The one-legged dancing bull fighter who had a golden tassel affixed to his stump

Double-legged former dancer Anna Smith in her hospital bed

The So It Goes blog’s occasional Canadian comedy correspondent Anna Smith has just been released from St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver after being admitted to their emergency department on Valentine’s Day to get a Dacron patch sewn onto her aorta… She tells me she wants “to warn healthy young people about the dangers of enduring  years in murky subterranean caves that pass as limelight”.

When in London, before her move to the Dominion of Canada, she helped Sir Gideon Vein run the now ironically-named Open Heart Cabaret. She used to dance at the Nell Gwynne club in Soho during the day, the Gargoyle Club at night and then spend her time at the old Comedy Store until the early hours.

If she had died under the surgeons’ knives in Canada, she had wanted her obituary to include the fact she had performed with Julian Clary and the much lamented late David Rappaport and that she had been forced to learn to play the accordion as a child and appeared on Canadian television with Andre the Giant.

“Now,” she tells me, “I’ve been given a heart-shaped pillow as a physiotherapy tool and it says Open Heart on it….Veins, hearts, sternums being sawn in half and wired together.”

She also tells me she was given “orientation at the hospital for the cardiac rehab program… The walls were adorned with vapid monotone posters dedicated to mind-boggling philosophical questions like WHAT IS AN AVOCADO (printed on green paper) and NUTS – WHATS IN ‘EM ? (printed on brown paper). Now that dietitians and physiotherapists can produce their own amateur pamphlets with the push of a print button, there is no longer any need for the Department of Health to waste public money on artists or copywriters. I sat though a dull PowerPoint presentation about Cardiac Health, which I made bearable by mentally substituting the word Catholic for Cardiac: WHY CATHOLIC PATIENTS NEED FIBRE… HOW CATHOLIC PATIENTS RELIEVE STRESS…”

Anna tells me that recent local Vancouver news includes the story that “Immigration Officials abetted by a local television station and the National Geographic TV channel raided a downtown building site where they chased, captured and filmed migrant construction workers from Mexico and Honduras. The workers were made to sign legal papers which they did not comprehend and which turned out to be releases so that their images can appear on a reality TV show called Border Services to be screened on the National Geographic channel.”

Anna also tells me that her sojourn in hospital has made her realise there is “hope for mutilated dancers” but it also seems to have allowed her to develop a possibly unhealthy obsession about Signor Donato, an obscure one-legged dancer who was an enormous success touring Australia in the 1870s.

She reports:

“It appears there was more than one Signor Donato. The original was a hit in Covent Garden in London in the 1850s and danced dressed as a bullfighter with a golden tassel affixed to his stump which, it was said, resembled a cushion on an old fashioned sofa, his mutilated state notwithstanding.

Lola Montez – pursued by a one-legged man?

“The second Signor Donato was an imitator of the original, who toured Australia and New Zealand several times before heading to California… possibly following the trail of Lola Montez, the Sligo-born ‘Spanish Dancer’, toppler of governments, and creator of the infamous erotic Spider Dance who ended her days performing charitable work for the fallen women of Brooklyn.”

Anna continues:

“One of the Signor Donatos (the first, I think) was said to be an immense favourite in London, Paris and Milan. He was said to have lost his leg fighting under Garibaldi when a shell burst during the Battle of Magenta in 1859. He surprised his audience with the grace and agility he displayed and danced to an introductory adagio, followed by the Jeanette Polka (accompanying himself with castanets) and concluded with the Garibaldi March.

“I first heard of him in a book I read in the 1980s: Enter the Colonies, Dancing, an Australian history of their early touring dancers. Then I read an article titled Strange Players by Dutton Cook (Belgravia). Strange Players was written in 1881 and is a documentation of famous maimed and mutilated dancers and actors working in London at that time.

“This small advert appeared in the Wellington Independent, 16 August, 1872 :

SIGNOR DONATO
Who created the great furore
at Covent Garden in 1864
will appear at the
ODD FELLOWS HALL
for
ONE NIGHT ONLY
On his way to San Francisco

“I have no idea what the great furore was…..and can’t find out if he ever arrived in San Francisco.”

