Well, no, yes, ah

So Me
by Graham Norton
Hodder, £18.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0340833483

Frankie Howerd’s career was a series of comebacks. In the early Fifties he was a radio star with listening figures of 16 million; he topped the bill at the Palladium and appeared in a Royal Variety Performance eight times. He flopped on live television, however, and between 1957 and 1962, when he was rescued from oblivion and put on at the Establishment Club by Peter Cook, he’d so lost his confidence he thought of leaving show business to run a country pub.

Edgy and depressed, and feeling like ‘a disintegrating jigsaw’, he could scrounge work only at the pier-end in Scarborough and Yarmouth and in ‘poorly paid pantomimes’ in Streatham and Southsea. Additionally, the Revenue was after him for thousands in back taxes and his crooked manager had secretly siphoned off the comic’s earnings, depositing the funds in a separate account used to pay for a wrestling venture.