Oy Oy!

What a sad day for comedy. Malcolm Hardee is brown bread. His body was pulled from the Thames yesterday, after he was reported missing a couple of days previously.

Who? You might well ask. Hardee was the dog-eared old geezer who ran Up The Creek in Greenwich (and now Croydon and Maidstone), often seen stumbling about his stage naked, or at the very least with his glasses on his cock (There you go, Charles de Gaulle).

He had three jokes:

What’s the difference between pink and purple?
Your grip

There’s people starving in Africa, not round the edges, plenty of fish

and

I met my wife in Australia. I said: ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

The audience had heard them so many times he rarely even bothered saying the punchlines himself, but when the acts weren’t going down too well, particularly on the Sunday open mike sessions, he could turn the crowd (which was often ready to taste blood) around.

He was namechecked by numerous comedians during their routines, including the likes of Daniel Kitson.

I remember the night Daniel did his first stand up at UTC after being one of the few who triumphed on an open mike session. After he h-h-h-h-handled the h-h-h-ecklers with ease and had the rest of us in tears, Hardee came on, and in his typical deadpan, said ‘Daniel Kitson, thought he was going to be shit, but he wasn’t. Don’t matter’

One of the good things about working for the Shopper was hanging about UTC, and Greenwich generally, for work which lead to spending a couple of nights over the years buying Hardee alcohol.

One memorable night upstairs at the Trafalgar we were getting lashed at the inaugural Greenwich Film Festival. (I then stumbled up to Mike Figgis and slurred in the manner of Withnail, ‘I have no questions prepared. I am quite pissed,’ to which he replied ‘Ah, my favourite type of interview’.)

But the best bit about those brief meetings of Hardee was he never had any idea who I and Lozza were! Probably who he was either.

Ah, the good old days … Oy Oy!