The preface to a 1895 German book (Fahrend Volk by Signer Saltarino, Leipzig) says:

“The one-legged dancer first came into style with Julio Donato, a Spanish bull fighter, who lost a leg in a bull fight. Through industry and practice, he was able to perform the most graceful, surprising and agreeable dances. His appearance, manner and personality were far from painful. He married the daughter of the Viennese actor Julius, herself a popular actress, who bore him a lovely daughter, Dora Donato, who became a very well known light opera singer. After Donato’s death, a number of artificial (kuenstlich) and genuine monopedic dancers and clowns sprang up, all of whom were only weak imitations of their prototype. Only the one-legged clowns who called themselves The Donatos after their famous original appeared not only to inherit the artistic ability of their predecessor but his luck.”

Anna tells me:

“The imposter Signors Donato were particularly prevalent after the Great War and some even teamed up together. One particular duo called themselves The Merry Monopedes.

Anna is recovering well from her operation but worried that she may become “the world expert on monopedic dancers”.

YouTube currently has a 1949 clip of a one-armed and one-legged dancer called Crip Heard.

North Korea – Walter Mitty truth in an anarchic, pedestrian totalitarian state

The throbbing industrial heart of the mineral water plant

It is ironic that one of the most controlled states in the world is so anarchic.

Every day on our continuing guided – or should that be guarded? – tour of the the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, we are told: “The itinerary has changed.”

It is in the countryside that you realise just how disorganised things are in North Korea.

An ox pulling a medieval plough is a rarity – possibly even a luxury. People sit using their hands on the soil. A tractor is as rare as a raindrop in the Sahara. Not unknown but still visually shocking.

In the cities, cars are a rarity. Even in the capital city of Pyongyang, where there is some traffic, vehicles do not exactly jam; they drip.

When one of our two ever-present guides realised I had been in North Korea before – in 1986 – she said: “You must see a lot of changes.”

I smiled and nodded a lie.

There seems virtually no change in 26 years. The monuments have got bigger. That’s about it.

When I was in China in 1984, people used to bicycle to get around. In North Korea in 2012, they still mostly walk. In the countryside. In the cities.

This is a very pedestrian totalitarian state.

Today, we got taken to a mineral water bottling plant to see the awe-inspiring strides North Korea has taken under the glorious guidance of its three great Leaders: father son and holy grandson.

The mineral water bottling plant, like so much else in North Korea, had a stylish look to it, but was not working. We were told the workers were “rehearsing for the celebrations tomorrow” of the late Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s 100th birthday.

Plausible if odd, given that our two official state tour guides had organised the trip and, in the coach, had told us what we would see happening inside the bustling bottling plant.

Someone in our group had been before to the same mineral water bottling plant – a couple of years ago. It was closed then too. Back then, the story was that it was closed “for maintainance”. No visible maintenance had been happening. It was – and still is – the Marie Celeste of mineral water bottling plants.

Today, the gleaming, suspiciously clean machines looked un-used. We were told by the manager of the mineral water bottling plant that, each day, they produce 400 tons of health-giving mineral water – 10,000 bottles per day. Quick mental arithmetic makes me realise this mean that 25 bottles must weigh one ton. This seems somewhat unlikely. Perhaps they are manufacturing health-giving mineral heavy water for health-giving mineral nuclear bombs.

The manager tells us the factory’s water is exported to 1,000 different countries around the world.

Opinion varies on how many countries there currently are in the world. But it seems to be accepted to be between 89 and 196 countries. (What, for example, of Palestine or Taiwan or, indeed, Scotland?)

So, of these 196 countries, North Korea sells its health-giving mineral water to 1,000 of them?

Welcome to North Korean reality.

Perhaps many of the countries are not of this Earth. I could believe that.

If modern-day Beijing has a touch of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis about it, North Korea has the touch of a paranoid Walter Mitty about it. In that very real sense, nothing has changed since I was last here in 1986.

One of the most frightening parts of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is when the hero Winston Smith is being tortured and is told that it is not good enough for him  to say he loves Big Brother; it is not good enough for him to say 2+2=5.

If Big Brother tells him 2+2=5 then he must truly believe that 2+2=5. He must know without doubt that the truth is that 2+2 really does equal 5.

In North Korea, people have no access to outside information sources. The trick is to ban the personal ownership of radios. The people have no access to foreign TV, no access to foreign publications or news sources, no access to radio except state-owned radio sets broadcasting the state radio channel. From cradle to grave, the truth they know is what the state tells them.

