Comedy

They say you only write about Malcolm Hardee twice in your career: once on the way up, once on the way down. It's good to be writing my second piece. The first appeared in the Guardian many moons ago. They did a survey of comics asking each to write about their favourite comedian. I was the comedian’s comedian, which made Malcolm the comedian’s comedian’s comedian. I wrote a poem about him, none of which I can remember apart from the line, ‘There’s only one Malcolm Hardee’, which is sadly now a shade numerically inaccurate.
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Malcolm was famous for two things: his bollocks. They were enormous. I first met him in the late ’80s at the Tunnel Palladium, by far the toughest club the world has known since open spots faced lions. He ran it and compered. At the Tunnel they used to heckle the acts on, bottle them off, and outwit them in the interim. It was a fantasic game. Some nights the whole show was over in 20 minutes. Anywhere else, that would be a disaster, but at The Tunnel it seemed like victory. I was in the toilets there and overheard two blokes talking: ‘It’s been a good night.’ ‘Yeah, but if Malcolm gets his bollocks out, it’s going to be a great night.’ And that was true.

Aside from his testicles, Malcolm had phenomenal balls. One time, backstage at Glastonbury, his lovely wife Jane gathered a group of us: ‘Have you seen the Hardee leap?’ We went to bear witness. There was Malcolm, miles away, preparing his run-up, and in front of us a vast assembly of tables and chairs. Surely no one could leap it! Malcolm ran. We held our breaths. He leapt and crashed straight into it. Hilarious. You had to be there.

There was a time when everyone on the circuit had a Malcolm story. Boothby Graffoe told me this one: Malcolm was standing outside Stabs nightclub in Greenwich, drunk as usual, when a car came round the corner, really fast, followed by a police car, even faster. The police car clipped the curb, flipped over on to its roof, and skidded to a halt upside-down in front of Malcolm. He leaned over, tapped on the window, and said to the two upside-down coppers: ‘Oi oi, is this your car?’