Award-winning comedian with a dark streak
In 1990, Sean Hughes Sean became the youngest winner Hughes of the Perrier Award for 1965-2017 Comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. “He looked like a pop star and women adored him,” recalled Steve Coogan, who was also in Edinburgh that year. “I spent far too much time imagining what it might be like to be him.” Hughes, with his boyish yet mournful features, became a leading light of British comedy, appeared on the panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, wrote books and acted too. Yet being him was not as enviable as Coogan supposed, said Michael Hann in The Guardian. Although capable of great charm, he was a darkly complex figure: introspective, angry and sometimes cruel, especially to the women in his life. He was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver when he died last week, aged 51.
Sean Hughes was born into a working-class family in London in 1965, the son of Irish immigrant parents. His mother was a traffic warden; his alcoholic father was a sometime driving instructor. When he was six, they moved to Dublin. Arriving with a London accent at the height of the Troubles, he struggled to fit in (he spent his childhood in a headlock, he said) and was miserable at his Christian Brothers school. “I’d like to thank God for f***ing up my life and at the same time not existing, quite a special skill,” he quipped, years later. In his teens, he saw comedian Richard Pryor’s film Live in Concert (1979), and realised that his future might be in performing. His parents, however, were not encouraging. They wanted him to work in a supermarket. “I loved my parents, but I’ve never really liked them,” he said, years later. “They gave me life, and a head start in the f***ed-up stakes, which is great for comedy, which was really sweet of them.”
He got his first break at college, said The Times, when he went to see a TV show being made. One of the show’s producers became wrongly convinced that he had seen Hughes and a friend perform at a festival in Tipperary, and booked them to appear on the show. That led to bookings on the Irish comedy circuit. The duo then decided to try their luck in England – though a therapist advised Hughes to stay in Dublin for treatment instead. His friend went home when they got nowhere; Hughes stuck it out, and, in 1987, made his first appearance at the Comedy Store, the centre of the new “alternative” comedy. He was 24 when he won the Perrier. By then, he had abandoned gags in favour of a narrative routine in which he imagined himself as an anxious misfit, living in a bedsit, waiting for a phone call from Morrissey (he was a huge Smiths fan). He then got his own postmodern sitcom, Sean’s Show, which had a cult following.
In 1996, Hughes agreed to appear as a team captain on Buzzcocks because he loved music. The show suited his deadpan humour, but he was conflicted about its success, said The Daily Telegraph: it made him rich, which he liked, but didn’t bring him the kind of fame he wanted. As he explained: “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.’” He left after six years, and then took trouble to avoid work that might add to his “celebrity” status. Instead, he presented a programme on BBC 6 Music; acted on stage and TV; and wrote a couple of bleak novels. In 2012, he went on tour with a meditation on his fraught relationship with his father. His mother, he said, was a “moron, but she was my moron”; when his father died, he didn’t shed a tear. “We used to high-five each other in the middle ground of self-hatred,” he said.
A self-confessed commitment-phobe, Hughes had a few long-term relationships, and many fleeting ones. As Caitlin Moran once tweeted, “We all had Sean Hughes – that’s just part of the collateral damage of living in London & being a woman.”