A Hardee annual celebration: St Malcolm’s Day and the story of the penis in the flying frozen chicken

I thought I knew most things about the late “godfather of British alternative comedy” Malcolm Hardee, who drowned at the end of January 2005. We met around 1985, I wrote his autobiography for him in 1996 and, in his memory until 2017, I am organising (if that’s the word) the annual Malcolm Hardee Awards for comedy.

But I didn’t know there has been an annual piss-up in South London every February since he died. Apparently, for the last five years, the first Monday in February has seen a celebration of Malcolm’s life

Gordon ‘Bres’ Breslin tells me next Monday (7th February) is the day this year.

“That’s the day,” he writes, “that the Beckenham Tunnel Club and Up the Creek hecklers get together for what we call St. Malcolm’s Day. We had a memorial lunch to Malcolm on the first Monday in February 2005 as a way of getting over the loss of a comedy legend and we have been doing it ever since. We get together just to reminisce about the bizarre acts he put on and Malcolm’s own routines. So if you are passing the La Rascasse bar and restaurant in Beckenham High Street any time from 1.30pm through to late evening please feel free to join us.”

Alas, on Monday evening I’m going to the Fringe Report Awards at the Leicester Square Theatre, but I’ll certainly be popping in to Beckenham in the afternoon.

Bres also told me this anecdote about Malcolm. It was May 1997, it was Whitsun Bank Holiday Sunday and Bres’ birthday and what better way to celebrate, he thought, than a trip Malcolm’s Up the Creek comedy club in Greenwich…

“We took our usual seats in the first row by the stage,” Bres told me. “A double act came on for the Open Spot. Their act had something to do with a frozen chicken. They were obviously novices at this game and posh with it: you could sense the crowd smelled virgin blood and would up the heckle levels.

“What must have been a funny skit to their pals in a ski chalet in Verbier went down like Eddie Shit doing his Freddie Mercury impression. As the act disintegrated, the duo chucked their frozen chicken into the audience in disgust. Naturally, it was thrown back at them but it didn’t quite reach the stage. I’d never seen a live chicken fly through the air let alone a frozen one and it was bloody heavy. It landed on my table and I kept it warm and safe from further abuse. It was my birthday, after all.

“Later, Malcolm was bringing the evening to an end when, flush with birthday alcohol, I thought I should get on stage with the now de-frosting chicken. It seemed a good idea at the time, because my mate Adrian had somehow got on the panda and was playing his harmonica as a duo with Malcolm. So I got on stage with the frozen chicken and suggested that Malcolm should stick his knob in it.

“The, by now, very vocal audience thought this would be a great idea and, so as not to disappoint, Malcolm duly whipped out his knob and oversized bollocks and stuck the whole bundle in, giblet to giblet as it were.

“I’ve often wondered whether the double act seeing this happen incorporated it into their own act!”

So I will certainly be celebrating St Malcolm’s Day with Bres and his pals this Monday 7th February at La Rascasse, 59-63 Beckenham High Street, London BR3 1AW.

It starts at 1.30pm and goes on way through to late evening.

Gordon Breslin is at gobres@btinternet.com

From now on, I will be putting St Malcolm’s Day in my diary every year.

Painting a New York fart, Tony Blair and Jo Brand

Yesterday, in response to my blog mentioning farteur Mr Methane, Jackie Hunter, former features editor of The Scotsman newspaper, reminded me that early 20th-century artist Maxfield Parrish painted a fart into a mural that now adorns the famous King Cole Bar in New York’s St Regis hotel. I have to agree with her that painting a fart is quite an achievement.

Yesterday was a funny old mixture of a day because British comedians are now planning for the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Going to the Fringe, like having a baby, is a nine-month project involving a lot of nausea, pain and uncertain results.

Charlie Chuck phoned me about his planned return to Edinburgh which sounds suitably unusual and the extraordinarily multi-talented Janey Godley, not planning to play the Edinburgh Fringe this year but just about to go to the Adelaide Fringe, told me about two possibilities she has been unexpectedly offered in two totally different media. From Janey, the unexpected comes as no surprise.

