Bernard Manning

Bernard John Manning, comedian: born Manchester 23 August 1930; married 1956 Vera Finnerran (died 1986; one son); died Manchester 18 June 2007.

Bernard Manning was in a sense the last "legitimate" racist in Britain. Legitimate because the gags which caused him to be so widely reviled in recent years were fossilised relics of the working-class comedy of the late 1950s.

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This was the era when Manning first emerged, as a crooning Manchester greengrocer who told jokes between songs. At that time, when black and Asian people were first settling in the UK in appreciable numbers, material which we would now call racist was largely acceptable and unremarkable, even on television. It was comedy known then as "blue" (and perfectly OK today) that got comedians into trouble.

It was several years before comedy began to turn away from being rude about ethnic minorities and ironically Manning, who was in a way an early alternative comic, was one of the first to steer away from race jokes. When he made his television début in 1971 on the Granada series The Comedians, his material was pretty much clean. While the black Yorkshire comedian Charlie Williams joked away in prime time about financially grasping "Jewboys", and another comic, Mike Coyne, cracked unpleasant jokes about Jamaicans in public toilets, the then 41-year-old Manning was using gags which could have come from a student rag magazine. ("A fella went to the doctors. He said, 'I've examined you and I can't find anything wrong with you. You must have Alice.' Fella says, 'What's that?' Doctor says, 'I don't know, but Christopher Robin went down with it.'")

It was only later in the decade, when the curtain finally came down on racist humour, that the ever-mischievous and iconoclastic Manning spotted a gap in the market and added a small proportion of his oddly archaic racial material to the repertoire. It never constituted more than a few jokes out of hundreds in his act, but the more he was attacked over it, the more resolutely - pig- headedly, to be honest - he stuck to it.

He affected never to understand what the fuss was about, but in reality, his racial material was underpinned by a small measure of basic working-class xenophobia and a large helping of basic working-class cussedness. Before political correctness, Manning's flat cap nostalgia offered white working-class people a cathartic belly laugh, a reminder that they had something to be proud of.

There is little doubt about it; Manning was racist, but not viciously so - and certainly no more so than the majority of working-class northerners of his age. It was a matter of pride to him that the "perverts" - his phrase - of the National Front and other ultra-right parties despised him. Personally, he was a generous-hearted, soft man whose soppy clown's face was not a mask for a more sinister interior.

He would argue that he was not racist, and that his act was "just jokes". In this sense, Manning was more about history than comedy. Whilst comedy hopes to shed some light on contemporary life and illuminate its ironies, Manning tried to preserve the past in Harpurhey, north Manchester, half a century ago, for folk of a certain age, who like him, were born, lived and died within the same few miles.

He admitted to believing the publicity racially dubious material brought him was money in the bank; it ensured Manning, well into old age, a constant stream of bookings from the more louche kind of pubs and clubs. But it kept him almost entirely away from television for the last several decades of his life. This was frustrating to those who believe he was technically one of the finest comics of the century. Manning's skill with humour evoked the admiration of such figures as Stephen Fry, the author Howard Jacobson and the social historian A.J.P. Taylor, who confessed he was a big fan.

John Fisher, the head of entertainment at Thames TV, believed Manning was the British Groucho Marx, such was his "ability to deflate a type of pomposity, a type of affectation, with the sharpest edge possible". Always sharp-witted, Manning was the master of insult and invective, whether directed at the royal family, at fellow comedians, whom he mostly loathed - or at hapless members of his audience unwise enough to go to the lavatory during his act.

Manning was born to John and Nellie Manning in 1930, in the middle of the Great Depression, above his father's small greengrocers shop in central Manchester. Despite being born poor, most of the Manning children - Jack, Bernard, Alma, Cathrine and Frank - would grow up to become millionaires. Bernard - ever fond of racial stereotype - believed this Midas touch (along with his own talent as a comedian) was partly to do with he and his siblings being partly Jewish, despite their having been brought up as strict Catholics.

