Classic British Comedy

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Will Hay: the lost master of British comedy
A new biography of Will Hay should help revive the reputation of this brilliant, shifty star, says Jack Watkins.
16 Jan 2009

The British are never happier than when garnishing the memories of their finest old comedians. Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe may have been dead for more than 20 years, but, from the endless TV reruns and documentaries, it's as if they've never left us. Max Miller, a generation older still, has his gags resuscitated, even though the best of them pre-date the Second World War. But where's Will Hay in all this nostalgic reverie? The 100th anniversary of his birth (1888), and the 50th anniversary of his death (1949) passed without noticeable comment.

It's taken until now for the first full biography of his life to be written, an overdue salutation to this forgotten hero of English comedy, the overlooked link between music hall and Ealing Studios.

Hay was big box office in his day, though even then this reserved, cerebral man, a regular of the BBC radio programme The Brains Trust, who studied astronomy and built telescopes for a hobby, was probably never truly loved by the masses. His screen persona, unlike many other British comedy or musical stars, was never the put-upon little man, or the perky ingenuous type, enlisting audience sympathies with a gormless smile and a wink at the camera (George Formby), a cheery factory floor sing-a-long (Gracie Fields), or by playing the hapless, would-be romantic (Norman Wisdom). Hay played authority figures – schoolmasters, police sergeants, station managers or prison governors – often in the job by accident, mistaken identity or a bogus CV, and trying to conceal serial incompetence through deceit, bluster, and obfuscation.

His manner was semi-genteel, but this would slowly fracture as his ignorance was exposed by pupils or subordinates. He would brazen it out by bellowing indignantly or resorting to violence – a cuff round the ear, a rap over the fingers with the cane – but a sniff, followed by a cough and a shifting of the pince-nez, would show his shaken dignity.

The adjectives most critics have used when describing his comic persona are "seedy" and "shifty". He was middle-aged and balding – actually a scratch wig covering a full head of hair – and his screen image was utterly sexless, in spite of a private reputation as a ladies' man. Other than in the underrated Where There's a Will (1936), he was seldom seen to express affection for another character. It's been said that only W C Fields rivalled his scheming, unlikeable traits. How could such a figure nevertheless have us rooting for him?

In fact, you only have to watch the Marx Brothers to see that likeability is not a prerequisite of audience laughter and sympathy. There's a sense, too that though Hay played a rascal, he was not the tyrant he pretended to be.

Somehow his underlings, normally as weak-willed and useless as he was, would recognize this, and they'd team up to save each others' necks.

Hay had developed his act on stage as a drag schoolmistress but, realising that his prim, ladylike impersonation precluded giving schoolboys a clump, he switched the gender. "The Fourth Form of St Michael's", the sketch which became the prototype for the later film scenarios, was perfected in the music halls of the Moss Empires circuit of the Twenties and Thirties. Hay's teacher, in cape and mortar board, despite an ignorance suggesting the only book he'd ever read was Ruff's Guide to the Turf, would attempt to teach a senile old man – recognizable as Harbottle in the films, played by Moore Marriott – and a knowing, bolshy youth – Albert, played by the Bunteresque, cor' blimey cockney Graham Moffatt. Scenes were built around wordplay and rambling dialogue, rather than gags, and there would be arguments about whether Hastings 1066 was a telephone number, or if Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, or an ohm was "somewhere what there's no place like."

The schoolmaster act appeared on the big screen in Boys Will Be Boys (1935), Good Morning Boys (1937), and The Ghost of St Michael's (1941).

The undisputed Hay classic, however, was Oh! Mr Porter (1938), in which he was the station master of the tumbledown, rural Irish station of Buggleskelly. A rarity of British comedy of the Thirties in its happy melding of music hall repartee and purely cinematic effects, it included many of the finest moments of the partnership with Marriott and Moffatt ("Next train's gone!"). The delight in eccentricity and obsolescence in this and other films he made with the pair, notably Ask a Policeman (1939), and Where's That Fire? (1939), foreshadowed the post-war Ealing comedies.

