Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

he eschewed the custom of caking the face in layers of make-up. He also elected to do without any of the formal, garish or gimmicky styles of dress.

      He chose instead to wear an ordinary, off-the-peg lounge suit and plain tie. The colour of both, he decided, would always be a medium shade of brown, because he thought that this could be relied on to be ‘a colour that didn’t intrude’: ‘It’s warm and neutral and man-in-the-street anonymous,’ he reasoned. ‘If people did notice my suit or tie I thought it would mean that they were not concentrating on my face.’²²

      He also resolved to dispense with the way that other comedians ‘framed’ each performance by making a formal entrance and exit. There would be no opening announcements or closing bows from him: he would simply walk straight up to the footlights and start talking – ‘No. Ah. Ooh, I’ve had such a funny day, today, have you?’ – and then, when he had finished, walk off again in a similar fashion, without ever signalling the presence of quotation marks.

      The key thing, he believed, was to create the impression ‘that I wasn’t one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street – as though into a pub, or just home from work. And I’d emphasise the calculated amateurishness of my presence and dress with a reference to the rest of the acts on the bill: “I’m not with this lot … Ooh no, I’m on me own!”’²³

      With all of this, he was almost ready: an unusually informal, ordinary-looking, everyday kind of clown with a plausibly flawed personality, a deceptively artful style of delivery and a rare gift for engaging an audience. There was just one further thing, he felt, that still needed to be done: he needed to change his name. He knew that he was stuck with ‘Frankie’, but he decided, none the less, to alter the spelling of’Howard’. There were, he was convinced, simply too many other, far more famous, Howards about.

      It was, in fact, an erroneous belief: in the absence of both Leslie (the London-bom Hollywood actor who had perished during the war) and Sydney (the portly Yorkshire comedian who had just died in June 1946), there was arguably only one notable Howard present in British show business at this time whose name had truly impinged on the public consciousness – and that was the actor Trevor Howard, who had only recently shot to stardom after playing the romantic lead in the 1945 movie, Brief Encounter.

      Even one solitary Trevor, however, appeared to be one too many for Frankie, who proceeded to change the spelling of his surname from ‘Howard’ to ‘Howerd’. Showing himself to be a surprisingly shrewd (if somewhat over-analytical) self-promoter, he reasoned that the minor alteration, aside from helping to distinguish him from the odd stem-feced matinée idol, would have ‘the added advantage of making people look twice because they assumed it to be a misprint’.²⁴

      Along with the name change came the invention of what in those days was called ‘bill matter’ (the slogan that accompanied the name displayed on the poster). There were plenty of examples to study: Max Miller was ‘The Cheeky Chappie’; Albert Modley ‘Lancashire’s Favourite Yorkshireman’: Vera Lynn ‘The Forces’ Sweetheart’; Donald Peers ‘Radio’s Cavalier of Song’; Robb Wilton ‘The Confidential Comedian’; and Sid Field ‘The Destroyer of Gloom’. Frankie Howerd, after much careful thought, came up with an epithet all of his own: ‘The Borderline Case’.²⁵

      Now, at last, everything really was well and truly in place. The professional career could commence.

      It began in his native Yorkshire, at the massive and Moorish Empire Theatre in Sheffield, on the night of Wednesday, 31 July 1946. Even though he was placed right down at the base of the bill, the act that was ‘Frankie Howerd: The Borderline Case’ proved impossible to miss. It was not just that he was different. It was also that he broke every rule in the book – literally.

      In How to Become a Comedian (a compact little manual that had been published in 1945), the veteran music-hall star Lupino Lane had spelled out the conventional code of conduct to be followed by any fledgling stand-up comic. Typical of his schoolmasterly instructions were the following sober decrees: ‘Any inclination to fidget and lack “stage repose” should be immediately controlled. This can often cause great annoyance to the audience and result in a point being missed. Bad, too, is the continual use of phrases such as: “You see?,” “You know!”, “Of course”, etc. These things are most annoying to the listener.’²⁶ Even if some people, at the time, might have resented the intolerant tone, no one really questioned the general advice. No one, that is, except Frankie Howerd.

      For all of his myriad insecurities, powerful bouts of crippling self-doubt and near-paralysing second thoughts, when it came to the true heart of his art, Howerd always knew exactly what he was doing – and what he was doing, on that first and on subsequent nights, was walking out in front of as many as 3,000 people and redefining the very nature of what being a stand-up was all about. He made it seem real. He made it into an act that no longer appeared to be an act. He pumped some blood through its veins.

      What made the newly professional Frankie Howerd so impressively sui generis as a performer was the very thing that made him seem, as a character, so very much like ‘one of us’. He stood out as a stand-up by refusing to stand out from the crowd. For all of his many influences, the thing that really made him special was his willingness to be himself.

      â€˜In those days,’ he would recall, ‘comics were very precise: they were word-perfect, as though reading their jokes from a script, and to fluff a line was something of a major disaster.’²⁷ Howerd, in contrast, told these same jokes just like the average member of the audience would have told these jokes: badly. He shook up the old patter from within, via a carefully rehearsed sequence of increasingly well-timed stutters, sidetracks and slip-ups, until, eventually, the whole polished package was scratched and then shattered – leaving people to laugh not so much at the jokes as at the person who was trying to tell the jokes.

      No audience, back in 1946, had anticipated such an approach, but, when it was witnessed, it worked. It worked, explained Howerd, because, unlike the conventional comedy style, the approach invited identification rather than mere admiration. By daring to appear imprecise, he brought his art to life:

      [The approach] worked, because the ordinary chap whom I was portraying is imprecise. You’ve only to listen to the answer when a TV interviewer asks what someone thinks of the Government: ‘Well … You know … Yes … Well, the Government … Yes, well … What more can I say? …’ People in real life don’t talk precisely as though from scripts, and neither did I attempt to on stage. My act sounded almost like a stream of consciousness, which is why I often didn’t finish sentences. ‘Of course, mind you …’ trailed away into silence – as again happens in real life.²⁸

      It was the perfect post-war comedy persona: a ‘proper’ person, with no airs or graces but plenty of fears and frailties – just like the vast majority of the people he was entertaining.

      Right from the start of his nine-month run in For the Fun of It, he was rated a performer of rare potential. Semi-hidden in the small print at the bottom of the bill, he soon became many theatregoers’ special discovery, the unknown performer who inspired them to exclaim at work the next day: ‘You should have seen this act!’ He soon started winning even more admirers once Bill Lyon-Shaw had coached him in the craft of commanding, as a professional, an ever-changing audience:

      He was actually a very poor timer in the earliest days of the tour,