John Manning's grandfather, so Bernard was told by his own father, was named Blomberg and came from Sebastopol in Ukraine. Interestingly, Bernard did not reveal this snippet of family history to me until after my 1996 biography of him was safely published. He claimed that the reason for this omission was that his Blomberg relatives, rumoured to be living in Philadelphia, might possibly be poor and make a beeline for Manchester if they heard there was a multi-millionaire relative there.

Some might impute a darker motive - that Manning feared losing credibility with his more racist fans. Such cowardice seems unlikely, however. Although keeping his ancestry under wraps, he was openly and visibly friendly with Manchester's Jewish community. He did frequent Jewish charity benefits, and told "Yiddishe stories", as he called them, with an aplomb and accuracy which satisfied the most critical Jewish joke aficionados. He was also known to give money to good causes in the city's Asian communities, and, although he would joke on stage about liking only "good English grub", was as fond of a curry at his favourite Indian restaurant as the next Mancunian.

Manning went to Mount Carmel Catholic School in Ancoats, became a choirboy and left at 14. He took a job in the Senior Service cigarette factory in Manchester for £1 per week. Here, his charisma and his singing soon earned him the title Personality of the Year in the company magazine, Smoke Rings. He started to sing outside work too, with the bands in dance halls and at venues such as the Eccles Conservative Club. He would be paid a few shillings, billing himself as "Bernard Manning, the Choice Voice".

When he was 19, he was called up and served in the 1st Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, where he was enthusiastic but unconvincing as a soldier, but successful as a singer in the regimental band. On his return from service in Germany, he became a semi-professional crooner in northern clubs and it was at one such venue, the Barnsley Catholic Club, that the comedian Jimmy James found Manning an agent, who found him a job as singer with the Oscar Rabin Dance Band.

In 1956, he married Veronica Finnerran, a secretary at a brake lining factory. "I'll never forget the year we got married," Manning would say, "because Manchester City won the FA cup." His marriage to Vera, as she was known, was to be long and happy and produce his only son, Bernard - still known throughout Manchester as Young Bernard.

In 1959, Manning opened his own establishment, the Embassy Club - later to be restyled, a little optimistically, "The World Famous Embassy Club". He performed at the Embassy throughout his life, and had slots for other acts. The Beatles, Jimmy Tarbuck and Matt Monro all took the Manning shilling. Of the Beatles, Manning remembered, "That John Lennon drove me potty because he wanted a washbasin. What did he want that for? You come here to work, not to wash."

Having his own venue was a brilliant commercial coup for Manning, since he paid himself for his act, and also creamed off the profits from selling alcohol to his own audience. The club was a family affair: Bernard on stage, his Dad behind the bar, his Mum on the till, his brother on the door and his sisters serving drinks. The beer at the Embassy Club was a matter of fascination throughout Manchester; it was uncannily lacking in body, and Manning would even joke on stage about how he was watering it, but when asked about this would roll his eyes and say, as with the racism, "It's only a joke".

Despite a boozy image, Manning was a non-drinker, even before he developed diabetes after being mugged outside the Embassy Club in 1984. The ailment was exacerbated by his weight. In 1974 he weighed 20 stone, and the public and media always maintained an interest in his alimentary canal. He settled down at around 18 stone.

Manning's television break came after the Granada producer Johnnie Hamp got to hear of him, although he had been warned that Manning was too blue for TV. Manning invited Hamp to watch him perform for an evening and then decide if he could clean up his act sufficiently for broadcasting.

Manning did four shows that night, recalls Hamp. The first was in a Catholic club run by a priest and some nuns, where Manning was as clean as whistle. Then he did a British Legion club, a showbiz club and a gay club. "The great thing was," said Hamp, "that Bernard changed his routine for every different location and for every type of audience."

Manning was the second act to be seen on the first episode of The Comedians. In frilly evening shirt and with cigar jauntily held aloft, he paused for the audience to quieten, then started: "Irishman, up in court for maintenance. The judge says to him, 'We have decided to allow your wife £7 a week'. He says, 'Thanks very much, I'll try and send her a few shillings myself'."

This first date secured his television success and that of the show. The Comedians was second in the ratings only to Coronation Street for the two years that it ran. Manning's pay rose from £10 a gig to £2,000 almost overnight. Professionally life was sweet, but then Manning's father died. He was devastated and did not eat for three weeks.

