Sean Hughes
Comedian whose dry surreal humour won him a cult following in ‘Sean’s Show’ and ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’
SEAN Hughes, who died last Sunday aged 51, was a stand-up comedian best known to television viewers as a team captain for 10 series of the comedy music quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks, alongside Phill Jupitus and Mark Lamarr, and as the star of the cult sitcom, Sean’s Show.
One of three sons, Sean Hughes was born in London on November 10, 1965. His mother was a traffic warden and his father a driving instructor and alcoholic. When Sean was six, the family moved back to Firhouse in Dublin. It was 1971 and the height of the Troubles in the North. Sean was sent to his new school sporting a bow-tie and a Cockney accent, a provocative combination whose effects he helped to mitigate by playing the joker.
From the age of 13, inspired by watching the American comedian Richard Pryor, he knew he wanted to work in comedy, but his parents gave him no encouragement and were delighted when he was offered a full-time job at a supermarket in Knocklyon.
“It was at that point, I said: ‘What are you talking about? I’m not going to do that for my whole life. I’m going to go over to England to do stand-up’,” he recalled in an interview. “They gave me no support whatsoever. I nearly didn’t make it through. When I was 19, I took my first acid tab and had a bad trip and it freaked me out for about a year... That was a real changing point for me, I could either hide under my bed for the rest of my life or just face it and get out.”
He got out, moved to London and in 1987 he started playing in The Comedy Store, but “hated every minute of it”. Booked to appear in a one-man show, A One Night Stand With Sean Hughes, at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1990, he decided to give up comedy if it proved a flop. In fact, the show, an acerbic exploration of bedsit angst set in a replica of his own living room, won him the Perrier Comedy Award and went on tour internationally.
Hughes’s television career began with Channel 4’s Friday Night Live, but he soon created his own showcase, starring in Channel 4’s Sean’s Show, a surreal sitcom broadcast in 1992-1993, which he performed in front of a studio audience in a recreation of his London flat, local pub and corner shop.
The spectacle of Hughes variously wandering around the set, dancing to The Smiths, monitoring answering machine messages from would-be dates, Samuel Beckett, and God, and holding conversations with a spider who was actually Elvis Presley, attracted cultish devotion and critical fury in equal measure and was nominated for the 1992 British Comedy Award for Best Sitcom.
Also in 1992, he recorded a series of brief programmes called Sean’s Shorts for BBC Two, in which he toured England, visiting local places of interest and meeting local people.
In 1996, Hughes joined Never Mind The Buzzcocks, the BBC Two music panel quiz hosted by Mark Lamarr, on which he endeared himself to audiences with his musical knowledge, boyish looks and dry surreal wit, remaining on the show for six years as team captain before handing over his position to Bill Bailey.
Buzzcocks had threatened to turn him into a celebrity, but as he explained in an interview, “you get dragged in and find yourself at a do with Dale Winton and think, What the f*** is going on with my life? This isn’t why I did comedy”. After leaving the show, he deliberately withdrew from the limelight, eschewing invitations to appear on other panel shows and avoiding doing any television that might keep him in the “celebrity ”category.
During the 1990s, he had dipped in and out of straight acting, taking minor roles in films such as The Commitments (1991) and The Butcher Boy (1997). In 2000, he played a poet in the BBC series Gormenghast and he provided the voice-over for Finbar, a shark in the BBC’s children’s cartoon Rubbadubbers.
In 2002, he took a job as a presenter on BBC 6 Music, hosting the station’s Sunday morning programme. He also had small roles in Casualty, The Last Detective on ITV, Coronation Street (as the wom--
anising travelling salesman Pat, Eileen Grimshaw’s love interest) and in the ITV adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple drama They Do It With Mirrors.
His stage roles included Touchstone in a West End production of As You Like It (2005) with Sienna Miller, and Mr Perks in the Olivier Award-winning production of Mike Kenny’s stage adaptation of E Nesbit’s The Railway
Children (2015). In 2012, two years after his father’s death, he tackled his difficult relationship with his alcoholic parent in Life Becomes Noises, which played at the Edinburgh Fringe before going on tour.
In later life, Hughes also found success as a writer. His first two books, Sean’s Book and The Grey Area, collections of poems, short stories and autobiography, were published to critical acclaim, and he went on to write two novels,
The Detainees and It’s What He Would Have Wanted.
In an interview in 2012, Hughes admitted that, like his father, he had struggled with alcohol, “blocking things out with drink”, but had become a teetotaller. “I matured very late in life,” he explained. “The idea of not drinking five years ago would have been alien to me.”
Hughes is believed to have been suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and had recently been taken to London’s Whittington Hospital.
He never married or had children, explaining that he did not feel cut out for that kind of life.