Three years ago this very week we broadcast the very first episode of The World’s Worst Records Radio Show. It was a stumbling and shaky start, but I have now presented more than 150 episodes, or 150 hours if you will, of tortuous music over the ether, in excess of 2,300 different songs of varying degrees of awfulness.
Harding has become a bit of an
obsession for me: an irascible cove who was known as the rudest man in Britain,
but underneath the gruffness was a severely troubled and lonely man, who spent
his life caught in conflict between his deeply held religious beliefs and his
homosexuality. So wrapped up in his life I became that I included his story in
my recent book, the Velvet Mafia.
Harding was not an actor, a
comedian nor a presenter but his presence would guarantee any TV show vast
audiences; the term ‘television personality’ was coined specifically to
describe him. The irascible former policeman/teacher/journalist gained an
unprecedented level of fame as a panel game juror (he also appeared, as
himself, in the Cliff Richard vehicle Expresso Bongo), but few outside
of Harding’s immediate circle knew that he was homosexual and, as he put it in
his last interview, ‘profoundly lonely’.
Harding broke through at a time
when the BBC had the monopoly on British media, controlling the radio airwaves
and maintaining the country’s only television channel (Independent Television
did not begin broadcasting until 1955). His face, and his voice, was broadcast
to millions of homes each and every week, but he was a complex, unhappy man.
His struggle to reconcile his sexuality with his Catholic faith caused him to
drink heavily, and his stint in the police force made him acutely aware of the
inhuman way the law of the land dealt with people like him at that time. He also
lived in constant fear of being blackmailed.
Loved and loathed in equal
measure, Harding struggled with his fame, calling himself ‘an over-employed
phoney’, and he suffered from debilitating stage fright that, like his battle
with his sexuality, he relieved through alcohol. By 1957, fed up with fame, he
was begging the BBC to cancel What’s My Line?, the very programme that
had consolidated his status as Britain’s favourite curmudgeon. ‘I hate being
made to jump through the same old hoops,’ he told friend and neighbour Godfrey
Winn over supper one evening. ‘I hate being regarded by the public as a circus
act.’
Harding was a man divided: often
petulant and testy, he was also enormously kind and generous and, although he
tried to keep his sexuality secret from his adoring fans, he was not always so
circumspect. When in the mood, Harding would drop in at the nearest pub and
drink until well past closing time, invariably accompanied by a group of young
male ‘friends’. One day, Harding was in Edinburgh to record an episode of the
popular radio show Round Britain Quiz. About an hour before the show was
due to go on air, he rang the studios in a panic: he could not leave his hotel
room as he had no clothes. His entire wardrobe had vanished. Harding could
hardly admit that the young man he had taken back to his room had robbed him,
taking everything including his wallet, his luggage, the clothes he had been
wearing and the script for that afternoon’s recording.
Another incident occurred in
Bristol, when Harding became involved in an animated and noisy argument with
another young man he had picked up. His friend Eric Dehn, a broadcaster who had
for many years taught in Bristol, managed to deal with the demanding youth, an
angry pub landlord as well as unimpressed and unaccommodating hotel staff, and
keep Harding’s name out of the newspapers, which would often use coded language
when reporting on the exploits of the ‘confirmed bachelor’ who ‘shunned the
company of women’.
Although he had worked at the
BBC since the war, Harding was starting to become a liability. As one producer
put it: ‘A time came when we at the BBC began to wonder how much longer we
could go on displaying this drunken homosexual like a freak at a sideshow.’ The
last line in his ghost-written autobiography, Along My Line, was the
gloomy ‘I do wish that the future were over.’ He spent the last eight years of
his life in Brighton, with a chauffeur, his loyal secretary Roger ‘Podge’
Storey, a housekeeper, his beloved dogs and a budgerigar. After Harding’s death
many of them sent reporters to Brighton to sniff out scandal: they returned
having made barely a scratch in their notebooks.
On 16 November 1960 Harding
collapsed on the steps of Broadcasting House shortly after completing a
recording of Round Britain Quiz. His chauffeur attempted to revive him, but
he died on the spot from a massive heart attack, aged just 53.
Born in December 1897, Hermione
Gingold an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric character. Her
signature drawling, deep voice was a result of nodules on her vocal cords she
developed in the 1920s and early 1930s.
After a successful career as a child
actress, she later established herself on the stage as an adult, playing in
comedy, drama and experimental theatre, and broadcasting on the radio. She appeared
in dozens of films, including the wonderful Bell Book and Candle, and
was a frequent guest on television chat shows and situation comedies. She also
appeared on stage on both sides of the Atlantic, and was a member of the original
1973 Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.
She died from heart problems and
pneumonia in Manhattan on 24 May 1987, aged 89. Her autobiography, How to
Grow Old Disgracefully, was published posthumously the following year.
Here are both sides of the pair’s
Philips 78, It Takes Two to Tango and Oh Grandma!
Enjoy!
Download Tango HERE
Download Grandma HERE
I love Harding's proto-Peter Cook/Viv Stanshall type delivery. You can just imagine him uttering "You fill me with inertia..."
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