A hunched figure in a tatty suit slouches slowly towards the stage with a suitcase, grumbling and muttering as he goes. Finally he grabs the mic and turns to glare at the audience, his face white as bone. This is Frankie Monroe and, believe it or not, he’s likely to be the funniest thing you’ve seen in a long time.

Billed as ‘Yorkshire’s Biggest Bastard’, Frankie is the darkly funny character creation of 26-year-old Joe Kent-Walters, who has already been much garlanded (he won the Chortle Student Comedy Award, Leicester Comedy Festival Best Show Award, and the BBC New Comedy Award). His live Frankie Monroe shows have a habit of selling out, including much of his month-long stint in Edinburgh last year, which culminated with Joe/Frankie winning the Fringe’s prestigious Best Newcomer award. He’s currently on tour, and plans are already afoot to introduce Frankie to bigger and wider audiences.

Explaining Frankie Monroe is simple enough: he runs Rotherham working men’s club The Misty Moon, which also happens to be a portal to Hell. Joe Kent-Walters’ story has even more twists and turns. He grew up in the Yorkshire village of Clayton West, about ten miles outside of Huddersfield. “It’s a former pit village that has been kind of steadily gentrified,” he says. “It’s just near the M1, so it’s become a little bit of a commuter place, but it’s still got a lot of original character. It’s where a lot of my stuff comes from, really.”

As a teenager, Kent-Walters would drink at the local working men’s club in Sissett, but more because it had a snooker table – and would serve teenagers – than as a way of seeing live entertainment. “They did have it, but I think by that time it was mainly tribute bands and things like that, rather than full-blown variety shows.”

As it happens, Kent-Walters might well have been in the market for seeing a variety show. He’d grown up loving the likes of Vic & Bob, The Mighty Boosh, Harry Hill and The League of Gentlemen – each one of them offering a contemporary twist on the vaguely absurdist tradition of the live variety circuit. “I was really obsessed with Vic and Bob,” he says. “They were one of the big, big comedy influences, and then realising that they were kind of parodying this thing that had its roots in the North.”

Soon, Kent-Walters was drawn towards performing and showbiz.

“I got really obsessed with George Formby when I was about 13, and that came out of that old world of light entertainment. I ended up joining the George Formby Society. I can play the ukulele and everything. Then that kind of led me into doing some stuff in the Red Shed Labour Club in Wakefield.”

A Northern identity

As a student at Leeds University, future stand-up Mark Thomas started his performing career at the club and went on to maintain close links with it. ”I used to open for their panto that Mark Thomas would help with,” Kent-Walters recalls. “That’s kind of where I first started performing. All these things, they all came from a few different places, really – lovely old-school light entertainment, showbiz stuff, loving that – plus a Northern identity, these mad characters that you grew up around, like some of my dad’s family. But also loving silly stuff, starting from Vic and Bob, and then realising that they were just putting an old form of entertainment through a kind of modern lens of absurdism, really.”

Kent-Walters duly joined the youth theatre group at the nearby Lawrence Batley Theatre and wound up studying theatre and performance at Leeds University, just like Mark Thomas and The League of Gentlemen before him.

It’s at this point that a certain white-faced fellow rears his head. “Not everybody on the course at Leeds was arty, but we kind of found our people, a kind of gang of weirdos, really. We started doing a thing called HalliGalli, which was German for ‘wild party’. It kind of cringes me out now, but we called them ‘happenings’ – you know, that kind of vibe. It was kind of an immersive party performance event sort of thing, which was basically just that we were all in costume and getting really pissed, but we would have public there.”

In October 2017, the group staged HalliGalli’s Eclipse at Leeds’ Hyde Park Book Club, set in the fictional ‘Halley Valley’, with a bill promising ‘LIVE ART · RITUAL · DJ’S · DANCE’. “The theme of it was a weird village fete where there’s going to be an eclipse at midnight and everything gets fucked up – the Devil comes out, and all of that kind of thing. And we just needed somebody to host it.”

Out of nowhere, Kent-Walters conjured up the character of ‘Frankie Monroe’ – the appropriately showbiz name, the look, even the voice.

