily have felt like one blow too many. Fortunately, however, he was not merely a doughty fighter; he was also a deep thinker, and he responded, once again, with intelligence as well as grit.

After giving in, for a few hours, to an understandably powerful surge of self-pity – during which he walked aimlessly through the streets of Peterborough feeling dazed and ‘miserable beyond words’1 – he returned to his dressing-room, tried his best to clear his head, and then did what he always did when faced with such a problem: he thought. He thought about every tiny aspect of his act, every element of his technique, every decision he had either made or failed to make, and every gag, every expression, every gesture, every routine, every show, every review, every hope and every fear – everything. The search would not stop until he had found the true causes of all the flaws.

The decline in the quality of his material, he acknowledged, had been the obvious catalyst for the crisis, but he felt sure that there was more to it than that – even though, much to his frustration, he could still not quite make himself comprehend what, precisely, it was. Then, after agonising over his analysis for countless hours, the answer suddenly came to him: it was sound, not vision.

‘It was ridiculous,’ he later exclaimed, ‘that neither the BBC nor the Jack Payne Organisation had spotted it, and I was singularly stupid not to have been aware of it much earlier on’:

I’d been giving stage, not radio, performances. It was as simple as that. Listeners weren’t able to see my expressions and gestures, and were baffled when the live audience laughed for no apparent reason – bafflement giving way to annoyance at the frustration of not knowing what was going on.2

Having at last diagnosed the cause, he wasted no time in devising a cure. Instead of continuing to stand back and project his voice at the studio audience (as he had learnt to do on tour), he now resolved to step forward and address the microphone. The aim, he explained, was not to ignore the live audience (without whose laughter he knew he would always be lost), but rather to develop a different technique: ‘transferring from visual to vocal clowning’.3

As was so typical of him, Howerd laboured both tirelessly and obsessively to effect the necessary change. ‘I used to do voice exercises, like a singer would do,’ he recalled. ‘I used to go up: “A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E”. And then I used to go down: “A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E”. So I learned to use my throat muscles as I would my face muscles.’4 He ended up being able to switch in an instant from a dopey baritone to a goosed falsetto, and then slip straight into stage whisper.

There were also many hours spent studying the recognised masters of radio’s more relaxed and intimate style of delivery – such as America’s Jack Benny (who, through the use of his sublimely timed pauses, had taught listeners to pay attention to what he was thinking as well as saying) and Britain’s Tommy Handley (who had the ability to race through reams of dialogue without ever sounding remotely rushed) – as well as many long and self-absorbed sessions in the studio, going over and over his act while practising standing relatively still and close up to the microphone.

Howerd did not stop there. He also took careful note of the seductive power of the well-spoken catchphrase. Having lived through the era of such hugely popular shows as ITMA – which, through weekly repetition, had coined several distinctive personal signatures out of common words and phrases, including, ‘I don’t mind if I do’; ‘After you, Claude.’ ‘No, after you, Cecil’; ‘Can I do you now, sir?’; and ‘T.T.F.N – ta-ta for now!’5 – Howerd could see and hear for himself how beneficial the odd verbal ‘gimmick’ could be, and so he started to think up a few all of his own.

His playfully unconventional way of emphasising the opening phrase ‘Ladies and Gentle-men’ had already become something of a trademark, but he now took to mispronouncing on a grander scale, stretching some words close to their limits (e.g. ‘luuud-i-crous’) while stretching the ends of others so far that they would snap off and shoot away like a stray piece of knicker elastic (e.g. ‘I was a-maaaazed!’). He also cultivated quite a few catchphrases all of his own: ‘Not on your Nellie!’; ‘Make meself comfy’; ‘Oooh, no, missus!’; ‘Titter ye not’; ‘Nay, nay and thrice nay!’; ‘I was flabbergasted – never has my flabber been so gasted!’; ‘Shut your face!’; ‘And the best of British luck!’

There were also some changes made (of a more subtle nature) to the ways that he shaped the ‘saucier’ sorts of material. The whole process now became far more devious and conspiratorial.

