Pervos of Comedy

I seem to have watched a lot of those Heroes of Comedy programmes on TV lately. To be fair, they're difficult to avoid: More 4 tend to show them back-to-back late at night, you can then catch more of them being repeated on Yesterday in daytime at weekends. I'm sure they must turn up on other channels as well. Anyway, after watching a few of them, it occurred to me that they were pretty selective in the bits of their subject's lives they focused on. Take the one on Norman Wisdom, for instance. It skates over his career in the late 1960s, mentioning his successful appearance in the Hollywood movie The Night They Raided Minskys, but offered little explanation as to why his film career then abruptly ended, simply claiming that he had to return to the UK to look after his children. What it misses out, of course, is his notorious last starring role in a film, the 1969 sex comedy What's Good for the Goose. Yes, that's right, Norman Wisdom was in a sex comedy, playing a middle aged bank manager who has a mid-life crisis and runs off with a hippie chick. There are bared boobs, bedroom scenes and you even get a flash of Norman's bum. Really, I'm not making this up. The most incredible thing about the film was that Wisdom himself was one of the prime movers behind it. Apparently he thought it would bring him to a new audience.

Not surprisingly, the film - which was produced by Tigon, the film company better known for its horror pictures like Witchfinder General - bombed at the box office and has only rarely been shown on TV. It is rarely mentioned in Wisdom's filmographies and most documentaries about him completely ignore its existence. History has, effectively, been rewritten. The image the entertainment industry now likes to paint of Norman Wisdom is as a wholesome family entertainer, a slapstick clown who never had to resort to the sort of crude humour and lewdness that modern comedians employ to get laughs. But Wisdom isn't the only popular old school comic to have had a brush with adult cinema airbrushed out of his life. 'Big hearted' Arthur Askey, another Heroes of Comedy subject, infamously appeared in the celebrated 1970s sex comedy Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse. Thankfully, unlike Norman Wisdom, Askey has no bedroom scenes and doesn't bare his bum or ogle any bared breasts. But he does pinch a few bottoms. Which is hardly surprising as his role is that of Arkright, the bottom-pinching patient. As with the Norman Wisdom episode, the edition of Heroes of Comedy devoted to Arthur Askey completely ignores this part of his career. Once again, it just wouldn't have fitted the image of Askey as the clean-humour purveying family favourite that it was pushing.

Now, to be fair, Askey wasn't the only popular comedian appearing in British sex comedies in the 1970s - they paid reasonably well and were semi-respectable: Chick Murray, for instance, seemed to make a career out of them in his later years. The difference with Murray, though, was that he loved making them and never tried to sweep them under the carpet. So, next time you are watching some old footage of Tommy Cooper, just remember him, wearing only a fez, chasing the Collinson twins around a magician's workshop, shouting 'Just like that' as he comes, in 1973's That Magic Touch. ( The scene where he uses his knob instead of a sword to thrust through a wicker basket containing his assistant is a classic). Or when you settle down to watch that repeat of the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas special this year, try not to think about their thee-in-a-bed romp with David Warbeck in the 1971 gay porn opus Boulevard Boy. OK, I made those up, but believe me, Arthur Askey did appear in Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse!