Titter ye not!

Frankie Howerd's career was revived by the popular Sixties TV series Up Pompeii

5 April 2012

The idea of the broken-hearted clown was a concept Frankie Howerd didn't believe in, because 'the brokenhearted clown would be a lot more broken-hearted if he wasn't a clown'.

Instead, he saw sadness everywhere and among all types of people, sadness which could be lifted for a time by someone such as him with a brilliant talent to amuse.

Making people laugh was, however, no laughing matter for him, one of this country's most popular and influential comics, yet a man plagued throughout his long career by self-doubt.

And reading between the lines of Graham McCann's biography, it would appear that not much else was either.

If temperament was counted, Howerd probably wasn't cut out to go on the stage. But from his childhood between the wars, he dreamed of nothing else.

Although a repetitive stammerer when he was flustered, he longed to be an actor. Failing in a fit of stage-fright to get into RADA, he joined every amateur theatrical group in the part of South-East London where he grew up.

Then, in 1940, he was called up, and finally his luck began to change. He found he could make soldiers laugh. And instead of performing to an audience, like the fashionable, quick-fire jokesters of the time, he began to confide in his audience, like an old woman gossiping over the garden fence.

Others had tried it earlier, but none would have as much success with the style as Howerd. Today, most stand-up comedians work a variation on the manner he made his own, from Ricky Gervais to Ben Elton.

During six years in the Army, Sergeant Howerd perfected his act, and, on being demobbed in 1946, he soon made his way into radio variety, then the most important entertainment medium in the country. Soon he was very famous, his weekly performances being heard and loved by nearly half the entire population.

There was, however, a downside. The material he'd been using for years in the small venues he played while in the Army was being used up in just a few performances on the radio. He needed help, and at this point in his life he got very, very lucky.

He met a young writer from Oldham called Eric Sykes who perfected the Frankie Howerd conversational style with some quite wonderful, surrealistic scripts, including all the 'oohs' and 'ahhs'.

And Howerd would honour their brilliance by rehearsing them to perfection.

As his career soared into television other writers followed Sykes, who soon developed his own career as a performer. In fact, an unseen pantheon of the very best comedy writers of the Fifties and Sixties helped make Howerd funny.

Howerd was the funny guy on stage with the illfitting toupe which looked like a dead ferret on his head and terrible brown suit, but, never confident enough to be an adlibber, he needed his scripts tailor-made.

There was a brief, bleak spell in the early Sixties when the public got bored with him, and when he returned unpaid to entertaining the troops overseas for moral sustenance as he would throughout his life.

But then he came back bigger than ever, as he was taken up by Peter Cook and the new satirists of the time. He had a hit West End show with A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and Up Pompeii, the popular TV series.

He never stopped working and should have been happy, content in the fact that he was revered by just about every comic in the country, loved by millions and well-off enough to have several homes, including one in the most fashionable garden square in London's Kensington. But he never was.

An extraordinarily difficult man with whom to work, he was consumed with fear that it could all end again and that he would return to obscurity. And inflaming his chronic anxieties was his unhappiness at being homosexual and a fear that the public would find out.

He hated the notion that some people might think him 'not quite normal', as many people considered homosexuals as recently as the Sixties.

And though he lived with his lover and personal manager Dennis Heymer for over 30 years, in his autobiography he referred to him only as a 'Mr Fix-it, a super Jeeves', pretending to have been near to marriage to a woman three times.

'Don't think I like being the way I am,' he confided in one friend. 'If there was a pill I could take which would change my nature, I would take it.'

He never was 'outed', but his habit of occasionally picking up young men led to at least one blackmail attempt.

He died in 1992 at the age of 75, five years older than he liked people to think he was. By then he had made a nation laugh for more than 40 years but, seemingly, had rarely laughed much himself. He was too worried for that.

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Titter ye not!

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