In the afternoon, I had to take a friend to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich which, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, is surrounded by a high Grade A security fence which makes it look more like a Stalag Luft Queen Elizabeth II escape-proof prison camp in World War II or a Ministry of Defence site in the Cold War.

In the evening, I went to Vivienne & Martin Soan’s monthly Pull The Other One comedy club at the beleaguered and now closed Ivy House pub in Nunhead. The venue was re-opened specially for the night to stage Pull The Other One with this month’s headliner Jo Brand.

Vivienne & Martin now have their next six shows arranged but with no definite venue and are looking round, although they would prefer to stay at the warmly ornate and atmospheric mirrored ‘golden room’ behind the Ivy House bar. One local alternative might be The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station.

Comedian and novelist Dominic Holland, making his second appearance at Pull The Other One called it “the weirdest gig that exists,” which it surely is. The format is about two hours of variety acts and two stand-up comics. Unusually, nowadays, the bizarre variety acts – far be it from me to name-drop Bob Slayer and Holly Burn – are as important to the feel of the shows as the stand-ups.

Afterwards, Dominic told me that his 14-year-old son Tom Holland, recently on stage as Billy Elliot in the West End, is currently in Thailand filming a lead role in major Hollywood blockbuster The Impossible. I thought Dominic was probably ‘talking up’ this film out of fatherly pride until I looked it up on IMDB Pro and found it is a big-budget tsunami disaster movie “starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland” and is one of the “most anticipated films of 2011”.

Other shocks of the evening were that the much talked-about cult comedian Dr Brown has got an entirely new character act in which he actually moves and talks semi-coherently. And I heard that legendary ‘open spot’ act Jimbo – he seems to have been doing open spots as long as Cilla Black has been acting-out the role of ordinary woman next door – is now getting paid gigs, has allegedly changed into a (different) character act and is perhaps going to the Edinburgh Fringe. If he won an award as Best Newcomer at the Fringe it would be very funny and would be a triumph for Brian Damage of Pear Shaped, who has long championed Jimbo and other – even by my standards – very, very bizarre acts.

A very funny night at Pull The Other One ended very entertainingly but totally unsurprisingly with nudity. There were even some calls for The Naked Balloon Dance of fond memory.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, Tunisia continued to stumble around like a blinded meerkat towards potential anarchic chaos and tanks were rolling around Cairo to prevent what threatened to be a popular uprising.

Is it my imagination or have things deteriorated badly in that area since the United Nations, evidently an organisation with no sense of irony, appointed Tony Blair as Middle East Peace Envoy and why is it I never actually see any pictures of him in the Middle East?

Could it be he’s just too busy talking to God and this week, according to The Times, signing a six-figure deal to make four speeches for a hedge fund which made around £100 million by betting on the collapse of the Northern Rock bank in the UK?

This was shortly after the Daily Mail reported that he got £300,000 for making one speech for banking giant Goldman Sachs, while he had a £2.5 million deal as “advisor”  to JP Morgan, who, according to London’s Evening Standard, won a contract to set up an Iraqi bank in the wake of the US-led invasion.

Which gets us back to the subject of Mr Methane and farting around the world and brings up the possibly pertinent question:

What is the difference between being a comedian and taking the piss?

The weird daily life of comedian Malcolm Hardee – and after

On Sunday, I went to the Up The Creek comedy club in Greenwich. The club was started and run by comedian Malcolm Hardee until he died (drowned) in 2005.

I went with a friend. We both knew Malcolm.

She had known him for about 20 years and had worked with him at Up The Creek. I knew him for about 20 years and, in 1996, wrote his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake. He could have written it himself but he – correctly, as it turned out – reckoned he’d never get round to actually doing it.

“Avalon have got me a deal with Fourth Estate to write my autobiography,” he told me. “Fuck it, I won’t do it. You’ll have to do it. I’ll split the advance with you 50/50.”

“Nah!” I told him. “You can do it. I’ll just be prodding you to write it. You’ll do it all. We can split it 90/10 in your favour.”

Eventually he persuaded me to increase my percentage to an 80/20 split in his favour.

This isn’t the way negotiations are supposed to go: me trying to take less, him trying to give me more.

