Enthusiastic UK comedy with the dead Malcolm Hardee and a new Chris Rock

Charlie Chuck backstage last night

I went to Adam Larter’s very aptly named Weirdos Comedy Club in the East End of London last night with comedian Charlie Chuck, who donned his new-ish PVC suit for the performance at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.

It’s no wonder Weirdos and Bethnal Green are much talked about. Equally odd Holly Burn was on the bill (“one to watch in 2013” said the Independent) plus Lee Kern as four-letter one-man band British Pasta plus 2011 Edinburgh ‘Best Newcomer’ Daniel Simonsen and 2011 Edinburgh ‘Best Newcomer’ Thom Tuck.

“Will there be any TV talent scouts around?” a friend asked me.

“No,” I said. “Too trendy for TV people.”

Which demonstrates what I know.

Because, after the show, I bumped into Polly McGirr, TV producer for Princess Productions and Managing Director of Up The Creek Management.

People tend to assume that Malcolm Hardee, the late godfather of British Alternative Comedy, owned his Up The Creek comedy club. In fact, the money was put up by three brothers – I like to call them The Brothers – and he initially owned an equal 25% in return for handling the creative side of the club.

Up The Creek club could have been named Jools’ or Malcolm’s

I think at one early stage Jools Holland was going to invest in the club but decided not to and, at one point, the club was going to be simply called Malcolm’s but it was decided (oddly, I think) that it sounded too ‘Essex’.

Polly McGirr is the daughter of one of The Brothers and is wildly enthusiastic about comedy.

I was quite exhausted just hearing her enthusiasm.

“You remember Malcolm?” I asked.

“I remember the club that night,” she said.

“What night?”

“The night of his funeral. I remember all the acts getting on stage. I remember Jools Holland, Jo Brand and the naked balloon dance being performed and I remember when I was small Malcolm sweeping the stage. Whenever there was a shit act he…”

“You used to watch shows from the sound booth, didn’t you?” I asked, foolishly interrupting what could have been a good anecdote.

That’s what happens in snatched conversations.

“I’m so passionate about Up The Creek and I love it so much,” Polly enthused to me. “I remember being so young and my dad and my uncles allowing me to watch this comedy brilliance and seeing guys like Terry Alderton and Charlie Chuck. Brilliant, brilliant guys I adore so much now and Malcolm introducing new acts by saying Could be good. Could be shit. Fuck it! 

“On my 13th birthday, I remember going to the opening night of the Willesden club (there was briefly an Up The Creek offshoot there) and I remember Malcolm coming out and my mum screeching Noooo! He’s naked!”

“And now you’re managing director of Up The Creek Management,” I said.

“Oh,” Polly explained. “I just do the new talent stuff. I love the weekends at Up The Creek. There’s no other place like it. That spirit of Malcolm is still there.”

“And Sundays…” I prompted.

“They’re done by Will, Jane’s son (Malcolm’s stepson). It’s brilliant. I love Sundays. They’re amazing. But Thursdays is now New Talent night. It’s either established acts trying out new material or it’s brand new guys and it’s still the same thing – Could be good. Could be shit. You never know.

Polly McGirr enthuses after the Weirdos show last night

“People are always saying to me: Why don’t you vet acts before they go on stage on a Thursday? But I say No. It HAS to be open mic: the idea that a crowd will never know who’s going to come on next. Could be good, Could be shit. You just don’t know.”

“How long have you been doing it now?” I asked.

“Three years. And I love it. It’s my home. Really. Seriously. It’s ridiculous, but I love the club so much.”

“So how,” I asked, “did you get an interest in comedy? Just cos you were hanging around it so much? Because The Brothers’ background is not actually showbiz. They’re – what are they? – property magnates?”

“For a long time,” explained Polly, “I wasn’t really doing much about the club, because I’d been around it for so long… But now I work in television and, because I love the club so much, I thought What I really want to see is new talent back here and being established back here and I love shuffling through all the crazy acts to find a gem that you adore. When you feel that buzz and there’s a real mix of different types of acts.”

“And it crosses over with your television work,” I said.

“Yeah,” Polly agreed. “So now I can take acts from the club and put them on TV. Recently, we’ve taken two guys who I first met at the Up The Creek open mic nights and they’re on CBBC as Britain’s first black comedy double act – Johnny Cochrane and Inel Tomlinson. I first met them at the Open Mic and thought THAT is what it’s all about! Either side of them were insane acts and you saw their brilliance.”

“But people,” I suggested, “say television doesn’t like or want original comedy; it just does the same thing over and over again.”

“We’ve got Johnny Cochrane and Inel Tomlinson on screen.” countered Polly. “It took two years to get them on telly, but it has been the most amazing time to establish them. We’re not very good at doing it in the UK – cool comedy – until now. And I really believe there’s great female comedy out there as well.

“I really love Harriet Kemsley. What I love about her is it’s really, really ballsy. When she does a really aggressive joke, it’s brilliant, so beautifully written.

Up The Creek: Dane Baptiste, a new Chris Rock?

“But the new act you HAVE to see is Dane Baptiste.

“For me, he takes every brilliant element of the urban (black) circuit and he does what acts usually can’t do in the UK which is cross over from urban comedy to mainstream comedy. He is Chris Rock to me.”

Dane Baptiste is already signed with Polly’s Up The Creek Management, but it is unusual to see even a comedy manager let alone a TV person so enthusiastic, I had to go home, lie down and recover.

A great comedy show and scarcely-believable tales of Malcolm Hardee

The Greatest Show on many legs last night

It is a difficult blog to write if someone you know quite well does a really stonkingly good gig, because no-one is really going to believe you when you say how good it was.

Even moreso when it’s an entire comedy club evening.

All I can say is that last night’s Pull The Other One comedy show in Nunhead, South East London, was one of the best comedy nights I have been at. And I have been at a few.

Vivienne and Martin Soan’s Pull The Other One shows are always odd and always entertaining but – like all the very best comedy nights – there can be some ups and downs, much like a well-loved camel. Last night, there were no downs – it was more firm-peaked dromedary than lumpy Bactrian - and the very excitable audience had every right to be just that… excited.

New-ish Darren Maskell was fairly indescribable but, if I had to put words to it, I’d try ‘successfully surreal’ and audience member Phill Jupitus was roaring with laughter at many parts. I particularly liked the miniature-chainsawed ice sculpture Darren gave to a member of the audience.

Lindsay Sharman in full-flow as a rage-filled Scots poet was extremely funny, as perhaps only rage-filled Scots poets can be.

Stephen Frost (left) attacks Martin Soan’s hair last night

And then Stephen Frost threw one of Martin Soan’s shoes out of the first floor window, grabbed a pair of scissors and cut off parts of Martin’s shirt and half his hair simply so Martin could deliver a gag about being “half-cut”.

Now that is true dedication to comedy. Especially as, if you throw a shoe out of a window into a South East London street, there is no guarantee it will still be there when you go to collect it ten minutes later. Fortunately the shoe was still there, though a shirt and jeans had been stolen.

Then, back on stage, there was Phill Jupitus reprising his 1980s persona of Porky The Poet with old and new material performed with flawless comic timing, followed by Oram & Meeton wildly on-form.

Stephen Frost and triumphant Martin Soan partially obscured by rising, cheering audience members in London last night

It maybe sounds like an ordinary comedy night ‘bigged-up’. It was not. It was a wonderful, wonderful event. At the end, one of the performers asked me: “Was tonight as good as I think it was?”

“Yes it was,” I said.

