Malcolm Hardee

Malcolm Hardee (5 January 1950 – 31 January 2005) was an English comedian and comedy club proprietor.

He served prison sentences for cheque fraud, burglary and escaping custody; in 1967, he escaped from Gaynes Hall Borstal dressed as a monk.

He also had convictions for arson and once infamously stole a Rolls-Royce which he believed belonged to British cabinet minister Peter Walker.

(Walker later wrote to Hardee after reading about this widely reported story and denied it had been his car.)

Hardee decided to turn to showbusiness as a way of staying out of trouble, saying: "There are only two things you can do when you come out of prison and you want immediate employment. You can either be a minicab driver or you can go into showbusiness" and "Prison is like mime or juggling – a tragic waste of time".

After coming out of prison in 1977 or 1978 (sources vary), Hardee joined Martin Soan's The Greatest Show on Legs – at the time, a one-man adult Punch and Judy act.

Revamped as a surreal sketch group, The Greatest Show on Legs became a regular at the Tramshed venue in Woolwich, alongside the likes of Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson.

Soon afterwards, in 1979, The Comedy Store opened in Soho and The Greatest Show on Legs became regulars there, too.

His high reputation among his peers rests on his outrageous publicity stunts and on the help and advice he gave to successful British alternative comedians early in their careers, acting as "godfather to a generation of comic talent in the 1980s".

Fellow comic Rob Newman called him "a hilarious, anarchic, living legend; a millennial Falstaff", while Stewart Lee wrote that "Malcolm Hardee is a natural clown who in any decent country would be a national institution" and Arthur Smith described him as "a South London Rabelais" and claimed that "everything about Malcolm, apart from his stand-up act, was original".

Hardee was also a compère and talent-spotting booker at his own clubs, particularly The Tunnel Club in Greenwich, South East London, which gave early exposure to up-and-coming comedians during the early years of British alternative comedy.

In his obituary, The Times opined that "throughout his life he maintained a fearlessness and an indifference to consequences" and one journalist claimed: "To say that he has no shame is to drastically exaggerate the amount of shame that he has".

In a publicity quote printed in Hardee's autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury's Birthday Cake, Arthur Smith wrote that Hardee had "led his life as though for the perfect autobiography and now he has paid himself the compliment of writing it."

Hardee was born in Lewisham, South East London, near the River Thames, and came from a long line of lightermen who earned their living on tugs pulling barges on the river.

He was 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 and was educated at three South East London schools – St Stephen's Church of England primary, Colfe's School, and Sedgehill comprehensive.

Expelled from the latter two schools he drifted into petty crime: stealing Coca-Cola from a local bottling plant, burgling a pawnbrokers and setting fire to a Sunday school piano because he wanted to see "holy smoke".

Their breakthrough came in 1982, when they performed their Naked Balloon Dance on Chris Tarrant's anarchic late-night TV show O.T.T.

The Greatest Show on Legs debuted there in 1982.

Arguably his most infamous confirmed stunt there was in 1983 when, performing at The Circuit venue – a series of three adjoining tents in a construction site with a different show in each tent – he became annoyed by what he regarded as excessive noise emanating nightly from Eric Bogosian's neighbouring performance tent.

Hardee obtained a nearby tractor and, entirely naked, drove it across Bogosian's stage during his performance.

His most infamous venue was The Tunnel Club, which he opened in 1984 next to the southern exit from the Blackwall Tunnel in Greenwich, South East London.

Perhaps the most-quoted anecdote concerning Hardee was that, on 9 October 1986 his house was searched by the police – who were looking for crumbs – two days after he and others stole Freddie Mercury's £4,000 40th birthday cake.

No crumbs were found at the house as he had already by then donated the cake to a local nursing home.

In 1987, as one of his many publicity stunts, Hardee stood for Parliament in the famous 1987 Greenwich by-election, as the "Rainbow Dream Ticket, Beer, Fags & Skittles Party" candidate, polling 174 votes.

Rivalling this stunt in Fringe infamy, in 1989, Hardee and Arthur Smith wrote a rave 5-star review of Hardee's own Fringe show and successfully managed to get it printed in The Scotsman under the byline of the influential newspaper's comedy critic.

He stood again in the 1992 election in order to publicise his comedy club because the election rules allowed him a free mailshot to all registered voters in the constituency.

Hardee regularly appeared in his own shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.

At the Fringe in 1996, The Independent reported that he attempted to sabotage American ventriloquist David Strassman's Edinburgh show by abducting the act's hi-tech dummy, holding it to ransom and sending it back to Strassman piece by piece in return for hard cash.

The plan failed.

He used this incident as the title of his 1996 autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury's Birthday Cake which he wrote with John Fleming.

In another encounter with the police, Hardee was once questioned by Special Branch officers after being found on the balcony outside government minister Michael Heseltine's hotel room, wearing nothing but a pair of socks and a leather coat containing £5,200 in cash and a pack of pornographic playing cards.

He had mistaken the room for that of a friend.

Collaborator John Fleming said of him that "At home, he occasionally put a live goldfish in his mouth to get attention – I saw him do it twice. It was often said of Malcolm, with a lot of justification, that he never had a stage act – his life was his act."

In his autobiography, Hardee claimed he was the first to attempt the 'banger-up-the-bum' routine, later perfected and performed by Greatest Show on Legs co-star Chris Lynam, in which a firework (occasionally a three-stage Roman Candle) was clenched between the buttocks and lit to a recording of Ethel Merman singing "There's No Business Like Show Business".

The claim for which Hardee was arguably best known throughout his performing life was that he was said to have "the biggest bollocks in show business" and he became renowned for a rarely performed but vividly unforgettable act in which he would use his own spectacles atop his genitals to create a unique visual impression of French President Charles de Gaulle with his testicles representing the politician's cheeks; this act pre-dated the Australian show Puppetry of the Penis by several years.

Hardee rarely appeared on television, though he did play minor roles in six Comic Strip TV films and one episode in the first series of Blackadder.

Hardee was also renowned as a talent spotter and owner of clubs which gave vital early exposure to up-and-coming comedians including Charlie Chuck, Alan Davies, Harry Enfield, Harry Hill, Paul Merton, Vic Reeves, Frank Skinner, Johnny Vegas and Jo Brand, with whom he had a two-year affair and whom he persuaded to become a comedian.

He hosted the first-ever outing of the new circus group Ra-Ra Zoo, who performed comedy mime to a, for once, silenced audience.

He also worked for a time as the manager of Jerry Sadowitz and was an occasional promoter and tour manager for his friend and neighbour Jools Holland.