Weird. That was everything connected with Malcolm’s daily life.

Last Sunday was the first time either of us – my friend and I – had been to a show at Up The Creek since Malcolm drowned almost exactly six years ago. Sunday had been Malcolm’s own unique nights.

So it was slightly strange. Like being in a parallel universe.

Everything inside Up The Creek was vaguely the same but slightly different.

Weird.

That was everything connected with Malcolm’s daily life.

Weird.

At home, he occasionally put a live goldfish in his mouth to get attention – I saw him do it twice. It was often said of Malcolm, with a lot of justification, that he never had a stage act – his life was his act.

We are talking here about a man who, when we were writing his autobiography, almost forgot to mention until the very last moment – after the first proofs had been printed – that he had once been detained and questioned by Special Branch officers when he was found in the middle of the night on a hotel balcony outside the then prominent government minister Michael Heseltine‘s room, wearing nothing but a pair of socks and a leather coat containing £5,200 in cash and a pack of very pornographic playing cards. (He thought it was a friend’s room.) I have spoken to people who were present at the hotel; they told me the Special Branch officers looked slightly stunned.

I felt much the same watching a Sunday comedy show without Malcolm at Up The Creek on Sunday.

Weird. Stunned.

Malcolm almost forgot to tell me the Special Branch story because it was not that unusual an incident in a very unusual life.

“Britain’s Got Talent”, Eric Morecambe, Malcolm Hardee and the question of torturing teddy bears

Last Sunday, at the late Malcolm Hardee’s annual birthday celebrations (he drowned in 2005), excerpts were screened from Jody VandenBurg’s long-planned feature-length documentary about the great man. If the mountain of great anecdotes which I know Jody has can ever be edited down to 90-minutes or so, it will be an extraordinary piece of social history: a vivid glimpse into the early days of British Alternative Comedy.

Last Thursday, I saw a vivid insight into an earlier British showbiz era: a preview of the first episode of BBC TV’s The Story of Variety with Michael Grade – it’s a two-part documentary to be broadcast much later this year.

I learnt stuff.

I didn’t know that smooth, sophisticated pianist Semprini was such a wild ladies’ man. There is a wonderful story about a showbiz landlady with the punchline “Oh, Mr Sanders, what must you think of me!”

I remember staying at the legendary Mrs Hoey’s theatrical digs in Manchester where there were no sexual shenanigans, but getting breakfast in the morning involved choosing from a roll-call of every type of egg available since the dawn of time and she and her husband (a scene hand at BBC Manchester) used to go on holidays to Crossmaglen, one of the most dangerous places in Ireland during the then Troubles.

Mrs Hoey’s was impeccably clean, but I had not heard the story – told in The Story of Variety – that you could guess in advance if a theatrical bed-&-breakfast place was not of the best if a previous act staying there had written “…quoth the Raven” in the visitors’ book.

I had also never heard the story of young English comic Des O’Connor’s first time playing the notorious Glasgow Empire where they famously hated all English acts. He went so badly on his first nightly performance that he figured the only thing he could do was pretend to faint, which he did and got carted off to the Royal Infirmary.

Old-style variety was much like modern-day comedy in that, as the documentary says: “You couldn’t be in Variety and be in elite company. It just wasn’t done. But, if you became a very big star, you could mix with kings and princes.”

Except kings and princes are thin on the ground nowadays and have been replaced by other gliterati.

The Story of Variety with Michael Grade is wonderful stuff for anyone interested in showbiz and bizarre acts. Ken Dodd talks of the old Variety theatres having “a smell of oranges and cigars”. In Ashton-under-Lyme, the performers had to hang their shoes up in the dressing rooms because of the rats.

But after-screening anecdotes and opinions were as interesting as what was in the documentary.

I had never spotted, until Michael Grade mentioned it to Barry Cryer after the screening, that now-forgotten-but-once-popular comic Hylda Baker’s stage persona was actually an almost direct copy of now-forgotten-but-once-popular comic Jimmy James. Like the sleight-of-hand in a good magic act, once you know it you can see it.

