Profile: Michael Barrymore: Funny man, sad story: Talent, wealth, fame . . . drink and drugs. David Lister on an up and down life

IT WAS like an awards ceremony from hell. The television celebrity mounted the podium, had a medallion hung around his neck, fought back tears and promised he would never touch liquor or drugs again. Doctors, nurses, monks, drunks and junkies applauded.

When Michael Barrymore received the Comedy Achievement Award in London earlier this year, he made a wicked speech parodying the archetypal showbiz award recipient. But last week's ceremony, surreal though it seemed, was no parody. Barrymore made his vow of abstinence at a drink and drugs clinic run by a Benedictine monk in the American state of Maryland. His treatment, lasting a month, had included a routine of menial chores such as cleaning windows and sweeping floors.

The reports must have shocked middle England. 'It is like being told that the Queen Mother is a fetishist,' wrote the Daily Mail's theatre critic, Jack Tinker. At 42, Barrymore, with his old-style music hall mix of song, dance and stand-up comedy, is one of the mainstays of Saturday night television. His quiz show Strike It Lucky and his variety programme Barrymore attracted 14 million viewers each. He topped the bill at last year's Royal Variety Performance. His latest two-year contract with London Weekend Television, announced on Thursday, is said to be between pounds 2m and pounds 5m. John Fisher, head of variety with Thames Television, describes him as 'the top light entertainer in the country, a position Bruce Forsyth held 15 years ago and Max Bygraves held in the Fifties'.

Fisher, Tinker and others say they find it hard to believe the reports of alcohol and drug abuse. Tinker pointed out that his comic timing was too good for a heavy drinker. But, his admirers acknowledge, Barrymore's background - his father, a lorry driver and labourer, was a drinker and a gambler who sometimes turned to violence - provided enough reason for trauma. So did the pressures of the relentless light entertainment schedules - once he recorded two whole series within three weeks, at the rate of two shows a day. In Maryland on Friday, Barrymore told reporters: 'You just think you are going crazy.' But this mumbling, nervous figure on the television news was not the Barrymore with which viewers were familiar.

They may have wondered before now if there was another side to Barrymore. One recent Saturday night, an advertisement for the following day's Sunday Mirror featured the cheerless, gaunt face of Barrymore's brother and the frail figure of his 80-year-old mother. The famous son of their family, they said, had not spoken to them for years, and had returned their Christmas and birthday cards. 'Michael, please get in touch,' pleaded his mother in the next day's paper. 'I love you and miss you. My door is always open.'

It was a throwback to the typical Sunday paper story of the Fifties: the working-class kid turned showbiz millionaire who writes his broken-hearted old mum out of his script. But Michael Barrymore is a throwback in many respects.

HE WAS born Michael Parker and chose the name Barrymore apparently after the pre-war American acting dynasty. It suggested ambitions beyond the traditional end-of-pier stand-up comic, and a desire to get as far away as possible from his roots.

Barrymore has frequently recalled, in his cheerful Cockney, his childhood in the then tough dockside area of Bermondsey, south London. His father would come home drunk and just keel over. 'He did this ten million times, and he keeled over one night, and we just went for his pockets and found about six or seven quid, a lot of money, and we decided to go to the Elephant and Castle to see a film. I was eight or nine and I'd never seen a film, and it was a Norman Wisdom film and I laughed for two hours and forgot about the problems at home, and I thought that was what I was going to do.'

Yet Barrymore may owe his talent to his father. His estranged brother, John, told the Sunday Mirror that their father was a brilliant mimic, known around the Bermondsey pubs as 'the actor'; he was always, John added, immaculately turned out - when his suits were not in the pawn shop.

When Barrymore was 11, his father came home one night, broke a few windows with his fist, left and was never seen again. Michael was delighted to see the back of him; both John and their mother say that he had a happy childhood. At school, the tall, skinny boy, with long delicate fingers, was known as 'Bones Parker'; his jokes had the other children in fits. It is all, as John tells it, the stereotype of a comedian's youth, down to the episode when his headteacher told Michael he would never amount to anything and asked him what he thought he would be when he grew up. 'A millionaire,' he replied.

After school, Barrymore formed a rock band, travelling round Europe in a transit van. For a time, he worked at Vidal Sassoon - a good way to meet showbiz people - and, at 18, he became chauffeur to the head of Sainsbury's. Later, he became a redcoat, on pounds 10 a week, at Butlin's in Clacton, Essex. For years, he still joined his brother and friends flogging toys and toiletries in Deptford High Street.

The gigs began to take an unusual form. Michael would do impersonations on stage, often with an anarchic and Goon-like flavour: he would stand on his head to do Alan Whicker down under; he would bend his legs to do Lester Piggott, open them to do Fiona Richmond. He was accepted for a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art but turned it down when he won a contract with a London agent as a prize in a pub talent contest.

Still, success was elusive. At one stage his only booking was a caravan park once a fortnight while he worked in Selfridge's toy department, where they took a dim view of him setting up a toy firemen's picket during the firemen's strike. In the mid-Seventies, his fortunes changed. He won on the television talent show New Faces and married Cheryl, a former dancer. She, by all accounts, was the making of him, replacing his friend Barry Mulligan as his manager. Her father, Eddie Cocklin, became his financial adviser and substitute parent, whose death led to the nervous breakdown in 1991 that began Barrymore's health problems. The couple are close - 'two bodies with one spine' was one description. They have no children and live in Essex.

With a catchphrase - 'Awwight?' - that was as popular as it was banal, Barrymore's television appearances began to multiply. He hosted a quiz show on the BBC in the early Eighties and got his own show in 1989. John Fisher, who gave him his first break on the BBC, said: 'I saw something very special, a creative spontaneity, something one hasn't really seen since Danny Kaye, the ability to be totally in charge of 3,000 people.'

His versatility is probably his greatest asset, joining in his guests' acts. One week he would do breakneck roller skating (having learnt to skate in a week); the next a complicated dance routine; another week he would join the Chippendales in a fake torso.

The shows struck an immediate chord with a mass audience. His warmth and rapport contrasted sharply with many of the new 'alternative' comedians. 'It doesn't matter how clever you are,' Barrymore has said, 'what a wonderful voice you've got, how brilliantly you dance, if, when people look at you, they don't like you as a person . . . It's what Tommy Cooper had. Nobody was more off the wall than Cooper; he was a load of rubbish, but you loved the man and you trusted him, and if he thought it was funny, you did.'

He had his critics. Bernard Manning said: 'He's a game-show host, certainly not a funny man at all. He's pinched most of his stuff from the Fawlty Towers bloke, the funny walks and that stuff, absolutely stolen.' Yet alternative comedians respect him. Frank Skinner, for example, said: 'You do feel he has a lot more brain than your average 'this bloke walks into a pub' type of comic. I feel in a way he's on the wrong circuit, that he should be working with French and Saunders, people like that.'

That's the nub of it. For all his success, Barrymore has never really broken out of the light entertainment ghetto to become a culturally accepted comedy icon. People who go out on Saturday nights may well still ask: 'But who is he?' It is a question that Barrymore may well have asked himself.

He insists that criticism never bothers him. In an interview last year he said: 'I don't care what anybody thinks, their opinions, it can't hurt me. Because of my background I couldn't be hurt any more than I was.' What 'background', his family wanted to know? His mother, according to John, once held down four jobs, partly to keep Michael in suits. It was hard, perhaps, but not as hard as that, his mother told a newspaper in 1990.

'I arrived here a month ago,' he said in Maryland, 'and I found me.' When he flies back to Britain this week, after further recuperation in Palm Beach, we shall await the discovery with interest.

(Photograph omitted)