I do not know that Adolf Hitler existed. I only ‘know’ because I have been told in books and have seen him speak  in old footage used in TV documentaries. But I do not from personal first-hand experience ‘know’ that he existed.

In 1986, the North Koreans showed us (its foreign visitors) a documentary film explaining how the Korean War started. As we saw in the film, the United States’ pet dogs the South Koreans wantonly attacked North Korea without warning. The valiant North Koreans fought back and pushed the South Koreans and the imperialist Americans back to the sea and the Americans begged for peace. The Americans did not push the North Korean forces back significantly; the Chinese did not enter the War and push the US/UN troops back.

In 1986, grandfathers and grandmothers would have been alive who remembered American troops passing northwards through their towns and villages; they would also have remembered Chinese troops passing southwards through those same towns and villages.

But, presumably, they could not tell their grandchildren that.

Because it never happened.

Their grandchildren ‘knew‘ from books and photos and captions and documentaries and museum trips what had actually happened in ‘reality’.

If their grandparents told them anything else, it could only be based on American imperialist fabrications. The only right thing to do, I presume, would have been to report them to the police.

Historical reality is what you are shown to have existed.

I know the aliens were defeated by an Apple computer because I have seen filmed evidence in Independence Day.

Pictures do not lie.

… CONTINUED HERE …

True tales from the Comedians’ Cricket Match?

Apparently, during filming of the new movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, author John Le Carré was phoned up and a key line was added. It was during a scene in which new information was assessed and the line was:

“Patently a fabrication from beginning to end. Just could be the real thing.”

I have found that the more unlikely a story, the more likely it is to be true. When comedian say something likely, it is often made up; when they say something too OTT to be true… it is often a toning-down of a far more OTT truth.

Yesterday, I was at the comedians’ annual cricket match against the locals at Staplefield in West Sussex. It seems to be held every six months.

Cricket is possibly the dullest game ever invented. But you certainly meet some interesting people and hear some interesting stories at the comedians’ cricket match.

While theoretically watching, I got talking to a retired fireman who used to work in Slough. He told me that, occasionally, he would cycle into work to Slough from Staplefield, a journey of 54 miles. It would take him three hours but keep him fit. And he once cycled from Slough to Northampton and back – a 140 mile round trip – to see a girlfriend.

Clearly Staplefield harbours some hardy people.

One comedian at the match told me about not appearing on the Sky TV talent show Don’t Stop Me Now in which contestants are ejected in various odd ways including being jerked up into the air by a rope or wire or dropped through a trapdoor.

The comic in question was told he could not use the word “Nazis” in his routine because “people might be offended”. Not offended by the routine or the gag, which was inoffensive, but by any use of the word “Nazis” in any sentence. Another problem was that he turned out to be too heavy for either the rope or the trapdoor. Sky did not use him on the show.

Another comic (and it is fairly obvious to other comics who this is) told me that, in horse racing, there had been a fad a few years ago – if a fellow jockey was asleep – to drop either snot or sperm onto the unconscious person’s closed eyes.

“Snot and sperm,” I was told, “are both at body temperature, so the person doesn’t wake up. But, when they do, they find their eyelids are stuck together for a little bit and they think they are blind… How we used to laugh!”

This story vies with another for most bizarre story of yesterday.

I heard the other story at local pub the Victory Inn from a guy of about 30 who claimed he had been in the Army and had been in Afghanistan. His tour over there is not actually relevant, but I mentioned to him the story I have blogged about before of the Irish Republican sympathiser who was put unconscious on a plane to New York.

The story I was told yesterday was a tale of a personal dispute between a couple of Army men and a non-Army person who had screwed them out of money. When the money could not be recovered, they removed him from his house one night, drugged him so he was unconscious, put him in a container lorry, drove it to the Balkans to a place they knew in a forest on a remote hillside miles from any town or village. They stripped him, gave him a tab of LSD and left him there on the hillside, naked and presuming he was still in the UK.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“I’ve got no idea,” the man in the pub told me. “Not interested.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

The story seems unlikely but, perhaps because of that, it has the ring of truth about it.

Who can tell betwixt reality and fantasy, especially if you find yourself naked and alone on a hillside where any locals you meet will be speaking in an unknown language.

“Show Me The Funny” – produced by people who never read their own title

Exactly a week ago, I wrote a blog rather piously advising comedians how to get to grips with structuring their hour-long Edinburgh Fringe shows.

