Tim Vine's comedy heroes - Entertainment - ShortList Magazine

5. Foster Brooks

He became a comedy hero of mine when I discovered his clips on YouTube. You could sum up his act by saying he has one joke where he pretends to be drunk. But he does it in such a way that it’s endlessly funny. He does a fantastic sketch with Dean Martin where he pretends to be an airline pilot.



There’s another clip – it’s one of the roasts. It’s where Dean Martin roasts Don Rickles, and during that Foster Brooks does a fantastic speech. I’d advise people to watch it.



The part of being drunk that Foster Brooks has absolutely nailed is that thing where someone is talking and they get hit by a burp they can’t stop in the middle of a sentence. Just before the burp comes out he just manages to hold it back. It’s very funny. To say that someone is a comedy hero of mine and their act consists of suppressing burps doesn’t sound like I’ve aimed high enough. There are great gags as well, but it’s all in the context of being off his face.

4. Max Wall

It’s hard for me to condense this into a list of five, but Max Wall is definitely one of my comedy heroes purely because of what he does in his funny walk. The clip I’ve picked is black and white, of a guy playing a snare drum and Max Wall does his funny walk to it. I’m not kidding – the speed of his leg movement at the beginning is like the Ali shuffle on fast-forward. It’s amazing. The only other person I know who does that sort of thing brilliantly is Billy Dainty.



Continuing on the silly walk theme, and also linking from Dean Martin, if you look at The Dean Martin Show clips – which feature every single Hollywood star – in amongst them is Dean Martin’s Uncle Leonard. He walks on to the set – which is like a pretend house – and walks in. Some music is playing, he does a selection of odd walks, and walks off again. And it’s his real Uncle Leonard.



ShortList: Is there a bit of Max Wall in the Tim Vine leg shimmy? We’re thinking about when you go, “Come on!”

You mean when I go, “Come on, Uncle Leonard!”? [laughs] A leg shimmy? I watch some of those moves back and I think, “That was a nice leg movement I did there.” I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to say early Elvis Presley, but… Elvis was the king of that kind of thing. In many ways he was the king of rock’n’roll. [laughs] If you look at Elvis and the stuff that he did, the great thing about it – aside from the fact he looked like a Greek god and that sort of music hadn’t been heard before, if you put those two things aside – was the package, and the cherry on the cake was the fact that when he stood in front of an audience there was abandonment. It was like he didn’t know what he was going to do and that was where the excitement came from. That’s why his films aren’t so good, because he knew what he was going to do.

3. Ricky Grover

The reaction he can get from a crowd almost defies belief. No one wants to follow him because he is such a hard act to follow. He supported someone quite big [at this point ShortList promises Mr Vine that we won’t name the comedy giant and household name] for five nights. On the first night Ricky goes out first and gets a standing ovation. It was so fantastic that he got a call from the management saying, “We’ll pay you for the other four nights, but we don’t want you here.” That’s how the story goes.

Ricky is a total joy to watch. When you’re a comic you see a lot of other comics – particularly when you’re on the circuit. There are some you watch and you feel that it’s great to have got in free to watch this guy. He has a tangible presence on stage – he’s a big guy, has a great face and it’s a defined comedy character that works.



2. John Archer

To say that my comedy hero is my support act seems to be terribly patronising. It’s like I’m patting him on the head: “You’ve joined the big boys now.” [laughs hysterically] It’s not supposed to be patronising. What I like about John are some of the reasons I like about Ricky: he has a brilliant presence and a brilliant face. That’s good enough, isn’t it?

I’m not a big fan of magic because a lot of magicians just rely on the magic and if you take away the tricks there’s not much else. But John combines the magic and the comedy – so you don’t hate him for the magic [laughs]. The two things complement each other and he does it brilliantly. In my view he’s the funniest comedy magician in this country. I also think he’s very funny in his own right, although he would say he wants to do the magic. He’s very funny. We met doing a gig in Butlin’s in 1994.

ShortList: Jesus.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. It was a Christian event. [laughs]. They had this thing called Spring Harvest. It’s a Christian conference and they like to put acts on at the end who won’t offend groups of Christians. My act is inoffensive and Archer’s is inoffensive. They threw us together and we were deeply offended by each other.

ShortList: And the rest is history.

And the rest is history... The rest is religion.



1. Benny Hill



Like Norman Wisdom, he was so much more popular outside this country than in his own land. Benny Hill unfortunately got the whole backlash from the birth of alternative comedy. He was seen as someone who represented something; in a very patronising way, people at the time were saying, “We’ve grown up and don’t need that sort of comedy any more.” It was purely because he was chasing girls around in fast-motion at the end of his show. The thing is, that was a very small part of what Benny did. Benny Hill was doing a one-hour show on ITV.

I don’t have many comedy DVDs that I watch more than once at home. But my Benny Hill VHS I do watch more than once. There’s some fantastic stuff on there. To this day I think he’s hugely underrated. I’m glad he didn’t have to stick around and have to listen to people saying he wasn’t as good as he was. Maybe he shuffled off this mortal coil at the right point. I think there’s something lovely about Benny Hill. He went out there and totally loved what he did. You can tell he loved it because when the show got axed his life was over. He was totally dedicated to that show.

If you watch one of those hours of his show there’s far more to it than him chasing girls around in fast-motion. There are loads of brilliant sketches and a lot of it was ahead of its time. Fantastic. In past times I’ve said that my favourite comedian was Frankie Howerd but for the purpose of this list I would put Benny Hill as my favourite. When you see him doing the sketches in front of a studio audience, his relationship with the audience was great. And he knows where he’s playing those smirks; he comes across as the cheeky boy, it looks like a sort of corpse, it’s perfect.

ShortList: He also had a nice little film career: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Italian Job and so forth.

Tim: Well, that was his film career.

ShortList: Once I’d said those two I was out.

Tim: Name another.

ShortList: That’s all I’ve got.

Tim: I’m not sure you’d say he had a fantastic film career. You could have said, “Did he crop up in two films?” “Yes.”

Tim Vine: Punslinger is out now on DVD