local church hall, old folks’ homes and even for the Shooters Hill Dramatic Society he had joined. He formed ‘Frank Howard’s Knockouts’, insisting once again that his name was in the title – the first significant traces of a performer’s ego becoming apparent?
Travelling to concert dates could prove a problem, but Frankie was nothing if not an opportunist, and thumbed a lift with anyone who would take him. Once he found himself on the back of a motor bike en route home after the annual Herne Bay Sunday School outing. It poured with rain. The upshot: to boils, add pneumonia.
Frankie expanded his concerts to other boroughs, and was soon performing in church halls throughout South London – and all for free. He even changed his name to Ronnie Ordex for a time, decided he didn’t like it, and changed it back again. Finally he felt it was time his efforts yielded a material dividend.
He started looking around for a suitable place to air his talent – for money. His first tentative attempts to turn professional resulted in dismal failure. But the boy tried, how he tried! Now twenty-one, he wrote himself a comic monologue, and rehearsed it until he was word perfect with scarcely a hint of a stutter. Then he thumbed through the entertainment columns to find the nearest music hall that was featuring what he was looking for. Talent Night!
In the thirties most of the country’s music halls put on a ‘Friday Night is Talent Night’ spot in their bill at one time or another. All Frankie had to do was pick the theatre, make his way there, and join the queue to put his name down on the list. He made sure he came on early so that he didn’t have to wait around too long kicking his heels and trying to control his nerves. That first monologue failed to get the laughs, so Frankie ditched it. The following week he put on schoolboy shorts and tried out a comic song. Again, a smattering of applause that sounded suspiciously like sympathy. Next, he switched to impressions. James Cagney, Charles Laughton, Noel Coward, they all came in for their share of mimicry. The trouble was that they all sounded the same. Frankie wrote that off to experience, and went back to playing safe – telling jokes.
It was at the Lewisham Hippodrome that he decided to try the one about Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins …
Long John is standing by the rail staring out to sea when Jim tentatively approaches him and plucks at his sleeve. ‘Yes, lad,’ growls the old sea dog. ‘What be ye wantin’?’
‘I was wonderin’, Long John,’ ventures young Jim, ‘how you come to lose your leg?’
‘Aaargh, that come from a cannon fired from a Spanish ship. I’m walkin’ the deck when — whoosh! This cannon ball takes me leg clean off. But quick as a flash me mates find a piece o’ wood and screw it in – and I’m as good as new.’
‘And … how come you got a steel hook for a hand?’ queries young Jim.
‘That, lad, be when I’m fightin’ Bluebeard the Pirate. He gets in a lucky swipe with his cutlass – and me hand drops overboard into the sea. Quick as a flash me mates grab a steel hook from the deck and screw it in – and there it is! Good as new.’
‘Finally,’ pursues the lad, ‘that eye patch. How come you’re blind in one eye?’
‘Ah that! That’s seagull droppin’s!’
‘But seagull droppin’s don’t make you blind –’
‘It do’, says Long John [and here Frankie would crook one finger at his eye] ‘if you’ve got a hook for a hand …’
He should have stayed in bed that day. On the bill were comedians Jimmy James and Derek Roy, both of whom had their own highly individual line in comedy patter, so the audacious tenderfoot found himself in tough company, while Jack Payne and his Band kept the music swinging. Jimmy – real name James Casey – was perfecting the drunk act that would be hailed as the best of its kind in comic history. As he staggered on in top hat and tails, trying to reach the cigarette in his mouth with two wavering fingers, you could almost see the stage tilting beneath him as he attempted to stay upright. He would become known as ‘the comedian’s comedian’, and Frankie, watching open-mouthed from the wings, could never have guessed that within twenty years he would be following his idol out on to the stage of the London Palladium in successive Royal Variety shows. Or that Jack Payne would one day become his agent.
‘Jimmy performed his drunk act like a rhythmic ballet. There was a kind of beauty about it,’ Frankie said, marvelling. ‘Humour is all about conflicting elements – and here was a drunk performing a ballet! There’s conflict for you.’
Derek Roy was making lesser waves, but would go on to become the resident comedian on the BBC’s Variety Bandbox, the most successful radio show of its kind, and Frankie would join him in presenting the show on alternate weeks. A-mazing – but that night in Lewisham his career could have been nipped in the bud for all time when he suffered the ultimate humiliation for any comic … being hooted off the stage.
New talent went on right after the interval. Jimmy James had closed the first half, and curiously enough excelled naturally in the style which Frankie would later adopt. He was a brilliant adlibber, and could milk laughs from the slightest chance remark. He was once asked by a BBC producer what he did on the stage, and replied: ‘I’m glad you brought that up. It’s been worrying me for years!’ While in a historic live radio show from the Garrick Theatre in the early fifties he mislaid his script and went through an entire nine-minute sketch with a bemused Tony Hancock as his feed, making it all up as he went along. And nine minutes can be a long time.
Curtain up. Frankie heard his name called. Taking his usual deep breath to stem his nerves he walked out with as much confidence as he could muster – and froze as a blinding spotlight pinned him to the stage like a fly in aspic. He gulped, tried to stammer out the start of the Long John Silver story. And dried.
Someone in the audience tittered.
Frankie tried again. After a few seconds his voice faded away into silence. The huge theatre was deathly quiet, suddenly hostile.
And poor, unfortunate Frankie just stood there, the shivering hub of his own personal nightmare.
‘I had never known anything like it – and yet it was what I’d wanted all my life,’ he said much later, appreciating the irony of that dreadful night. ‘I could only stand there like an idiot screwing up my eyes against the glare. I tried to get going on the joke, but it was so off-putting that my voice just tailed away and I dried up! I suppose I just wasn’t used to it.’
The audience started to laugh and heckle. Boos and cat-calls mingled with the jeers. From the pit the orchestra leader hissed, ‘Say something – or get off the stage!’
Frankie got off the stage. His eyes were streaming with tears of humiliation.
It was a chastening experience, the kind where a brave soul might say to himself: ‘One day I’ll laugh about this …’ And he did, years later, with Derek Roy. But not then. Frankie turned up his coat collar and crept away into the night.
He tried again, this time with the Carroll Levis Discoveries – nothing to do with jeans – that would eventually become a hit TV talent-spotting show. He keyed himself up no fewer than four times. ‘Comedy, impressions, comic monologues, dramatic speeches, I tried them all.’ Result? ‘Nothing. It was no good.’
Successful amateur, failed pro. Frankie Howard’s curriculum vitae could have been summed up in those few words, and it hardly made impressive reading. He could make people laugh with his sketches and gags on a local level – church hall audiences loved him. But when it came to the ‘real thing’, as far as a career in comedy was concerned, he was up against a brick wall and he knew it. Worse, he could see no way round or over it.
Then the war came, and with it a chance to conquer fresh pastures. That’s if he could conquer his nerves first.