Bernie Clifton – family entertainer and national treasure: Crackerjack to Vegas

Legendary comedy entertainer and British national treasure Bernie Clifton has just published his showbiz autobiography Crackerjack to Vegas.

He has ridden his puppet costume creation Oswald the Ostrich around the world. 

I talked to him via Zoom at his home in Derbyshire.

He was wearing a woolly RAF hat. 

In 2016, he appeared on BBC TV’s The Voice. He had originally applied anonymously, under his real name…

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JOHN:  When you appeared on The Voice, your choice of song was The Impossible Dream.

BERNIE: My version was really The Inevitable Scream. All I am, really, is a singer. I’m a pub singer who got in with the wrong people.

JOHN: Was it difficult to write your autobiography?

BERNIE: Well, it took me 14 years. I had to go and refill the ink-well and get a new quill.

I missed the first 18 years of my life out. All that failure. All that thrashing. I was a thick boy in a grammar school who obviously had no right to be there. When I was 10, I was told by my ‘inspirational’ teacher: “The day you pass your Eleven-Plus, Bernard, little pigs will fly.” 

JOHN: But you did.

BERNIE: I did. And I remember not having the courage to go up to Mrs Fairhurst and look up in the sky and say: “I can’t see any pigs.” I just didn’t have the guts.

JOHN: Why did you change your birth name? Bernie Quinn is a good strong name.

BERNIE: Because I went to a pub to do a Sunday noon gig where you had to share the stage with strippers. It was a male stag do on a Sunday lunchtime. I turned up as ‘boy singer Bernie Quinn’ and there, in coloured chalk, it said: ONE FOR THE LADS – BURMA QUEEN… I had been mistakenly booked on the phone as an ‘exotic dancer’. So I changed my name from Quinn to Clifton. My dad was  not best pleased.

JOHN: Why choose Clifton?

BERNIE: I went through the phone book. I realised I needed a two-syllable surname. So I went from Tipton (a town in Staffordshire) to Lipton (a grocer) and I think maybe there was Teabags along the line. In the end, I chose Clifton – a bridge in Bristol. And ‘Bernie Clifton’ seemed to scan.  You know – Bernie Winters – Bernie Clifton.

JOHN: You wore clogs as a kid.

BERNIE: My parents had five boys so there were seven of us all living in a two-bedroom house. I don’t understand how my parents managed to procreate.

We lived ‘cheek by jowl’ in Charles Street, St Helens in Merseyside. Everything was ‘just round the corner’ – the school, a shop, everything and, when I was four, I think Hitler must have told Goering and the Luftwaffe: “What they need is a playground”.

We lived at No 59 and one morning we woke up to find that Nos 65, 67 and 69 had disappeared in a bombing so then we had somewhere to play. I think we were too young to feel any fear. At the time, you were just grateful to survive and be fed. It made me realise in recent years how much ‘under the cosh’ we were. But happy. Because it was everyone’s lot. Everybody was having the same problems, weren’t they?

JOHN: Why did the Germans bomb St Helens?

BERNIE: It was the glass trade (Pilkington’s) in St Helens. You can’t march an army unless you’ve got glass. And, probably more importantly, we were just ten miles down the road from the Liverpool docks.

Anyway, I passed my Eleven-Plus but I was hauled out of grammar school at 15 – “There’s no point you staying here” – then I got a job as a bread lad at the Co-op and eventually ended up as an apprentice plumber for the local Corporation.

I got that because we were staunch Catholics and the Building Manager was also a staunch Catholic and it was always a good idea to be seen at 10 o’clock Mass on a Sunday. I kid you not. That was the way forward in your career. I got the job and discovered that, working in bathrooms, I got good acoustics.

I realised I had a good singing voice and got a job with the local dance band at weekends. In the interval, we used to go out and get drunk. Then, when it came to the last waltz, when I wasn’t required on stage, I used to find the doorman’s bicycle where he hid it under the stairs and ride round the dance floor on it. Me and my mates got known for doing anything. There was no vandalism in it, no violence. It was just, as the Irish might say, we were doing it for the craic. We’d do anything and that stayed with me. This is fun!

In retrospect, it got me out of a pretty grey time for this country – the early 1950s.

The RAF changed my life. To be sent to the leading edge of the Western World’s defence, training pilots and navigators how to drop a bomb on Moscow… It was absolutely ludicrous! I mean, I was a guy from St Helens who couldn’t hold down a job as a plumber!

As a plumber, I was known as The Tsunami Man… I was a disaster.

Everything I tried I failed at.

But, in the RAF, I was ultimately posted to Lindholme, near Doncaster. From a plumber, I became a radar mechanic at the sharp end of the Western Alliance. We were defending the West against the Russians and the RAF decided that this failed plumber from St Helens should be fitting radar boxes on Vulcan V-bombers at Bomber Command’s Bombing School just outside Doncaster… 

It was all a fluke.

I was very lucky. Doncaster was the hub of Northern clubland entertainment – pubs and clubs – and I just happened to have been dropped ten miles down the road. My weekends were free. So, every Sunday morning, I would borrow the flight sergeant’s bike without asking, pedal into Doncaster, park it somewhere, then get a trolleybus out to some miners’ welfare. That was how I found my way into entertainment.

JOHN: Everything’s a series of accidents but success is taking advantage of the tiny possibilities when they happen. And determination.

BERNIE: In my radar mechanics’ classroom in Wiltshire, everyone else in the class was sent out to Bomber Command stations in the middle of nowhere. But, of those 30 guys, I was the one who was sent to Doncaster. It was just a weird mish-mash of circumstances.

JOHN: But you had the nouse and the talent to take advantage of it. And then you got into the glamorous world of show business.

BERNIE: Well, I starting working in bathrooms and then getting paid to sing. I was a pub singer, And that was it. I became ‘a turn’ – a singer, but with a few choice gags that I’d picked up on the building sites.

That got me to Batley Variety Club, where I was seen by Barney Colehan who ran the BBC TV’s Good Old Days. He booked me; I had never been on television before.

I went along with me few gags and a song and Les Dawson was topping the bill. After the show, he took me to one side and gave me a proper (verbal) kicking. He said: “You’re OK, but you’re doing the same gags as another hundred comics. Why don’t you…” – his very words – “…plough your own furrow… What do you like doing?”

“I said: “I do like mucking about on stage with props”.

And he said: “Well, just go out and be a ‘prop comic’. Nobody else can be arsed to do it.” 

At the time, everyone was doing the mother-in-law gags. So I went out ‘inspired’ by Les and I did anything that was visual and just picked it up and ran with it.

(… CONTINUED HERE… )