Hay split from Marriott and Moffatt because he argued the routines were becoming repetitive. His ego may have bridled, too, at the way Marriott often drew the bigger laughs. But ill health restricted his later public appearances, and having made his last film, the black comedy My Learned Friend in 1944, he had pretty well faded from view by the time of his death.

Watching Hay films today is a curious experience. They seem to exist in an Edwardian, rigidly class-bound world that we can scarcely imagine, and the pacing is often awkward. Yet there is an abrasive, delinquent quality to the best of them that makes for bracing viewing. There's a satisfying depth, cynicism and ambiguity about Hay's character, and an absence of sentiment, that wears well. It's time his talent as the true genius of inter-war British comedy was unequivocally celebrated.

* 'Will Hay', by Graham Rinaldi, with a foreword by Ken Dodd, will be published by Tomahawk Press ( www.tomahawkpress.com )

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It's nearly 25 years since he died, but still only Tommy Cooper can get away with... what do you give a cannibal who's late for dinner? The cold shoulder.
Clement Freud
20th March 2009

The late, great Tommy Cooper died 25 years ago next month - but his comedy lives on more than ever Tommy Cooper died on stage at Her Majesty's Theatre, London, 25 years ago next month. His wife, Gwen, whom he called Dove, was sitting at home watching the show on television. His mistress Mary, who was also his stage manager, was standing in the wings.

Jimmy Tarbuck was hiding under Tommy's huge red cloak, passing him the props in one of Cooper's best-known acts. Tommy was to have hauled out a succession of unlikely objects - a bucket, a mannequin's leg for the display of nylon stockings, a large wooden stepladder - before Jimmy himself emerged to protest he couldn't pass anything more through.

When Tommy collapsed clutching his chest, the audience laughed and cheered until the curtain came down and they realised that this time it was not another stunt deliberately gone wrong. Since it was being televised live, Jimmy Tarbuck had to continue as compere. And because, for legal and medical reasons, no one was allowed to move the body, the show carried on in front of the curtain with Cooper's size-13 boots protruding from beneath.

I had met Tommy Cooper around 1960 at J Sheekey - a restaurant near Covent Garden that steamed startlingly fresh fish, which was served with a choice of either lobster or parsley sauce. He was sitting with a party to whom he related how he had tried to avoid Army service - he actually spent seven years in the Horse Guards - by slotting his left hand under his shoulders and claiming to be a hunchback. He showed how it was done, standing up (he was 6ft4in), speaking loudly in his Devon accent, watched and encouraged by the entire J Sheekey clientele, which tended to be a mixture of greengrocers, actors and pugilists.

Tommy Cooper was a star of television, which was then just starting up as a form of entertainment. I was a nightclub owner who had achieved a modicum of regional fame doing a cookery programme for the fledgling Southern TV. South of Guildford I was occasionally recognised. Cooper was nationally famous. He and I became friends. He asked me to call him Thomas - Tommy, he explained, was his stage name. For some years, when he was performing in London, we had lunch at Sheekey's. I always paid the bill. Thomas was famously mean - deliberately, professionally, entertainingly unkeen to put his hand in his pocket.

'Have a drink on me,' he told the bandleader of the group which had accompanied him at a Blackpool theatre for a week as he handed him a bulging envelope. It contained half a dozen tea-bags. It is on public record that he was wildly unpunctual, drank to excess - Barry Cryer recalls breakfast in one Bournemouth hotel when Tommy demanded a gin and tonic with his cornflakes - and smoked 40 cigars a day.

He suffered from multitudinous ailments - chronic indigestion, sciatica, lumbago, bronchitis - and, like the Daily Express, was the victim of severe circulation problems. It is also known that not infrequently he beat up his wife, Gwen. When it happened, she would call Miff Ferrie, Tommy's agent and manager, saying she was leaving him. Ferrie noted the calls down in his diary. 'She is divorcing Tommy,' he wrote on one occasion. 'Can't stand it any more. He keeps beating her up. Last time was on their anniversary.'

