with a horrible act

I think Alexei Sayle has it right on the late Manning:

To be among a crowd of these guys, or to be trapped alone with one of them, is a terrifying experience. They are all completely incapable of sustaining a normal, warm, personal conversation, with its to and fro; instead they resort to telling a string of old jokes, or insults and put-downs disguised as gags, in the space where an exchange of ideas or confidences or information might usually fit. This means, of course, that the comedians control the encounter, but at the price of the person on the receiving end of the gags not wishing to repeat the experience, ever. Sometimes you glimpse the bright working-class kid they must once have been - even Bernard, the ambitious greengrocer's son, keen to get on, eager to please.

In the end, though, Manning was simply being himself, an unhappy man who was not capable of change. His proud boast was that his motto was "To thine own self be true", though he could not resist adding: "That's from fuckin' Shakespeare, that is."

Those who should really be ashamed of themselves are the revisionists who sought to rehabilitate him: those such as the full-time contrarians at Living Marxism who gave his biography a good review, or those critics and comedy completists looking for the latest reputation to restore, who asserted that his mixture of bile and old pub-gags was him being "ironic " or "postmodern", or that he was an expression of some kind of undiluted and authentic working-class culture. Bernard Manning wasn't any of these things; he was just a halfway decent comic with a horrible act.

I somehow read that as “full time cormorants at Living Marxism” the first time round, and it seemed to fit quite well.

Comments

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I think Jim Bowen on Newsnight on Monday night got it right - Manning was a different era, but was he really that different from the hilariously unfunny Little Britain, that talentless twat Jimmy Carr or even some of the more nearer the mark episodes of Extras, which I've found thoroughly unpleasant in places?

[ejh]

It's a good question but there might be an answer in his longevity. The others will get found out sooner or later - they don't have the talent to keep going once the novelty value's worn off (mind you, Jimmy Carr wore off first time I came across him). Manning had a career lasting half a century despite his limited repertoire because of who he appealed to and how.