The night was, in fact, as good as some of the best nights at the late Malcolm Hardee’s clubs The Tunnel Palladium and Up The Creek and, inevitably, Malcolm’s ghost made an appearance last night.

‘Porky The Poet’ had written new poems about Martin Soan, Stephen Frost and Malcolm Hardee (as well as one about touring with Madness).

And, at the beginning of the evening, a man approached me in the club’s darkness saying “I know your face.”

“Crimewatch?” I asked.

“No. You do occasional Facebook postings on the Malcolm Hardee Appreciation Society page and I recognise your face from there,” he said.

This I find slightly worrying, as there is only a tiny icon-type picture of me there and, although I have occasionally been ‘recognised’ by people in trains and at parties in the past, I have only been mis-recognised as a totally different person, because I have a very unexceptional face.

I have often been mistaken for a ‘Peter’. Whether this is one particular Peter or, more likely, a variety of different Peters nationwide, I know not.

But this guy who really did recognise me in the dark at Pull The Other One last night was one Nick Bernard.

“I used to live next door to Malcolm Hardee’s house in Fingal Street in the mid-1990s,” he told me. “Well, Malcolm wasn’t living there then – that bloke from Only Fools and Horses was – but I used to hang out a lot with Malcolm. Have you heard the story about his first date with Jane (his future wife)?”

“Try me,” I said.

“I think Malcolm had met Jane at Up The Creek,” said Nick.

“Yes,” I said, “the way she tells it, the first time she saw him, he was naked on stage…”

“It was Malcolm who told me this,” said Nick, “and then Jane who ‘affirmed the narrative’… He chatted her up after the show and arranged to go on a date the next day.

“So the next day he turns up in his Jaguar at her house all suited-and-booted to pick her up… but he is desperate to go to the loo. And, rather than knock on the door and say I’m really sorry, I’ve gotta go to the loo, he thinks the best thing is to go before he knocks on the door. Except he needs to do a shit not a wee.

“So he shits in her neighbour’s front garden but doesn’t have anything to wipe himself, so he pulls his suit back together, knocks on the door, takes her to the car, Jane gets into the car and becomes aware of this foul smell… but she still married him.

“There’s obviously some winning charm there.”

“I think,” I said, “women liked his innocence.”

“Well, he did have a huge charm,” said Nick. “I think it was the honesty. I mean he could be really quite cruel, but it wasn’t like mean or deliberate. He saw the line of humour and the eventual laugh and he thought: I’ll just go for the humorous line and fuck it!”

“I think the definitive Malcolm story,” I said, “is the Matthew Hardy one where…”

“Oh! And his tax!” Nick said.

“His tax?” I asked.

“Well, you know Malcolm never paid his tax?” asked Nick.

I nodded, obviously.

“So, after Matthew Hardy moved in with him,” said Nick, “there was an M.Hardee and an M.Hardy sharing an address – same name but different spellings. So, after Malcolm was owing multiple years of tax… Well, he had written to the tax office and said he’d died and that hadn’t worked… Well, it did for a bit… Then he wrote to them saying You’ve been getting my name wrong and he told them he was M.Hardy not M.Hardee… Then the tax office started chasing Matthew Hardy…”

“After Malcolm died,” I told Nick, “his brother Alex was sitting sorting through the paperwork in Malcolm’s place and the phone rang. It was someone from the tax office asking: Can I speak to Mr Malcolm Hardee, please? So Alex says, I’m afraid he died and the taxman says, You tried that last year, Mr Hardee.

“But the definitive Malcolm story, I think, is the one Matthew Hardy tells on the anecdotes page of his website…”

THIS IS MATTHEW HARDY’S STORY:

Malcolm Hardee on the Thames (photo by Steve Taylor)

He took my visiting elderly parents out in his boat. Goes up the Thames and on the right was some kind of rusted ship, pumping a powerful arc of bilgewater out of its hull, through a kind of high porthole, which saw the water arc across the river over fifty foot.

I’m on the front of the boat as Malcolm veers toward the arc and I assume he’s gonna go under it, between the ship and where the arc curves downward toward the river itself. For a laugh.

Just as I turn back to say “Lookout, we’re gonna get hit by the filthy fucking water” – the filthy fucking water almost knocked my head off my shoulders and me off the boat. I looked back to see it hit Malcolm as he steered, then my Mum and then Dad.

I wanted to hit him, and my Dad said afterwards that he did too, but we were both unable to comprehend or calculate what had actually happened. Malcolm’s decision was beyond any previously known social conduct. He must have simply had the idea and acted upon it. Anarchy.

We laugh… NOW!”

In defence of blind and dishonest policemen

Up The Creek comedy club in Creek Road, Greenwich, London

Sometimes you need scum to hold society together. Take the police and politicians.

Yesterday I was in Greenwich.

Around lunchtime, I was walking on the other side of the street from Up The Creek comedy club.

Five men were standing outside the club. One man was being repeatedly punched in the face by two of the men. The other two were standing watching.

At around ten o’clock last night, I went out to buy some chocolate for my eternally-un-named friend from a late-night shop. I was walking along the pavement a little way from Up The Creek, near a road junction – If you know Greenwich, it was at the start of Creek Road, where traffic from central Greenwich’s square one-way system comes round into two-way Creek Road.

There was heavy traffic driving along the other side of the road. A man wearing a grey suit was standing in the middle of my side of the road near the junction, facing the on-coming traffic, doing slow-motion tai-chi moves. His back was to the blind corner of the junction. No traffic was coming round the corner behind him (it is controlled by traffic lights). But any vehicles coming round that corner would not see him until the last moment and would, fairly inevitably, hit him.

As I approached him, the man slowly staggered off the road and onto the pavement behind me. A few minutes later, as I was leaving the chocolate shop, the man staggered in asking where he could buy drink.

Yesterday, an MP used Parliamentary privilege to reveal that Sir Norman Berttison (South Yorkshire police chief at the time of the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster in which 96 people died – currently Chief Constable of West Yorkshire) “boasted” about a plot to “fit up the Liverpool fans”. It is claimed he said at the time: “We are trying to concoct a story that all the Liverpool fans were drunk and we were afraid that they were going to break down the gates so we decided to open them.”

The (allegedly) Independent Police Complaints Commission has been given the names of 1,444 officers, including 304 serving police, to investigate over the disaster. According to the Daily Mail, around 164 police statements were altered to make them look more favourable to the agreed police version of events.

And, according to a piece in the Daily Mail on 12th September this year, “Richard Wells, who took over at South Yorkshire Police a year after the 1989 tragedy that killed 96, admitted the scale of the conspiracy to pin the blame on the innocent dead and injured had left him ‘disappointed and angry’.”

Other people might have said that a conspiracy made them disappointed and angry. He appears to have said it was “the scale” of the conspiracy which disappointed him. An interesting distinction.

Samurai swords, as used by armoured Japanese warriors

I was also interested to read a couple of days ago in the Guardian a follow-up to a previous news story in which a policeman used a 50,000 volt taser on a 62 year-old blind man because he thought the blind man’s white stick was a samurai sword.

White cane of a type used by blind or partially-sighted people

I had not realised that this registered blind man, who previously had two strokes and reportedly is only able to walk at a “snail’s pace” was tasered in the back.

The policeman involved has not been suspended pending any investigation and is still allowed to carry and use a taser.

As far as I understand it, police rules on tasers say they should only be used when there is an imminent and high threat to the police officer involved. Quite how this could happen when the “threat” is a man walking away at a snail’s pace with his back to the policemen, is an interesting logistical point.

