It may be a name which springs less readily to mind these days, but in the 1960s Harry Worth was a major TV comic with a genial, bumbling persona, forever confounding petty officialdom.
If that suggests a touch of Tony Hancock, however, nohow and contrariwise: Worth had none of Hancock's pomposity or aggression. Like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot he was entirely guileless, an innocent who never seemed out to cause the trouble which invariably happened when he was around. The cause was his circumlocutory way of putting things which would inevitably tie the listener in knots, governed as it was by a logic comprehensible to no one except 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 (top) 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 or crass: 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 our friend's unique brand of reasoning rarely give way to cartoonlike rage; most of the fun, in fact, is in our relish of their struggle to retain a semblance of professional composure as they become increasingly entangled in the workings of his mind.
You could say, I suppose, that Harry Worth's world is a kind of mirror image of Hancock's. Galton and Simpson have said that in order to remain sympathetic Hancock's character could not be aggressive from the off but needed to be provoked by the pomposity or officiousness of those around him or the character would risk looking like a mere buffoon - an essential point which, as they said with some bemusement, Hancock's later writers for ITV didn't always grasp. In Here's Harry, by contrast, everyone around our hero remains reasonable, despite considerable provocation, but such is the sweetness and innocence of Worth's own character that this agent of chaos remains sympathetic to the viewer and you can't blame him for the confusion he has unwittingly caused.
A particular instance of the way that Here's Harry acts as a reflection, a reverse, of the Hancock programme is the number of closeups of the reactions of the supporting cast, allowing us to savour each stage of the mounting exasperation which attends any attempt to engage with his thought processes. People rhapsodise about Hancock's ability to make a range of emotions flit across his face in a single shot but in Here's Harry it's the officials, the shop assistants and others, whose expressions provide much of the fun. These 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 even though the playing is admirably restrained you are still left in no doubt of the simmering annoyance.
When Worth 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 seems to me to lack the verve and invention of the BBC work. And the introductory sequence is misjudged: we see him on a busy high street, declaring to all and sundry: "My name is Harry Worth!", whereupon every last pedestrian, adults and children alike, scoots off in panic.
Alright, I suppose it sets up the character for viewers not familiar with him but an awareness of Harry's talent for spreading confusion ought to steal up on individuals as they come into contact with him. This unlikely mass exodus segues into the series' wistful theme tune, as though the makers can't quite make up their minds about the mood: are we meant to laugh at this social pariah, find the situation poignant or what? Why, for that matter, given that sequence, should anyone within the vicinity choose to engage with him, given such widespread notoriety? (Yet they must or there'd be no show.)
Far better, surely, that famous opening to the BBC show with the shop window starjump gag suggesting a childlike persona which the viewer can't help but warm to. And if we don't love his character unconditionally the whole edifice totters.
If you are looking for a biography of Harry Worth there is a tantalisingly short book by Roy Baines - less than eighty pages, including many pictures. 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 and interesting 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 really needs to be centrestage in order to blossom fully, causing trouble - however unwittingly - to others rather than having it brought to his own door.
Quite late on in his career, not apparently in the best of health, Harry Worth 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.
In 1982 there was a one-off revival of Workers' Playtime in which, I presume, he included elements of his old stage act; it sounds fresh and vibrant and is well received by the audience.
Links and related posts:
The 1982 spot on Workers' Playtime can be heard here.
The official Harry Worth website can be found here. It includes links to episodes of Here's Harry on youtube.
The ITV sitcom 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 well 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 - one of the milder examples of his propensity for causing confusion.
There are, I think, elements of Harry Worth's persona in Count Arthur Strong, a stage creation who then starred in a radio sitcom subsequently reworked for TV. Below are three pieces I wrote about him:
Goodbye, for the moment, to Count Arthur Strong
More thoughts about Count Arthur Strong
Talking of sixties comics, I may as well take this opportunity to plug my own book.
In praise of Freddie "Parrotface" Davies
No comments:
Post a Comment