Gwen admitted the marriage was volatile. Their son wrote that they did have fights but his mother was more than a match for him. She would throw things at him and he would spend his time ducking. And there was his mistress, Mary Kay, who some dismissed as a passing fancy - though she was a respected stage manager with whom he fell in love. They met in 1967 in a church hall used by Thames TV for rehearsals and she accompanied him on tours, which his wife declined to do.

I simply found him good company. A typical lunch has him lumbering in an hour and a half late, not absolutely sober, smoking a cigarillo. 'What are you drinking?' he asks. I say: 'Gin and tonic.' He says: 'Thanks, I'll have one of those too.' Suddenly, he starts to jump up and down. 'Are you all right Thomas?' 'I took some Milk of Magnesia but forgot to shake the bottle.' His face lights up, as it always did when he told a joke.

His jokes would continue through the meal, always funny - though many people tried his lines without succeeding in getting anything like his laughs: 'I had a ploughman's lunch the other day. The ploughman was furious. This woman went to the doctor who examined her, and said: "You have a bad back." She said: "I want a second opinion." He said: "All right, you're ugly as well." 'I backed a horse at 20-1. It came in at 20 to four. A man walked into the doctor's. He said: "I've hurt my arm in several places." The doctor said: "Well, don't go there any more".'

Thomas Frederick Cooper was born in Caerphilly in 1921, son of Tom - a Welsh-born Army recruiting sergeant, and his wife, Gertrude, who came from Crediton in Devon. When the boy was three, the family moved to Exeter for the climate. His parents had a van from which they sold ice- cream at county fairs and Thomas acquired a West Country accent that became part of his act. At the age of eight an aunt bought him a conjuring set, on which he worked long hours: conjuring became part of his act.

In his first job at a South Coast dockyard, he entertained fellow shipwrights with his tricks and found they laughed even more if the tricks did not work; that also became part of his act. In 1940, he was called up into the Army, and was posted to Montgomery's Desert Rats in Egypt, where he performed in the Naafi Entertainment Unit. One evening, in a sketch in which he was scheduled to wear a pith helmet which he had forgotten to bring, he took a fez from a passing waiter and put it on his head. That remained in his act for the rest of his life; he was wearing it when he died.

It was impossible not to like him and on the 20th anniversary of his death I hosted a Radio 4 programme about Thomas. Afterwards, I received a letter from Weston-super-Mare. It was from his mistress. I was taken by her accounts of the general acceptance of their relationship by her family.

'Dear Clement Freud. Mary Kay here. I had to listen to your programme as I was happily involved with Tommy for almost 20 years. I am sad that I was dismissed as "a prop girl" and " lightly connected" by one of your guests. I was stage manager for Thames TV for many years, had no interest in "Light Ent" as it was called, when they asked me, as a favour, to work on a Cooper show. I soon discovered how totally dedicated Thomas was towards his work. I was told by our PA that Tommy wanted my phone number so that he could ring and take me out. Very flattered. I did admire him - and the way he worked endlessly on his pathetic little sketches.

'He asked me to work with him in Scarborough one summer season and we were soon living together. It was a difficult decision but my husband (who was in a relationship with a woman who worked at Thames) approved of Tommy - eventually they became good friends and were always sending humorous anecdotes to each other. Norman and I took turns looking after our beautiful sons and, by the way, they were happy about Tommy and I; my youngest had a particularly good relationship with him, spent a season with him at Skegness, used to caddy for him around the golf course.

'I looked after Tommy because his wife did not wish to help with props and clothes and cooking. She was a great lady and I know they had a good relationship, but I'm glad I was able to help with so much. He often said: "Mary, I want you to be with me till the day I die." I was - even in the ambulance on the way to the hospital I held his hand. We had a very wonderful life, full of fun and love - he was an absolutely beautiful man to be with.'

