I was so often the butt of jokes that Prince Philip once asked me, ‘Are you really that bad?’
His friends Morecambe and Wise mocked him mercilessly and, as Des O’Connor revealed in his uproarious memoir, the nation laughed along
One morning, I suppose it was around Christmas 1967, a phone call punctured my happy mood. I was walking on air that day — my single, Careless Hands, was perched near the top of the charts. I had my first Top Ten hit.
not everyone was delighted. A voice I knew very well complained down the phone line: ‘Des, I’m having my breakfast and they’re playing your song on the radio. Can’t you do something? It’s scaring the pigeons.’
That was eric Morecambe, of course. And it didn’t happen just the once. He was always doing it.
eric and I had been at loggerheads over my new singing career, ever since I confessed to him that I wanted to be more than just a stand-up comic. We were chatting in a coffee bar near the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth between shows that summer when I told him my ambition. I saw myself as a star, like Tom Jones.
eric’s glasses waggled in sheer surprise. ‘You want to be a star like Tom Jones?’ he repeated. I kept a straight face and nodded.
‘Well, I want to have an affair with Brigitte Bardot but all things are not possible,’ he said. I insisted I would be a successful singer. eric insisted that, in that case, he would join the Royal Ballet.
You can understand why I made sure to send him a copy of every new track I recorded. It became a game and, of course, it wasn’t a game I could ever win — not against eric. He found new ways to insult every song and I must admit, I loved it. I never dreamt that our private joke would one day become a national sport.
At first he started dropping gags and rhymes about me into his act: ‘If you want me to be a goner, buy me a record by Des O’Connor!’ I thought that was hilarious and I even wrote one-liners for The Morecambe And Wise Show: ernie: ‘I’ve got some good news.’ eric: ‘ Has Des O’Connor got a sore throat?’
But eric being eric, he found ways to make the jokes bigger and funnier. When I had to go into hospital to have cartilage removed from my knee, eric came to visit me — then told 20 million viewers that it wasn’t cartilage that was taken out, it was a cartridge. Someone had taken a potshot at me with a rifle while I was singing.
His agent, Billy Marsh, thought that one went a bit too far, and said so. ‘ All right,’ eric promised, ‘I’ll tell the audience that I like him really.’
On the next show, he said: ‘now, ladies and gentlemen, some of you are wondering about myself and Des O’Connor, wondering, do I like the man? Well, let me tell you, Des O’Connor came and sang at my daughter’s wedding. He did. He wasn’t invited, but he did.’
The truth is eric, ernie Wise and I had been friends for many years. We met when we appeared in variety together at the Hull Regal in 1954. The boys, as everyone called them, had just started to top the bills around the country, while
I had only been in showbusiness for a few months.
The boys soon twigged that I was a rookie and took me under their wing. They gave me tips on how to survive and would suggest gags and ways of improving my act.
I was earning £20 a week, which would have been OK if I was getting booked every week — but one week’s work in four meant I averaged less than a pound a day. It was hardly enough to cover my digs, food and agent’s commission, never mind anything else, and often I literally did not have a penny in my pocket.
That week in Hull, I didn’t have the train fare to get back to northampton, where I was staying with my parents. ernie and his wife, Doreen, offered to give me a lift — he was the proud owner of a lime-green Austin A30. It was a smart little car but with three adults and all the bags, the fourhour journey was a bit of a nightmare. I am quite sure ernie and Doreen could have done without their passenger.
But they cheerfully played down the discomfort. They knew I didn’t have any cash and would have to hitch- hike otherwise. The onscreen ernie was often portrayed as a mean, tight-fisted man but in real life nothing could have been farther from the truth.
Being penniless was nothing new to me. I grew up that way. As a child in Stepney, east London, I had rickets, a disease caused by vitamin deficiency. The doctor fitted me with leg callipers and told my parents I would never be able to walk without them.
My Dad wasn’t having that. every day he spent at least an hour encouraging me to stand up unaided, urging me to attempt a step or two. If I fell down, he fell
down too and we’d lie on the floor, giggling together. One day, he held out a banana — a rare treat. ‘ You can walk if you really want to,’ he said. ‘You can have the banana if you come and get it.’
I tried and I fell. I tried again, fell down again. I begged my dad to throw the banana to me and he shook his head. ‘Bananas can’t fly,’ he said. I didn’t succeed that day nor the next, but finally I got my banana. Then Dad started encouraging me with bits of chocolate or a sip from his glass of Guinness.
One night I managed to walk the length of the room. The callipers went into the cupboard under the stairs and I never wore them again.
My dad was always cracking jokes. Everyone knew him as Harry but his real name was Harris and his own father had come to England from Cork. In London, my grandfather met and married Catherine Barrs, the daughter of an East End orthodox Jewish family.
Neither the O’Connors nor the Barrs were best pleased by the match, and in 1909 my father must have been one of the few O’Connors to be bar mitzvahed. He always used to joke that he went to school at St Cohen’s.
WHEN our home was destroyed in the Blitz, we moved to Northampton. I left school there aged 14 and signed up for a seven-year apprenticeship with a local printer, which lasted three days before I realised that wasn’t the career for me.
I switched to an office job in a shoe factory —but what I wanted was to be a footballer, and I played a few times for the town club’s reserves. Then the RAF changed my life.
I got my National Service call-up a few weeks before my 18th birthday and was assigned clerical duties. In the office, I discovered I could make the other guys laugh. One evening, I was standing on a table in the NAAFI canteen, doing an impression of our commanding officer, when the laughter suddenly died.
One person kept applauding. I turned to see it was Captain Stewart, the commanding officer. ‘Very funny, O’Connor. I think the whole camp should see that. We’re having a talent contest in two weeks — and you’re in it!’