It basically said they should follow the rule of The Elevator Pitch and constantly make sure everything within the show was relevant to a core 10 or 12 word description of what the show was about.

Obviously, the producers of last night’s new ITV1 series Show Me The Funny did not read and did not take the advice of this wise and admirably-written blog.

Their main problem, though, appears to be that they did not take the advice of their own title:

Show Me The Funny

If you broadcast a show about football matches, I think my best advice is that viewers should be able to see people playing football. The producers of Show Me The Funny failed to grasp this simple concept.

In Show Me The Funny, we had a show about comedians in which the producers appeared to be trying increasingly desperate ways to avoid showing the comedians actually performing comedy.

The show was overproduced. Lots of travelogue stuff. Lots of background (most of it irrelevant). Lots of snippets of other shows’ formats. It took 13 minutes before any comic actually stood up and did any comedy. And that lasted something like 30 seconds.

I imagine Herbert’s Hair Salon and “Liverpool’s highest bar” were very appreciative for being given network television exposure but what has a comic helping out in a hair salon for a few seconds of screentime got to do with a comedy talent show? It was a mindless cobbling-on of other reality TV formats. It was a sign of a production with no confidence in its own format.

I am sure the producers justified the waffle and overwhelming visual, verbal and conceptual padding to themselves and to their ITV commissioning editor as “adding production value to the concept” but the effect was they lost all sight of what their selling point was.

All the producers had to do was what it says on their own label – Show Me The Funny

KIS KIS – Keep it simple; keep it simple.

It does not matter how much it costs, how long it takes or how glossy it looks… If a two-minute item destroys the pace of a one-hour show, cut it.

In this case, the first 30-minutes destroyed the one-hour show.

The two female comedians had to arrange a blind date between two strangers in the street for a 3-minute section of the show. Why? Two of the men were sent off to find Liverpool landmarks for two minutes. Why? The other two men had to find women called Michelle in the street. At this point I thought I was watching a bad showreel for several even worse would-be TV reality formats.

Hellfire!… just Show Me The Funny!

Show Me The Funny gave glimpses of about 15 other show formats, none of them relevant to the title of the actual show and none of them gelling into a single whole.

I lost all interest in trite and cliché analysis of why Liverpudlians are inherently funny when I was about 13. This show managed to dumb down to lower-than-an-11-year-old level. It tried to be all things to all viewers and ended up being nothing to anyone.

After 23 minutes, there was some brief chat about how to write comedy material, but it lasted about 30 or 40 seconds.

27 minutes into the hour-long show, the first real stand-up performance started. And then they cut away from the routines, trying and failing to build-up the tension.

In the first 30 minutes, viewers must have been falling asleep, switching off or jumping out of windows like tsunamis of lemmings.

There is no shortage of good stand-ups out there. There does, however, seem to be a shortage of talent behind the camera.

I had wondered why there was no producer’s name credited in Radio Times.

Now I know – it was (probably) not because no-one wanted to take the blame but because, in the actual end credits of the show, there were producers credited all over the place. There were more producer credits in there than at the end of a $100 million Hollywood blockbuster. And, having read those end credits carefully, I still do not know who actually produced the show.

It was a classic case of too many cooks – a show created by a committee of the uncommitted.

The real problem is TV producers wanting to have total control over exactly what happens, rather than sitting back with a good concept you believe in and, if necessary, tweaking the resultant drama. If it becomes a car crash disaster, that is not a problem. A car crash is just as entertaining as a tight race. But don’t try to over-control.

Just as important as the production is the pre-production. The concept, the format, the careful choice of the participants. If you have the right people, sit back and trust the talent.

There are two big things in TV production.

The first is decision-making.

Show Me The Funny had no idea what its own format was and could not even decide which of 15 other formats to nick.

The second important thing in TV production is delegation. And that includes performers. You choose the right performers and then have faith in your own decision.

If an act dies, then it dies. That’s the game.

Show Me the Funny looked like a show where everyone behind the camera was covering their own asses and where so many production elements and so many producers were involved that, ultimately, it would be impossible to blame any one person if – as happened – it went arse-over-tit.

When they actually got down to the nitty-gritty in the second-half of the one-hour show and viewers half-saw comedians performing comedy then being criticised by audience members and by three well-chosen judges – critic Kate Copstick, comedian/actor Alan Davies and, in this first episode, comic Jimmy Tarbuck – the programme was at least watchable, if still a mess.