Last December, I went to Westonsuper-Mare to call on Mary. She has the face of a well-bred angel and is small and a bit bent, the way you are if you were born in 1927 and have had a couple of accidents over the past three years. She lives with her partner, William; they have been together for 20 years. He cherishes her. I took them to lunch at a local restaurant. William had steak, Mary ordered a salad of watercress, pear and gorgonzola which turned out to be pretty grim. We went to their house, which has a garden and a tree. 'Not too many trees in Weston-super-Mare gardens,' she said.

'Why did you move to Weston?' 'I came here because they were hounding me in London; I had been Thomas's mistress for ten years - or was it 20?' She beats her small fist against her smooth forehead to restore memory. 'Until he died, we spent our lives together - except for Sundays and holidays when he went home to his wife and children.'

Mary organised him: companion, dresser, driver, made his props and fezes, wrote his letters for him, of which she has copies, though she has nothing written by him and only the one picture of the two together, with an inscription on the back - by her. They toured together: Blackpool, Brighton, Cardiff, Italy, Belgium, all over. They were booked into hotels as Mr and Mrs Cooper. I mention Thomas and drink. 'Brandy, I have noticed, doesn't bring out the best in people,' says Mary.

On the morning of the day Thomas collapsed on stage, he had said to her: 'Mary, when I die you will never have to worry about money again.' She sits in an armchair which is much too big for her, has a slight coughing attack, and apologises. 'He was a very good and generous man. I just accepted what he gave me: sometimes £5, sometimes £20.' I ask about his will. 'Nothing in his will, though there still might be (William catches my eye and looks up to heaven). I don't know why he had to die.'

MARY was born in Rotherham, the youngest of three children of a man in the steel business - 'a very educated man' says William - and a strict Catholic. She was sent to a convent in Buxton followed by Drama School, then Matlock Theatre. There, she played juvenile leads and the piano. Her elocution teacher got her an audition at Covent Garden where she sang for two years, met Arthur Ridley of Dad's Army fame, married Norman Kay, who was a musical director, lived in Kensington and had children. She then went back into showbusiness as a stage manager with Thames Television and they asked her to do the Tommy Cooper show.

So, a graph of Mary's life would show 40 years of straightish lines with minor ups and downs, two decades of towering highs and lows, followed by another brace of West Country contentedness. Today, she has William to care for her and a chair by the tree in the garden where she sits and looks back upon a hectic existence that revolved around false legs, disappearing parrots, fezes to prepare, fanmail to answer and a star who depended on her.

A star who she probably knew better than anyone else; a genius of comedy who left her 'just like that', as he used to say.

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*Clement Freud is the grandson of Sigmund

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Life is no joke for the most popular clown around
P Whitington
independent.ie
June 19 2010

Nothing dates quite as badly as comedy, and while classic acts like the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy do achieve a kind of immortality, most funny folk are doomed to become outmoded and forgotten. Such is the fate of Sir Norman Wisdom, who once upon a time was the most popular film comedian in Britain, and even threatened to make it big in America, but is now largely unknown to anyone under 40.

Now 95, Sir Norman is living in an old folk's home on the Isle of Man, the tax haven to which he retreated in the 1960s. He has been suffering for the past five years with vascular dementia, which has devastated his memory to the extent that he no longer recognises himself in his own films. He's not the only one. In a BBC2 documentary called Wonderland: The Secret Life of Norman Wisdom Aged 92 in 2008, he came face to face with obscurity. In a heartbreaking moment, he asked a little boy outside his grandson's school if he knew who he was. The boy stared at him blankly, even when he announced with a smile that he was Norman Wisdom. How are the mighty fallen.

For Norman was once a favourite of royalty, a beloved national institution and among the highest-paid British film stars of his day. In many ways, he belonged to the old tradition of the sad clown, and Charlie Chaplin was among his biggest fans. But Norman started out with different ambitions, and stumbled on comedy only by chance.