It had to be, because the code of self-censorship within the BBC was fast becoming even more neurotically draconian in peacetime than it had been during the war. Thanks to the efforts of the Corporation’s Director of Variety at that time, Michael Standing, all of the BBC’s producers, writers and performers who were working in the field of ‘Light Entertainment’ now found themselves saddled with a short but extraordinarily censorious ‘policy guide’ known informally as ‘The Green Book’.6

According to this well-meaning but somewhat snooty little manual, ‘Music-hall, stage, and, to a lesser degree, screen standards, are not suitable to broadcasting’. The BBC, as a servant of the whole nation, was obliged to avoid causing any members of the nation any unnecessary offence: ‘Producers, artists and writers must recognise this fact and the strictest watch must be kept. There can be no compromise with doubtful material. It must be cut.’7

In order to ensure that all of its employees understood what this ‘doubtful material’ might be, the manual proceeded to spell it out in sobering detail. There must, it said, be no vulgarity, no ‘crudities, coarseness and innuendo’, which meant ‘an absolute ban on the following’: –

Jokes about –

Lavatories

Effeminacy in men

Immorality of any kind

Suggestive references to –

Honeymoon couples

Chambermaids

Fig leaves

Prostitution

Ladies’ 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 –

Pre-natal influences (e.g. ‘His mother was frightened

by a donkey’)

Marital infidelity8

As if that was not enough to completely obliterate the average red-nosed comedian’s act, there was more: no advertising; no American material or ‘Americanisms’; no derogatory remarks about any profession, class, race, region or religion; no jokes about such ‘embarrassing disabilities’ 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 ‘God’, ‘Hell’, ‘Bloody’, ‘Damn’ or ‘Ruddy’, but also not even the odd ‘Gorblimey’). 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 Miller’s over-reliance on his so-called ‘Blue Book’ had already earned him a five-year ban from the BBC during an earlier, slightly more tolerant, era; now, in the age of ‘The Green Book’, the incorrigible directness of his material – (e.g. ‘I was walking along this narrow mountain pass – so narrow that nobody else could pass you – when I saw a beautiful blonde walking towards me. A beautiful blonde with not a stitch on – yes, not a stitch on, lady! Cor blimey, I didn’t know whether to toss meself off or block her passage!’) – 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 – via the use of a remarkably wide range of verbal idiosyncrasies in his delivery – hear the sort of meanings in certain innocent words that no English dictionary would ever confirm. ‘To say “I’m going to do you,”’ he later explained by way of an example, ‘was considered very naughty, yet I got away with the catchphrase: “There are those among us tonight whom I shall do-o-o-o”.’ Howerd would also respond more censoriously than the censors whenever one of his stooges, such as the show’s band leader Billy Ternent, made a supposedly ambiguous remark: ‘He’d say something like: “I’ve just been orchestrated,” and I’d reply: “Dirty old devil!”’10

It all added up to a real mastery of the medium. Howerd’s 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 comedy’s coming of age, included Howerd in an elite group of young British performers who had now earned the right to be considered ‘true men of broadcasting’.11 The turnaround was also recognised by the producers of variety Bandbox, who responded to Howerd’s 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 – and now more urgently than ever – 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 – and admiring – a young fellow-comedian who was appearing in Schleswig-Holstein at the time in another CSE revue entitled Strictly Off the Record.

The comedian’s 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: ‘It was as if,’ he recalled, ‘the King had contacted me for a game of skittles at Buckingham Palace.’12 He did not actually know what Howerd looked like – he only knew the sound of his extraordinary voice and the ‘sheer brilliance’ of his special brand of ‘happy nonsense’ – but Gordon provided him with a suitably vivid description and then advised him to arrange to visit the star as soon as possible.

A few days later, an excited Sykes travelled by train to Sheffield, and made his way to the Lyceum Theatre. There, in a dressing-room backstage, he set eyes on Frankie Howerd for the first time. He was more than slightly taken aback when Howerd started to explain how much he had admired the material Sykes had written during the war – because Sykes knew that he had not written any material during the war. The act that Howerd so warmly recalled had in fact been built from second-hand material culled from American shows on short-wave radio – just like Howerd’s had. When Sykes pointed this out, he was rather surprised – and very pleased and relieved – to find that his hero still seemed interested in finding a way to use him on the show: ‘He said, “Do you think that you could write for me?” Well, I’d never written anything for anyone in my life! So I said, “Well, er, no doubt: when do you want it?” And he said, “Eight days from now.” So I said, “All right, hang on a minute, have you got a bit of paper?” And then he went out to do the matinée performance of the pantomime, and by the time he came back at the end I’d written his first script.’13 A new partnership had begun.