As she is a judge on the Malcolm Hardee Awards, which I organise, it is a relief to be able to say Kate Copstick was well cast as the bastard daughter of Simon Cowell and Cruella de Vil.

But the three judges were as savagely cut about in the editing as the acts.

The one thing you don’t do with 5-minute comedy spots – like magic – is cut away. You show the funny.

These are professional comedians.

Comedy = timing.

Leave the timing to the comic. Don’t cut. Especially if you have comedians doing 5-minute spots. Don’t just show 30 seconds or 70 seconds of the act, which is what happened. Comedy is about build-up and timing.

I have wondered for ages why no-one has tried to do an X-Factor for comedy. Great idea. Good young-ish audience profile. I am still wondering because this is not that show.

Great prize – £100,000 in cash, a UK tour and a DVD out before Christmas. Pity about the format (if you can even call this dog’s dinner that).

Show Me The Funny

The clue is in the name. They should have read their own title and made THAT show not this shapeless showreel for the massed ranks of indecisive producers involved. They do not seem to even know if it is a talent show or a reality show. It ends up being neither. It fails to be the X-Factor and fails in a bizarrely misguided attempt to be The Apprentice or MasterChef.

Too many behind-the-camera cooks.

No broth.

It’s Special. Why did I almost cry at this low-budget movie which everyone else seems to see as a comedy?

So this is the movie’s plot, right?

A man takes a pill. He believes it has given him limitless superhuman powers.

The movie is this year’s release Limitless. Right?… Wrong.

An ordinary person tries to become a superhero with mixed consequences.

The movie is last year’s release Kick-Ass. Right?… Wrong.

Now let’s bring in the Marx Brothers…

When I was a kid, I used to see Marx Brothers movies on TV and I didn’t think they were particularly funny. But, when I later saw them in a cinema, with an audience, they were very very very funny indeed.

As I mentioned last week I received a DVD in the post from mad inventor John Ward who, in a previous incarnation was a cinema projectionist and therefore has an interest in movies.

The 2006 movie he sent me was Special – Specioprin Hyrdrochloride.

I only got round to watching it last night alone in the dark in a living room with a friend. We expected a quirky comedy.

Quirky it was. A comedy it was not.

Yet UK distributors Revolver sell the movie as “a comedy spectacular” and have a review quote on the back cover saying it is “hilarious”.

When I went to look at the reviews on IMDB, they were 100% positive and they kept saying it is a funny film.

I did not find it funny at all.

It was visibly low-budget and shot in documentary-style washed-out colours.

The film I saw was not a comedy.

Yet everyone else I have read seems to think it is. Maybe it is another Marx Brothers film: you have to see it with an audience to get the full comic effect. Or maybe I am odd and have just missed something.

I do not like Robert Altman films. Except for one: Images.

It is about schizophrenic delusions and the editing between reality and fantasy is exceptional.

Special is better.

The plot involves a (very) ordinary man who takes part in the clinical trials of a drug called ‘Special’. He believes the drug has given him superhero powers. It has not. He dresses as a superhero and decides to fight crime. The result is a moving, mesmerisingly-gripping, sad and immensely humane film about madness and delusion which includes sparse and understated but astonishingly good special effects for a such cheap film.

According to IMDB, Special cost about $1 million to make and grossed $6,387 in the US. Normally, that would not be a good recommendation. What seems to have happened is that Special has been successful on the film festival circuit but not commercially. Admittedly a nightmare to market, it has slipped under the radar.

It has one of the best scripts I have seen in years – and it is one of the few movies to actually use film editing to its full potential, interweaving reality and fantasy. Plus it has top-notch acting by an entire cast of (to me) unknowns; and spot-on direction. It is a wonderful jewel of a little film (77 minutes).

It was written and directed by Hal Haberman & Jeremy Passmore, a pair of recent graduates from USC.

I saw Dark Star at the Edinburgh Film Festival in the 1970s. It was directed by the then unknown John Carpenter and co-written by him and the then unknown Dan O’Bannon. They, too, were USC students. Dark Star screamed rough talent. And so does Special.

John Carpenter went on to direct movies like Halloween, The Fog and Escape From New York. O’Bannon’s later scripts included Alien and Total Recall.