“I was just like, ‘yeah, he’s an old-school guy doing a turn, but the setting is devilish’, so I put a load of white on my face, and put the shoulder pads in. I suppose the world existed, that weird, creepy village, and he just came very naturally from that, really.”

Kent-Walters reckons that, in among the stew of an absurdist take on the Northern variety circuit, there were a few more oblique influences on Frankie. “Someone who really influenced me as a child was Tim Burton. I was the right age. I just absorbed all of that stuff, that creepy world, and so Beetlejuice I think is very Frankie. You can see how those characters, they’re really similar, like, a dodgy guy in the underworld kind of thing. That was definitely a fairly big one. Aliso there’s the band The Cramps, just that energy that they’ve got, kind of gross and dirty, but rock ‘n’ roll glam at the same time, and the imagery that their stuff conjures up.”

Frankie’s first flourishing was fairly brief. “I continued him on for a little bit [there was a HalliGalli ‘Frankie’s Furnace’ event in March 2018], but then when we stopped doing the art collective that all got closed, as these things often do. Then Frankie lay dormant for several years.”

Clowning around

On graduating, Kent-Walters started working as a comedian, even forming a sketch double act called The Lovely Boys with his friend Mikey Bligh-Smith. The pair had a shared fascination with the noble art of clowning, and post-pandemic they made the pilgrimage to France to study the subject at the legendary École Philippe Gaulier. “The idea of the training is that you play games, loads and loads and loads, so you really know what it is in your body to have fun and be playing a game. You play games in the morning, and in the afternoon you get up in front of people and you perform. It was really fun.”

Back in Blighty, Kent-Walters started winning awards playing a new character. “He was like an arsehole actor – Edwardo Soliloquy, he was called. It was a good set, but I felt like I was acting. It felt quite contrived, and that I got bored of.”

Gradually, Frankie Monroe began to resurface. “I’d love to say that one day I looked in the mirror and he was there saying ‘it’s time, it’s time’. But no, I just thought I’d give him another go.” In stark contrast, Kent-Walters found playing Frankie “totally freeing. You can do anything you like as Frankie. It’s so much fun, and weirdly, I feel like I am my funniest self being Frankie. It feels more like a mask, like an alter ego. I can’t see myself getting bored with him, really.”

Indeed, Frankie’s current success looks set to grow and grow. Last year’s award-winning show, Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe… Live!!! is currently on tour, and work is fast progressing on this year’s follow-up, Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe… Dead (Good Fun Time)!!!, in which the character will have various obstacles to overcome, from encountering a new nemesis, Vegas Dave, to, well, being dead.

On top of that, Kent-Walters, now resident in Manchester, recently recorded a pilot for a potential BBC Radio series, produced by comedy supremos Hat Trick. Centred on Frankie hosting a quiz night at the Misty Moon, the cast features Mikey Bligh-Smith plus Manchester comedy circuit luminaries Molly McGuiness, Freddie Hayes and Janice Connolly, aka Mrs Barbara Nice. If the show gets the green light, 2025 could be an even bigger year for Kent-Walters.

Still, he remains adamant that Northernness is key to his comedy. “I just think everyone’s funny in the North. It’s a currency, isn’t it? For me, it’s just so intrinsically tied up with being daft and I’ve found that ‘daft’ doesn’t always translate.”

In their early days, Vic & Bob would often reject suggestions that their work was surreal, insisting “no, we’re just daft”.

“Yeah! And it’s not a word that translates that well with the Southern middle classes. Like, I feel like they can say ‘daft’, but they don’t quite get ‘daft’.”

Because it’s ‘daft’ as a positive?

“Yeah, yeah, exactly! But it’s such a Northern thing, isn’t it, to be daft?”

Reader, know this: exquisite Northern daftness has a new king, and his name is Frankie Monroe.

By Andy Murray

Main photo of Frankie Monroe by Matt Stronge

 

Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe… Live!!! is on tour throughout March and April 2025, with dates including Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester. Full details here:
https://frankiemonroelive.com/

A work in progress performance of the Frankie Monroe… Dead!!!! show will close the forthcoming A Lovely Weekend 2025 comedy festival in Manchester: https://www.seetickets.com/tour/a-lovely-weekend-2025