“Perhaps the police are employing blind people themselves,” I suggested to my eternally-un-named friend last night. “Perhaps it’s an equal opportunities initiative.”

“You’re very unfair,” she said.

“Tell me about the waving knives story,” I suggested and pressed the record button of my iPhone.

“I had just finished shopping at Marks & Spencer’s in Greenwich,” she said. “It was about six o’clock at night and I was stepping out of the door. The pavement was empty except for this child of maybe ten or eleven who was maybe two shops away, stomping along, with his arms moving as he marched. He wasn’t slow. He looked like he knew where he was going. He had a plan. And, in each hand, he had a foot-long bread knife. He wasn’t waving them about over his head; they were swinging backwards and forwards as part of his marching.

“He was a little guy, which made the knives look even longer. He was maybe up to my chin and I’m 5’4”. He was stomping along. There was no-one on the pavement near him. I think maybe they had gone into shop doorways. But I was coming out of Marks & Spencer’s and my brain went: Do I just walk past him and assume he’s not going to stab me? Or do I not risk that because he’s obviously off on some odd mindset. It might be a case of Oh, I’ve got a knife… Ooh, there’s a woman. Let’s stab her!

I wasn’t stupid enough to think I wasn’t at risk. So I stepped back in, found the security guard and said, There’s a boy just about to pass… and, as I’m talking to him, the kid passes with the bread knives and the security guy rushed off to have a look at the video they have of what’s passing in the street.”

“And you never heard any more about the kid or anything happening?” I asked.

“No,” my eternally un-named friend said.

“And it was a few years ago,” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “I think it was before the shooting in my square… We used to have gangs running through from one side to the other.”

“How many?” I asked. “I thought it was just one person on one night.”

“No,” she corrected me. “There was one person who was shot. That was one gun on one night, though who knows how many guns the others had? No, there were gangs of ten or twenty passing through. I didn’t count and it was a bit hard to tell. It was like rats going down holes. And, if you’re coming back from shopping and they’re running towards you – Whooaaa! – You suddenly pass someone who’s charged towards you holding some metal bar in his hand, looking back over his shoulder.

“They were having a whale of a time having fights. It happened for about two or three years. It stopped after the actual shooting. Sometimes the police came, but there was a time when I phoned up and said: There’s a bunch of youths outside. What do I do? 

“What are they doing now? I was asked.

“Well, at the moment, I said, they’re just sitting on a bench talking, but one’s just thrown a glass panel from a shower unit into the children’s play area

“Well, said the policeman, that’s a past event now, isn’t it?… That was a minute ago, so it’s not happening now, is it?

“But, I said, there’s obviously something wrong with them. It was a six-foot high pane of glass…

“It was like you’ve heard in Victoria Station. They would have running fights. Wasn’t someone stabbed there? That was what was happening in Greenwich for a couple of years. You would be sitting here and there would be a commotion outside for five minutes or half an hour, then it would stop a bit and you’d look out and see little groups because they were waiting for someone or whatever.

“When the shooting happened, the first I knew was this BANG! and everything went deathly quiet. The next time I looked out, I saw a little policewoman standing with tape at one entrance to the square, cordoning it off. All the entrances were taped off.

“Someone told me They’ve shot someone, but he hasn’t died and I said Well, that’s a pity. One down, nineteen to go - because you got so blasé with it.

“You no longer cared if people killed each other, you just wished they would and would they mind hurrying up about it, please? That’s the truth. That’s how you felt. It’s where you live. The noise was annoying, it was a bit frightening to step out. You’d think Oh, I could do with some milk. Will I go out now? Better not. Maybe that would be a bit daft.

“You just had to live with it, because no-one really did anything about it.”

Last night, I moved my car at about one o’clock in the morning, ready to drive away from Greenwich. I have had it broken-into twice in central Greenwich, so I now park it in a different area. As I turned a corner, there was the man in the grey suit I had seen a few hours earlier. Now he was staggering along in the middle of a side road, heading towards Creek Road, a main road from central Greenwich into London.

As I turned my car right into Creek Road, he staggered onto the pavement at the other side of the street. As I drove away, in my rear view mirror, I saw him turn around, half cross the main road then turn into the road, walking, swaying along the middle of the left side of Creek Road, his back to any oncoming traffic, heading towards London.

I hoped he would meet some police.

That is not a hope I often have.

I wanna tell you a meandering story which ends with a large sexual organ

No truth in obituaries

When the late comedian Malcolm Hardee died, the surprisingly voluminous obituaries quoted some of the many bizarre stories linked to him. But, often, the stories were slightly wrong. It was fairly obvious the obituarists had read Malcolm’s autobiography (which I wrote with him) but were slightly mis-remembering and mis-quoting the anecdotes.

One story involved his genitals getting painted in day-glo paint. It happened at the Glastonbury Festival but at least one obituary claimed he regularly did this at comedy clubs.

Now, because the mis-quoted and mis-remembered stories were printed, the myth will become fact.

Malcolm would have liked that.

Yesterday afternoon, I bumped into top rock fiddler Bobby Valentino in a street in Greenwich.

Somehow, the subject of calling people ‘Wally’ came up – as in “He’s a Wally,” meaning “He’s an idiot.”

I said: “I think that started at some rock festival in the West Country, didn’t it?”

Was it originally Wally from Essex or Wally from Wessex?

“No, Essex,” said Bobby Valentino. “There was a Weeley rock festival in Essex in 1971. I was still at school and a mate of mine, Barry Bartlett or Spot Hughes, came back from the Festival and said, Oh, I’m Wally from Weeley, and, from then on, everyone was called Wallies.”

“The story I heard,” I said, “was that an announcement kept being made Could Wally please contact the organisers about something and eventually people started to yell out Wally! as a term of derision and, when they left the festival and spread out to their homes across the country, the name spread all over the country too. That’s the story, isn’t it?”

“As far as I know,” said Bobby Valentino. (Update for regular readers of this blog: his dispute with PRS over royalties for past work continues.)

When I got home, I looked up Wikipedia, which currently reckons a Wally chant did develop over the course of the Weeley Festival weekend in 1971, but that it had been a continuation of the same behaviour at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.

I had heard the term ‘Wally’ had started in the West Country. This seems to have been because (again according to Wikipedia) in 1974, a group of New Age travellers encamped near Stonehenge were being evicted and, to hinder the eviction, they all gave their name as Wally of Wessex.

Stories take on their own life. And, you may have noticed, I have been quoting what is in Wikipedia as fact. Always a dubious thing to do. But people do.

Later yesterday, I got an e-mail from Bobby Valentino:

“After I saw you today,” it said, “I remembered an Edinburgh Festival story which I hope is true.

“Some years ago one of Kirk Douglas’s sons – the one who had the drink and drug problems – fancied himself as a comedian and booked himself a slot at the Festival. At one of his shows, he wasn’t going down at all well, brick-like in fact. He then said completely the wrong thing – Do you know who I am?… I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.

“A quick witted member of the audience immediately piped up: No, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son!  to be followed by another audience member… and another… and another.”

(For extraordinary people who have never seen the movie, this is a reference to the scene in Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus where, at the end, everyone in the hero’s army stands up and says I am Spartacus.)

“As far as I know,” I told Bobby Valentino, “the story is totally true, but it happened at the Comedy Store in London.”

I said this with some authority, having heard the story several times. But who knows if it is actually true?

“I think I might blog about stories tomorrow,” I told Bobby Valentino.

“If you do,” he said, “you should point out that there are two sorts of people who tell stories more than they actually do what they’re supposed to do – musicians and fishermen.

