Читать книгу Titter Ye Not! - Hall William Hutcheon - Страница 8

Preface

His letter came out of the blue.

It landed on my desk on a breezy March morning in 1966 as I stood by the window of the London Evening News looking down on the bright yellow vans parked the length of Tudor Street, just another envelope in the batch of morning mail.

Except that this one was different.

The address was badly typed, and unevenly spaced. But inside was an unsolicited letter from a comic I had found side-achingly funny, even when I wasn’t all that sure exactly why. Frankie Howerd had always made me laugh, usually in fits and starts and abrupt bellows rather than prolonged mirth. He had that quality of surprise that kept you on tenterhooks for the next line even as he jollied you along on some impossible foray into his own misadventures.

I had reviewed The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery for the paper, and liked what I saw of Frankie amid the flying gymslips and stocking-tops of the little horrors of Ronald Searle’s warped imagination. The letter of thanks that he sent me was a reflection of the man who wrote it, with an appealing honesty, a heartwarming naïvety of sorts, to which you couldn’t help but respond.

We met numerous times after that, usually in his dressing-room after a first night with the congratulations flowing, but also in his London homes. And amid the uncertainty and self-doubt that plagued him, just as it does every great comedian, you could sense the warmth of someone who needed to be wanted – or was it the other way around?

It was this warmth that came through and touched the hearts as well as the funny-bones of millions, capturing a whole new generation of young people in his later years. It made Frankie’s, passing all the sadder when it happened.

But this book is mainly about the fun times, the ludicrous moments, the paradox of a man who brought laughter to millions yet too often for his own good was a soul in torment.

A complex, fascinating figure whose like we will never see again. I hope you enjoy meeting him.

WILLIAM HALL

London, August 1992