Special’s Jeremy Passmore is one of the credited screenwriters on the upcoming re-make of John Milius’ Red Dawn.

Having seen Special, that can only bode well for Red Dawn.

I did not laugh when I watched Special but lots of others seem to have laughed. So it must be me that’s odd.

I found it sad, touching and bittersweet.

Almost everyone who has seen it seems to agree it’s exceptionally well-made and psychologically gripping.

The intangible nature of reality and the man with the (second?) biggest bollocks in British showbusiness

Yesterday, I drove up to see a friend in Cromer, on the North Norfolk coast.

Looking further north, from the end of Cromer Pier, she told me there is nothing until you reach the North Pole. And even when you get to the North Pole… there is nothing.

Well, there’s something, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

The ‘facts’ surrounding “godfather of British Alternative Comedy” Malcolm Hardee can be a bit intangible too. The myths are many, various and often surreal. I read the other day that he once kidnapped the singer George Michael, mistaking him for a George Michael lookalike. Where that story came from I have no idea, but Malcolm would have enjoyed it.

On the way back from Cromer, I stopped off at North Walsham in Norfolk, for dinner or supper depending on where you come from. I suppose I could call it a dinner party, except I’m not convinced such things exist except in Islington. But one thing I’m sure of is that also tucking-in was Vivienne Soan, who runs the monthly Pull The Other One comedy club in Nunhead, South London (this month’s show headlining Jo Brand has, not unusually, already sold out).

The subject of Malcolm Hardee inevitably cropped up.

Malcolm was renowned for having the biggest bollocks in British showbusness. Although, strictly speaking, we are not talking here of bollocks but of scrotum. In fact, in later years, in rare moments of quiet contemplation, he would admit to me that he only had the second biggest bollocks in British showbusiness, following what he told me was an embarrassing tabletop contest with Jenny Agutter’s dad. Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but I prefer to think it is.

When Malcolm drowned in Rotherhithe at the end of January 2005, the story which initially circulated was that he had probably fallen out of a small rowing boat into the water late at night while crossing the maybe 8ft of water between his Wibbley Wobbley floating pub and his house boat the Sea Sovereign.

The story was that he died happy, drunk, clutching a bottle of Budweiser and – it was said, depending on which version of the story you heard – he had anything from £50 to £250 in his pocket – winnings from a horse race or a greyhound race that day.

The story about the bottle of beer was confirmed at the Southwark Coroner’s Inquest.

According to PC Martin Spirito, when Malcolm’s body was found in Greenland Dock, “the male had a bottle of beer clenched in his right hand.” Sergeant Roy Dawson, overseeing the dive, said: “The bottle was held in his right hand. It fell from his hand on the ascent.”

The Coroner found Malcolm had not fallen into the dock from a rowing boat, as people had assumed and had told each other, but had fallen from the quayside while trying to board the Sea Sovereign. I once fell into a neighbouring dock myself, while helping Malcolm take a vacuum cleaner on board his boat. (Don’t ask.)

Yesterday, though, Vivienne Soan told me another story about the money in Malcolm’s pocket when he died. She and her husband Martin (who long performed with Malcolm in The Greatest Show on Legs) understood there were no £50-£250 betting winnings in his pocket but there were a very very large number of £1 coins because Malcolm had (not surprisingly, if you knew him) raided his own one-armed bandit machine in the Wibbley Wobbley and put all the coins in his pocket.

The weight of all these coins in his pocket would have weighed him down when he fell into Greenland Dock.

Who knows what is truth and what is myth?

Malcolm’s date of death is usually quoted as 31st January 2005. But, in fact, Southwark Coroner John Sampson said at the Inquest: “He was last seen on the quayside outside the Wibbley Wobbley public house at about 6am on Sunday January 30th.”

He was not reported missing until January 31st – because it was not uncommon for him to disappear occasionally – and his body was not found and recovered until February 2nd 2005.

So his date of death is usually quoted as January 31st 2005.

More probably it was January 30th 2005.

But, as Malcolm would have said:

“Fuck it… It don’t matter, do it? There are people starving in Africa… Not all over… Round the edge – fish.”

I would say R.I.P. Malcolm, except that I suspect he would have hated the thought of resting in peace.

Many will be thinking of him on 30th and/or 31st January.

* * * * *

The Malcolm Hardee Awards for comedy are presented annually in August until the year 2017.