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).
Showing posts with label Spitting Image. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spitting Image. Show all posts
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Book review: The Invisible Girl by Peter Barham and Alan Hurndall (Harper Element)
In 1991, a new name appeared in the credits of Week Ending and the News Huddlines. I assumed the formal-sounding monicker belonged to some retired university professor.
A year later, ‘D. A. Barham’, a tall, attractive but very shy teenage girl, appeared in the Writers’ Room.
She had been a brilliantly clever but lonely, bullied child who spent years listening to radio comedies and building up a collection of 350 cassettes of them. She developed an ambition to write, believing that she could do better than much of what she heard!
Her first contributions were submitted under initials because she didn’t believe producers would take a female’s work seriously. If only she had known that the BBC were desperately trying to attract women into comedy writing!
Having ‘outed’ herself by turning up at Broadcasting House (a nerve-wracking experience, as she later admitted) she now hid behind another alias, that of an eighteen year-old. She was actually fifteen but because of her height, intelligence and remarkable knowledge of comedy and current affairs, she could probably have passed herself off as a mature twenty-something.
Her work demonstrated a stunning capacity for wordplay; she could spot potential puns instantly. She also had a filthy mind, often employing vulgar expressions which I hadn’t heard since my own schooldays! Furthermore, she was seldom asked for rewrites and could adapt her ideas to any market.
And then there was the sheer quantity of material she produced. Every week, hundreds of gags and dozens of sketches poured from her laptop (a novelty among writers then but she was always fascinated by computers).
Her progress at BBC Radio was rapid and she made the decision to forego a sixth form scholarship and university in favour of moving to London to write full-time. Her reputation grew and she began to attract national press attention.
It was no surprise when she won the Contract Writer’s Award, a bursary with a guaranteed income and the opportunity to develop new BBC radio projects. It was also seen as a passport to television. Her shyness disappeared and ‘D. A.’ was finally replaced in credits by ‘Debbie’.
We had been close but we parted in 1994. She went on to develop radio sitcoms and quizzes, then to TV where she wrote for Spitting Image, Rory Bremner, Clive Anderson and many other big names. She also wrote books and became a prolific journalist.
But even when she was a star columnist for the Sun, she never lost her love of radio. She continued contributing to the Huddlines and was part of the Sony Award-winning team behind the Sunday Format.
And while she preferred to write rather than perform, she made radio appearances, mainly reviewing the press.
Her name was everywhere and I assumed that her life was an exciting round of media events. So I was stunned to learn in April 2003 that Debbie Barham had died, aged 26. It transpired that she had suffered from anorexia since 1995, her weight at times being as low as four and a half stone, and she had lived as a virtual recluse. But her illness never affected the quality of her work.
At her memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, eulogies were delivered by personalities ranging from Ned Sherrin to John McVicar. Her final radio sitcom, About a Dog, was broadcast in 2004 with a script sympathetically completed by Graeme Garden.
She was highly secretive so when her father Peter decided to write her biography, he asked me for my memories, describing me as ‘perhaps the only person who was ever allowed to see the inner Debbie’. The resulting book is often harrowing and, to some reviewers, controversial in terms of whether Peter should have written it or not but it is packed with fascinating tales and hilarious examples of his daughter's radio genius.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 750, 24 August 2006)
A year later, ‘D. A. Barham’, a tall, attractive but very shy teenage girl, appeared in the Writers’ Room.
She had been a brilliantly clever but lonely, bullied child who spent years listening to radio comedies and building up a collection of 350 cassettes of them. She developed an ambition to write, believing that she could do better than much of what she heard!
Her first contributions were submitted under initials because she didn’t believe producers would take a female’s work seriously. If only she had known that the BBC were desperately trying to attract women into comedy writing!
Having ‘outed’ herself by turning up at Broadcasting House (a nerve-wracking experience, as she later admitted) she now hid behind another alias, that of an eighteen year-old. She was actually fifteen but because of her height, intelligence and remarkable knowledge of comedy and current affairs, she could probably have passed herself off as a mature twenty-something.
Her work demonstrated a stunning capacity for wordplay; she could spot potential puns instantly. She also had a filthy mind, often employing vulgar expressions which I hadn’t heard since my own schooldays! Furthermore, she was seldom asked for rewrites and could adapt her ideas to any market.
And then there was the sheer quantity of material she produced. Every week, hundreds of gags and dozens of sketches poured from her laptop (a novelty among writers then but she was always fascinated by computers).
Her progress at BBC Radio was rapid and she made the decision to forego a sixth form scholarship and university in favour of moving to London to write full-time. Her reputation grew and she began to attract national press attention.
It was no surprise when she won the Contract Writer’s Award, a bursary with a guaranteed income and the opportunity to develop new BBC radio projects. It was also seen as a passport to television. Her shyness disappeared and ‘D. A.’ was finally replaced in credits by ‘Debbie’.
We had been close but we parted in 1994. She went on to develop radio sitcoms and quizzes, then to TV where she wrote for Spitting Image, Rory Bremner, Clive Anderson and many other big names. She also wrote books and became a prolific journalist.
But even when she was a star columnist for the Sun, she never lost her love of radio. She continued contributing to the Huddlines and was part of the Sony Award-winning team behind the Sunday Format.
And while she preferred to write rather than perform, she made radio appearances, mainly reviewing the press.
Her name was everywhere and I assumed that her life was an exciting round of media events. So I was stunned to learn in April 2003 that Debbie Barham had died, aged 26. It transpired that she had suffered from anorexia since 1995, her weight at times being as low as four and a half stone, and she had lived as a virtual recluse. But her illness never affected the quality of her work.
At her memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, eulogies were delivered by personalities ranging from Ned Sherrin to John McVicar. Her final radio sitcom, About a Dog, was broadcast in 2004 with a script sympathetically completed by Graeme Garden.
She was highly secretive so when her father Peter decided to write her biography, he asked me for my memories, describing me as ‘perhaps the only person who was ever allowed to see the inner Debbie’. The resulting book is often harrowing and, to some reviewers, controversial in terms of whether Peter should have written it or not but it is packed with fascinating tales and hilarious examples of his daughter's radio genius.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 750, 24 August 2006)
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