I was vaguely aware that Eric Morecambe’s famous catchphrase “Look at me when I‘m talking to you” was actually lifted from ventriloquist Arthur Worsley’s act – the dummy Charlie Brown used to say it to Worsley. (Eric freely admitted where he had got the line from.)

Most interestingly, Michael Grade said he would not have commissioned ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent series (which he likes) because he wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to get so many interesting acts.

But bizarre and interesting variety acts have always been and are always out there. I know from personal experience, looking for Gong Show style TV acts, that you just have to put an ad in The Stage newspaper on three consecutive weeks and they spill out like a tsurreal tsunami. A combination of real-people adding interest to their drab lives in godforsaken towns and suburbs around the UK… and struggling professionals who in previous times might have played clubs but who now often play street theatre.

The Story of Variety with Michael Grade comes to the conclusion that live Variety was killed off in the mid-to-late-1950s by a combination of television, scheduling rock stars in Variety stage shows (which split the audience into two groups, neither of which were fully satisfied) and adding strippers (which destroyed the appeal for family audiences). But this did not kill off the acts, merely the places they were showcased. Sunday Night at the London Palladium thrived on ITV in the 1950s and 1960s.

Michael Grade was wrong.

There are loads of good variety acts playing the Piazza in London’s Covent Garden every week and there is a third tier to the annual Edinburgh Fringe, which no-one ever seems to mention. There are the paid-for Fringe venues… plus the two organisations offering free venues… plus the free street theatre with which Edinburgh is awash throughout August.

And Variety is not dead elsewhere. Mr Methane still farts around the UK; Charlie Chuck is more speciality/spesh act than stand-up, The Bastard Son of Tommy Cooper doubles as The Great Voltini and the ratings success of Britain’s Got Talent on ITV1 and The Magicians on BBC1 show that there are not just loads of good spesh acts out there but that there is an appetite for them.

Now, what was the name of that bloke who used to torture teddy bears on a wheel of death at Malcolm Hardee’s old clubs The Tunnel Palladium and Up The Creek?

Was it Steve someone?

The near-sinking of comedian Malcolm Hardee’s birthday party on 5th January 2002

The late comedian Malcolm Hardee was born on 5th January 1950. He used to put on a birthday comedy show.  This is an extract from my 2002 diary. Malcolm had recently bought the Wibbley Wobbley floating pub in Greenland Dock, Rotherhithe… He drowned a few feet away from the Wibbley Wobbley in 2005.

SATURDAY 5th JANUARY 2002

Charlie Chuck, advertising man Paul (whom Chuck knows) and I went to the first of two birthday parties which Malcolm Hardee is holding this weekend. It was on his new floating pub The Wibbley Wobbley.

When we arrived, Malcolm was dressed in naval captain’s uniform with Russian Convoy medals on his chest. I went to the bow area to say hello to him.

“Go back up to the bar end,” he whispered, “We’re sinking – I’m not kidding – We’re going down.”

And, as we walked back up towards the bar, sure enough, I realised we were indeed walking slightly uphill.

We were all eventually evacuated – maybe thirty of us – and someone suggested the problem seemed to be that they were trying to pump the water out underwater via the pump where water enters.

A fire engine turned up. Then two policemen. Then another two policemen. Then another fire engine. Then another two policemen. And another two. It was a good night for criminals in Rotherhithe. The police were unsmiling and uninterested except when they had chats amongst themselves. The firemen were surprisingly fat. How do they get up ladders?

On the quayside, one theory for the slow sinking of the Wibbley Wobbley was that ice in the recent bitterly cold weather had blocked the pump and a build-up of shit in the septic tank was weighing down the vessel at one end.

The Wibbley Wobbley is not yet insured. No surprise there: neither is Malcolm’s car; and he has two driving licences under different names.

After about twenty minutes, Malcolm told me: “The Coast Guard have arrived. Straight up, a bloke from the Coast Guard has just just turned up because he heard about it. He seems to be in the mood for a party.” We turned and looked at the eight policemen already here. They did not talk to the Coast Guard man.

A well-known comedian was standing next to us with staring eyes, accompanied by a tall dark man who also had brightly staring eyes. Both looked startled at what was happening.

This is no time to be on coke, I thought.