“John Sebastian wrote a song about it called Stories We Can Tell.  The Everly Brothers covered it and I played it with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.”

After all this, last night, I went to Vivienne and Martin Soan’s monthly Pull The Other One comedy club in Herne Hill, South London.

In May 2011, I posted a blog about a very weird night there which included, in the audience, a very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head and a beard.

He was there again last night and sat right by the stage.

Michael Smiley and audience member last night

About a third of the way through the wonderful Northern Ireland comedian Michael Smiley’s act, which involved tales of coming to Great Britain 30 years ago, the very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head and a beard asked in a conversational tone:

“Are you Scottish?”

“No,” replied Michael Smiley to loud laughter. “Are you Pakistani?” he added to louder laughter (including very loud laughter from the black gent).

When the laughter subsided, Michael asked: “Do you love people from Scotland?”

“I am the last king from Scotland,” the very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head and a beard told Michael Smiley.

“You’re the last king of Scotland?” Michael Smiley said. “You’re not mate. Let me spread a few more rumours for you. What else have the voices been telling you?”

“You can get on with the show now,” the very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head and a beard, said languidly.

“Well,” said Michael Smiley amiably, amid laughter, “if you’ll shut up, I will.”

“Alright,” said the very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head and a beard.

“Thankyou,” said Michael Smiley.

The audience laughed and then added in a few ironic Owwwws of sympathy.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Michael Smiley, joining in, “He comes in, sits at the front, shouts out mad shit all the time, I try to get on with my shit, I try to get him to shut his shit up and I’m the feckin’ bad guy!”

The audience roared with laughter.

“I might have to stand up here and wank off a pig for you by the end of the show, just to weird the whole thing up just a little bit more. White middle class Herne Hill come out for a bit of weirdness!

“Just so you can say to your friends tomorrow: You shouldn’t have bothered your arsehole with that new restaurant down in Brixton Village. We were up in Herne Hill last night in the dark like a firecracker and there was a mad black bloke at the front and a really angry Northern Irish guy on stage. That was two stereotypes for the price of one! I couldn’t believe it! All we needed was a fuckin’ midget on a unicycle… There’s an angry lesbian poet on at the end. This is like shit time travelling. All you people who bought your squats in the 1980s are just flipping out now. When you get back to your house, there’ll be a re-run of Boys From The Black Stuff on TV and you’ll come in your pants!…”

The audience roared with laughter.

It was a very weird night

And that is without even mentioning the very attractive young girl Mina The Horse prancing around the stage with a tail sticking out of her bottom or Richard Vranch and Pippa The Ripper giving a chemistry lesson with hula hoops or George Egg producing a large bowling ball from a small suitcase and sharing with the audience the fact that, to encourage their greyhounds to win races, owners smear mustard on the dogs’ arseholes when they put them in the starting traps.

After the show, my eternally-un-named friend who used to work for the late comedian Malcolm Hardee told me: “He once asked me to get a large penis for him.”

This was at his Up The Creek comedy club in Greenwich.

“I think he was being a bit… well, he might have actually wanted it but there was one somewhere – was it in the dressing room upstairs?” she asked me.

“Search me,” I said.

“Or maybe it was behind the upstairs bar,” she continued. “I think it was a prop.”

“You think it was a prop?” I asked. “But it might not have been?”

“You always ask me these things when I’m very tired,” my eternally-un-named friend complained. “It’s not fair. It was a prop. I don’t know what he was actually using it for at that point, because I hadn’t seen it in anything, but then I didn’t see the shows, did I, because I was in the box…”

“So did he…” I started to interrupt.

“…office,” she completed.

“So,” I continued, “did he suddenly just say Get me the giant penis?”

“It was after a show and everything was winding up,” my eternally-un-named friend explained, “and there was a large penis upstairs and I can’t remember now because I’m very tired, but I think it was a papier-mache one. Whether it was worn on the head or on another part of the body I don’t know. Maybe an act had had it and left it behind or whether Malcolm actually wanted it…”

“But you found it?” I asked.

“Well, he told me where it was,” she replied. “I think it was in the dressing room and there was a muddle of stuff up there, but it was obvious which one it was.”

“How giant was it?” I asked.

My eternally-un-named friend held her hands apart.

“That’s about 18 inches,” I said. “What colour?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “It was the early 1990s and I’m very tired, but I think it was a life-likey thing. I can’t help thinking it might have been some sort of headgear…”

“For a dickhead?” I asked.

“…or a prop,” she continued. “To be honest, I don’t even remember if it was papier-mache. You know who might know? Martin Soan. He might say, Oh yes, there was a giant penis we used.”

“Were there a lot of dickheads around Up The Creek?” I prompted.

“You know what Malcolm was like,” said my eternally-un-named friend, ignoring me. “There was a point where he has this stuffed cat, which you could easily get from the Nautical Shop.”

“That’s where he got it,” I said. “I was there when he bought it.”

But that’s another story.

Cutting the faggots with the lawyers – but not cutting crime in Greenwich

Yesterday afternoon, ironically, I went to the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

The reason why it was ironic will become evident later.

I was given a private tour of the building and, indeed, taken to the very Gents toilet where future Mensa member Alfred Hinds famously escaped for a second time (he escaped three times) by locking his two guards in the toilet round the corner from the Bear Garden. He was not a prisoner to mess with, as he also successfully managed to sue a Chief Superintendant in the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad for libel.

It is a very nice building, the Royal Courts of Justice, with allegedly 3.5 miles of corridors and 1,000 rooms, one of which is painted. I had my tour in the middle of the afternoon yesterday – Friday – and there appeared to be only one case being tried. It was suggested to me that this might have been because all the judges had knocked-off early to get to their country homes for the weekend.

Surely not.

But I was particularly impressed when I heard about the Royal Courts of Justice’s ancient ceremony of “cutting the faggots”. This is part of what is claimed to be the the second oldest ceremony in England (after the Coronation ceremony).

Details on this ceremony seem to be a bit sketchy but, as far as I can understand it, “cutting the faggots” is part of the feudal legal ceremony of “Rendering of The Quit Rents to The Crown”.

At this point we enter the area in which it is a joy to be British.

Apparently, “the paying of Quit Rents by the Corporation of the City of London to the King (or Queen) is an annual ceremony dating back to 1235. It takes place at the Royal Courts of Justice, where the City Solicitor hands to the Queen’s Remembrancer two faggots, six horseshoes and 61 horseshoe nails.”

The six horseshoes and 61 horseshoe nails are around 550 years old and are in payment – as rent – for an ancient forge in Tweezer’s Alley, near the Strand.

According to Wikipedia (and you could not really make this up):

During the ceremony, a black-and-white-chequered cloth is spread out — it is from this that the word “Exchequer” derives. The Solicitor & Comptroller of the City of London presents the horseshoes and nails and counts them out to the Remembrancer who then pronounces “Good number.” Two knives are tested by the Queen’s Remembrancer by taking a hazel stick, one cubit in length, and bending it over a blunt knife and leaving a mark. Then the stick is split in two with a sharp knife. After the two knives are tested the Remembrancer pronounces “Good service.”

I am a bit confused about the centrality of faggots in this ceremony.

According to another source, the City Solicitor cuts faggots with a hatchet, and – it would seem on a regular basis – “some of the spectators are amused, while others seem to find it distasteful.”

Someone told me yesterday that, apparently, the rough cost of an average hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice is £5,000 per hour.

