Northern Irish comedian renowned for bawdily irreverent humour and his catchphrase, “it’s the way I tell ‘em”
The catchphrase of
Frank Carson was “It’s the way I tell ‘em”. The Belfast-born comedian, who has died aged 85, had an ingenuous, robust and manically assertive way with a gag, but could sometimes be almost uniquely insensitive to the possible effect on other people.
In some ways he was a more animated version of Bernard Manning. He had a raucous laugh (“like John Cole on steroids,” said one commentator), which shook his bulky frame, but it was not always a complete protection against an inability to walk the fine line between what was acceptable and what was not.
Most of his material was no worse than bawdily irreverent, such as one of his favourites about the priest aboard an aircraft who confides that the wine now being served is the one always consumed by the Pope: “No wonder His Holiness drops to his knees every time he gets off a plane.” Or the joke about a petrol bomb thrown at Ian Paisley: “He drank it.” Or saying, in the presence of Prince Philip, that the last time he had seen him he had been in the Queen’s arms: “That’s a small pub in the Edgware Road”.
But it was not entirely uncharacteristic when, in 1987, the comedian arrived one hour and 40 minutes late for an engagement in a miners’ club near Mansfield and, asked by the Jamaican club chairman where he had been, replied: “I am not speaking to you, you black bastard”. Later he said it was only a joke and apologised, adding, “most of my jokes are racist – usually about the Irish”. He himself had needed to be thick-skinned about being picked on – he was a Belfast Catholic.
Carson also needed a thick skin to survive in northern clubland where he earned up to £5,000 a night. Booed off the stage in Sheffield, he was asked to give some of his £1,000 fee back after he had used the same jokes he had just employed on his TV show, Laughs at the London Palladium. Far from enduring this grave misjudgement on his part stoically, the audience threw beer mats at him, shouted out the punch lines of jokes before he could get to them, and jeered him when he left the stage 20 minutes early.
From his early boyhood,
Carson had been no stranger to strife. His background in Northern Ireland was indeed of a grim and stressful sort that was best turned into a joke for the sake of survival. He was born near Belfast docks, the son of a man who had been a dustman and a newspaper seller. As a tubby, fair-haired schoolboy of five nicknamed Snowball, he tried to make people laugh as a way of showing that he was not a nobody. “I wasn’t meant to be just another boy in the class,” he said when he was in his sixties, admitting that he had always wanted to be loved and had dreamed of meeting people like the Queen, the Pope and Princess Margaret – which by then he actually had done.
But when he left school at 14 he first worked as an apprentice electrician. Digging a hole outside a house, he severed an electric cable with his pick and cut off the electricity to the north side of Belfast. Then he worked as a plasterer.
unsecured loans He was not much better at that. He escaped the sack because he made his colleagues laugh and his employers realised that made them work better.
He began performing at pubs and clubs in the evenings, standing in front of the venue, handing out leaflets and selling tickets and then surprising ticket-buyers once inside by being the man who was doing the comedy routine. He even managed to find comedy in his National Service with the First Parachute Battalion, which he joined when he was 18, training on the Isle of Wight and Manchester Ringway Airport and serving in Palestine. Over 50 years later, he recalled with unusual solemnity shooting dead an armed terrorist who would otherwise have shot him. He himself was shot in the leg and on another occasion narrowly escaped death when a bomb went off outside a cinema at Seronaand the seven RAF men he was with were all killed.
Carson moved towards stardom when, demobbed,
bad credit loans he made dozens of appearances on television in Ireland and then moved to England in 1966 and appeared on the BBC’s The Good Old Days music hall show and on Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks television show. His Belfast accent and bawdy confidence were immediately distinctive. He did summer seasons at Pontins and Butlins holiday camps, a TV series with the Irish group The Bachelors and then hit his stride in The Comedians, a series which gave a platform to all sorts of funny men and women – and on which Carson, despite his initial fears that the programme would “fall on its arse”, was a natural.
Carson’s blustery act became a favourite on the pub and club circuit as well as being showcased in various forms on television, age seeming to make him more, rather than less, reckless. In 1976 alone he appeared in 41 nationally networked television shows and the following year he compered the grand final of the Pub Entertainer of the Year award.
By the time his children (by his wife Ruth, who had known him from the age of seven) were of working age, he was rich. But he retained the traditional working class belief that working youngsters should send money home to their parents. Not unnaturally, his children disagreed. He tended to deflect serious discussion about family or other matters with an impenetrable wall of jokes.
The comedian and comic writer Spike Milligan once asked: “What’s the difference between
Frank Carson and the M1?”, and gave the answer “You can turn off the M1.” But Carson did much highly regarded charity work, often quite quietly and at odds with his bluff persona, for which he was knighted into the Order of St Gregory by the Pope in 1987. When a writer in an Irish journal in London disputed this award and complained that Carson “denigrated Irish people by portraying them as morons”, he replied: “It’s a pity the writer doesn’t show as much charity as those who have given so generously to appeals”.
He is survived by his wife, a daughter and two sons.
