Potty, Pumpkin, Tickle and Velcro- a good night's entertainment

Last night's TV reviewed: Clowns

Tommy Tickle, as the name might suggest, is a children’s entertainer. From what we saw last night, his act consists of balloon-folding, general larking about and, perhaps more surprisingly, a few gags about Robert Mugabe. All of which is enough to get him around seven gigs a week – especially since he bought a list of party contacts from Timmy Tickle (no relation), who moved to Essex to become Silly Billy Blue Hat. Tommy does find the work stressful, but luckily he’s discovered the perfect way to relax when he gets home: he smokes and drinks a lot.

Tommy was one of four men featured in Clowns (BBC2), a film by Daisy Asquith. At times, Asquith was possibly over-keen to present the Sad Clown archetype – and so to ask the kind of questions that might encourage the tears to flow. (Mr Pumpkin, for example, was quizzed at length about his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.) On the whole, though, she wisely took a back seat and allowed the tragicomic contrast between being a children’s entertainer and being a middle-aged bloke to speak engagingly for itself.

It is amazing, said one of the children's entertainers, that there is not more panic about their credentials. People are not otherwise in the habit of inviting rouge-cheeked strangers in baggy trousers into the company of their infants. Tommy Tickle admitted if he were not a clown himself he'd probably be first with the paedo jokes. (As it is, when they start with the jibes, he feels like 'kicking them in the fucking nuts'.) It soon became apparent, however, that the real problem with clowns is not that they like children too much, but that so many don't like them at all.

Tickle was a case in point. A plump, bald man with a voice as crusty as Krusty's, he even thought his own daughter “vile”. Kids these days, they had no moral boundaries. He always wore a cricket box, because you can tell a child 100 jokes but there is none as funny as punching a clown in the nuts. Tickle spends a lot of time in shopping centres twisting balloons into the shape of swans for children who would be impressed only by a Play-Station 4. He ends his busy days in costume, in the pub, drinking himself into oblivion, giving himself another three, four, five years, max, in this job. His view was that it helps to have had “a massive amount of personal upheaval in your life”. That way when you are in a room of screaming kids who only want to punch you in the butt, “it seems an all right night”. Tickle, a traditional clown, seemed permanently on the verge of explosion ("Do you want a fucking balloon? I'll give you fucking balloons! I'm up to here with fucking balloons!"). Not unlike his daughter, who had just been expelled from school ("I swore a lot and I punched a lot and got in a bit of a fight with a policeman"). He suggested she should become a clown, and she was enthusiastic: "I could dye my hair green and blue and pink and all them amazing colours." She should do very well in showbusiness.

If Asquith wasn't talking to clowns with issues around children she was talking to clowns with issues around parents. Potty the Pirate's back story just wasn't funny. He had gone through 14 schools, his father had been a raging alcoholic, his mother was a Jesus freak. She now turns up to his shows and makes a point of not laughing, not even at the ventriloquism bit with the giant rat. She wished Potty would settle down and have children of his own. Potty thought it unlikely. We saw him on a date with a presentable Hungarian accountant. She had no real complaints, but noted he kept making “pirate noises in inappropriate places.” While his girlfriend observed he finds it hard to divorce himself from his on-stage role, Potty was touchingly starry-eyed, seeing every appearance in a church hall or a suburban living-room as part of a noble vocation.

At least Mr Pumpkin, after a Freddie Mercury-impersonating phase, was married with three sons. But he was in torment because his mother had Alzheimer's and no longer cuddled him. He invited Asquith to meet her but because this was one of the worst-edited documentaries ever (all sorts of continuity slips with clowns one moment in make-up, the next without, repeated images, unidentified locations), we never did. He had always been his mum's entertainer. Now he had lost his audience. The most Pagliacci moment was watching Mr Pumpkin play a home movie of his mother, dancing to the song Unforgettable. For a while, his lips moving soundlessly, the clown was wholly unaware of the camera watching him.

Serving as a stark warning to the other three was the fantastically embittered figure of The Great Velcro ("You've probably read about him in the papers"), a much-loved children’s entertainer for 30 years – until the day one small boy pushed the heckling too far. So it was that entertainer snapped, and gave the lad what might once have been called a clip round the ear, but these days is regarded more as assault. (“The man’s old-school,” as Tommy Tickle explained approvingly.) You were reminded of Mr Partridge, the childophobic Punch and Judy man in Hi-de-Hi!. The Great Velcro proved an entertaining chap, though not necessarily to children.

"The deification of kids," he said, "has happened in the last 30 years." It is, perhaps, unfortunate that he has been a children's entertainer for 30 years. "The Romans and the Greeks would crucify them. Little sods! This kid started behaving really badly. He was looking at my balls going." (The Great Velcro made a noise not unlike Velcro.) "I thought, 'Sod it! I'm not having this any more!' Big disaster, really, because they called the police. The policeman said, 'It's not called clipping round the ear any more.' The kids were shouting, 'Are you going to prison?' I got a caution. God! I shouldn't have done it but I did. This kid had pushed the boundaries of a 63-year-old man. One day in 63 years!"

I must say it sounds a cracking party, and worth every penny. Assuming he got paid. Which is uncertain. "Do you think you'll ever do another children's party?" asked Daisy Asquith with that solicitude that marks the television director. "Oh, I will. On special request. If they want a particularly violent magician, I will be there," said The Great Velcro. Nowadays he performs for the elderly, who are quiet and, indeed, sometimes asleep. If I may make a suggestion, his top hat and frock coat rather suggest an undertaker, which may worry the terminally bewildered.

“I started off with nothing,” Velcro told us with impressive stoicism, “and I’ve got most of it left.” Anyone, having watched Clowns, will feel moved to stand the poor guy a stiff drink at the end of his stint. Unless he is driving, in which case you will read about him in the papers. The misfortunes of clowns and clergymen tend to tickle the press.