Anyway, to explain the irony, last night, I had been in Greenwich the night before and parked my car behind the Up The Creek comedy club in a road 30 seconds walk from the centre of prim Greenwich which the famously uncaring local council has allowed to get run-down because, it appears, the councillors tend to live in flash roads and this road has only a block of council flats down one side.

Yesterday’s irony is that I was looking round the Royal Courts of Justice in the afternoon and then, in the evening, my car got broken into in Greenwich (again).

It was broken into in that exact same road behind Up The Creek in December 2010. I blogged about it.

On that occasion, nothing was stolen. On this occasion, the car was parked under a streetlight with a StopLok on the steering wheel and was double-locked, which means that, if you smash the window, you cannot open the doors from the inside – the doors are double-locked.

What they did was to smash the window (the Autoglass repair man explained to me exactly how it was done, but I am not repeating it). Then someone climbed into the car through the window, looked in the glove compartment and in the central armrest and lowered the back seat to get access to the boot from inside the car. And then climbed out the window again. The car was overlooked by two buildings.

I had, alas and unusually, left a SatNav and CDs in the lower part of the two-level arm rest (it is not obvious there is a lower level). They nicked the SatNav but left my CDs. This is only the latest in a long line of people insulting my taste in music.

It was -2C when I found the car window smashed at 10.35pm. By the time I got home after a 90-minute drive with no passenger window, it was -6C.

Things could be worse, though.

When I got home and switched on my TV, the BBC was reporting 200 deaths from cold across Europe and 100 of those deaths were in the Ukraine where temperatures were -40C.

This morning, ‘the world’s most travelled person’, Fred Finn, who lives in the Ukraine, told me in an e-mail: “I should be home by 8.00pm tonight but, given weather conditions today, anything is possible. The weather hasn’t been like this for 90 years they say.”

Back in Britain, the police in Greenwich told me mine was one of three cars broken into in that street behind Up The Creek last night. To me, that feels more important than the temperature in the Ukraine.

But around 100 people are dead in the Ukraine from the cold; around 200 in Europe; and over 200 were killed yesterday in the Syrian city of Homs by the Syrian armed forces.

Egocentricity is not really an admirable character trait.

I must remember.

Malcolm Hardee, godfather of British alternative comedy – remembered

It was seven years ago today that ‘godfather of British alternative comedy’ Malcolm Hardee drowned in Greenland Dock, Rotherhithe. His body was found and recovered on 2nd February 2005.

When it happened, I put a page online where people could leave memories of him.

Comedian Charlie Chuck wrote:

I met Malcolm and played Up The Creek in 1990. A man was sat on the steps with his head in his hands. I said to Malcolm: “Whats up with him?” He said: “It’s Jack Dee. He’s on next”.

Jo Brand, Lee Evans, Simon Day, John Thomson, Bill Bailey, Harry Hill, Johnny Vegas, Mark Lamar, Boothby Graffoe, Bob Mills & the rest. Without Malcolm, The Creek and his pioneering, it may never have happened for some.

Malcolm saw me and pulled me out of a bolt hole in Nottingham. I auditioned for him. I didn’t have a clue. He put me on a TV show called The Happening with Jools Holland. I died on my arse. I imagine Malcolm felt bad about it. He took a chance on a twat like me. He said to me: “I’ve got Vic Reeves on at The Creek on 15th November. Meet him”. The only Reeves I’d heard of was Jim Reeves. I didn’t listen and played the Sandiacre F.C in Longeaton, Derby, instead.

During the Edinburgh Festival, at half one in the morning, two men were locked out of a car. The only place open was a bread shop. They went in and borrowed some baking implements to break into the car. It was so funny, me and Malcolm howled. 

The last time I worked with Malcolm, from me picking him up, he talked about religion and Jesus Christ. I often wandered why. He had never mentioned it before.

Joke No 1, Malcolm told me, he had a terrible day, he woke up at 9am and a prawn cocktail slapped him in the face, that was just for starters.

His memory will live on.

Comedian Jeremy Hardy wrote:

Malcolm, you helped and encouraged me when I started. At the time, I think I took it for granted. I’m not sure I ever thanked you. We lost touch over the years, partly because I tried to avoid getting involved in things which would involve you owing me money. I’m sad now that I hadn’t seen you for so long. You once introduced me at the Tunnel club as your little brother and people believed you. I think you only meant it as a joke but, in retrospect, I’ll take it as a compliment if you don’t mind.

Alan Davies wrote:

My memories of Malcolm….

The Tunnel club in early 1989. I was an open spot. I was 22 but I looked about 12. Malcolm looked worried for me: “You’re not going to wear that shirt are you?”. He introduced me. “Stone him!” they shouted. “Crucify him!” Before I could do my first line someone asked what I was drinking. I held up my glass and said Directors. Then I made a joke about my shirt and did some material before I could get booed off. At The Tunnel, if you survived the open spot they’d slap you on the back and cheer you loudly. It was that or humiliation. No middle ground. Malcolm said: “I’ll book you”, which was fantastic for me, just starting out. “By the way”, he said,”It’s not Directors. The landlord’s done a deal with Whitbread even though it’s a Courage pub”.

The following month, I did a full spot and, soon after, the pub was raided and it was over. Up The Creek was great and I played it a lot, but The Tunnel was special. The hardest gig. If you went well, they’d virtually chair you off but, if not, a humming noise would start and gather volume as more joined in. “Mmmm”…. louder and louder…. Malcolm would hurry from the back bar…. “mmmm…MALCOLM!” was the signal for him to rescue the turn.

One night there was a juggler – Rex Boyd – who tossed clubs into the audience inviting them to throw them back. “Oh no!” said Malcolm. “I’ve only just got them to stop throwing stuff”. The first club nearly took the juggler’s head off but he caught the second and was granted a wild ovation.

Malcolm gave me loads of gigs,including one in Bungay which I drove him to as he consumed an enormous curry alongside me. There were stories all the way there and all the way back. He was the one-off’s one-off.

Comedian Jeff Green wrote:

I remember many times backstage at Glastonbury – bringing me on to nothing! And playing trivia machines at Up The Creek. I remember you pretending to faint in the Gilded Balloon at Edinburgh – to see how many people would come to your aid. I remember spending an afternoon rowing boats on a trip to a gig in Bungay And all those times I don’t remember ever hugging you and telling you what a great bloke you are. And I regret that.

Journalist Andrew Billen wrote:

I met Malcolm a few times and interviewed him once for the Observer, but did not know him. I just think he was the funniest stand-up, possibly the funniest man, I have ever seen.

PR man Mark Borkowski wrote:

I first met Malcolm in a bar in Edinburgh in the 1980s. He had a profound influence on me. Malcolm was a legend and a true Gandalf of the dark alchemy of the publicity stunt. One of my last conversations with him was when David Blaine was doing his stunt in London, sitting in a glass box dangling from a crane. Malcolm rang me up to ask if I could help him organise the media and a crane because he’d got one of his mates in Deptford to knock up a glass box and he was going to put his up right next to Blaine and sit in it for the same amount of time… stark naked. When I told him he’d never get away with it, he decided to settle for standing underneath Blaine throwing chips at him. As anyone who ever saw him perform will know – he had balls.

Comedian Simon Munnery wrote:

I first met Malcolm when I was doing open spots at The Tunnel club. I’d been booed off before, but never booed on. I loved the place and I loved Malcolm. I remember two blokes chatting in the toilets. Says one: “It’s been a good night.” Says the other: “Yeah. But if Malcolm gets his bollocks out, it’s going to be a great night.”

