Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

to that ignorant pig. I’d rather not be in show-business at all – and that’s that.’¹⁶

      The secretary had obviously been screamed at before, because, once her ears had stopped ringing, she simply patted Howard on the shoulder and advised him to calm down: ‘Swallow your pride. You may never get this sort of chance again.’ Howard, however, was having none of it. With widened eyes and scarlet cheeks, he raged at all the rudeness, injustice and contempt he had suffered, not only that day but on so many, many days before, and then, folding his hands over the top of his head, moaned that he was in no mood now to put right what had gone so horribly, utterly wrong. ‘Have a go,’ said the secretary with a sympathetic smile, and guided him by the arm back to outside the door of the manager’s office.¹⁷

      So many thoughts, so many options, bounced around in Howard’s head during the handful of seconds that he hovered outside that door: turning the other cheek; punching the other cheek; begging forgiveness; offering forgiveness; speaking his mind; biting his lip – countless ticks and an equal number of crosses. In the end, as he moved to open the door, he settled on speaking his mind.

      Crashing into the office and racing straight up to the desk, Howard fixed his tormentor with his very best baleful glare and, stabbing the smoky air with his finger for emphasis, he screeched: ‘I am now going to make you laugh, you clot. You’re going to fall about with laughter, you idiot. Because I’m a very funny man, you oaf!’¹⁸ Then he noticed that Barnard was shaking.

      He was shaking neither with fear nor rage, but rather with laughter. ‘That’s a great act. Great. It’s a hoot,’ he cried, shaking his head, wiping his eyes and smiling broadly. ‘Can you do any more?’¹⁹

      Howard, having purged himself of all fury, did a quick double-take and then proceeded to do his proper act. He was more disorientated than genuinely relaxed, but what he did went down so well that Barnard now thought nothing of summoning a pianist to support his rendition of ‘Three Little Fishes’. When it was all over, Barnard shook Howard warmly by the hand and assured the exhausted performer that it had been the best ‘cold’ audition he had ever seen. He hired Howard on the spot, and then arranged for Jack Payne, the self-styled capo di tutti capi of the post-war Variety world, to see his newest client perform in front of an enthusiastic military audience at Arborfield in Berkshire. Payne (who had no recollection of his pre-war encounter with Howard) arrived in time to watch him steal the show.

      Barnard’s initial idea had been for Howard to make his debut as a professional in a relatively run-of-the-mill touring show in Germany. Payne, however, preferred to entrust the monitoring of his early career to Bill Lyon-Shaw, and so he was drafted instead into a far more prestigious new domestic revue by the name of For the Fun of It. Produced by Lyon-Shaw, it boasted such well-established names as the veteran stand-up Nosmo King, the comedy double-act of Jean Adrienne and Eddie Leslie and, topping the bill, the hugely popular singer Donald Peers. Howard joined two other fresh professionals – his fellow-comic Max Bygraves and a contortionist called Pam Denton – at the bottom of the bill in a special showcase for ex-Service performers entitled ‘They’re Out!’

      Before the tour began, Howard sat down and invested an extraordinary amount of careful thought into how best to shape his on-stage persona. Desperate to get his professional career off to a strong and certain start, he analysed every aspect of his act – from what he should say (and how he should say it) to what he should wear (and how he should wear it) – and gradually built up an idea, and an image, of the kind of distinctive performer he wanted, in time, to become.

      First of all, he reflected on what he most admired about his own comedy heroes – and what he could take from them and then adapt for himself. When he thought, for example, about two of his favourite American performers, Jack Benny and W.C. Fields, he drew inspiration from the prickliness of their respective images (Benny the hopelessly vain and miserly old ham, Fields the drunken and cynical old fraud) and the unusually sharp, self-aware and defiantly pathos-free nature of their material.

      What he found especially refreshing was the fact that neither of these fine comedians (in stark contrast to the vast majority of their peers) was enslaved by any obvious need to be loved. It did not matter to Benny if anyone actually believed that he was waited on day and night by an African-American servant (whom he rarely, if ever, bothered to pay), or wore the cheapest toupee in Hollywood, or refused to acknowledge that he had long since passed the age of thirty-nine, or, when asked by a mugger to choose between his money and his life, resented being hurried – ‘I’m thinking it over!’

      Similarly, it did not matter to Fields if the odd person took offence when he knocked back one too many treble measures of bourbon, mumbled something insulting about his wife or aimed a large boot at little Baby LeRoy’s backside. Like Benny, Fields was more than happy to use all of his various foibles, failures and flaws – whether they were real and exaggerated or imaginary and stylised – rather than try, like the more typical kind of comedian, to hide and deny them. The only thing that mattered to this exceptional pair of performers was the number of laughs they were able to generate. It was this attitude – a subtly smart, self-mocking and grown-up attitude – that Howard (the hypocritical ‘friend’ of elderly deaf pianists) was ready to emulate.

      Turning his attention to the delivery of his material, Howard not only recognised the debt he already owed to George Robey, but also anticipated the impact to be had from studying the style of a more recent favourite, Sid Field. What both of these performers did was to dominate an audience through indirection, preferring to coax the laughs out rather than waiting for them to be handed over on a plate.

      Robey had shown how much funnier a clown could be when he acted as if he was labouring under the illusion that he was not actually a clown. Once the first ripple of laughter had rolled towards him from over the stalls, he would stick his hands stiffly on his hips, hoist his nose high up in the air and then snort censoriously: ‘Kindly temper your hilarity with a modicum of reserve.’ When this act of pomposity summoned up an even louder and deeper splash of derision, he would, with an air of mounting desperation, urge the audience to ‘Desist!’ – which in turn, of course, would succeed only in prompting an even bigger and more gloriously anarchic burst of playful mockery.

      More recently, Howard had been deeply impressed by the classy comic artistry of Sid Field. Like Howard, Field was a peculiar mixture, on stage, of lumbering masculinity and camp effeminacy, of working-class toughness and middle-class gentility – the critic Kenneth Tynan summed it up rather nicely when he likened it to a strangely effective blend ‘of nectar and beer’.²⁰

      Besides having the knack of being able to act with his entire body – with his nimble hands and knees as well as his brightly expressive face – Field also had a wonderfully playful way with words and sounds and idioms. Ranging freely from coarse, back-throated cockney, through the nasal, drooping rhythms of his native Brummie, to the tight-necked, tongue-tip precision of a metropolitan toff, he turned common words and simple phrases into a special repertory of colourful comedy characters.

      Howard adored the way that Field (a master parodist of effete behaviour) needed only to cry a single ‘Be-ooo-tiful!’ or cluck a quick ‘Don’t be so fool-haar-day!’ to trigger yet another gush of giggles. He warmed to the performer even more when Field paused to interact with the members of the pit orchestra (‘And how are yooo today? R-r-r-reasonably well, I hoop?’), boast to an unseen acquaintance in the wings (‘Did you heah me, Whittaker?’) and bridle at an imagined insult aimed at him from the audience (‘Oh! How very, very, dare you!’). Watching him, Howard felt that he had found a kindred spirit, and drew encouragement to follow suit.

      When