We were eventually allowed back on the ship by the firemen.

Then we were evacuated again and told no-one would be allowed back on again that night.

Then we were let back on board again.

In all, the non-sinking took about 90 minutes.

The eventual explanation was that, indeed, a pipe had got blocked and shit really had built up on board to such an extent that it almost sank the boat and everyone in it.

A simile for many a comedy career, perhaps.

***

POSTSCRIPTS

Malcolm’s friend Deke has continued the tradition of Malcolm’s annual birthday party (well it would be annual, wouldn’t it?)  on the Sunday nearest to 5th January. This year it is this coming Sunday (9th January 2011) from 7.00pm at the Lord Hood pub next to Up The Creek in Greenwich. The event will include performances by Steve Bowditch (ex-Greatest Show on Legs) and a screening of The Tunnel the award-nominated short film about Malcolm’s notorious comedy club The Tunnel Palladium. Deke’s e-mail is dekedecore@hotmail.com … You can see The Greatest Show on Legs – Martin Soan, Steve Bowditch and Malcolm Hardee – perform their Naked Balloon Dance here.

This year’s annual Malcolm Hardee Awards for Comedy will be presented during a special two-hour tribute show at the Edinburgh Fringe – starting at 10.00pm on the evening of Friday 26th August 2011.

There is a Malcolm Hardee Appreciation Society group on Facebook.

A funny thing happened at comedian Malcolm Hardee’s birthday show in January 1999

The comedian Malcolm Hardee drowned in 2005. His birthday was on 5th January. Every year at his Up The Creek comedy club in Greenwich, he used to put on a show and post-show party on the nearest Sunday to 5th January.  This is an extract from my 1999 diary…

***

SUNDAY 3rd JANUARY 1999

In the evening, I went to Malcolm Hardee’s birthday show and party.

Before the show started, we were in the Lord Hood pub next to Up The Creek and, for some reason, I asked him: “Who are those people sitting over there?”

He nodded at one of the group: “That’s the stripper I used to go out with.”

She was a middle-aged woman.

“She hasn’t done it for a while,” he added.

Malcolm started his show by saying lots of people in the audience had seen him so many times he was just going to tell the set-up for each of his jokes and they could complete the punch-line… Which they did.

There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe
She had so many children…

…Her cunt fell off.

What goes in-out, in-out, in-out and smells of piss?…

…The Queen Mother doing the Hokey Cokey.

And so on.

The first act on was Chris Luby, performing his traditional imitations of Trooping The Colour and wartime spitfires with his mouth. Apparently, on Malcolm’s Christmas Eve show, Chris’ act had gone badly and, in the middle of his Battle of Britain impression, a heckler had yelled out: “Do a glider!”

Tonight’s acts also included The Bastard Son of Tommy Cooper who did a couple of sword-swallowing routines I hadn’t seen before. He bent a wire coat-hanger flat, put it down his throat as normal – his head bent back to let the metal go down his throat in a straight line – and then he brought his head 90 degrees forward to its normal position and pulled out the bent coat-hanger. He also put a red neon strip light down his throat while the house lights were dimmed and we could see his throat illuminated through the thin skin.

Charlie Chuck performed as only Charlie Chuck can. A drum kit was destroyed. Then someone I didn’t recognise came on and imitated Malcolm as host and, after Boothby Graffoe performed, the stand-in came on again and impersonated Malcolm hosting the show.

Where is Malcolm? I wondered.

So I went to the bar and it turned out he had collapsed by the toilets. I met his mother who said she had thought he was dead: his face had been grey and they had almost called an ambulance. Both she and I were surprised because he hadn’t really been drunk earlier. And, as I had seen him paralytically drunk a few months ago, I was especially surprised.

Malcolm told me: “I just went straight down – unconscious. I think someone spiked my drink.”

When he returned to the stage to continue the show, he still didn’t seem particularly drunk either, so maybe someone did indeed spike his drink.

He took it in his stride – as he takes any unique, bizarre event – as if it’s a perfectly normal thing to happen.

If they built a Malcolm Hardee theme park it would be in the style of Magritte and/or Salvador Dali.