Backstage at the Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh one night, a bunch of comics were sitting round and Malcolm was seemingly out for the count, slumped in a chair, so we began discussing his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake which had just come out. Someone said: “Do you think any of it was exaggerated at all?” and we laughed because, knowing Malcolm, that wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility. Then Malcolm sits bolt upright and mumbles: “Uh uh – It worked for George Orwell”, then collapsed back into a stupor and the assembled comics spent the next twenty minutes filling in the gaps… “Road to Wigan Pier – he only got as far as Watford”…. ?

Simon Day of The Fast Show wrote:

I was supporting Vic Reeves in Newcastle. We were staying at the Copthorne Hotel. Malcolm arrived having missed the show. Earlier in the day, he had won eight grand (true) and had a girl with him he was attempting to mount. He was half-cut and mistakenly assumed I had gone to my room with a girl he had seen me talking to earlier. He decided it would be highly amusing to inch along the balcony from his room and expose himself to me and the girl, who didn’t exist, wearing just a dressing gown.

He climbed out of the window, the icy waters of the Tyne swirling 100 foot below. He struggled along for ages finally reaching my room; no doubt he shouted “Oy! Oy!” and pressed his balls to the glass. It was the wrong room. I was fast asleep on the floor above. On returning to his junior suite, he was hurled to the ground by two Special Branch officers. (There was a Tory Conference on.) They wanted to know what the fuck he was doing on the window ledge, naked except for a dressing gown.

They searched his room and found £5,760 in a vase on top of the wardrobe and a pack of pornographic playing cards. He was taken to a portakabin nearby where he gave his address in Fingal Street. All sorts of alarms went off. It was the former home of a leading member of the IRA. After intensive questioning, they decided that he was not a threat to national security only social security and off he tottered. I miss him.

He was my friend, my agent, father figure, dodgy uncle, wayward best mate. He ran the two best comedy clubs of all time. He had a humanity and gentleness which he tried to hide. Above all, he was the king of comedy.

The definitive story about anarchic comedy godfather Malcolm Hardee

London-based American comic Lewis Schaffer is nothing if not quotable.

In my blog yesterday, I quoted his views about racial and racist jokes. In the same conversation, we also talked about Malcolm Hardee, the late godfather of British alternative comedy who was known for random outbreaks of nudity onstage and renowned for having “the biggest bollocks in showbusiness”.

I met Malcolm around 1985 or 1986 and wrote his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake in 1995. He drowned in 2005.

Also present when Lewis and I talked was a friend of mine who knew Malcolm far longer than I did.

“I never met Malcolm,” Lewis said, “but I would say he is he is someone who is ‘best remembered’… I never experienced what Malcolm Hardee was. The impression I get for the guy is that he didn’t really have much respect for other people. He was always messing with people. In a way, he brought people on stage at his clubs just to humiliate them.”

“No,” I answered. “They humiliated themselves.They knew how tough Malcolm’s audiences could be. They knew if they could survive the Sunday night audience at Up The Creek and, even more so at The Tunnel, then they had a good act. I always thought the Tunnel audience was firm but fair. If you had a good act, they would listen and applaud. If the act was not so good, they would shout out razor-sharp heckles. If your act was shit, they would throw beer glasses at you. Firm but fair. And, if you died on stage with good reason, when you went off, Malcolm would say: Well, he was shit, wasn’t he? or That was shit, wasn’t it, but I’d fuck her.”

“He let the acts do what they did,” my friend said. “He was secure in his own world, because he lived and worked in the area he came from, so he was very secure. He was amongst people he had grown up with.”

“He half-joked he didn’t like going north of the River Thames,” I said. “and that was partly true because, when he opened a comedy club at Harlesden in north west London, he didn’t really have very much interest in it because it took a bit of time to travel up there and people didn’t know who he was.

“He said to me once that he liked being in Greenwich because he was a big fish in a small pond. He liked being recognised in the street. I once asked him why he was so attractive to women and he said: Because, to them, I’m a celebrity here. No-one knows who I am in Huddersfield but, in Greenwich, I’m a local showbiz celebrity.”

“But,” Lewis asked me, “what was he thinking when he peed at the back of the stage when someone was performing and the audience saw him and laughed but the act did not see him? That’s so disrespectful to an act.”

“It was like he was at home,” my friend said. “He felt at home. He felt so comfortable, he could say and do anything. He was…”

“But he urinated on the wall…” Lewis interrupted.

“He probably just thought,” I suggested, “I need a piss and it’s going to get a laugh. It’s as simple as that.”

The definitive Malcolm story, I think, is this one which Australian comic Matthew Hardy posted on the web page I set up after Malcolm died.

__________

He took my visiting elderly parents out in his boat. Goes up the Thames and on the right was some kind of rusted ship, pumping a powerful arc of bilgewater out of its hull, through a kind of high porthole, which saw the water arc across the river over fifty foot.

I’m on the front of the boat as Malcolm veers toward the arc and I assume he’s gonna go under it, between the ship and where the arc curves downward toward the river itself. For a laugh.

Just as I turn back to say “Lookout, we’re gonna get hit by the filthy fucking water” – the filthy fucking water almost knocked my head off my shoulders and me off the boat. I looked back to see it hit Malcolm as he steered, then my Mum and then Dad.

I wanted to hit him, and my Dad said afterwards that he did too, but we were both unable to comprehend or calculate what had actually happened. Malcolm’s decision was beyond any previously known social conduct. He must have simply had the idea and acted upon it. Anarchy.

We laugh… NOW!”.

__________

“Malcolm could have killed them and himself,” I told Lewis Schaffer. “The only reason he did it was because he knew it would get a laugh when it was told as a story later. He would do something because he thought, Oy Oy. That’ll get a laugh; I’ll do it, and just not care about the consequences.”

“People can’t help but admire that sort of thing,” my friend said. “They wish they could do it themselves.”

“They admired Malcolm’s balls,” I said.

“Literally and figuratively,” my friend said.

What I wrote about Malcolm at the time of his death was:

__________

Malcolm successfully turned himself into a South London Jack The Lad but the real Malcolm was and remained entirely different – a highly intelligent, rather shy, gentle and – despite his borrowing habits and forgetfulness – an enormously generous man.

People ask why women were so astonishingly attracted to him. I think it was because they discovered that, underneath the “Fuck it! Don’t give a shit!” exterior, he was a gentle schoolboy who just had a love of pranks, wheezes and escapades.

He was much loved by everyone who knew him well.

I remember being in his living room one afternoon. For no reason, he suddenly pulled a real goldfish from its bowl and put it in his mouth so its little orange tail was flip-flopping between his lips. Not a piece of carrot. A real goldfish. He looked at me for approval through his spectacles with wide-open, innocent eyes.

At this point, coincidentally, his wife Jane came into the room, looked at his mouth and said casually, “Oh no,” then, more reprovingly, “Not again, Malcolm.”

He looked rather embarrassed, as if caught with his trousers down.

The irony, of course, is that with his trousers down he was never embarrassed.

A road accident in Greenwich

Last night at around ten o’clock, I collected a friend from Greenwich. I parked in a small street behind and just a few yards away from the Up The Creek comedy club.

As I waited for my friend in the car, I could see, across some waste ground and half-hidden by a tree, an ambulance parked by the pavement in Creek Road, which runs parallel to the road where I was parked. The ambulance was facing the wrong way and a couple of paramedics were kneeling down at the pavement behind the ambulance, apparently tending to someone. I could see no other vehicles and no police car, so I figured someone had fallen down or had a heart attack.

So it goes.

A few passers-by looked down at what was happening as they passed.

