Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

the Major, and the General, and send-up the Sergeant-Major. So they were a dead-cert audience to start with. Whereas once he went into Civvy Street, it was a different matter. When he got up North, for example, and into Yorkshire – where they’re a bloody hard lot anyway – they’d be saying, ‘What’s this bugger doin’ ’ere, ey? Does he not know what he’s about yet?’ He had all of that carry on. And so he had to learn timing, and learn to adjust his pace to the audience he was playing – you’ve got to be much faster in the South and much slower in the North, and you’ve got to be impossible in Scotland – and learn to pay far more attention to that kind of detail.²⁹

      Grateful for the expert advice, Howerd proceeded to do just that, and, as a consequence, gathered an even greater quantity of praise as the tour progressed. The other two novice professionals on the bill, Max Bygraves and Pam Denton, were also attracting an increasingly positive audience reaction. Both of them, as the tour evolved, would grow increasingly close to Howerd.

      The friendship with Bygraves was probably one of the firmest Howerd would ever have. Sharing both a dressing-room and digs throughout the duration of the tour, the two young comedians became each other’s primary advisor, sounding-board, supporter and all-purpose ‘cheerer-upper’.

      The first time that Bygraves (a much more traditional type of comedian) saw Howerd in action, he thought him ‘the most nervous performer I’d ever met’.³⁰ The act, however, impressed him – as, indeed, did the high degree of courage it took to do it – and he became very protective of his very talented but horribly anxious new friend. At the end of the tour’s first week, for example, Bygraves discovered that an over-cautious Frank Barnard was attempting to pressure Howerd into cutting out the most audacious aspects of his act. ‘Why don’t you stop bullying him?’ he shouted at the boss. ‘You can see the boy’s a nervous wreck, so why don’t you leave him alone until he gets settled?’³¹

      His intervention was only partially successful – Howerd did have to squeeze into his routine a few things that were more immediately recognisable as jokes – but the gesture, none the less, could hardly have touched the co-performer more deeply. ‘I’ve always been grateful to Max for speaking up for me,’ Howerd later said, ‘and I’ve always admired his guts: after all, like me he’d been in the business just a week, yet there he was arguing the toss with the management and risked being tossed out of the show on his ear.’³²

      The pair went on to evolve together as performers. ‘We were about the same age, same weight and height,’ Bygraves reflected, ‘and both had the same dreams of making our way in show business.’³³ Both certainly benefited from being taken under the wing of the senior pro on the tour, Nosmo King.³⁴

      An asthmatic, cigar-puffing stand-up comic in his sixtieth year (whose somewhat ironic stage name had been inspired by a ‘NO SMOKING’ sign he once spied in a railway carriage), King used to stand and watch his two young protégés every night from the wings, and then afterwards, over a cup or two of hot tea in his dressing-room, he would advise them on what they had done well and what he believed they could learn to do better.

      One of his most useful tips of the trade concerned the art of voice projection. Sensing that both Howerd and Bygraves, as they began to work the large and noisy halls, were sometimes struggling to make themselves heard (and were therefore vulnerable to heckles of the ‘Oi! We’ve paid out money – don’t keep it a secret!’ variety), King took each of them to the centre of the stage, made them look at the EXIT sign in the middle of the circle, and then said: ‘Now pretend that sign is somebody’s head. Don’t talk like we are talking now. Don’t shout, but throw your voice at that sign.’ The increase in power, clarity and authority was evident, to both, immediately: ‘It worked,’ exclaimed Bygraves gratetfully, ‘it really worked!’³⁵

      While all of this comic bonding was going on, it appears that Howerd was also forming a far less predictable romantic attachment to the female third of the tour’s troupe of youngsters: Pam Denton. How real (and how intimate) this relationship actually was remains unclear – he would make no mention of it in his memoirs, and she would subsequently disappear without a trace from public life – but, according to Max Bygraves, Denton was one woman with whom Howerd became ‘totally enamoured’.³⁶

      He certainly liked her, and liked spending time with her, and she, in turn, appears to have enjoyed being with him. He had always been fascinated by speciality acts (he would be joined on a subsequent tour by strongwoman Joan ‘The Mighty Mannequin’ Rhodes), and had been drawn right from the start of the tour to Denton’s carefully choreographed on-stage contortions. He also warmed to her calm, down-to-earth and friendly personality – and, like any other comedian, he loved the fact that she laughed so long and so loudly at so many of his jokes.

      Tall and thin with an engagingly open face and a bright, gap-toothed grin, he had, in those days, a far from unpleasant physical presence, and, when his spirits were high, he was quite capable of exuding a considerable amount of charm. His problem, however, was that while it took something extraordinary to lift his spirits up, it only took something trivial to drag them down to the floor. As Bill Lyon-Shaw recalled:

      Poor Frank was very shy, very introverted, and terrified of everybody – especially women. I think the main reason for this was that he’d been turned down by a lot of the girls of the ATS – let’s face it, he was no oil painting! – and I gather that they’d been rather cruel to him. So that was the thing that had made him so frightened of women.³⁷

      Denton, however, was different. She admired his talent, and was touched by his vulnerability; whether she wanted ultimately to make love to him or merely to mother him, she certainly wanted to share many of her spare hours with him. He was gentle, attentive and very, very funny, and, in her eyes, he made even the toughest times of the tour seem tolerable.

      He dubbed it ‘Our Tour of the Empire – The Empire Sheffield, Wigan, Huddersfield, Glasgow …’³⁸ When things had gone well for both of them, he would relax, sit back, and entertain her with a selection of dialogue and one-liners he had memorised from the movies of W.C. Fields. When things had gone badly for her, he would put an arm around her shoulder, mock her critics and make her laugh. When things had gone badly for him, he would slump down, hold his head in his hands, and explain, in his inimitable gabbling manner, what he believed had actually happened – which often made her laugh even more.

      Neither Denton nor Bygraves, for all of their deep affinity for their friend and fellow-performer, could ever quite fathom the full reason why a man so marked by self-contradictions soldiered on with such faith and fortitude. One day it was all about carpe diem: he would lecture all and sundry on the importance of making one’s own luck, staying true to one’s ambitions and never, ever, giving up. The next day it was all about embracing one’s fate: fancying himself as a serious reader of palms, he would often grab Bygraves’ hand, gaze at it for a moment and then assure him solemnly that he could look forward to one day becoming a millionaire (‘Frank,’ Bygraves would always say with a world-weary sigh, ‘I think you’ve got your wires crossed’).³⁹

      There seemed to be something equally contradictory about his attitude to his audience. He dreaded rejection, but, whenever he sensed that it might be about to happen, he appeared to actively invite it. If