‘I used to be afraid of the dark. Yesterday, I got my electricity bill. Now I’m afraid of the light’. One more: ‘I went to the solicitor’s and said: “I want to make a will”. He said: “Fine, leave it to me”. I said: “But I hardly know you”.
No one felt uncomfortable watching Jimmy. His humour was, in the words of television producer John Fisher, ‘underpinned by a warmth and kindness that is rare in comedy today’
These are just two jokes by the late Jimmy Cricket, the Northern Irish comedian who died yesterday, aged 80. Jimmy’s death has left me feeling profoundly sad. Sad for Jimmy, his beloved wife of 52 years ‘Lady’ May, and his dear family, but also about the way comedy has changed in recent years.
We used to have the balance just right. There were always ‘blue’ comedians, comedians who were ‘near the mark’, comedians who swore, comedians who loved to shock. But don’t we have too much of that nowadays? And not enough of the old-school comics who just simply wanted to make us laugh and not lecture us? Jimmy Cricket’s humour, with its blend of clever word play and hilarious visual gags, never set out to cause offence. This ironically made him quite ‘alternative’ in the current climate, where offending people is seen (wrongly) as the essence of good comedy.
‘I try to keep my act topical, but I never want to offend anyone. I’d run a mile before I’d do that’ he told me in late 2022 when I interviewed him to mark his 50 years in show business. He went on: ‘My comedy is genuinely inclusive. I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable.’
No one felt uncomfortable watching Jimmy. His humour was, in the words of television producer John Fisher, ‘underpinned by a warmth and kindness that is rare in comedy today’. A working-class lad from Cookstown with no family links to the entertainment business, Jimmy came up the hard way, graduating from working in holiday camps to the northern club circuit in the 1970s. His big break only came in 1980 when he reached the final of Search for a Star, but his trademark costume of floppy hat, tailcoat, cut-off evening trousers and Wellington boots marked ‘L’ and ‘R’ (invariably worn on the wrong feet), only came after he was asked to wear the outfit for an appearance on the BBC’s music hall celebration programme, The Good Old Days.
It’s easy to forget today just how big a star Jimmy became in the mid-to-late 1980s. He had his own prime time Saturday night ITV series, in an era when Saturday night TV was all about family entertainment. In the 90s though things began to change. Variety shows were seen as passé, and acts like Jimmy’s began to disappear from our screens.
Comedy became a lot crueller, with satirical shows like Have I Got News for You and later, Mock the Week representing the new zeitgeist. But there should always have been room in the schedules for the likes of Jimmy Cricket. That there is public demand for gentler, less abrasive comedy can be seen by the enduring popularity of shows like Dad’s Army, which still gets very decent ratings when repeated on BBC2. I saw Jimmy perform in Crosby in 2022 at a Talking Pictures TV event and the audience loved him. I stayed friends with him afterwards and discovered what a genuinely kind man he was. It wasn’t just the lovely, humorous Christmas cards he sent each year. When he learnt my father had died and I was feeling bereft he rang me up and spent a good 20 minutes on the phone trying to console me. That meant so much to me when I was at my lowest ebb.
Underpinning everything Jimmy did was his Christian faith. I was reminded by a friend yesterday who used to work in television that on the 1987 edition of This is Your Life featuring Jimmy, Roy Hudd, another great comic, said by way of tribute: ‘It’s an awfully old-fashioned word to use these days, but he’s a real Christian.’ Indeed, Jimmy received a Papal knighthood from Pope Francis in 2015 in recognition of all the work he did for charity. But going beyond that, he was the friendliest and most approachable of men.
RIP Jimmy, and thanks for all the laughs. Let’s hope your style of comedy returns to our TV screens again.
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