I loved my new role. I was certainly cocky: after seeing Max Bygraves at the Embassy in Peterborough, I wrote him a fan letter. ‘Dear Max,’ I joked, though he didn’t know me from Adam, ‘how come when I’m better- looking than you, sing better than you and am funnier than you, I’m still earning 28 shillings a week in the RAF while you are top of the bill? Seriously, I’d value your advice.’
Max sent me a long reply, packed with advice about working my way to the top — taking any gig, while remembering that a paying audience deserved the best I could give them. I followed every word, first as a Butlin’s redcoat and then as a stand-up comedian at the Windmill Theatre.
But nothing could prepare me for my f irst night at the Glasgow Empire. From the moment I walked on, the audience looked at me like an intruder at a funeral. Nothing I did could make them crack a smile, let alone give me a laugh. I broke out in a sweat, then my heart began to pound and my lips went dry.
Clutching my side, I keeled over and lay still. The musical director’s head bobbed up over the footlights. ‘Son,’ he hissed, ‘is this in the act?’
‘No,’ I whispered back. ‘I’ve fainted.’ A stagehand dragged me into the wings and, as the panic subsided, I realised I had a choice — I could give up the business for ever and go home to my parents, or I could go back out there for the second show.
The next time, it took three long minutes of silence and hostility. Then somebody weakened and gave me a laugh. That’s all it took to restore my confidence. It wasn’t a great performance but I finished it standing on my own feet.
For years after that, Eric used to do an impersonation of me — but only when he and Ernie were playing the Glasgow Empire. It went: ‘ Good evening, ladies and gentlemen — thud!’
The truth is, that wasn’t the toughest crowd I ever played. Nothing could be more difficult than stepping out on stage in front of 2,000 shrieking Beatles fans who were desperate to see their idols . . . and got Des instead.
It was my first appearance on Bruce Forsyth’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium, in October 1963 — just as Beatlemania reached its hysterical peak in Britain. I was due to do six minutes before the band came on.
I’d known the kids would be loud but I couldn’t have guessed how shrill and deafening the din would be. As I prepared to go on, I knew nothing I said could be heard. Telling jokes would be useless.
A bag of sandwiches and a French loaf were on the stage manager’s desk. His supper, probably. I pinched them, ripped up the bread and stuffed it in the bag.
Then I walked out into a barrage of screams, and started throwing bread into the crowd. They were stamping their feet and the whole place was shaking, but my business with the bread started to raise a few laughs too. ‘It’s feeding time at the zoo,’ I yelled.
One girl caught a piece of bread and started leaping around. ‘She loves me Yeah Yeah Yeah!’ I sang, and the audience could at least see me shaking my head like a moptop. The laughter built up.
THAT was my whole act. There was never any chance of getting a joke heard, so I just kept flinging bits of bread until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Fab Four clutching their guitars. I just threw the bag into the audience, gave them a wave, and ran.
When you’ve faced an auditorium like that, nothing will faze you again. So I took it in my stride, 20 years later, when I met the Duke of Edinburgh and got a royal heckle.
At a Lord’s Taverners cricket charity dinner at the Mansion House, I was standing in a line of celebrities waiting to be presented to Prince Philip. David Frost was introducing us to HRH: ‘ This is Michael Parkinson . . . this is Shirley Bassey . . .’ and so on.
When he reached me, the Duke shook my hand. Then he said, ‘Des O’Connor . . . you’re the chap who is always on Morecambe & Wise.’ I pointed out that I didn’t usually appear but they often mentioned me. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me, are you really that bad?’
By then, I was used to being the butt of national hilarity. Eric’s gag was no longer a private joke.
It just never stopped. One Christmas I counted 13 insults on nine TV programmes in five days. There were stories about my songs clearing bats out of old buildings and frightening fleas off dogs. Children at a school in Bristol had a sponsored Des-athon and raised £1,250 for charity by listening to my records for seven and a half hours. I rang the school to thank them and the headmistress said, ‘I’m afraid you can’t talk to them right
now — they are still under sedation.’ On another occasion I was signing autographs at the stage door of the Palladium. A dear little old lady beckoned me closer, as if she wanted to whisper something confidential. I leant towards her and she slipped an envelope into my hand.
I asked her what was inside and she said seriously: ‘That’s my address and there’s ten pounds inside. Will you send me your next album?’ I pointed out that it would cost less than that in a shop. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to go in and ask for it.’
I couldn’t take it too much to heart. Eric might call me Deaf O’Connor but my singles spent a total of more than two years in the charts. And more often than I’d like to admit, the gags were genuinely funny.
My favourite of all came out of a neardisaster. In 1968, Eric had a heart attack at the wheel of his car. Luckily someone got him to hospital but it was a close thing. When I heard the news, I was about to go on stage in Paignton. At the end of my show, I asked the audience to join me in a prayer for my friend Eric Morecambe, who was in a cardiac ward that night.
A few days later, the old rascal had the nerve to give a press conference from his hospital bed. A journalist asked if he was aware that Des O’Connor had asked his whole audience to pray for him.
‘Well,’ said Eric, ‘those six or seven people probably made all the difference.’
Sadly, Eric died of another heart attack, in 1984. His widow Joan told me later how fond he had been of me . . . and my music.
One evening, Joan said, she went into Eric’s study and found him relaxing on the couch, smoking his pipe and listening to one of my albums on his stereo.
As Eric liked to remark, ‘You can’t say fairer than that.’
ADAPTED from Bananas Can’t Fly: The Autobiography, by Des O’Connor, published by Headline, £20. © Des O’Connor 2001. To order a copy for the exclusive price of £10 (plus £2.99 P&P), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/des