Bernard Manning:'I get up on stage and I do an act," Bernard Manning once said. "It's not me, just as an actor playing a part in a film isn't the character. I don't go home to my grandkids and say, 'F***ing queers, n*****s, they're all c***s'. It's my act, not me. It's all a joke."
It is certainly true that, away from the stage, the controversial, much-reviled comedian and club-owner Manning, who has died aged 76 following a kidney problem, could be a polite, generous and courteous man, referring when appropriate to people as gay or black, for example, once he was off stage. He had a number of good friends among Manchester's wealthier Asians and raised vast amounts for developing countries.
Countless friends and acquaintances, down on their luck, would testify to Manning's unpublicised acts of kindness; he was known as one of the softest touches in the business.
If he was professionally racist and sexist, but privately as tolerant as any man from his background and generation was likely to be, some would see the contrast as a redeeming quality, others that he was simply a hypocrite and a coward. It has to be said that few of the middle-class liberals who denounced him had ever seen him live, and certainly not at Bernard Manning's World Famous Embassy Club in Manchester, where he was a local hero.
His name became a byword for all that is supportive of bigotry in humour; "fat" and "ugly" were words that were often used to describe him and tended to define the quality of serious debate about him. Seen as a public face of intolerance, this member of a minority group - the socially deprived northerner - was in turn despised and even hated. Manning, conservatively said to be worth £5 million, laughed all the way to the bank.
Technically, he was a fine comedian, although the delivery, like the man himself, was of an earlier era. He told mostly short gags, rattling off the prelude and pausing expertly before delivering the often surprising punchline.
Hugely popular as a live act in his own and other clubs, he disliked television and performed on it only occasionally, although it was television that first brought him to prominence in the 1970s Granada comedy series, The Comedians. After that he rationed his appearances, being incapable of moderating his material to suit the medium.
Bernard Manning was born in Harpurhey, one of Manchester's poorest areas. His father was a greengrocer, who instilled a driving ambition and work ethic into his children - all four of them became extremely wealthy. Manning left the Roman Catholic Mount Carmel school at 14 and went to work in a cigarette factory. He went into the army to do his national service in Berlin (1948-50). Then he joined his father in the business, most days getting up at 4am to collect fruit and vegetables from the market.
However, he was determined to be a professional singer and performed in local clubs at night. He acquired a manager and in 1950 appeared at the Oldham Empire, billed as "Britain's newest singing thrill". Soon he moved to London as vocalist with the Oscar Rabin Band, but it did not work out - Manning missed Manchester and his girlfriend Vera, whom he was later to marry.
A job as compere at the Northern Sporting Club on the Rochdale Road suited him better. He sang a couple of songs, introduced the acts and wrote his own comedy material, often extemporising at the expense of the audience. "People think you have just thought of it, but you haven't," he said many years later. "It's all there, catalogued. Do a song, whip in a couple of quips and gags, have a go at a few folk."
After a long engagement, Manning and Vera were married in 1956. He was completely devoted to her and was devastated when she died in 1986.
In 1959, Manning had borrowed £30,000 from his father and transformed a rundown old billiards hall into the Embassy Club.
Again, Manning the family man came to the fore: "Everything clicked into place. My sisters and my brother were going to go behind the bar. John, my brother-in-law, went on the door. Mum would work the cash till, Dad do the cellar and Vera keep an eye on the rest of the club. It was a real family concern, a right team, with few outsiders - and no fiddlers."
The club was a fantastic success from the start - almost overnight the family went from earning hundreds of pounds a week to thousands. Owning the Embassy did not preclude Manning from appearing elsewhere and he continued to be a top draw as singer and comedian at other clubs all over the north.
At the Embassy he booked the big northern acts of the day, including the Beatles. "They were 14 quid and they just did a one-off show," he recounted. "All nice boys, got there dressed, went on and did the show and then buggered off. That John Lennon drove me potty because he wanted a dressing room with a wash basin. What did he want that for? You come here to work, not to wash."
Manning was 41 when he made his TV debut in Johnnie Hamp's The Comedians, alongside Mike Reid, Frank Carson and 30 or so others. The snappily-edited show, which featured quickfire gags from club comics mostly new to viewers, was a huge success, and Manning swiftly became one of its biggest (in all senses of the word) stars.
With the national fame came the notoriety - with Manning cheerfully praising Enoch Powell and even Hitler in various newspapers. "I am an admirer of Adolf Hitler," he told the Sunday People. "Not everything about him, of course. I deplore his gas chambers and Gestapo as much as anyone, but I admire him for the things he got right, which I reckon was about 50 per cent."
It has been said that Manning was banned from television because of his material, but this is not strictly true. He appeared on various TV shows, but it became evident that he was engaged in a process of self- marginalisation by refusing to compromise, so in effect, he banned himself. But the shades of American comics Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, TV casualties for vastly more honourable reasons, wouldn't perhaps have exactly identified with this sweating racist.
Manning continued to run the Embassy until ill-health obliged him to hand over the reins to his son, Bernard jnr, in the 1990s. Although he was rarely on television, Manning stayed in the limelight. In 1996 a World in Action researcher secretly taped him doing racist jokes at a police function. Manning was attacked in parliament. In 2002 councillors in Weymouth, Dorset, cancelled a performance that they feared would breach anti-racism laws.
Despite diabetes, strokes, angina and failing eyesight, Manning carried on right to the end, devastated to have to cancel a gig for the first time in 60 years when rushed to hospital three weeks ago. For good or ill, for all his protestations that it was "all just a joke", he was always defiantly, unrepentantly, his own man. He is survived by his son and three grandchildren.
Bernard Manning: born August 13th, 1930; died June 18th, 2007