Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

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.