PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Modley and Randle: supreme in time and place
THE NORTH, and Liverpool in particular, has probably produced more comedians than any other part of the land.
The two who most deeply represented their roots and their class were Albert Modley and Frank Randle (right), both brash, both loved, both more at home on stage than anywhere else, although Randle also made films which appeared to have come fresh out of someone’s back yard, having displaced the brush and shovel in the process. Albert, in truth, was a Yorkshireman, but he chose to live in Morecambe and his humour was as close to Burnley’s as it was to Batley’s. Frank Randle, was from Standish, Wigan area, and once, in his youth, sold ‘t’finest oranges in Wiggin at t’middle of Chorley market site proper next to t’pump.’ He always appeared on stage without teeth. He would stagger on carrying the sort of red lamp found near street excavations. ‘Look what some dam’d fool left in t’road,’ he would say, and the theatre would erupt with joy at the sight of him, not so much because it was funny-which it was-but because any tackler in the audience might have said the same thing in identical circumstances.
Randle had a sketch in which he played a character celebrating his hundredth birthday. He would sit there, surrounded by relatives, being fawned upon, and his mind would appear to wander, vague and without reason, until, in some flash of reality he would leap onto a table, grab his old army cutlass, and cry: ‘Come among me - I’ve had eight on t’end of this at once.’ When an old girl friend, long past her prime, arrived on stage he chased her off and reappeared grasping her undergarments. His stage wife glared accusingly. He was all innocence. ‘They just came off in my hand, love.’ When, at the end, he and his partner lit the candles to go upstairs to bed, tears rolled in the audience, for Randle’s was comedy and drama at the same time, and here was the man’s greatness. He was as much actor as comedian, strong and inimitable in his own right.
When a theatre annoyed him, he went up in an aircraft and bombed it with toilet rolls. He was invariably vulgar. He would appear on stage carrying a beer bottle, take a swig, then belch loudly. ‘Aye,’ he would say, ‘there’s eight of them in every bottle.’ He would appear in bathing costume. ‘By God, that watter was cold. When I came out I didn’t know whether my name was Angus or Agnes.' Brash and vulgar, then, and noble, too; daring for his time, but sensitive, a regional comedian of the type that declined as theatres faded and television grew in strength.
And so to Modley.Albert was 56 when I met him, full of wheezy laughs and living by Morecambe promenade. He was funny without trying to be so on occasions. He said things like, ‘He was unmatured for t’job’ (referring to one of a new breed of comedian), or, ‘That’s the most miserablest time I ever had.’
Predictably, perhaps, he referred to radio as wireless, and to some, even at that time, he was an anachronism. He was much more gentle than Randle. We sat in his front room sharing a common joy at past times and good stories and at intervals a woman he failed to introduce would poke her head around the door and say, sharply, ‘Why are you telling him all that? Why don’t you talk about now? Why is it always the past?’ And I smiled, but I was thinking, ‘Why don’t you push off, and why don’t you realise that this man is unique and great and warm and memorable and precious, so that he can say what he likes?’
See him set there, all square; and capped, on stage and you were able to observe every echo of humour that ever came out of the vast caverns of the Northern region. You could peel him like an onion, each layer rich and revealing and satisfying because he represented several generations of thought and each one was, and is, being lost in the new ethic of international sameness.
Lacking the music hall and that remarkably English idiosyncrasy known as the fol de rols, the new comics began to look alike, dress alike, and tell the same jokes. Nothing funny ever happened to them on the way to the theatre because they had never performed in one. There is not a comic in the land who could have described, in all seriousness, a Royal Command Performance like this:“So the Queen and Duke were in this box and there’s another box at the other side of the theatre, built to balance things, and everyone comes on and bows to Her Majesty, but I don’t. I bows to the wrong box, and then I look up and say, Have they gone?
“I forget to bow, but lovely. I don’t overdo it. I crack a gag about our mayor not wearing a chain - we let him run loose. Anyway, when we lined up afterwards to meet the Queen and Duke, she says, 'I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your performance. I’ve had a good laugh.' And the Duke says, 'Yes, jolly good.' And she says, 'But I did not understand why you say the mayor doesn’t wear a chain because he does.' She says, 'I distinctly saw it and it had a ship on with a crest and a thing like a net, what they call '- oh, what did she say? - 'something they go shrimping with.' And the Duke says, 'I always thought they went with a net.' And she says, 'Shut up!'”I found it impossible to watch Albert on stage and not feel an initial anticipation, a sense of history, a hint of nostalgia, because he became the last of a great and traditional line. He would stand, squat and jowly, pretending to be a tram driver, using drum cymbals to imitate the controls, juddering his body and calling to someone imaginary on the line ahead: ‘What do you mean, where am I going? I’m going’ - here the head craning outwards and upwards to glimpse a non-existent destination board on the exterior of the tram- ‘I’m going to DU-PLI-CATE. Albert was around show business so long that he came in for the second house: the great club boom.
He started in clubs during the I926 strike, progressed to theatres and panto (thirteen pantos with Francis Laidler) and films (Upfor t’Cup, Take Me to Paris, Bob’s Your Uncle, Bob’s Shop), and so back to clubs. ‘There’s only one way to start in this theatre business,’ he said, ‘and that’s in concert party’, He was in a double act, The Two Eddies. And they went to Limerick.
“Limerick, oh Gawd, it was murder for me because they didn’t know what I was talking about. As far as Ireland goes, I wouldn’t mind a holiday, but I wouldn’t go to work there again. Not Limerick. They hrew everything. We used to get so that we daren’t go on. Terrible, two of us trembling in the wings. We were supposed to do about eight minutes and we were doing three. The boss would say, ‘You haven’t been on, have you?’ and we’d say, ‘We have-we’ve had enough.’ ‘Look out,’ we’d say-halfpennies, pennies, owt would come. We thought, Roll on Saturday! and the digs -cor, oh boy; hardly any lights, tumbling up steps into a cold bedroom. I’ll tell you when it was-Limerick races. Never forget it as long as I live. Everything closed that day. ‘You’ll have a real time there,’ everybody was telling us. It was the most miserablest time we ever had because we had nowt much, we couldn’t afford to go to t’races, and we couldn’t bet because we didn’t know anybody, and they wouldn’t speak to us much because as soon as you opened your mouth-English, ugh!
“And the pubs, clubs, every one closed. Couldn’t get a drink of anything. By God, aye.”
A little cult grew around Albert long after his peak. People phoned each other to say, ‘He’s on, Saturday night,’ and radios untouched in years would burst into life at the throaty sound. When he appeared, thereafter, at one of the many Yorkshire clubs, they said, with warmth, ‘If you live to be two hundred, you can come back here every year - the ultimate accolade because that particular club was not given to fine words or behaviour.
When a leading pop singer, a girl of some national reputation, appeared there, an official pounded the top of his table with a pint glass during her act and shouted, ‘Best of order, please, ladies and gentlemen. Give the little cow a chance.’
I would like to have covered Randle and Modley in vinegar and pickled them as an example to the world. They established the simplest and most direct creed of them all: a pure and earthy creed. Albert summed it up. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I do love a good laugh.’
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007