Brian Glanville's Introduction to the new edition of The Comic (2003)

Comedians have fascinated me since boyhood. Perhaps because my father, an Irish dentist with a surgery opposite the London Palladium and the Warner Theatre, had so many of them as patients. Tommy Trinder, above all. He was the star turn at the Palladium then, and would give my family tickets in the front row, then make jokes about us: "We once had some people from Finchley here." I vividly recall Tommy, dressed as Carmen Miranda ("Oh no, no, no Columbus, you've discovered too much tonight") going up to a bewildered Latin-American combo leader and asking him, "Is your name Brian Glanville?" My father was an expert on comedians past and present and would imitate them: Harry Champion, Harry Tate and such kings of the music hall. Bud Flanagan, of the Crazy Gang, huge Fred Emney, Stan Laurel, Max Wall, all were patients, too. When my Uncle Gerry took over the surgery one met Frankie Howerd, who'd brought in a friend for treatment. Years later, walking through Holland Park with my small older son while the nanny propelled the twins in a push chair, I met him emerging from the trees and mentioned our meeting. "You asked me to come and see you," I said. "You've taken your time," he replied. "Well, I lived in Italy for several years," I answered. He looked at the three children. "You don't spend all your time abroad, do you?" he asked. The last time I saw him, I was cycling down the Earls Court Road to a Chelsea match at Stamford Bridge, when Frank came lurching across from just outside the police station. "Frank!" I hailed him. "Just a minuite, just a minute!" "It's me," I said, "It's Brian Glanville." He eyed the bicycle. "Where's the Rolls?" he asked. 

Frankie wrote me two enthusiastic letters about The Comic. Arthur Askey liked it, too. I'd met him, also in Holland Park, in his old age, strolling with his endlessly admiring sister, forgotten now, perhaps, but in his day immensely admired by fellow comics; not least by the gloriously indestructible, endlessly funny fellow-Liverpudlian, Ken Dodd, surely the last of the Mohicans. Tommy Trinder praised the book, too, as did Eric Morecambe, whom I often met when covering home games of Luton Town. But Max Wall, another patient and a sometime partner of my father, didn't like it. It was the bad language, he said, but I wonder whether it might have been the parallels to his own career. Nowadays, no one would turn a hair were he to leave wife and family to go off with a young dancer, in the shape of the plangently named Jennifer Chimes, but in those days it was professional suicide. Even if he did have a late, second life. My father, I remember, was dreadfully shocked at the time. During the war, I could listen to Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Fred Allen on the American Forces Network; the first two would later play the Palladium. Then there were the incomparable Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields. And Sid Field, splendidly, at The Prince of Wales.

I wrote The Comic largely because I thought I had discerned a pattern in the lives and careers of comedians. The rise from humble background, marriage, frequently, with a young chorus girl, success, divorce, crisis after remarriage, alcoholism quite often, redemption and re-birth, occasionally. Johnny Lucas wasn't based on any comedian in particular. When Ion Trewin, one of three Booker Prize judges, praised it on the radio, my Seckers publisher, Tom Rosenthal, told me that the word had spread around the Frankfurt Book Fair that I'd win the Prize. I told him, seeing who the other judges were, that there was no hope at all of that, but that at best it might get a place on the short list. It didn't. 

Later, after I had had the great good luck to collaborate with Roy Hudd and Patrick Garland on the Crazy Gang musical, Underneath the Arches, I turned The Comic into a play. Working with the show at the Prince of Wales, preparing it with Chesney Allen himself, was a marvellous experience. But The Comic didn't make it to the boards. This, though Stoll Moss, who owned so many London theatres, commissioned it, Dave King, himself a stand-up comic once, who had metamorphosed into a successful actor, would play the lead, Bill Bryden, then at the National Theatre, would direct it. But then the late Holmes A'Court, that cunning little Aussie operator, levered Lew Grade out of his own company, of which Stoll Moss was part, and the project collapsed. Years later it was due to go out on Radio 4 with Roy Hudd, another fan of the book, playing Johhny, but those were the palsied days of the Birtian regime and although the Head of Light Entertainment wanted it, one of Birt's remote committees thumbed it down. This was depressing, the more so as I felt I'd invented a particularly funny line which didn't appear in the book and thus has never been seen or heard. I had Johnny talking about appearing on the platform at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and saying, "I told them, 'I'm Johnny Lucas and I'm an acoholic,' and they said, 'We'll let you know.'" 

At least that's now in print. 

Brian Glanville 2003