By the time my friend came out and joined me in my car, the paramedics had got up and were clearing things from the pavement. It looked like a pillow and medical equipment and suchlike.

I had to drive out of our road and turn back on ourselves into Creek Road, heading for the middle of Greenwich and the Blackwall Tunnel under the River Thames.

As I started to drive forward, we could see that, previously hidden by a building, across the waste ground, in front of the ambulance in Creek Road was another ambulance and a car facing the wrong direction and a police car. Behind the second ambulance, there was a stretcher raised on wheels with more paramedics standing round it.

After we did our 180 degree turn into Creek Road, we passed the first ambulance.

Before we got to it, we saw an abandoned motorbike lying on its side, on the pavement, halfway into a bus shelter. There was a dark pool of petrol coming out of it, as if the motorbike was bleeding.

So it goes.

We drove past the first ambulance, drove past the second ambulance, drove past the paramedics, past the closed Up the Creek comedy club (it was a Tuesday) and, as we turned left into the one-way system in the middle of Greenwich, I looked right and saw a lone policemen standing in the middle of the street stopping traffic turning into Creek Road. The traffic was queued-up, the drivers probably pissed-off. By the time they turned into Creek Road, the ambulances and police car would be gone and there would be nothing to see.

“I wonder when it happened,” my friend asked me. “I wonder what we were doing.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s not relevant to our lives.”

About ten minutes later, as we drove up onto the flyover leading to the Blackwall Tunnel under the River Thames, a police car came racing through the roundabout, its siren blaring, its blue lights flashing, heading towards Greenwich.

So it goes.

By the weekend, I will have forgotten any of this ever happened.

It is not relevant to my life.

A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and is soon forgotten.

One man can change the world with a bullet (or six) in the right place….

(A version of this blog was also published in the Huffington Post under the title What Links Dead Comedian Malcolm Hardee, Gangster Mad Frank Fraser & a British Political Sex Scandal?)

My local handyman (who is a very interesting person; he was at university – UCL, London – with the mother of Kate Middleton, our possibly future Queen) came round to mend my side gate yesterday. He was telling me he hated reading Charles Dickens and could not understand what people see in Dickens’ writing.

“Just caricatures,” he fumed. “Just caricatures. But,” he continued, “Horace Walpole is worse. “The Castle of Otranto is utter shit yet people thought it was a great piece of writing at the time and they thought Horace Walpole’s name would be remembered. Now, quite rightly, no-one remembers him except dusty academics. He’s a footnote. Who knows which ‘famous’ people’s names are going to survive from the 20th century? It’s pot luck.”

Also yesterday, Bill Alford sent me a Facebook message telling me he had posted on Flickr ninety-five… count ‘em that’s ninety-five… photographs he took in the years 1985-1987 at the late Malcolm Hardee‘s legendary – nay, notorious – seminal alternative comedy club The Tunnel Palladium.

In among the early photos of Keith Allen, Clive Anderson, Phil Cool, Jenny Eclair, Harry Enfield, Jeremy Hardy, Ainsley Harriott, Jools Holland, Eddie Izzard, Phill Jupitus, Josie Lawrence, Neil Morrissey, Mike Myers (yes, that Mike Myers), Vic Reeves, Jerry Sadowitz, Screaming Lord Sutch, Squeeze and many others at Malcolm’s Tunnel Palladium, there is a photo of a trendy-looking gent captioned Johnny Edge.

All ninety-five… count ‘em that’s ninety-five… of Bill’s photos are interesting – a nostalgic flashlight on an earlier comedy era – but the photo of Johnny Edge was the one which interested me most because I never met Johnny Edge.

I only knew of him by reputation.

He died almost exactly a year ago, on 26th September 2010.

He was just an ordinary bloke living in south east London, whom most people had never heard of yet, when he died, he merited very lengthy obituaries in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Independent.

In that sense, he was a bit like Malcolm Hardee.

Most people in Britain had never heard of Malcolm Hardee but, when he drowned in January 2005, such was his importance to the development of British comedy, that he merited near full-page obituaries in the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard, the Guardian, the Independent and The Times - indeed, he managed to get two obituaries in the Evening Standard and two in the Guardian.

Malcolm had told me tales of Johnny Edge coming to his comedy clubs and, when I showed the Flickr photo to a friend who worked at Malcolm’s later comedy club Up The Creek, she immediately recognised him:

“Oh yes. I recognise him. He was a regular. He always seemed to me to be on his own. I didn’t know who he was, but other people seemed to know him and treat him with respect, like he had been in known bands or something, He looked ‘reggae’ and he held himself well, maybe just because he was older and quiet. He seemed nice. I think if he had been in a rock band I would have heard which one, which is why I wondered how people were familiar with him… Now I come to think about it, maybe Malcolm always put his name ‘on the door’ so he got in for free. Logically, I think that is highly likely.”

When Malcolm had told me about Johnny Edge being a regular at his clubs, I could feel the slight thrill he had in being able to say he had met and, to an extent, known him.

Johnny ‘Edge’ was a nickname. He was actually Johnny Edgcombe. What he did in 1962 was the catalyst that triggered the Profumo Scandal in 1963 which played no minor part in bringing down the Conservative government in 1964.

Edgecombe had fired six shots at osteopath Stephen Ward’s mews flat, where Edgecombe’s ex-girlfriend Christine Keeler was hiding.

Malcolm’s barely-contained thrill at having a link with Johnny ‘Edge’ was the same thrill I could sense in him when famed 1960s South London gangster Charlie Richardson came to a party on Malcolm’s floating pub the Wibbley Wibbley. It is the same thrill some people feel if they have an even tenuous link with the Kray Twins.  I have heard more than one stand-up comic joke about the TARDIS-like capacity of the Blind Beggar, seeing as how most of the population of East London appears to have been in the pub the night Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell.

It is the thrill of one or two degrees of separation from important historic or society-changing events.

Malcolm had three degrees of separation from the Krays, which I think he always cherished and which is mentioned towards the start of his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake (now out-of-print, but currently available from me via Amazon at  the remarkably reasonable price of £49.99 + p&p).

When Mad Frank Fraser, the Richardson’s ‘enforcer’ was shot in the thigh during a fight at Mr Smith’s Club in Catford, he was eventually left lying in the front garden of Malcolm’s aunt Rosemary and uncle Doug. The shooting was part of the bad blood and linked events which led to the shooting in the Blind Beggar which brought the Kray Twins and, to an extent, the Richardsons down.

Links within links within links.

To an extent, I share Malcolm’s thrill with one or two degrees of linked separation from national, international or parochial history. Everything and everyone is inter-linked.

Malcolm never met Mad Frank Fraser. I have and I am glad to have met and chatted to him a couple of times: the man who once lay bleeding in Malcolm’s aunt and uncle’s front garden.

Links within links within links.

Once, Mad Frank told me he worried “a bit” what people would say about him after he was dead, because what people are seen as being is ultimately not what they are but what people write about them in retrospect.

A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle really can change the world. Ordinary unsung individuals can be part of the chain that creates historic events. Or, to quote anti-hero Mick’s line in Lindsay Anderson’s trendy 1968 film If….

“One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place…”

Or six bullets.

Has British comedy stagnated since Monty Python, Hardee and Tiswas?

Beware. This is my blog. These are my very highly personal opinions. You can object. Please do.

People have said Alternative Comedy is not dead, it has just ceased to be Alternative. It has become the Mainstream. But they seldom talk about the next new wave of British comedians who will replace the now mainstream Alternative Comedians.