As late as 1982, when the new anti-racist, anti-sexist comedy was in the ascendant, Manning won the National Club Comedian of the Year award, and did again in 1985. The height of his fame, however, was in 1977, when he topped the bill at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Although it was only one afternoon appearance as part of a Granada documentary, he unquestionably got a standing ovation, which - along with a Royal Command Performance with Des O'Connor, Richard Attenborough and Mike Reid - was the proudest professional moment of his life. After the Royal Command Performance, he met the Queen, who said she had enjoyed the show. To celebrate his success, Manning bought a £20,000 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, registration 1 LAF.

In 1986, Vera Manning died. "I have lost the bedrock of my life," Bernard said, and went to live with his mother. It was the start of a gentle decline in his fortunes. In 1994, two black waitresses at a Round Table charity dinner in a Derby hotel took exception to Manning's act and went to an industrial tribunal against the management of the hotel for racial discrimination. They lost, later to have the decision overturned at appeal, where they won an undisclosed sum. Manning was most insulted that they claimed he had used the word "wog". "It's a horrible, disgusting word I've never used in my life," he complained. The terms "niggers" and "coons", he insisted, were historical words with respectable roots.

In 1995 he was secretly filmed by the television programme World in Action telling racist gags to an audience of appreciative policemen. One of the jokes he told as part of his act was: "When the police pull you up, they must caution you. They say to you, 'You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and used in evidence'. Your next sentence must be, 'Please don't hit me again, officer'. But if you're a nigger, 'again and again and again'." In the mouth of a Ben Elton, with a small textual alteration, this could have been seen as an anti-police joke. Coming from Manning it caused a furore and won the condemnation of the then Prime Minister, John Major.

In 1995, Manning's youngest brother, Frank, died, followed two weeks later by his beloved mother. For the first time in his life, Bernard was the only Manning left within a 10-mile radius of where he was born. He sought the companionship of his girlfriend Lynn Hilton, the former wife of Mark Hilton, a one-time Oldham Athletic footballer, and doted on Young Bernard and his grandchildren.

A surprising development in the 1990s was that, having been ostracised from mainstream entertainment and banished to the purdah of smoky clubs, he began to be dug up, albeit as a curio, by the intelligentsia. He was the subject of a plethora of thoughtful broadsheet and colour magazine articles. His biography received warm reviews from, amongst others, Living Marxism and The Jewish Chronicle. Manning, it seemed, was irrepressible.

An appearance on Caroline Aherne's Mrs Merton Show in 1998, however, was another disaster. Aherne coaxed him into being outrageously racist in a way he had never been before. If he was being ironic, as his friends and admirers hoped, he was not convincing at it.

He continued a punishing round of clubs, pubs and his own Embassy Club, with a mixture of 90 per cent magnificently delivered comedic gems and 10 or less per cent of gratuitous racist gags, which began to pall even with his devotees. To the end, he drew the line at mother-in-law jokes, which he considered disrespectful to older women, and toilet humour. He also disapproved of the television comedy 'Allo 'Allo, which he saw as an insult to the heroes of the French resistance.

He toyed with a self-reinvention at one point a few years ago, when his son, Young Bernard, relaunched the Embassy Club as an alternative comedy venue. For a few nights, Manning appeared on stage at the club alongside Peter Kay - a bizarre mix, but never one that quite achieved the required yin and yang. Perhaps Bernard was, in his own way, a bit too alternative already for a rebrand.

The final word on Manning might come from a cleaning lady who was flitting around his ornate sitting room with a feather duster the last time I saw him. Bernard was railing about how other comedians who had done disgraceful things - from dodging their income tax to committing adultery - were honoured with medals and knighthoods. "Then there's me," he moaned, in that rasping Lancashire growl, "I've never knowingly done a bad turn to anybody in me whole life."

From the other side of the room came the cleaning lady's voice, sounding uncannily like Mrs Merton. "Perhaps it was something you said, Bernard," she suggested.

Jonathan Margolis