Peter Hickey: An Appreciation

When Peter Hickey died last year, the media coverage was centred on the fact that he died in a fire and only briefly mentioned his long and impressive comedy writing career. I tried to redress the balance a little with this article in the Radio Magazine.

I stay in touch with some of my old BBC colleagues and, from time to time, an email will arrive, headed ‘Some Sad News’. This happened a few weeks ago when I learned that the comedy writer Peter Hickey had died aged 67 in a fire at his Brighton home.

As a script editor, Pete was the first person to select anything I’d written for BBC radio (Week Ending) and in later years I would sit with him on Wednesday afternoons writing last-minute News Huddlines sketches while he compiled that show’s opening monologue.

He would plough methodically through hundreds of gags sent in on spec (many handwritten/hopeless) and somehow produce a flowing routine which got roars from 300 people at the recording but he was never too busy to contribute ideas if other writers were struggling. On one occasion, Gerry Goddin and I were discussing a news story I’d read about Siamese twins arrested for fighting…each other (only In America!) With Pete’s input, we quickly wrote a sketch which went down very well despite being in dubious taste but then he loved outrageous humour; if someone sent in a really offensive gag, he would groan ‘Oh de-ar!’, laugh, remove his glasses and go off to regale the producer with this foul offering before returning to the mountain of submissions.

Pete grew up in Bermondsey and even as a child wrote short stories. His father sent him to Pitman’s College but his early jobs included taxi driving (often conveying some shady characters!) and working for a Russian tea merchant who also specialised in certain ‘duty-free’ goods! After an involvement with pirate radio, he put his shorthand and typing training to good use as a sub-editor for the Sun and also worked in the teleprinter room at LBC/IRN where his colleagues included our own Paul Easton.

By this time he had started writing for BBC radio. Derek Jameson claimed in his autobiography that Pete wrote the notorious sketch which led to his expensive libel action against Week Ending but years later he still employed him to write for his show on BSB.

In fact, he wrote for an amazing array of stars on radio or TV in the UK, USA and Australia: David Frost, Joan Rivers, Bob Monkhouse, Ronnie Corbett, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, Little and Large, Roy Walker. Alfred Marks, John Inman, Keith Harris, the Copy Cats…But he was more likely to boast about who he HADN’T worked for; he proudly told me that he’d never written for Spitting Image! (I guess he didn’t need to).

Radio quizzes were a speciality for Pete, for example, Press Gang, where he attempted to write material accommodating the speech difficulties associated with host Glyn Worsnip’s cerebellar ataxia. And then there was the hugely popular (and frequently risqué) Trivia Test Match, its 8-year innings ended only by Johnners’ death in 1994. The show still gets BBC7 repeats.

And with his lifelong love of movies, he must have been delighted when studios employed him as a script consultant.

I remember Pete as a dapper character (radio comedy writers didn’t usually wear ties, braces and cufflinks!). He appeared forbidding if you didn’t know him but once you did, he was friendly, encouraging and an amazing source of scurrilous showbusiness stories!

On a professional level, he never used any of my initial material until I had reached the required standard. Any revisions he made demonstrated his perfect English or his years of experience of what made a gag work. And seeing how my material fitted into the monologues he compiled taught me about structure - which carries through to my work today. I’m glad I knew him.

(With thanks to John Vyse and Paul Easton for their help regarding Peter Hickey’s extensive CV).

(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 809, 10 October 2007).