Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

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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.

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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.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo)His career in radio was about to begin.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_2b90d4a0-256b-5c64-9a2f-0c9ecc97a84c)

Variety Bandbox (#ulink_2b90d4a0-256b-5c64-9a2f-0c9ecc97a84c)

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’.

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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.

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Some of them might have caught the odd comic novelty on the wireless before – such as the old Sheffield-born stand-up Stainless Stephen,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#ulink_4f967d1b-c526-584a-bcd9-1489ff7771ac)

The One-Man Situational Comedy (#ulink_4f967d1b-c526-584a-bcd9-1489ff7771ac)

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’

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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.

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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’.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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!’

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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’.

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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.’

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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’)