It all began with Charlie Williams.

Less well remembered these days than some of his peers, the former footballer was, in the early 1970s, Britain’s best-known black stand-up, having been promoted from the ranks of Granada’s ensemble showcase The Comedians to host top-rated game show The Golden Shot following the departure of Bob Monkhouse.

It’s in the latter role that photographer Andy Hollingworth remembers him, provoking his typically grave grandfather into uncharacteristic fits of merriment. Tracking him down to take his photo years after the fact, Hollingworth took what turned out to be a Damascene route, finding in his shoot with Williams the flash that lit up a life-long vocation. The title of his retrospective exhibition at Blackpool’s Showtown is an unburnished statement of this resolve: I Photograph Comedians.

If he were a little more immodest, he might have qualified those three indisputable words with the modifier ‘well’. Or ’empathetically’. Or even ‘revealingly’. The love that Hollingworth bears for comedy, evidenced in the display drawers of what he terms ‘humourabilia’ – a lifetime’s worth of badges, tickets and backstage passes – is apparent in the connection he achieves with his subjects.

Most frequently, the image produced is one that peels back the layers of performance, revealing, in a single moment of impeccably balanced stillness, the skill that prevents an act executed at full tilt from prat-falling into the banality of slapstick.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, for instance, are posed on the back of a lorry on a Liverpool night, looking like a still from a lost Morecambe & Wise film, their skyward gaze capturing something of the haunted surrealism that lends the depths of Dada to their cartoon freneticism. If their invocation of Eric and Ernie is indirect, Jon Culshaw’s portrait, inhabiting the persona of the much-missed Les Dawson, is a tribute to the most sincere form of flattery; an imitation with its heart worn firmly on the sleeve of its dinner jacket.

If these images, along with that of Sarah Millican, perfectly cast in the role of Second World War poster icon Rosie the Riveter, suggest no small degree of collaboration with his subjects and a consequent shared authorship, others, perhaps, pull back the safety curtain of the public image, revealing something of the person behind the performer. In his ostensible portrait of the gung-ho, devil-may-care Johnny Vegas, for instance, the more soulful eyes of his originator Michael Pennington are those which meet the camera. Likewise, Hollingworth’s study of Rik Mayall diverts the tsunami of his comedic invention underground, so that the Mayall in front of his camera glowers like the anti-hero of a German expressionist silent film, all hectic potential.

Of course, in some cases, a more straightforward approach is all that is required. Hollingworth’s monochrome of Victoria Wood is as warm and direct as her stage persona, while Ken Dodd’s maverick physiognomy necessitates no studio titivation.

An interesting adjunct is a display case of Polaroid ‘lifts’, in which the emulsion layer from the instant camera image is carefully transferred to non-photographic paper, the resultant images imbued in the process with additional translucency. Among this set, the wonderful Thelma Barlow, of both Coronation Street and Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies, shines.

It’s the larger, framed photographs, though, that catch both eye and imagination, and, in an exhibition running parallel to the Golden Mile, one image in particular seems to encapsulate the wind-blown eddy of nostalgia and front that make up the Blackpool of today: Cannon and Ball walking away down North Pier, Tommy’s arm around Bobby’s shoulder, the words of their theme song audible over the monochrome, “together we’ll be okay”.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: 2015 Johnny Vegas © Andy Hollingworth Archive

All photos copyrighted to the Andy Hollingworth Archive

 

Andy Hollingworth’s I Photograph Comedians is at Showtown in Blackpool until February 23, 2025. For more information, click here.