Memories of early alternative comedy: Malcolm Hardee and Sir Gideon Vein and the late lamented Ian Hinchliffe…

Anna, not too long ago, recovering in a Vancouver hospital

Last week, I got an e-mail from this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent Anna Smith. In part it read:

“The whole time I was living in London – over four years – I never saw a window with the blinds or curtains open, except once.

“I was walking home from The Earth Exchange, which was a vegetarian restaurant in North London that used to be a good place for comics to work – Julian Clary played there when he was starting off and Andrew Bailey and David Rappaport did a macabre duo with candelabra and a huge birdcage which David wore on his head as he descended the stairs making bird sounds while Andrew carried the lit-up candelabra, throwing corn flakes at him…

“Anyhow, one night at about three in the morning, I was walking back towards central London with Tony Green, who was dressed as Sir Gideon Vein, when I spotted a window lit up, curtains pulled wide open, on the main floor of a house. I was amazed! Finally I would get to see what went on inside a dwelling in London at night.

“Tony tried to stop me. No, he begged. Don’t do it. What will the people who live in there think when they look out their window and see a big girl with red hair in plaits standing outside and staring into their sitting room?

“But I could not stop myself, so I raced up to the window. Tony gave up. Besides, he had to take a piss. I stood in front of the window staring in, but there were no people at all; it was just a very dull looking sitting room.

“So, a bit dejectedly, I returned to the pavement where I found Tony  urinating into a flowerbed. What will the people think, I asked, if they open their front door and look out and see you pissing on their flowers?”

Tony Green this month in his normal attire

Tony Green is an interesting figure from – if he can forgive me for saying this or even if he cannot – the early years of British Alternative Comedy. His character Sir Gideon Vein was (and, indeed, occasionally is) a Victorian era throw-back character.

Tony has occasionally turned up fleetingly in this blog. About 20 years ago, he took me to the fetish club Torture Garden. He looked like he was dressed as the Peter Davidson incarnation of Doctor Who. But he was not. That was normal attire for him. A few weeks ago, I mentioned him performing as both The Obnoxious Man and The Pompous man at Pull The Other One comedy club.

I recently met him at the Soho Theatre bar in London for a cup of tea, but he soon moved us to the upstairs room of a nearby pub. No surprise there.

When I switched my iPhone’s recorder on for this blog, Tony was doing an imitation of the late performance artist Ian Hinchliffe’s gruff Yorkshire accent.

Ian Hinchliffe (right) with Tony/Sir Gideon Vein at T’others

“I’m not having people thinking I’m a fookin’ shirt-lifter. Are you taping any of this? You’ve got it at the middle, really. I mean anyone will be thinking I’m a fookin’ shirt lifter. Such bad terminology and who really cares these days?… Not that I give a damn, you know, but…”

“Sadly missed,” I said. “Sadly missed. The first time I saw Ian Hinchliffe was at a club down in Oval around 1990 – I think you were running it. Malcolm Hardee and I went to it.”

“That was T’others at The Ship,” said Tony. “You and Malcolm came with his mother. I remember I got into an altercation with Malcolm and she said: Hit him, Malcolm! Hit him!

Malcolm Hardee and mum

“He told her He don’t mean it, mum. I know him. It’s only a joke! and he said to me You didn’t mean that, what you said? and after that, I got on very well with Malcolm’s mother and I told her Mrs Hardee, you’re very well-spoken.

“Yes, she told me, I don’t know how Malcolm came to get that accent. It was around the time his little eye started going off in the wrong direction.”

“I met someone,” I told Tony, “at the interment of Malcolm’s ashes. He had known Malcolm as a teenager and said he used to practise it in front of a mirror – the accent, the droop of the cigarette out of the mouth and everything, the whole character.”

“I once said to Malcolm,” Tony told me, “I don’t know how you get away with it. Your material’s crap. And he said It’s not a question of the material, is it? It’s not a question of talent. You don’t need talent, you don’t need material when you’re me. It’s charisma. When you’ve got as much charisma as what I’ve got, you don’t need nothing else.”

“That’s sort of true,” I said. “Are you a Londoner?” I asked, trying the get the chat onto some course.

“Of course I am,” said Tony in mock outrage.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You could be from anywhere.”

“That,” replied Tony, “is what someone said to me the other day. Are you from the Colonies? How dare… God, sir… I’m a Londoner born and… (He started singing) Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner…”

“… from the 19th century, perhaps,” I said.

Did Kirk sing Londoner in The List of Adrian Messenger?

“Of course,” said Tony. “Well, I’ve been going a long time now. Remember Kirk Douglas singing Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner in The List of Adrian Messenger? He can’t do it with the authentic Cockney accent any more that I taught him in 1963. I was only a young man then.”

“You taught him an accent?” I asked.

“Of course I did!” said Tony in mock outrage. “His Cockney accent.”

“How did you meet him?” I asked.

“Well,” replied Tony, “I was only – what? – in my (he started laughing) in my sixties at the time. I look very good for my age, you gotta admit it does work. I can tell you the secret, John. It’s Oscar. There’s a picture in the attic. Hey!” he said, putting on a Kirk Douglas whine, “what’s that song you’re singing? and I said It’s a song. Buy us a few drinks, Kirk. Buy US a few drinks – there were ten of us in the company…”

“You just bumped into him?” I asked.

“You don’t believe this, do you?” asked Tony. He started laughing. “You’ll believe anything!… It was in the Cutty Sark and I thought it was going to get me into movies. All I got was half a pint. I never saw him again. He’s been using it ever since. Even now – how old is he? He’s nearly 100 now. He’s had two strokes. When he gets on TV, he still sings (Tony put on a Kirk Douglas whine) Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner… He’s forgotten to do the Cockney accent, but you can’t expect everything at 97. But I forgive him. I’m like that in my old age.”

“Someone,” I said, “was lamenting to me that they had not seen Sir Gideon Vein perform for ages.”

“I used to run a private little club off Mallow Street,” said Tony. “It was one of those places, John, where you got carte blanche to do as you like. I could put all of my favourite performers on there. People like Mr Hinchliffe and one or two other oddities.”

“You were one of the few people to put Mr Hinchliffe on,” I said.

“We did a gig some time ago at an arts centre,” said Tony. “Someone called Chris Brooke put us on and I said to Chris: Do you think it’s a good idea, Chris, really? You’ve just taken over this new job as programme devisor which, from what I understand it, is quite a good job. Do you think it’s a good idea for the first one to put on the likes of Hugh Metcalfe – the man who started The Klinker club – and Hinchliffe and me as compere? For the first one, that’s not a good idea.”

“Because?” I asked. “It’s great idea, surely?”

“Well, did he want to keep the job? But he was quite clever, because we kicked off and, after us, he put on the Mike Westbrook Band and you can’t go wrong with the Mike Westbrook Band. I saw Ian in the dressing room. On this occasion, they had had some particularly good canned beer – one of his favourites – on the train and he had over-indulged. Maybe about 15 pints. Anyway, he fell asleep on stage. His partner – they were both over 60, so you could hardly call her his girlfriend – went Wake up! Wake up! And, after about seven minutes of snoring on stage, he did wake up and he looked at the audience and said: What are you bastards doing in my bedroom?

“Quite a good line, actually. So funny, in fact, that someone who was running a mega performance art festival in Belfast decided to book him as one of the headline acts.”

… TONY GREEN’S MEMORIES ARE CONTINUED HERE …

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.