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Malcolm Hardee (born Lewisham, London, 5th January
1950 - died London, 31st January 2005) was an
anarchic British comedian, author, club proprietor
and compere.


==Early Life==

Hardee came from a long line of River Thames
lightermen - who earned their living on tugs
pulling barges. The eldest son of Frank and Joan
Hardee, he spent his first two years in an
orphanage while his mother was in hospital with
tuberculosis. He was educated at three south-east
London schools - St Stephen's Church of England
primary, Colfe's grammar and Sedgehill
comprehensive.

Expelled from all three, he drifted into petty
crime - stealing Coke from a local bottling plant,
burgling a pawnbrokers and setting fire to a
Sunday school piano because he wanted to see 'holy
smoke' - eventually serving prison sentences for
fraud and burglary. He also had convictions for
arson and once infamously stole a Cabinet
Minister's Rolls Royce.

During the late 1960s he worked as a mobile DJ -
"Wolf G Hardee" - in between stints at various
detention centres. After coming out of prison in
1977, he decided to turn to showbusiness as a way
of staying out of trouble, saying: "Prison is like
mime or juggling - a tragic waste of time".

Hardee regularly performed at the Edinburgh
Festival and, with Martin Soan, he formed the
Greatest Show On Legs -­ at the time, an adult
Punch and Judy act. It became a regular at the
Tramshed in Woolwich, alongside the likes of Rik
Mayall and Ade Edmondson. Soon afterwards, The
Comedy Store opened in Soho, and they became
regulars there, too. Their breakthrough came in
1981, when they did the balloon dance on Chris
Tarrant's OTT. He also became known for an act in
which he would use his own genitals to perform a
unique and unforgettable impression of Charles de
Gaulle.

==The Clubs==

Though an accomplished comic, Hardee is best known
for being a compere and owner of clubs which gave
vital and early exposure to up and coming
comedians such as Alan Davies, Harry Hill and Jo
Brand, with whom he was once romantically
involved. He also worked for a time as the manager
of Jerry Sadowitz, and was tour manager for his
friend and neighbour, Jools Holland. 

His most infamous venue was The Tunnel Club
(situated next to the southern approach to the
Blackwall Tunnel in Greenwich, London|Greenwich,
south-east London) where even accomplished
comedians rarely managed to complete a whole set
against its unforgiving crowd. He also helped
start the careers of Vic Reeves and Paul Merton.
Hardee didn't help the new acts with his stage
introductions and often introduced them, with a
nerve unsettling, "This next act's probably a bit
shit" - and if the audience didn't heckle the
hapless act - he did; however once the act was off
stage, he would often comfort them backstage with
words of encouragement and urge them to try again.

It was at the Tunnel Club that comedian Jim Tavare
once opened his act, with the unwise opener,
"Hello, I'm a schizophrenic" - to be met with the
lighting rejoinder from a wag in that night's
audience, "Well, you can both fuck off then!".

=="He has no shame"==

One journalist said of Hardee: "To say that he has
no shame, is to drastically exaggerate the amount
of shame that he has". This neatly summed the man
up. Whenever or whatever Hardee did, either as a
comedian or as an interruption to other comedians,
he preferred to do it naked although the story,
printed in newspapers on his death, that he once
appeared naked on stage with his mother Joan is
untrue.

==Freddie Mercury's birthday cake==

On September 5 1986 Hardee's house was searched by
the police - who were looking for crumbs, after he
and others stole Freddie Mercury's 40th birthday
cake; no crumbs were found at the house as he had
already by then donated the cake to a local
nursing home. No charges were pressed.

==Performances==

Hardee rarely appeared on television, though did
play minor roles in six Comic Strip film projects.

He told the story of a blind punter coming to one
performance and unfortunately arrived in time for
the mime act and sat there for 10 minutes, hearing
only the occasional burst of laughter; eventually
he got up and shouted, "Tell us a joke for God's
sake"!

==Settling down - and finding his trousers==

He wrote his autobiography "I Stole Freddie
Mercury's Birthday Cake" with John Fleming in 1996
and in 2003, also with Fleming, co-edited an
anthology of mostly non-comic writing by 19
stand-up comedians, called Sit-Down Comedy. He
also ran columns in comedy magazines in which he
gave tips and told anecdotes about life as a
comic. He was fond of collecting put-downs used by
comedians as a way of curtailing hecklers.

In later years, Hardee ran the Up The Creek comedy
club in Creek Road, Greenwich, then his own pub
The Wibbley Wobbley on a converted barge in
Rotherhithe. In later years he had calmed down
somewhat and in 2003 said, "I'm happy where I am
in southeast London. I'm respectable now. I have
trousers, a house and a wife."

==His death==

On 2 February 2005, Hardee's body was recovered
from Greenland Dock in Rotherhithe, by the River
Thames after he was reported missing from his
barge on January 31. A post-mortem soon confirmed
he had drowned. It seems likely that he fell
drunk, into the water on the way back to his
houseboat "The Sea Sovereign" (20 feet) from The
Wibbley Wobbley, which was moored nearby. About
700 people attended his funeral at St Alfege's
Church in Greenwich - and perhaps fittingly, was
one of the few funerals ever to get rave reviews
the following day in both the Daily Telegraph and
Sun newspapers. He was cremated at Hither Green in
south-east London and his ashes scattered on the
Thames he loved.

==Others' comments==

Miles Kington, writing in The Oldie said, "I saw
Malcolm perform several times and when he was good
he was very good and when he was drunk he was not
so good, and sometimes naked, which didn't always
make it funnier, but even when it didn't quite
work I envied the danger he brought to the act. I
could never do anything like that. I could never,
as he is reputed to have done, get a tractor and
drive it (also naked) into the tent of a rival
comedian who was making too much noise."

==References==

The Times: obituary - 7th February 2005.

The Oldie - issue 192 - March 2005

==External Links==

http://www.malcolmhardee.co.uk  His website:
obituaries and tributes