Born on February 4, 1915 in Marylebone, London, Norman was raised in considerable hardship. His father was a chauffeur, his mother a theatre dressmaker, and as a boy Norman, his brother and parents all slept in one room. After his mother died, Norman spent several years in a children's home in Kent before leaving school at 13 to become a grocer's boy. He also worked as a coalminer, a waiter, and a cabin boy on an Atlantic cruise ship before joining the army.

In the Royal Hussars, he learnt to box, becoming a noted flyweight. And it was while fooling around in the gym one day that he discovered his capacity for slapstick comedy. Over time, he worked up a vaudeville act that involved jokes and pratfalls and some singing -- he had a sweet singing voice, and would later go on to have a number of hits.

He was performing a charity concert in Cheltenham Town Hall during World War II when he was spotted by a noted entertainer in the audience. Rex Harrison was suitably impressed, and came backstage after the show to urge Norman to become a professional comic. In 1946, Norman left the army and did just that. At first he worked as a comic sidekick to the popular magician David Nixon, but once Norman had honed his act he hit the big time pretty fast.

He began sporting a cheap suit several sizes too small with a crumpled shirt and tie and a flat cap worn askew. He developed a trademark idiotic laugh and a tendency to fall over at the drop of a hat. Audiences loved it, and within a few years Norman was packing out West End theatres and Charles Chaplin was calling him "my favourite clown". In 1953 he began a very fruitful collaboration with the Rank Organisation that would result in 15 hugely popular films. In comedies like Trouble in Store (1953), Man of the Moment (1955), The Bulldog Breed (1960) and A Stitch in Time (1963), Norman played a diminutive everyman who endures a series of disastrous setbacks and misunderstandings before emerging triumphant at film's end.

He almost always played the same character, Norman Pitkin (though the surname sometimes changed, the personality never did), and was generally engaged in some kind of menial employment -- a butcher's boy, milkman, department store flunkie, or lonely beat cop. He usually hankered after some unattainable woman to whom he could not summon the courage to speak, and was bullied by a posh employer or authority figure. He was often teamed with Yorkshire character actor Edward Chapman, who played a kind, exasperated stooge, and led to the most famous Norman Wisdon catchphrase, "Mr Grimsdale!"

Norman's appeal at this remove is not easy to explain. His films were not especially well-scripted or witty, and relied in the main on his considerable skill as a physical comic. His energetic slapstick was both impressive and strangely graceful, and reminiscent of great silent comics like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Chaplin. Like Chaplin, Norman traded on the winning charm of the downtrodden everyman, and his films also had a lot in common with those of the ukulele-strumming, northern comic George Formby. And while critics might not have thought much of Norman's endearing idiocy and constant pratfalling, the plain people of Britain took him to their hearts.

Every self-respecting schoolboy in the 1960s and even '70s (when his films were still being shown on television) could do a half decent Norman Wisdom impression, and in fact comedian Lee Evans is still doing one today. Norman's appeal was not confined to Britain. His films did well here in Ireland. And in a poor and largely rural country on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, he became an unlikely superstar. For some reason, Wisdom's 1950s' comedies were among the very few Western films that were allowed to be shown in Albania during the Cold War era. Perhaps partly as a consequence, Norman became a superstar there.

When he was invited to visit the country in 1995 after the fall of communism, Norman was overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome he received, with even the country's president, Sali Berisha, admitting he was a huge fan. And when Norman visited again in 2001 when England were playing Albania, his presence at the England training ground eclipsed that of David Beckham. Back in Britain, however, the dawn of the swinging '60s coincided with a sharp decline in Norman's fortunes. At 50-odd he was getting a bit old to play a juvenile clown, and his antics and comedic style seemed suddenly outdated. By the end of that decade his film career was effectively over.

He ploughed on, appearing in Royal Variety shows and even starring in a Broadway play, and only officially retired from showbusiness in 2005. But the game was up, and soon a generation of Britons would appear who didn't even recognise his name.