Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann
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odd mention in the letter pages and the gossip columns), but also furnishing them with an invaluable extra âpegâ 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 â a combination of tried-and-tested routines, smart prevarications and a sharp rush of adrenalin each Sunday night saw to that â 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 decadeâs worth â in fact, an entire lifeâs worth â of comic material, and still people wanted, and expected, more.
âIn Music Hall,â he reflected ruefully, âyou could use much the same script for the duration of the tour â 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.â8 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 â 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 friendâs anxious requests for âspareâ 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. Howerdâs 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 âthe most unusual of all radio discoveriesâ.9 It was clear that something special was happening. âI was considered to be very much the alternative comedian at that time,â he would recall. âI was different to everybody else: my attitude was different.â10 In an era when radio was still Britainâs 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 âgreenâ clientâs increasingly propitious situation. Dale began urging Howerd to invest (or rather to allow him to invest on Howerdâs behalf) in various stocks, shares and properties, and Jack Payne persuaded him to sign a dubious new ârollingâ 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 â he possessed at that time neither the head nor the disposition for serious business â 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 âumsâ, âoohsâ, âahsâ and âoh nosâ, 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 â the structure, the rhythm, the pace, the humour, the tone â sounded as good and as true as it could.
âThe great paradox of show-business,â Howerd observed, âis 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.â11 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, âI could be relatively relaxed once Iâd got over the terror of opening night.â On radio, however, where the script was always new, âevery broadcast was an opening nightâ: âI worked so hard on my material, and was so bedevilled by nervous insecurity, that after every Variety Bandbox Iâd go home with a dreadful migraine.â12
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 â 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 â both for him and for them â 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 âoohsâ and âahsâ, 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 âThree Little Fishesâ. 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 Peopleâs Palace in the Mile End Road). While he was resting in his dressing-room, an urgent message came from Jack Payne: the