Here's Harry ...

 

 

It might not be a name which springs readily to mind now, but in the 1960s Harry Worth, born on this date in1917, was a major TV comic  whose genial, bumbling persona was forever frustrating petty officialdom. 

If that suggests Tony Hancock, however, he had none of Hancock's pomposity or aggression: like Jacques Tati, Worth was guileless, an innocent who never seemed out to cause trouble; it just seemed to  happen around him anyway. In Worth's case the cause was a cheerfully circumlocutory way of putting things which inevitably tied the listener in knots, as his utterances were governed by a logic comprehensible to no one but the mild and agreeable speaker himself. (Arthur Haynes was perhaps more closely linked to Hancock, and has been described as ITV's answer to Hancock, though Haynes's tramp character was several notches down from Hancock's TV persona socially.)

There is a DVD set available (above) which contains all the surviving episodes of his longrunning 1960s BBC sitcom Here's Harry, and they repay watching today, notable as they are for their restraint. It may be comedy for a wide audience but it's not broad: in the salvaged shows there is at least one major slapstick opportunity which takes place offscreen, and despite severe provocation characters at the receiving end of Worth's reasoning rarely give way to cartoonlike rage; most of the fun, in fact, is in our anticipation of their struggle to retain their composure when increasingly entangled in Harry's special brand of reasoning. 

You could say his is a kind of mirror image of Hancock's world, where Galton and Simpson have said that in order to remain sympathetic Hancock's character needed to be provoked by the pomposity or unreasonableness of those around him otherwise he risked looking like a buffoon (a point which, as they said with some bemusement, Hancock's later writers didn't always grasp). In Here's Harry, by contrast, everyone around Worth is reasonable - but such is the warmth and innocence of Worth's own character he remains sympathetic and you can't blame him for the confusion  he has unwittingly caused. 

And there is yet another example of the way that Here's Harry acts as a kind of mirror image, a reverse, of the Hancock programme. Closeups are of the supporting cast as much as the lead, so that we are able to savour each stage of the mounting exasperation which invariably attends any attempt to engage with Harry's thought processes: their expressions are where much of the fun lies. Supporting actors are of a high calibre, too: Jack Woolgar and Reginald Marsh, for example. In one scene where Harry is explaining something to a gardening expert it cuts away about five times to a close up of the latter's face. And although the playing is restrained you still get enough information to guess at the victim's slowly simmering annoyance in a way which would not be possible on radio.

When he left the BBC for ITV, in addition to a sketch show he starred in a sitcom called My Name Is Harry Worth, along much the same lines as Here's Harry, though with a kindly landlady rather than an auntie to look after him. It's agreeable enough but not with the same verve and invention of the BBC work. And the introductory sequence seems to me to be misjudged: Worth, on the high street, declares to all and sundry: "My name is Harry Worth!", whereupon every last pedestrian, adults and children alike, scoots off in panic. I suppose it sets up the character for those not familiar with him but surely an awareness of Harry's unique talent for confusion ought to steal up on individuals as they come into contact with him? This mass exodus is immediately followed by the series' wistful theme tune, as though the makers can't quite make up their minds about the mood: are we meant to laugh, find it poignant or what? Far better, surely, that famous opening to the BBC show: the shop window starfish trick suggests a childlike persona which the viewer can't help but warm to.

 

 

If you are looking for a biography of Harry Worth there is a tantalisingly short book by Roy Baines - less than eighty pages. If you can find a copy, however, there is an earlier book, named after the BBC series, which not only includes five scripts but quite a detailed account of the making of the series. I don't suppose, at this late stage, that there is likely to be a fuller biography, though maybe it doesn't matter too much. Enough BBC TV and radio episodes of his work survive to give a sense of his quality. 

An early radio series, written by Barry Took, which paired Worth with Peter Jones was recently repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra, with Jones as Dudley Grosvenor, a character, already familiar to listeners from Jones's earlier show with Peter Ustinov, In All Directions. Worth is the dupe of the wily Grosvenor, and the show works perfectly well, but in hindsight you can see that Worth's character needed to be  centrestage  in order to blossom, causing trouble -  however unwittingly - to others rather than having trouble brought to his door. 

 

 

Quite late on in his career Harry Worth, not apparently in the best of health, returned to radio. I'm not sure whether the scripts were newly written or adaptations of old TV shows, but it's good to hear him, even if there seem fewer opportunities seized for the accidental confounding of others than in some of the sixties TV shows: there comes a point when simply to see a much-loved comedian go through his paces is enough.

 

Links:

The official Harry Worth website, possibly maintained by his biographer, Roy Baines, can be found here. It includes links to episodes of Here's Harry on youtube.

My Name is Harry Worth is not currently on DVD but I have seen the series in recent years on a Freeview channel, so it may crop  up again.

"Thirty Minutes' Worth" is both the name of his (variable) ITV sketch show, available on DVD, and the name given to the radio sitcom of  his later years.

Talking of sixties comics, I  have to plug my own book - not to be found in a library near you,  in all likelihood.