Reputations: Frankie Howerd | Nice Guy Eddie | Midsomer Murders | Secrets of the Honours System | Arts critics (original) (raw)

Reputations: Frankie Howerd | Nice Guy Eddie | Midsomer Murders | Secrets of the Honours System

'He pontificated," said Alan Simpson, remembering Frankie Howerd. "He was a pontificating drunk." So, he added, being a fair man, were Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and himself. "And, of course, John Speight had a stutter as well. With him stuttering and Frank oo-ahing, it was like a parrot house sometimes."

Some moments in Reputations: Frankie Howerd (BBC 2) were so funny I heard myself whimpering more in pain than pleasure. This is the point at which audiences actually start to cry.

Even as a young man, Frankie Howerd looked like a moulting moose. As Eric Sykes said, "What other job could he have got? You tell me. Join the fire brigade? Can you imagine? Brass helmet on. Course you can't! There's only one thing he could do well. Go up on the stage and have the whole house with tears rolling down their face." Griff Rhys Jones, who was shanghaied into producing a Frankie Howerd show when the previous producer had a nervous breakdown, laughed so much you had to leave him to it.

There is a small overlap of terror and laughter which is hysteria. Here was a man in an ill-fitting wig who reduced people to hysterics.

The wig had a scene to itself, being variously described as a bird's nest, some kind of dead animal and a hedgehog. It had, allegedly, its own dandruff. According to Alan Simpson, Howerd secured it by knotting two strands of his own hair on top. This was only fairly effective. In one newsreel we were privileged to see it trying to take flight.

When Howerd's career was in the most desperate doldrums, the best comic writers alive got together to write a script that saved him. Sykes said, "We all knew he was the gold nugget and you can't have a gold nugget being depressed." They also recall, as writers will, that they weren't paid a penny.

A man I knew encountered him once in a sauna, a slightly hazardous place to meet Howerd. Sweating heavily, he admitted to being a TV critic. Frankie peered closely. "I hope you're not that Nancy Banks-Smith."

If you fancy becoming a detective, there are a couple of templates to study. Nice Guy Eddie (BBC 1), starring Ricky Tomlinson, is the private eye as loveable scruff. John Henshaw, playing his brother-in-law, said, "All right, so you're skint. Your wife doesn't trust you, you might have an illegitimate son and your business is going down the pan. At least you've still got your looks." Ricky Tomlinson slid his bloodshot eyes sideways like a bulldog with a moustache. Loud, lively, Liverpudlian.

Then again, you could be a posh cop like DCI Barnaby in Midsomer Murders (ITV1), where the scenery is charming and the death rate appalling: Marjorie (who fell downstairs), Ginny (who drowned in her swimming pool) and, best of all, Lady Chetwood (flung headlong from her own battlements). Something so obviously packaged to sell overseas shouldn't irritate me so much. It offers elderly actors with nice vowels a sort of summer camp without which they might end up on the street nicking mobile phones.

Jon Snow, having been offered an OBE and having turned it down on grounds of journalistic integrity, felt moved to investigate the whole shebang and shibboleth in Secrets of the Honours System (Channel 4). And secrets they remained. Snow walked miles in a marked manner without actually getting anywhere. Nobody wanted to talk to him. Not even Sir Trevor McDonald, Sir David Frost, John Simpson CBE or Kate Adie OBE. Does this man have no friends at all?

Possibilities are, it seems, secretly sieved by ever-finer flour-graders until they reach the PM, who probably pops in a crowd pleaser. The Queen herself never alters the list. She has Orders of her own. She can also honour herself, which must be jolly.

Most touching was the boxer Terry Spinks, an Olympic gold medallist in 1956, who finally received the minimum, an MBE, this year. At the Palace he increased the gaiety of the nation by making his top hat waggle, a party trick mastered by few. No light was thrown on Terry's prolonged wait or, indeed, on anything else much. "I don't know how you could do it in public, really," said Sir Peter Baldwin, a former flour-grader, as if the whole thing was faintly disgusting. Which it may be.