The British comedian and actor ROY HUDD died aged 83 on 15 March 2020. A naturally funny man, Roy Hudd was more than just a comedian for he was also a radio host, presenter and playwright and possibly the country’s best authority on the history of music hall and variety theatre. Michael Darvell pays tribute to a great man of British entertainment.
You could say that Roy Hudd was the last of a dying breed of comedy entertainers in the British tradition, the end of a line that included the likes of Flanagan and Allen, Sid Field, Jimmy James, Arthur Askey, Ted Ray, Ken Dodd, Jimmy Jewel & Ben Warriss, Arthur Haynes, Hylda Baker, Beryl Reid, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson, Morecambe and Wise, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse and, of course, his own personal hero, Max Miller.
Born in Croydon in south London on 16 May 1936 to parents Harry and Evalina Hudd, Hudd lived with his mother after his father left following the Second World War. However, Evalina had mental problems and committed suicide when her son was just ten years old. After that Hudd lived with his grandmother. On leaving technical school he joined the Royal Air Force and then attended the Regent Street Polytechnic to study commercial art. After a number of jobs including messenger boy and window dresser, he ended up as a commercial artist and went to work with Harry Beck who was famous for designing the London Underground map, the basis of which is still in use today.
At the age of 21 Hudd made his professional stage debut as a comedian at the Streatham Hill Theatre in 1957. His stage partner in those days was Eddie Cunningham, a fellow member of the boys’ club they both belonged to. Calling themselves ‘Hudd and Kay – The Peculiar Pair’ they were chosen the following year to work at Butlin’s holiday camp in Clacton, Essex as in-house entertainers, the famous Redcoats. Not only was this a valuable training ground for comedians, but it also provided excellent exposure for other performers who, at that time, included Dave Allen and Cliff Richard.
Early appearances on radio for Hudd included In Town Tonight and Workers’ Playtime. I was first aware of him in 1964 when he appeared on BBC Television in 61 episodes of Not So Much a Programme… More a Way of Life, Ned Sherrin and David Frost’s follow-up after the success of That Was the Week That Was. The show itself was not a patch on the original, but Hudd stood out as one of the best things in it. After that he had his own series just called Hudd, followed by The Illustrated Weekly Hudd. He then carried on working steadily in television through the 1970s including some appearances on The Sooty Show.
Hudd was rediscovered in the 1990s for television drama in the Dennis Potter mini-series of Lipstick on Your Collar, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. Then he did Common as Muck, a sit-com about dustmen, and guest slots on such popular programmes as The Bill, One Foot in the Grave, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Last of the Summer Wine, Hollyoaks, New Tricks, Missing, Ashes to Ashes, Doctors, Holby City, Benidorm, Law & Order UK, Casualty, Call the Midwife, Midsomer Murders and even Broadchurch. Between 2002 and 2010 he was in a hundred episodes of Coronation Street, playing Archie Shuttleworth, the oddly comical local undertaker.
By far his biggest success, however, was on radio, recording 51 series of The News Huddlines, a topical sketch show broadcast on BBC Radio 2 from 1975 to 2001. It dealt with topical stories, songs and jokes of the day and was at times quite satirical and politically incorrect. He was joined in the BBC Radio Theatre recordings by, at various times, June Whitfield, Chris Emmett, Janet Brown and Alison Steadman. The series became the longest running audience comedy on radio. Other radio shows featuring Hudd included The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and I’ve Never Been Gone, again with Whitfield.
As well as TV and radio Hudd was still prominent in live theatre, both as a comedian and in straight drama. In 1963 he had played Pistol in Shakespeare’s Henry V at Richmond Theatre. In the 1990 season he appeared in Much Ado About Nothing at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park where he was also seen in Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones’ musical of The Fantasticks in a cast that included Martin Clunes, Mark Addy, Karl Johnson and Basil Hoskins.
A big hit for Hudd was Underneath the Arches, the musical he co-wrote about The Crazy Gang for Chichester Festival Theatre in 1981. He appeared as Bud Flanagan while Christopher Timothy played Chesney Allen. The show made a successful transfer to the West End, running for over a year at the Prince of Wales Theatre where it won a Society of West End Theatre Award (later the Oliviers).
Other theatre work included the role of Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! in 1977, appearing in Christopher Tookey’s musical of Dickens’ Hard Times at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, playing the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz at the Royal Festival Hall and touring the UK in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. He also appeared in over 30 pantomimes and also wrote dozens of them too, including Mother Goose which he played at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2016.
One of Hudd’s abiding obsessions was the history of music hall, variety and pantomime. Inspired by his hero Max Miller, whom he often imitated in his stage act, Hudd appeared in The Good Old Days at the City Varieties Theatre in Leeds and indeed was an authority on the subject of music hall, writing many books about the history of the genre and its personnel, its jokes and its anecdotes. He collected stories, gags and monologues from old-time music hall days which he then published in some of the nearly 20 books he wrote, and he also issued them on CD. He was President of both the British Music Hall Society and the Max Miller Appreciation Society and was a former King Rat in the Grand Order of Water Rats, of which he was a member for 40 years.
Having conquered most of the entertainment media – theatre, music hall, pantomime, radio, television, farce, musicals and stand-up comedy, Hudd was also at times called upon to appear in films, from the horror film The Blood Beast Terror in 1968 to the tale of a mischievous pug called Patrick in 2018. In between came such titles as Up Pompeii and Up the Chastity Belt, The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, The Alf Garnett Saga, A Kind of Hush, Purely Belter, Jack, the Last Victim and Robot Overlords.
Hudd was married first to Ann Lambert and then to dancer and director Debbie Flitcroft. His son, Max, is also an actor. He was awarded an OBE in the 2004 New Year Honours List for his services to entertainment and received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Westminster, his alma mater, which, in Hudd’s earlier days, was originally the Regent Street Polytechnic.
In 2012 he was also made an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law at the University of East Anglia. In 2009 Hudd published his autobiography, A Fart in a Colander, which he also recorded on CD. On 8 March this year, 2020, he was about to embark on a UK tour with his wife Debbie in a show called An Evening/Afternoon with Roy Hudd, but he passed away a week later on 15 March. We shall not see his like again…
Roy Hudd: 16 May 1936 – 15 March 2020. R.I.P
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