The Rudest Man in Britain

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.

 

Looking back over those early programmes, I see that there were a few discs in that first show I have not featured on this here very blog, so I shall start to rectify that right now. Today I present for your edification a serious rarity, both sides of the 1953 release from British television celebrity Gilbert Harding and actress Hermione Gingold, It Takes Two to Tango and Oh Grandma!

 

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.’

 

In London Harding’s closest friend was the columnist Nancy Spain, and the pair were regularly seen at the Golden Guitar Club, a bar frequented by the LGBT media and that was co-owned by Larry Parnes. Harding was envious of Spain’s ability to live openly with her lover, Joan Werner Laurie. The women were accepted as a couple among their friends, although occasionally stories about a romantic entanglement between Harding and Spain would surface in the press, a sheen of faux-respectability that kept the tabloids and gossip magazines off their tail.

 

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.

 

A few weeks before his death, Harding had been grilled about his personal life by the former Labour MP John Freeman for the TV series Face to Face. Britain’s rudest man was reduced to tears when discussing the death of his mother and admitted to the interviewer that he ‘should be very glad to be dead’, but he refused to be drawn on his sexuality, talking vaguely about living in ‘a cloud of sexual frustration’ and admitting that he thought himself impossible to live with. With the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality still seven years away, no one of his standing could have been open with the public about their sexuality without ruining their career. Freeman later referred to him as ‘just about the most deeply miserable man I have ever encountered’.

 

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