***

POSTSCRIPTS

This year’s annual Malcolm Hardee Awards for Comedy will be presented during a special two-hour tribute show at the Edinburgh Fringe – starting at 10.00pm on the evening of Friday 26th August 2011.

There is a Malcolm Hardee Appreciation Society group on Facebook.

Malcolm’s friend Deke is holding his annual remembrance celebration of Malcolm this Sunday (9th January 2011) from 7.00pm at the Lord Hood pub next to Up The Creek in Greenwich. The event will include a screening of The Tunnel the award-nominated short film about Malcolm’s notorious comedy club The Tunnel Palladium. Deke’s e-mail is dekedecore@hotmail.com

Spending Christmas 1998 with Malcolm Hardee in Sarf Eest London

It was 22nd December 1998 and the comedian Malcolm Hardee (who drowned in 2005) was still living with his wife Jane. The record label Beggar’s Banquet were just about to release a CD single by his stepson’s rock group The Llama Farmers. It was two years before the turn of the century, with the Millennium Dome (now the O2 Dome) still a new structure. This is an extract from my diary…

***

I spent the afternoon with Malcolm, who has developed a habit of making a wet sound with his mouth, as if tasting his own saliva.

At the end of Malcolm’s road, a house-owner has put a new tiled name on their house: Dome Vista.

“But all you can see from the back windows of his house,” Malcolm told me, “is the bloody great flyover from the Blackwall Tunnel standing at the end of his garden. You can’t see the Millennium Dome. Fucking Dome Vista!”

I had been going to take Malcolm out to lunch but, on the way, as is often the case, he had “a better idea” and we went to the warehouse office of the three brothers who co-own Malcolm’s Up The Creek comedy club to pick up Malcolm’s weekly cheque. Two of the brothers plus wives and five or six staff were having a Christmas buffet meal with lots of seafood and champagne. On the walls of the room in which we sat were drawings of various property developments, including a new Greenwich shopping centre: they already own two existing Greenwich markets.

“He used to live in a mansion next to Rod Stewart in Hollywood,” Malcolm had told me about one of the brothers. When Malcolm tells you a wildly unlikely story, it usually turns out to be true. The more unbelievable the facts, the more likely they are to be true.

“That’s a bit severe,” this brother said of Malcolm’s ultra-close-cropped hair.

“Just had it cut,” Malcolm explained.

“Malcolm,” another brother explained to me, “only has his cut his hair every six months. He lets it grow over six months, so he only pays for a haircut twice a year.”

“No I don’t,” said Malcolm aggrieved and blinking. “I set it on fire at Beggar’s Banquet, in the offices.”

“Why was that?”

Malcolm thought briefly, shrugged and ignored the question. The truth is that he occasionally sets his hair on fire just to have an effect. He set fire to two cinemas in his youth. There has been a lot of arson around in his life.

“It doesn’t catch fire easily but it doesn’t cause any pain,” he mumbled defensively, by way of an explanation about his hair.

“What did Beggar’s Banquet say?” I asked.

Malcolm shrugged and blinked.

“You should make a record like Keith Allen,” I suggested. “You’d get lots of money. Form a group called The Old Lags.”

“I don’t hang round the Groucho Club enough,” he mumbled.

Malcolm recently came back from Australia, where he met his friend Wizo. “Typical,” Malcolm told the brothers, wives and staff over champagne and seafood, “Wizo lost his job the day I arrived and I had to pay for everything. He’d been selling advertising space in the Melbourne Age newspaper. They told him he had to wear a suit, but he got bored and came in one morning wearing a chef’s outfit. They weren’t happy. The good thing about Australia, though, Wizo told me, is that you can be poor quite comfortably.”

Malcolm’s brother, formerly a comedy promoter in Manchester, is now working in Wizo’s old London job – for music mogul Miles Copeland.

“My brother’s throwing a Christmas party for friends and relations,” Malcolm told us. “He tried to charge his guests £70-a-head to come but no-one’s agreed yet, so he’s probably going to invite them for free but have a whip-round for a new washing machine while they’re there.”

The brothers, their wives and staff looked impressed.

