Frankie Howerd

A peek inside the late Frankie Howerd's home

Perhaps it is the pink walls and the kitsch interior. Or maybe it is because it remains trapped in a timewarp. Whatever the reason, the home of comic legend Frankie Howerd is still up for sale nearly two years on - and has been reduced to almost half the original asking price. Fans of the camp Carry On star can pick up his Somerset country estate for £450,000.

Fans of contemporary and classic comedy have had plenty to enjoy thanks to Radio 2 and Radio 4 lately. Following profiles of Frankie Howerd and Stanley Baxter, Dick Emery was the latest comedian to be featured in Radio 2's Comedy Greats series. An admirer of Emery, host David Walliams paid an affectionate tribute to a performer whose work seems sadly neglected nowadays. This despite the fact that The Dick Emery Show once pulled in TV audiences of 17 million.

Walliams and the other contributors to the programme made a convincing case for an Emery retrospective. Perhaps some of the material is un-PC or out-of-date nowadays, but that does not stop Carry On movies being broadcast on a regular basis. Time to give Emery a chance, I would say.

Second of four specials, great comics of yesteryear presented by stars of today. Last week it was Frankie Howerd and Clive Anderson, tonight it's Stanley Baxter and Eddie Izzard. To those who remembers Baxter's parodies of Hollywood (and royalty and showbiz), presented in TV shows so lavish they looked as good as the originals, Izzard seems an odd choice to appraise his talents. But this is about Baxter's comedy, a kind of showbiz cartooning that was all his own, and how he learned to perfect it. And he's still here to tell the tale himself.

Radio review: Titter Ye Not: The Frankie Howerd Story

Frankie Howerd - a mix of comedy, tragedy and rather more besides, finds Elisabeth Mahoney.

Frankie Howerd's Tearful Last Words

He spent his life raising titters from his adoring public but hours before his death what Frankie Howerd wanted most was to say sorry.

Time Out Review

Jigging energetically around the stage, firing off volleys of falsetto observations and faux-aristocratic impressions, he's like an energetic Frankie Howerd in a Worzel Gummidge wig, sending up video footage of acne-scarred teens playing retro computer game 'Track & Field', while lamenting the use of fear as an educational tool for children.

Frankie Howerd Reveals All (Yorkshire) was a selection of shorts hung on the washing line of Class. Such sketches as "I'm working. I'm middle. One's upper" (although I liked that "one") are but splinters and shadows of the great original sketch on class by Marty Feldman and John Law.

And it does have Frankie Howerd who is not so much the greatest thing since sliced bread as sliced bread itself. His loaf falls apart in layers of expression.

The show was like a victory V. sign, meant to be both cheerful and obscene at one and the same time. But there was one monent when Frankie Howerd proved he is the best, the only stand-up solo comic we have. Like Marie Lloyd he took a tear jerker for a tenor and made it unbelievably funny and filthy. It was a total demolition job on the song, and "I did it my way" will never be the same again.

There was a patina of polished antiquity about all the sketches in Frankie Howerd, The Laughing Stock (Thames) as if they had been buffed for generations by a butcher's thumb.