Will Hay - Graham Rinaldi

I’m unashamedly showing my age here, and I’ll readily forgive anyone for asking ‘Will WHO?’ But thirty or forty years ago, in the days of only three TV channels (four from 1982), when video and DVD were not yet with us, you were rarely more than days away from a Hay movie on the small screen. Before my time (honest) – to be exact, around 1935-1943, he was one of the biggest names in British cinema.

In a very full biography, almost 400 pages long, this book takes us more than amply through his life and career. Born in Stockton in 1888, from the same generation as the better-known Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, both also British-born, although they worked mainly in the US, Hay was one of those few comic performers who made a name for himself on the music hall stage and then made a successful transition to the movie industry. Working in theatres allowed him to develop a perfect sense of timing, not to say an excruciating appetite for terrible puns in his dialogue.

‘Grand old place, Connemara...grouse on the moors.’
‘And deer in the hills.’
‘Yes, but cheaper in the town.’

‘The Cossacks. Surely you know what the Cossacks are?’
‘Yes sir, they’re what you put your feet on in church.’

He did make one remark which must have come back to haunt him. ‘It won’t last, it won’t catch on,’ he said after attending a demonstration of one of the first newsreels with sound in the mid-1920s. ‘I can’t see any future in talking pictures!’ If he had been right, he would be more or less forgotten by now.

His character, developed during the music-hall days as a pompous shifty-eyed schoolmaster or some other figure in authority who was so stupid that his pupils or underlings nearly always got the better of him, rarely varied. In what was to become probably his most successful and certainly best-remembered film, ‘Oh! Mr Porter’ (1937), he played the role of William Porter, an incompetent railway worker who thanks to family connections was given the job of stationmaster at a very remote station in Northern Ireland, and became involved with a group of smugglers and gunrunners. He also played the part of a British agent in ‘The Goose Steps Out’ (1942), a wartime comedy which ridiculed the Nazis effectively and featured a priceless scene in which he teaches a group of young Germans to make V-signs at a portrait of Hitler, as he has assured them that it is a mark of the greatest respect. (In words, I grant you, the description falls a little flat. You have to see it!).

Maybe his best film was the black comedy ‘My Learned Friend’ (1943), in which he played a seedy lawyer being pursued by a convicted forger whom he had unsuccessfully defended in the past and is determined to kill him. Sadly, while making it he became seriously ill, and though he made a partial recovery, it proved to be almost the end of his career. From then until his death from a sudden stroke in 1949, he was never the same man again.

Although he generally played the role of an utter fool, he was in fact an extremely intelligent man who spoke several languages and could have probably turned his hand to any number of careers open to him. As a performer he not only acted, but also wrote songs and taught himself several musical instruments. An early flying enthusiast, he was a close friend of the renowned airwoman Amy Johnson, and held a pilot’s licence, though he gave up the hobby after another friend was killed in an accident. His lifelong hobby was astronomy; he published a book ‘Through My Telescope’, and while watching the stars through it on one occasion he was thrilled to discover a white spot on the planet Saturn.

This biography portrays all sides of the man. Naturally, the focus of attention is his acting career. The making of the films, and his contribution to each, are described in great detail. We learn plenty about the duo, cheeky ‘fat boy’ Graham Moffatt and the ‘doddering old fool’ Moore Marriott, who appeared as the supporting cast in several of his pictures, and were also to prove quite an influence on and inspiration to Tony Hancock, and later writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft when they came to create ‘Dad’s Army’ some years later. Mainwaring’s character was based to some extent on that of Hay, Pike on Moffatt and Jones on Marriott. Yet there is plenty to be said about the astronomy, the flying, and his family life, although an early marriage proved less than happy and eventually ended in separation.

Throughout the book, the picture emerges of a perfectionist, a man who would never be satisfied with anything less than the best from those who worked with him, a man who took his comedy very seriously and never suffered fools gladly. He may not have been the most pleasant man to know, or not at least until ill-health in his last few years softened him somewhat. It won’t be everybody’s ideal read, and his humour belongs to another age, evoking a more gentle time when humour was more innocent, and the censors even drew the line at anyone using the word ‘blasted’.

Occasionally the style becomes a little too colloquial, and this I found slightly jarring - but maybe I'm splitting hairs. I certainly enjoyed it, and it has put me in the mood to seek out one or two of his films again – I must have seen all but a couple, albeit some time ago. Anybody curious to know more will find a few clips on Youtube, but read this very well-written and informative book first. In addition to a well-chosen plates section, it also includes an invaluable detailed 17-page filmography.