After the meal, we drove off to a bank where Malcolm deposited his cheque from the brothers and various other cheques including one for £29 from BBC TV to cover sales to Croatia of a Blackadder episode he appeared in. He was much impressed by the sale to Croatia. He banked about £900 then withdrew £700 and went to a betting shop, allegedly to check if ‘his’ greyhound was running at Catford. Instead, after realising a dog called ‘Oi Oi’ (Malcolm’s catchphrase) had won the previous race and he’d missed it, he bet £50 on a dog at random in the next race… and it won!

“I always win bets on dogs at Christmas,” he told me. “The rest of the year, I lose everything, but I always win just coming up to Christmas.” Then he added unexpectedly: “I part-own a greyhound.”

“You do?” I asked dubiously.

“It’s handled by a bloke who got ‘done’ in the 1970s for greyhound ‘ringing’. He got arrested after he had a very good black dog and disguised it by dying it brown. But, as luck would have it, when the dogs paraded round before the Off, it started to rain and the dye came out.”

This sounded like an urban myth to me.

“Ricky Grover,” I said, “told me a story about the ‘wrong’ dog coming round the final bend at Romford Stadium and someone throwing four footballs onto the track in front of the dogs.”

“Oh,” said Malcolm, never to be out-anecdoted, “I was once in prison with a bloke nicknamed ‘Teddy Bear’. His job was to stand by the rail at various stadiums around the country and, if the ‘wrong’ dog was winning, he would throw a teddy bear onto the track;. The dogs stopped racing, went crazy and tore it apart. His great talent,” explained Malcolm, “was that he could run very fast after he’d thrown the teddy bear.”

After picking up answerphone messages at Up The Creek, collecting mail from a new tenant in his old house in Glenluce Road, attempting to buy his own £7.99 autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake in a Greenwich remainder shop for £1 (they had sold out), visiting the kitsch Emporium shop which sells lava lamps and 1960s memorabilia and buying a Christmas tree from a dodgy-looking man in a car park, we went back to Malcolm’s current home in Fingal Street via Jools Holland’s railway station (to see the top of the mini castle tower he has built) and up a suburban back street to drive past Shangri-La – a corner house the outside of which the owner has decorated.

On the side wall of the house, there are embossed metal horses heads and three large garage doors.

“The anvil’s gone,” Malcolm told me, slightly peeved.

“Has he got three cars?” I asked.

“No, he’s got green astroturf behind them,” Malcolm replied as if that explained it all.

“It’s a strange world,” I said.

“Nah,” said Malcolm, making a wet sound with his mouth, as if tasting his own saliva. “This is South East London.”

Never go south of the River

In Apocalypse Now! the character Chef, played by Frederic Forrest, says after something unexpectedly leaps out of the jungle at him (I’m trying not to give the shock away): “Never get out of the fucking boat! Never get out of the boat! I gotta remember! Gotta remember! Never get out of the boat!”

I can sympathise with him.

In London, the equivalent truism is “Never go South of the River. Always remember. Never go South of the River.”

I remember reading a piece in the Daily Telegraph years ago (I do love the Daily Telegraph and still lament the passing of its Page Three) which pointed out that the southern bank of the Thames from London Bridge to Deptford – or it might have been Dartford – has been a haunt of dodgy geezers and crime families since Elizabethan times.

I have been in Greenwich most of this week and, at 0100 in the early hours of Thursday morning, I went down to find the front passenger window of my car had been smashed in. The double locking system on my Toyota means that, if you do smash through the window, you still can’t open the door from the inside. So the yobbo only rummaged through my glove compartment and only managed to steal… the Toyota manual for my car.

I can’t fault his taste, though I can fault his efficiency. He missed the SatNav.

And now I have to fork out six quid to get a new manual.

I went to Greenwich Market yesterday. Two stall holders told me that, earlier in the day, it had been snowing inside the market.

Greenwich Market has a roof.

Never go South of the River.

Always remember.

Never go South of the River…

The Long Good Friday script and Malcolm Hardee following in the footsteps of Laurence Olivier

On Sunday, I met an old friend of the late comedian Malcolm Hardee at the first annual Pantomime Horse Race in Greenwich. It has only just reminded me that, I guess around 1990/1991, Malcolm told me another chum of his – Barrie Keeffe, who scripted the wonderful British gangster movie The Long Good Friday – had approached him with an intriguing, bizarre and possibly brilliant suggestion.

