Leave 'Em Laughing (II): Sid Field & Norman Wisdom

The word 'genius' has all too often been bandied about in the world of entertainment. In the field of film comedy, it has fortunately been used more sparingly. Clearly, some exponents of this most elusive and exacting art form richly deserve such labelling – Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, Max Miller, Max Wall, Tony Hancock and George Burns among them. But high up on the list of these comedy greats, one would have to add the name of Sid Field, the man who claimed, with doleful irony, that it took him thirty years to become an overnight star.

Sid Field was born in Birmingham on April Fool’s Day 1904, and he began his love affair with comedy when, as a small boy, he dressed up in his father’s trousers, boots, and wing collar to give backyard impersonations of Chaplin. Later, when searching for a wider audience than a couple of other small boys and a line full of washing, he ventured one day into the street and caused chaos among the traffic. He was hauled home by a policeman and told, 'We've already got one Chaplin, we don't need any more', a statement that Field would one day totally disprove. He began his professional career in a juvenile troupe with three other boys and ten girls – the Royal Kino Juveniles. He was eleven years old at the time. After twenty-eight years of touring the halls, progressing from comedy feed, to song-and-dance man, to light comedian and finally laughter-maker without any gimmicks except talent, Sid finally found himself in London’s West End in a show called Strike a New Note.

The show opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1943. At the time of the first performance, there wasn’t a single ‘star’ on the bill. In the programme, there was a very prophetic footnote, however. 'Here is youth', it declared, although Sid at the age of thirty-nine would have been the first to admit that he neither felt, nor for that matter looked, youthful. The note went on: ‘All are players of experience, needing but the opportunity to make themselves known.

Sid Field was became not just known, but positively acclaimed by the public. In less than three weeks, the theatre posters were changed to read ‘Sid Field – the new funny man’. After all those years of obscurity, he’d arrived, and theatre critics began asking where this genius had come from, where had he been hiding! They would merely have had to take a short hop on the bus to North London just six weeks before to find the answer, because at the Finsbury Park Empire he had been doing virtually the same act in front of a tough and far less enthusiastic audience.

Nevertheless, Field’s sketches rightly rate among the all-time theatre comedy classics – ‘The Golf Lesson’, ‘The Photographer’, the post-war spiv ‘Slasher Green’ are miniature masterpieces. His comedy was the pure old gold of music hall, with a simple situation set against a basic background on which he would build layer upon layer of laughter. Fortunately, some of his greatest sketches have been preserved in glorious Technicolor in the film London Town (1946). In this million-dollar musical fiasco, which lost its way in direction as well as an overblown budget, Sid's sketches glitter like diamonds in a base metal setting.

Two years later he made his last feature film, this time as a Cromwellian barrow boy in Cardboard Cavalier. It has to be said that the screen never totally captured his special brand of magic, but in the two films released by Rank, there are some marvellous moments of comedy timing that rate alongside any produced by his idol, Charlie Chaplin.

Tragically, Sid Field’s bright starlight shone all too briefly. A mere six years after he had ‘made it’, he died of a heart attack when he was only forty-five. Renowned theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wryly observed that ‘alcohol and self-criticism were his pall bearers’. He was sadly missed, not just by an adoring public but by a generation of comedians that came after, with an approach to comedy he influenced so powerfully.

There was a stylish silver-voiced link between Sid Field and Norman Wisdom, their comedy ‘feed’ Jerry Desmonde. Jerry, whose real name was James Robert Sadler, first joined Sid in 1942, and was so good that audiences watching the famous golf or photographer sketch, could be forgiven at times if they believed it was a double act. When Sid so unexpectedly made his last exit, Norman Wisdom was quick off the mark to persuade Jerry to become his straight man, and it was a masterful move. If Jerry was Sid’s right-hand man, he was most certainly Norman’s left-hand man. Norman and Jerry were as important to early-1950s British comedy film as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were for American audiences in the 1940s, and the similarities extended to their straight men. Bud Abbott was slim, persuasive and aggressive, while Jerry Desmonde was tall, angular and also persuasive and aggressive, but in a more refined English way.

Wisdom, like Chaplin, leaned heavily on the ‘plight of the little man against the world’ approach to comedy, and also like Chaplin he resorted, sometimes too often for comfort, to winning over audiences by the old clown ploy of pathos. He was, nevertheless, the most successful British film comedian in the traditional sense since the Second World War, and his films – particularly those crafted by screen-writer Jack Davies, who had learned all the tricks of the trade alongside Marriott Edgar and Val Guest writing scenarios for Will Hay – testify to that success.

Norman Wisdom was born in 1918 and started the musical side of his life as an Army bandsman, later taking the familiar route of touring ‘the halls’ to polish his act. When he first appeared ‘live’ on BBC television, his impact on audiences was immediate and some critics claimed him as the new Chaplin. In 1953 he made his film début as the star of Trouble In Store, a film where the comedy relied mainly on well-constructed and lengthy slapstick routines. The formula was employed in all his most memorable film comedies: The Square Peg in 1958, and perhaps his funniest, On The Beat (1962) and A Stitch In Time (1963).

Norman Wisdom’s popularity proved extraordinary long-lasting. Even years later, when he was less visible in films and TV, a rare theatre appearance would be a major draw and certain of a sell-out. During a promotional stint in 1987 for the TV series Best Of British, he appeared on the BBC Wogan show – in his 70s he still performed an athletic piece of slapstick. It brought the house down.