There may come a time where I sit down to write one of these things without having to say how sad it is that someone I respect immensly has died, but for now, let's carry on with that theme!

Its a week or so on, but I was really shocked to hear that Arthur Miller, the greatest playwrite of the 20th Century had died.

He was the reason I wanted to be an actor, and was who got me through every audition I ever went to. Death Of A Salesman is the greatest play in the world bar none - an exploration of the American Dream, and the hypocricy which lies therein. Anyone who has read it or seen it would agree that it is one of the most memorable and powerful pieces of drama that has ever been written, and that comes from Millers understanding of the human condition.

He went by the ethos of always challenge everything, never believe anything you are told by those in power - and no one wrote about it better than him.

The Crucible, another favourite, and All My Sons - both tragic pieces, yet so brilliant. It is sad he was never as popular in his own country as he was else where. It was his cynicism and politics that kept him largely out of the theatrical spot light over the past decade or so - a man who hated broadway for all the shmaltz and tourist tat that clogs it up.

He loved Britain though. He was always involved intricately with every major production of his work here - we got his work - we understood it when the American public didn't.

I still live to play Willy Loman, and who knows, maybe one day I will get the opportunity to do so.... but lets not remember him just for the factthat he was once married to Marilyn Monroe, he was so much more...

Another shock this week was that Hunter S Thompson, another writer who I revere, shot himself. I would say that it is a tragic waste of life, a horrible way to go, but lets face it, he was never going to die of cancer was he?! I think he always lived on a knife edge, and for whatever reason he had for doing it, I'm sure he's bitter someplace else!

I think that sometime in the next few months, I'm going to have no one left to look up to! Any contenders, step forward please!
- posted by pearly @ 10:16 AM

 
This week, a man who I only spoke to a few times but played a seminal part in my life was found in The Thames.

Malcolm Hardee was the owner of Up The Creek, the best comedy club in the country. He introduced me to the world of comedy way back in 1995 at a benefit for my secondary school at Up The Creek. He was compering, and ended up as I remember getting his knob out by the end of the evening. Worryingly, I was hooked!

I'll never forget that night, and the many more I spent in that club heckling the new acts, drinking too much, and of course his legendary Birthday Gigs.

Just this year infact, I was due to start working for him at his new club "Up The River" though it shut before I could start!

I will leave it to this piece written in the Independent, I can add no more.

Oi oi....

Malcolm Hardee

Comedian and club-owner dubbed 'a south London Rabelais'
05 February 2005

Malcolm Gerrard Hardee, comedian, agent, manager and club-owner: born London 5 January 1950; married Jane Kintrea Matthews (one son, one daughter previously with Pip Hazelton); died London 31 January 2005.
Malcolm Hardee was arguably the greatest influence on British comedy over the last 25 years. Almost every significant new comedian was agented, managed or promoted by him, or passed through one of his clubs in south-east London, the Tunnel Club in east Greenwich and Up the Creek nearby. The comedians he helped in their formative years include Jo Brand, Jenny Eclair, Harry Enfield, Paul Merton, Vic Reeves, Jerry Sadowitz and Johnny Vegas.
As a performer he was best known for his naked balloon dance with his own ensemble, the Greatest Show on Earth; and his impression of President Charles de Gaulle using no props other than his own spectacles atop his semi-flaccid penis was unsettlingly realistic. But Hardee's other claim to fame was that he had the biggest bollocks in show business. He said that, at puberty, they did not drop, they abseiled. Everything about Hardee was larger-than-life - except his bank balance, because he did not care about money; instead he took an almost schoolboy delight in pranks, wheezes and escapades.
His friend and fellow comedian Arthur Smith called him "a south London Rabelais"; Stewart Lee noted that "in any decent country he would be a national institution". Yet Hardee's influence remained almost totally unknown outside the comedy and media worlds. At one BBC party in the 1990s, a Head of Television Comedy was heard to say: "He's not going to get on television because he keeps taking his willy out."
Everyone who saw him perform thought they knew him: outrageous, shambolic, disreputable. But, despite his image, Hardee was highly intelligent and gentle. He was born in Lewisham, south-east London, in 1950 and the schools he attended included Colfe's public boys' school (though he was soon expelled). He loved knowledge, and was very good at figures. But he tended to show off. He set the Sunday School piano on fire so he could make a joke about Holy Smoke and he later burned down two cinemas.
In the 1960s he worked as a mobile DJ, in between doing stints in detention centres. He once arrived on a stolen white horse to impress a girlfriend. Later he graduated to car theft - including a politician's Rolls-Royce: he spent much of the 1970s in prison.
In 1978 he joined up with his chum Martin Soan to form the Greatest Show on Legs, a troupe who toured an adult Punch and Judy show round the West Country. This led to a fixture at the Tramshed in Woolwich, in south-east London, and then regular slots at the newly opened Comedy Store in Soho. From the 1970s onwards, Hardee was well known for his stunts at the Edinburgh Fringe and during his annual appearances at Glastonbury Festivals he would wistfully reminisce: "I remember this when it was all fields."
He also turned up in several Comic Strip television films, often cast against type as a policeman, and he appeared in the first Blackadder series in 1983.
In 1984 he became proprietor and compere at the Tunnel Club. For fledgling comedians, the Tunnel was a baptism of fire, with unforgiving audiences and flying beer glasses. From the audience's viewpoint, they were firm but fair; from the stage, it looked like Custer's Last Stand. The reason acts kept going there was that they knew if they could play the Tunnel they could play anywhere. It sharpened their performance, and Hardee would and did help everyone. The Tunnel closed in 1988. He then ran Up the Creek, in central Greenwich, for 12 years.
A rather dishevelled figure with a mumbled conversational style Hardee was, astonishingly, a "babe-magnet". The first reaction he provoked was "not with a bargepole", but his underlying nature - kind, generous - soon became apparent and resolve melted. He was incapable of sexual fidelity, yet attracted enormous devotion and his several long-term relationships (often overlapping) were usually with strong, intelligent women. Although sexually rampant, Hardee was never sexist. I once asked him how he would like to be remembered. "As a good bloke," he told me:
Someone who won't let you down. I'm loyal. I'm unfaithful to women. But nearly everyone I meet I keep in some sort of contact with.
His autobiography, I Stole Freddie Mercury's Birthday Cake, appeared in 1996.
Malcolm Hardee drowned in Greenland Dock, in Rotherhithe, which he had often visited as a child with his father, a Thames tugboat captain. He fell from his dinghy on the way back from the Wibbly Wobbly pub, which he owned, to his home ship the Sea Sovereign, drunk, with horse-race winnings in his pocket, and very happy. He was found two days later and identified by a policeman - not for the first time. His own reaction to his death would probably have been: "Fuck it! That's the catchphrase tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Fuck it!"
John Fleming

- posted by pearly @ 7:52 AM