Mock not the afflicted

Last night's TV reviewed: Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me

Rather You Than Me (BBC4) was Frankie Howerd seen through the eyes of his longtime and long-suffering partner, Dennis Heymer, who survived to tell the tale. It was, inevitably, what Dennis felt, what Dennis did, and, fortunately, Dennis was played by the quite remarkable Rafe Spall. Dennis knew the things which stayed inside the family. From Howerd's sexually abusive father to his childish partiality for jelly and cream. From his attempt to cure his homosexuality with mindbending drugs to Bette Davis's advice to keep his wig on the teapot. ("It steams it. Keeps the contours.") No, poor soul. Mock not the afflicted. David Walliams was Howerd in every possible respect except, of course, he wasn't. The one thing that is lost in these re-creations is the laughter.

All right, so the clue was in the title, BBC4’s The Curse of Comedy season has been sadly bereft of humour, offering not so much rib-tickling as wrist-slashing recreations of the lives of some of the best-loved comic talents of TV’s golden age. Starting with Steptoe & Son’s Wilfred Brambell drinking himself to destruction over his repressed homosexuality, the series brought us, via a demonic Tony Hancock and last week’s monstrous Hughie Green, full circle last night to a Frankie Howerd who, like Brambell, spent most of his life strapped to the torture rack of self-loathing. Even by the standards of its predecessors Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me was a jaw-droppingly bleak portrait of one of the funniest men ever to appear on stage and screen.

And while we're at it; BBC Four might not be the most flush place, but in each of the Curse of Comedy season dramas so far – Steptoe, Hancock, Hughie Green – the thoroughly flush entertainers seem to be living in drudgery. It may well have been Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (a time of – horrors! – no Ikea or Skandium) but surely, being well-off, these celebrities lived in slightly more extravagant surroundings than the dingy semis that keep cropping up in these dramas.

Other flaws in Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me were more glaring. David Walliams never really picked up Howerd’s character by the scruff of its neck, neither mimicking it well nor creating something distinctive. The tics weren’t quite outrageous enough, the swoop of those “Ooooh” and “ahhhs” not full-bodied, the lip pursing and rolling eyes were in abeyance. It was also hard to follow and decipher: the drama was apparently set in a fallow period of Howerd’s career after (presumably) success, but this wasn’t made clear. He just seemed a bit hopeless and pathetic, and then Peter Cook jumped in right at the end to save his career.

The suggested root of Howerd’s misery and self-loathing was his homosexuality, which he seemed utterly ashamed of; and the drama sought to illuminate that alongside his relationship with Dennis Heymer. Rafe Spall played Heymer beautifully: puppy-dog devotion and iron belief mixed with frustration and anger at how Howerd kowtowed to his demons. Seen through Heymer’s eyes, the comedian’s anxieties were wholly due to his contradictory nature: a man of notorious promiscuity, yet who could never reconcile himself to the fact that he was gay. Heymer was the loyal lover who recognised the comedian’s need for “someone to look after him” and stood steadfast despite the indignities heaped upon him. At another level, though, it dealt with the possibility that Heymer’s presence in Howerd’s life was the very thing that knocked him off kilter – because of his inescapable urge to deny it. As Howerd said to Heymer, albeit in jest: “I was perfectly all right until I met you.”

But their drama didn’t go anywhere. It was still, listless. A performance Howerd gave at the Oxford Union in 1990 book-ended events. But Walliams didn’t set the stage alight there, the jokes weren’t very good, the innuendo fizzed as flat as month-old Coke. The same at the restaurant table where Howerd first bewitched Dennis, then a waiter, in the 1950s: the expressions of the diners were mesmerised but at what? Howerd just seemed a mumbling fool. The writing was more confident when tracking the tricky terrain of the men’s relationship: Howerd hated his body (and called his penis, “parsnip”). The sex he had with Heymer was “dirty”. All his partner could say was “I love you”, but Howerd’s terror at being outed in the press overrode any endearments: “You’ll have to make yourself scarce in the morning.”

Howerd revealed his father had abused him, but this didn’t explain away all his demons or give the drama much added weight. The best scene was a rare moment of happiness and it wasn’t his, but Heymer’s as he finally had guilt-free sex with another man. Howerd went to a doctor who gave him LSD as some kind of aversion therapy. Howerd and Heymer’s relationship remained something of a pantomime to the end, Heymer still playing the chauffeur/agent/dogsbody in public. We didn’t know about the Howerd before the painful period, or the Howerd after, although at the end he seemed more relaxed, clasping his lover’s hand with affection. But it was all as insubstantial and threadbare as the furniture: the real Frankie Howerd escaped detection with nothing more than an arch “Oooh missus”.

The film itself focused chiefly on one of the lowest ebbs of Howerd’s life when, having enjoyed enormous fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s, stage fright and near-nervous breakdown almost scuppered his career. He bounced back in That Was the Week That Was on the trampoline of a Johnny Speight script, like Tosca reappearing above the battlements. "And now," said David Frost soberly, "The Week in Westminster, and our lobby correspondent is Mr Frankie Howerd." As I remember it, the subject was Macmillan's budget. Howerd's face, the greatest thing since sliced bread, fell into assorted slices. "Ooh," he confided subversively to the achingly smart young audience, "I blame Dot. I do! Dot." Dot was Lady Dorothy Macmillan. They fell about in their millions. It was the first time we had realised that a prime minster's partner is always funny and vulnerable.

Unfortunately the relentless dreariness of the last night's script, combined with an underwhelming performance by Walliams, meant we always stopped just short of seeing the real Howerd, the one with the spark of comic genius. As such, while not unsympathetic, Howerd emerged so devoid of charisma it was impossible to believe he’d ever made anybody, let alone countless millions, split their sides. Maybe that was the point. It is accepted wisdom that Howerd was not witty in himself, and he says here, "I'm useless if I haven't got a script."