Billy's life of variety

Black Country comedy legend Billy Dainty died 20 years ago this month. As a tribute variety show is lined up in his home town, Mark Andrews looks back on the man who made the transformation from music hall comic to TV star.

You had to have a sense of humour to grow up in the Black Country, said Billy Dainty, disputing the myth that comedians had to be cockneys or northerners.

With a career spanning more than 40 years at the top of light entertainment, he might well have had a point.

Dainty died 20 years ago this month, at the tragically young age of 59, and in January a star-studded tribute show including his former comedy partner Roy Hudd, Irish comic Jimmy Cricket, and 1980s comedian Paul Squire, has been organised at Dudley Concert Hall in his memory.

Childhood friend John Burgin - who was born in the same street as the star, just over two weeks earlier, says Billy's star quality showed through at a very early age.

"Billy's mother had wanted to be a dancer, but her mother wouldn't allow her to have dancing lessons," says John, who still keeps the newsagents in Dudley where he was born.

"Billy lived on the opposite side of the road. Because his mother was never able to learn to dance, she made Billy join a class for ballet dancing. He was the only boy in a whole group of girls."

Stardom

Billy was born above Hoopers, his parents' florist shop on the corner of Wolverhampton Street and Southall's Lane, which was more recently as a hairdressers.

The youngsters both went to the Wolverhampton Street School a few hundreds yards up the road, and they both learned music together.

"He started, and so did I, at Madame Whiston's music school, just two doors away," remembers John. The building was later converted into a supermarket, and today it stands empty. Only a set of large steel shutters distinguishes it from the neighbouring shops. But it was the music lessons at Madam Whistons which really set Dainty on the road to stardom - and he got a taste for the limelight at a very early age.

Billy was 12 years old when he got his first real experience of showbiz, when he performed with the dance troupe Dancing Babes. He wrote to his mother, Floss Dainty, saying: "Dear Mum, I'm crying as I write this letter, so please excuse the tearstains."

He soon overcame his initial stage fright, and his younger sister Betty also started appearing alongside him, performing with stars including Arthur Askey and Ted Ray.

A big break came in 1942, when Billy was 15, when he and Betty performed in Mother Goose at the Coliseum in London.

John recalls appearing on stage with Billy around this time in a concert party at Sedgley's Clifton Cinema. "There were 25 pupils from the music school in it," he says. "We had also got the Dudley Hippodrome Orchestra performing with us. I played the violin and xylophone, he played the ukulele."

Billy left school at 14, and went to work as a petrol pump attendant at Broadway Garage in Dudley, now a door showroom. "I had a year of that, I wasn't very happy serving petrol," he told Express & Star theatre critic Dennis Barker in a 1962 interview.

"Then an artiste who knew my mother very well said that I was wasting my time and that I ought to do some stage training.

"The war was on. It was a big decision to make. But I went to London and started at a dancing school."

He won a scholarship to Rada, where he studied for just over a year before joining the chorus of "Strike a New Note" with the comedian Sid Field, as well as up-and-coming double act Morecambe and Wise.

Dainty became something of a star in the world of music hall variety, combining silly walks, comic dancing and hilarious patter and banter with the audience, and established himself as one of the most popular pantomime dames of all time.

But he was quick to spot the changing face of entertainment, with music hall going out of fashion with the post-war rise of television. He decided TV could be a suitable vehicle for his act, and made appearances on "Sunday Night at the Palladium".

Not all his TV appearances were successful. In 1967 he took on the role of cabaret performer Billy Cook in the sitcom pilot That's Showbusiness, with a supporting cast including June Whitfield and Kenneth Connor, but no series resulted.

In 1968 Dainty took the music hall theme to the small screen when he appeared in the BBC variety series Kindly Leave the Stage. It was a questionable format: Dainty and other comics appeared alongside lesser-known music hall acts, recycling old gags about subjects such as nose-less dogs and slack knicker elastic. The format seemed very dated.

Successful

In 1974, he made his first of three appearances at the Royal Variety Show, and went down a storm, and he was said to be a personal favourite of the Queen Mother.

The following year his stand-up show Billy Dainty Esq made it on to the screens, and the programme was much more successful.

From 1975 to 1980 he also appeared with Rod Hull on the children's show EBC1: Emu's Broadcasting Company, before forming a comedy partnership with Roy Hudd in the 1980s.

In 1983 he returned to his home town for the BBC TV series Comic Roots, and John Burgin remembers this well.

Sadly, it would be one of the last times John would see his childhood friend. He appeared in a pantomime production of Aladdin at Nottingham in 1985, but was forced to pull out after being taken ill. He died on November 19, 1986, following a battle with cancer.

"He came to see me just after he was ill, but I never saw him again," says John.

Billy Dainty was a true comedy legend but, although he cut a swaggering figure on stage, he was surprisingly modest off it.

"I don't really look upon myself now as a success," he told the Express & Star in 1962. "A success in this business is a man who can fill the theatre 52 weeks a year, and I'm not one."

Billy never forgot where he came from, and he said that his Black Country background was a big help in shaping the comedian he became.

l Our Boy Bill, starring Roy Hudd, Joan Regan, Jimmy Cricket, Lizzie Wiggins, Paul Squire and many others, will be held at Dudley Concert Hall on January 21, starting at 7pm. All proceeds go to Cancer Research and the Grand Order of Water Rats.