London History

East End writer and actor Marty Feldman was never going to qualify for leading man roles. With a sizeable and skewed, and manic bulging eyes, the cockney comic was strictly built for comedy. The pity is that he’s nowadays mainly remembered for his remarkable looks, obscuring the huge contribution he made to British radio and TV writing from the 1950s on.

Martin Alan Feldman was born on 8 July 1933 in the East End, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who had travelled from Kiev to Whitechapel. Youthful enthusiasms included boxing and playing the trumpet. He left school at 15 with a broken nose and ambitions as a jazz musician. These came to nothing, and he drifted into a succession of dead-end jobs including a messenger boy for an advertising agency, a kitchen porter. There are extraordinary stories from these years. On has him being deported from Paris for vagrancy; another working as a greyhound track tipster; a third has him being introduced to poet Dylan Thomas, who advised Marty that he had writing talent. Whatever the truth of the stories, by the early fifties he was in London, working in variety. He ventured into comedy as part of the Morris, Marty and Mitch trio, who made their TV debut on BBC’s ‘Showcase’ in 1955. But it was as a writer that he would taste real success.

The year before he had teamed up as a writer with Barry Took, who he had met working in variety, the prolific pair contributing scripts to TV and radio hits of the time including The Army Game. Marty also worked on the huge radio (and then TV) hit Educating Archie with Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney (later to have huge smashes with On The Buses and The Rag Trade).

During the 1960s, Feldman was astonishingly prolific and diverse. As well as conventional sitcoms, such as the Army Game spin-off Bootsie and Snudge, starring another East End favourite in the shape of Alfie Bass, he was collaborating with Took on the innuendo-laden Round The Horne, providing superb material for performers Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick as the outrageously camp Julian and Sandy. The writers drew heavily on ‘polari’ (or gay back slang) for dialogue. At the time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. He was chief writer on the satirical Frost Report, which mixed the new generation of Oxbridge comics (including future members of Monty Python and the Goodies), with more established writers such as Barry Cryer, Frank Muir and Feldman. The famed ‘class’ sketch starring John Cleese and the Two Ronnies was co-written by Marty.

By now, Feldman was moving away from the mainstream, more attracted by the surreal antics of his younger cohorts. He collaborated with Cleese and Graham Chapman on ‘At Last the 1948 Show’ in 1967. The show saw an unwilling Feldman back on screen too, where he was an immediate hit. The manic eyes were the result of an operation to correct a thyroid complaint, and he used them to great comic effect. The next year, the BBC gave him his own sketch show, ‘Marty’, which he co-wrote with Took. A succession of hit vehicles followed and Feldman proved popular in Europe too, The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine winning the Golden Rose at Montreux in 1972.

He was emboldened to move into films, and despite the flop of this first (British) movie, ‘Every Home Should Have One’ (written with Took and Denis Norden) he pursued a career in America with much more success - initially at least. Mel Brooks used him superbly in ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Silent Movie’ (Feldman was often most effective silently mugging to the camera). But ‘The Last Remake of Beau Geste’ in 1977 and ‘In God We Trust’ in 1980, both written and directed by Marty, flopped badly. You don’t often get a third chance in Hollywood, and Feldman returned to performing, writing and directing for TV.

His last role was as ‘Gilbert’ in the movie ‘Yellowbeard’ penned by Graham Chapman and Peter Cook and with a mix of Pythons, established British actors such as James Mason and Michael Hordern, plus American comics Cheech and Chong. On location, he told a journalist that he was ‘too old to die young, and too young to grow up’. A week later, he died in his hotel room of a massive coronary, brought on by shellfish poisoning. Leaving behind Lauretta, his wife of 23 years, he was just 49.