I desperately want to spot any new wave for the annual Malcolm Hardee Awards, which I organise. Our avowed intent is to try to find “comic originality”.

We do find admirably quirky individuals to award the main annual Comic Originality prize to – last year, the one-off Robert White; this year, the one-off Johnny Sorrow.

And their one-offness is as it should be. You cannot have comic originality if 37 other people are doing something similar.

But where are the new style comedians performing a recognisable new type of comedy genre? There has not been anything overwhelmingly new since so-called Alternative Comedy arrived in the mid-1980s – over 25 years ago.

As far as I can see, there have been four very rough waves of post-War British comedy, most of them comprising overlapping double strands.

The first double wave of ‘new’ comics in the 1950s were reacting partly to stuffy mainstream 1930s Reithian radio comedy, partly to the necessary order of the 1940s wartime years and partly they were rebelling against the dying music hall circuit epitomised by John Osborne‘s fictional but iconic Archie Rice in The Entertainer (1957).

The Goon Show (1951-1960) on BBC Radio, at the height of its popularity in the mid 1950s, was the antithesis of the ‘old school’ of pre-War comedy. The Goons were a surreal comic equivalent to John Osborne’s own rebellious Look Back in Anger (1956) and the kitchen sink realism which surfaced in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Osborne was ultra-realistic; The Goons were ultra-surreal.

But Osborne’s plays and The Goons‘ radio comedy were both reactions to the rigidly ordered society in pre-War, wartime and immediately post-War Britain and The Goons‘ new anarchic style of comedy (although it owes some debt to the pre-War Crazy Gang and although the Wartime radio series ITMA was slightly surreal) really was like the new rock ‘n’ roll (which was not coincidentally happening simultaneously). It was startlingly new. They were consciously rebelling and revolting against a clear status quo which they saw as stuffy and restrictive.

Hot on the heels of The Goons came a different form of rebellion – the satirists of the 1960s – with Beyond the Fringe (1960) on stage and That Was The Week That Was (1962-1963) on TV. These two slightly overlapping Second Waves of new post-War British comedy were again reacting to a stuffy status quo.

The First Wave, the surrealist Goons wave, then reasserted that it was still rolling on when a Third Wave of influence – Monty Python’s Flying Circus - appeared on BBC TV 1969-1974 and – as satire declined in the 1970s – it was Monty Python‘s (and, ultimately, The Goons‘) comedic gene pool that held sway for a while – also epitomised, oddly, by the children’s TV show – Tiswas (1974-1982).

The Goons, Beyond The Fringe and That Was The Week That Was had been rebelling against something; Monty Python was surreal and Tiswas was anarchic just for the sheer sake of it. Monty Python and Tiswas were one-offs, but they have pale imitations trundling on even to today.

After Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, a Fourth Wave of new comics arose in the early and mid-1980s – a generation influenced by the satire gene not by the Goons/Python gene. These mostly-university-educated young left wing things rebelled against Thatcherism with their often political-based humour which became known as Alternative Comedy.

But again, just as there had been a second overlapping wave of comedy in the previous generation, this mostly ‘serious’ comedy was paralleled by a different wave possibly more low-key but epitomised by the decidedly fringe appeal of the hugely influential Malcolm Hardee, whose release from prison and subsequent comedy career coincided with the start of and overlapped with the future stars of Alternative Comedy.

Malcolm’s strand of mostly non-political comedy was spread by the clubs he ran and the acts he managed, agented, booked and/or nurtured: acts including the young Paul Merton (performing as Paul Martin when Malcolm first managed him), Jenny Eclair and later Keith Allen, Harry Enfield, Harry Hill, Vic Reeves, Jerry Sadowitz, Jim Tavaré and Johnny Vegas.

While London’s Comedy Store nurtured future mainstream acts (some progressing there from Malcolm’s clubs), the more bizarre and original new acts continued to flock to Malcolm’s gigs and clubs including his near-legendary Sunday Night at the Tunnel Palladium gigs and later his lower-key but just as influential Up The Creek club.

These two strands of 1980s comedy – the alternative political and the Hardee-esque – successfully came together in a Channel 4 programme – not, as is often cited, Saturday Live (1985-1987), a mostly failed hotch-potch with different presenters every week, but its long-remembered successor, Geoff Posner‘s Friday Night Live (1988) which supposedly firebrand political polemic comic Ben Elton presented every week in what was supposed to be an ironic sparkly showbiz jacket.

Political alternative stand-ups mixed with strange variety and character acts, oddball comics and cross-over acts like Jo Brand, Jenny Eclair, Harry Enfield and many others nurtured by Malcolm Hardee.

This was both the highpoint and the start of the decline of Alternative Comedy because serious money was spent on the relatively low-rating Saturday Live and Friday Night Live on Channel 4, both ultimately shepherded by Alan Boyd’s resolutely mainstream but highly influential Entertainment Department at LWT.

Since then, where has the next giant New Wave of British comedy been? There are random outbreaks of originality, but mostly there has been a barren mediocrity of pale imitations of previous waves – and the desolate, mostly laugh-free zone that is BBC3.

At this point, allow me an even more personal view.

I thought I spotted a change in Edinburgh Fringe comedy shows around 2003 when Janey Godley was barred from consideration for the Perrier Award (despite a very lively verbal fight among the judging the panel) because it was decided that her seminal show Caught in the Act of Being Myself did not fall within the remit of the Awards because it was not a single ‘show’ repeated every night: she was basically ad-libbing a different hour of comedy every performance for 28 consecutive nights.

That same year, Mike Gunn performed his confessional heroin-addict show Mike Gunn: Uncut at the Fringe although, unlike Janey, he lightened and held back some of the more serious details of his life story.

It seemed to me that, certainly after 2004, when Janey performed her confessional show Good Godley!,  Fringe shows started an increasing tendency towards often confessional autobiographical storytelling. Good Godley! was one of the first hour-long comedy shows at the Fringe (though not the only one) to use material that was not in any way funny – in that case, child abuse, rape, murder and extreme emotional damage. Janey did not tell funny stories; she told stories funny. Viewed objectively, almost nothing she actually talked about was funny but audiences fell about laughing because it truly was “the way she told ‘em”.

Since then, too, there seems to have been a tendency towards improvisation, probably spurred by the financial success of Ross Noble and Eddie Izzard. The traditional 1980s Alternative Comics still mostly stay to a script. The 21st Century comics influenced by Janey Godley, Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble often do not (to varying degrees).

So it could be argued there has been a tendency in this decade away from gag-telling (apart from the brilliant Jimmy Carr, Milton Jones and Tim Vine) towards storytelling… and a tendency towards improvisational gigs (bastardised by the almost entirely scripted and prepared ad-libs on TV panel shows).

But long-form storytelling does not fit comfortably into TV formats which tend to require short-form, gag-based, almost sound-bite material – you cannot tell long involved stories on panel shows and on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow type programmes. So a tendency in live gigs and certainly at the Edinburgh Fringe – a tendency away from gag-based comedy to storytelling comedy – has been unable to transfer to television and has therefore not fully developed.

Occasionally, a Fifth Wave of British comedy is sighted on the horizon but, so far, all sightings have turned out to be tantalising mirages.

One possibility are the Kent Comics who all studied Stand Up Comedy as an academic subject in the University of Kent at Canterbury. They include Pappy’s aka Pappy’s Fun Club, Tiernan Douieb, Jimmy McGhie, Laura Lexx and The Noise Next Door. But they share an origin, not a style.

Whither British comedy?

Who knows?

Not me.