When The Long Good Friday was produced as a TV movie, I was working for Lew Grade’s ATV in Birmingham. Lew had financed The Long Good Friday via one of his subsidiary production companies Black Lion for transmission on the ITV Network at Easter. But, when the movie was completed and Lew saw what the climactic ‘twist’ to Barrie Keeffe’s plot actually was (I presume he had never personally read the script before it was produced), he was morally and patriotically outraged. He immediately withdrew it from its ITV transmission and, initially, refused to even let the producers buy it for themselves for cinema distribution. It was only when George Harrison’s Handmade Films made Lew an offer he couldn’t refuse that he eventually relented and allowed it to be screened in cinemas to critical acclaim.

More than ten years after he had scripted The Long Good Friday, Barrie Keeffe told Malcolm he had bought rights from the Estate of the late John Osborne to update the classic showbiz play The Entertainer.

The Entertainer (which was partially about the Suez Crisis) had been written by Osborne in 1957 specifically for Laurence Olivier who also went on to play the central role of faded and rather seedy comedian Archie Rice in the 1959 movie version.

Barrie Keeffe wanted Malcolm Hardee to star as Archie Rice in this updated stage version but other events in Keeffe’s life intervened and, as far as I’m aware, the updated version of The Entertainer was never written.

I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like.

Malcolm was strangely unable to act – in his various appearances in The Comic Strip Presents, Blackadder etc, he could never really ‘inhabit’ a character. As has often been said by his friends and admirers, Malcolm never really had a stage act: his greatest act and his greatest performance was his life.

But it could have been a masterstroke of casting and the thought of Malcolm Hardee as Archie Rice conjures up all sorts of visions of what might have been.

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There is an American trailer for The Long Good Friday here; clips from The Entertainer here; and clips of Malcolm Hardee here.

An American re-located re-make of The Long Good Friday is due for release in 2011. I don’t have high hopes, although the alleged re-make of The Italian Job triumphed by totally throwing away the original script and just using the title. As Barrie Keeffe’s plot ‘twist’ at the end of the original Long Good Friday – the one which so outraged Lew Grade – is so specific to the UK, it will be interesting to see how the American-based re-make can possibly cope.

A glove on the head in Macclesfield, a pantomime horse race and a new sexual perversion

It was a bit of a surreal weekend.

On Saturday night, Vivienne and Martin Soan‘s regular monthly London club Pull The Other One was playing their second irregular show in an interestingly packed Macclesfield Town Hall.

Interesting because it did not strike me as a regular comedy audience. They appeared to be a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road audience just out for a good time on a Saturday night. They could have been there for an Agatha Christie play by the local Rep; they could have been there for a Michael McIntyre show. Fair enough.

What surprised me, then, was that they really seemed to appreciate the always very very bizarre, surreal comic, musical and visual talents of Andrew Bailey – who seems never happier than when he has a rubber glove on his head – and the Marmite-odd performances of Holly Burn.

Both are really beyond Alternative comedy; both would have been watched in stunned incomprehension 15 years ago (and Andrew Bailey was); but both were now accepted and appreciated by what seemed to me to be a very mainstream audience. Surprising and somehow reassuring.

But, then, the show had started with full-frontal nudity from Martin Soan with a brown paper bag over his head – so they had a hint up-front it was not going to be a Michael McIntyre show.

This Pull the Other One show in Macclesfield on Saturday night was so odd that when I went to see the first annual Pantomime Horse Race in Greenwich on Sunday afternoon, it seemed a perfectly reasonable and sane event.

Although, in the gents toilet of one Greenwich pub, the normal condom vending machine was joined by another wall-mounted vending machine selling a Viagra substitute, inflatable sheep and inflatable guitars.

Condoms are perfectly normal in a gents toilet vending machine… Viagra is fine… inflatable sheep I can cope with… but inflatable guitars as a sex aid ???? Have I missed a rising perversion ???

All help and advice (preferably with pictures) gratefully received.