Mike Harding is a comedian of the Billy Connolly era, whose act paved the way for many contemporary performers by mixing straight comedy with humorous songs. His interests and hobbies are almost embarrasingly diverse. Few people could boast of work as a playwright, of being a life vice- president of the Rambler’s Association and of composing music for the cartoon Dangermouse. It’s a pretty obscure blend, let’s be honest. Today he is probably best known as a presenter and folk DJ for BBC Radio 2. In anticipation of a recent tour which brought him to the York Grand Opera House, I caught up with him to find out a bit more about his recent shenanigans, as well as enjoying a bit of a retrospective into his vibrant and varied past.
One thing in particular was pressing on my mind when we spoke – how on earth did he find the time to do such a mind-boggling range of stuff? His Wikipedia page lists him as a “singer, songwriter, comedian, author, broadcaster, photographer, traveller, filmmaker, playwright and musician”, on top of which he still finds time to pursue an equally diverse range of hobbies. The answer was surprisingly simple: he doesn’t watch any television. “What are you doing when you’re watching television?” he asked, before supplying an answer for me: “Just watching someone else’s shit.” I was sceptical; how much time did that actually save? But he was adamant: “Days in your week. Weeks in your month. Months in your year. Seriously.”
His attitude is somewhat surprising considering his not insignificant experience within the TV industry and his current penchant for religious programmes. He does record these shows on VHS to watch over dinner though, just in case you were detecting a contradiction. Even the shows he enjoys, however, are not exempt from criticism as he lays into the certain kind of people that dominate these shows: “Some of the people involved in those have got a 2:1 from some dickhead university… And they’ve got a really, really, really insulting attitude towards the people that watch it.”
Attempting to steer the topic towards something a little more relevant, and a little less objectionable, I mentioned Dangermouse and Count Duckula – the cartoon of my childhood that Harding composed the musical score for in the 1980s. As it turns out, Harding not only scored the music, but actually wrote the whole first series of Dangermouse when the show’s actual writers got stuck. He became involved with the Dangermouse team after making a pilot for his own cartoon, which was apparently a rather surreal experience: “I created this character who was sort of a busking frog called Far-out Fred and he had a mate called Matusky who was a Glaswegian tom cat and they had another little pal who’s an irascible French cockroach. So I had these three characters, and I got them doing stuff, as you can imagine, because he was a busker on the streets, and, well, it was very, very surreal.”
But the show was sidelined after an urgent appeal to Harding from the team behind Dangermouse. Harding was just the outside-the-box thinker that they needed. “They said: ‘look, it’s really stuck, and we don’t know where it’s going’. They’ve got three episodes, and straight away I said: ‘the problem is, you’re trying to do a James Bond type mouse, and really, what you’ve got to understand is that a mouse can do anything’. They’d tied it down to very real James Bond situations – villains on islands, that sort of stuff. But of course I said look: you can go anywhere. Anywhere in space or time – because you’ve created this character.” Speaking of creating characters, some of the best-loved and most memorable Dangermouse characters were Harding’s inventions. Baron Von Greenback? Leatherhead? Both Harding ideas. Most importantly for me – and I admit I lost control a little when I heard this, very unprofessional – the silent character Nero, the little furry white caterpillar which is Greenback’s obligatory Bond villain pet is all Harding’s work.
The blurb for Harding’s current show describes him as the ‘Grandfather of Alternative Comedy’. I wanted to probe this idea, but was afraid of striking a nerve. Harding, you see, used to be known as the ‘Rochdale Cowboy’ after a song he describes as “a deconstructed, postmodern musical piece which I did: a parody of a parody.” The ‘Rochdale Cowboy’ is, I think, a much cooler title than the Grandfather of anything, and if it were me, I might feel a little resentful at having to make the change. Harding, however was much more level-headed. “I don’t mind, I don’t give a chuff about labels – if people want to use that it’s fine, I just don’t care.” He can understand why people need such labels, however, and he explained where the current one had come from: “I started working at the same time as Bill Connolly, and at that time we broke the mould of the ‘Bernard Manning’ type comedian, the ‘Charlie Williams’ type comedian, that was the dinner-jacket and the velvet bow tie. All it took was a good bit of observational comedy, and we were the first, the first to do that. We broke the mould by not telling ‘mother-in-law’ jokes. And there was nothing wrong with them, they’re perfectly interesting, perfectly fine. But tastes change, people change.”
As far as Harding is concerned, alternative comedy is just a label for what he does that doesn’t have any special significance. I wondered whether he had any opinion on current trends in comedy, and he had an answer straight away- something I was beginning to notice is a bit of a habit, for him: “I watch comedians now, a modern comedian’s set, on DVD, if someone lends me a DVD. And what’s interesting now is the desperation in a lot of comedian’s faces as they realise that the market is full, oversubscribed, that there’s millions of the buggers. You know, sooner or later, they’ll take their clubs, drag them out onto the ice and beat them to death. There’ll be a cull. People will be officially culled from the world of comedy. They’ll be coming after us year after year to keep the numbers down.” I pointed out that this was unlikely to happen unless comedians were particularly responsible for the spread of diseases like TB, but Harding was unconvinced.
I always like to finish up an interview by finding out what the essence, the USP of a performer’s latest work is. For Harding this was his stage show- although he has a very great number of books and plays both newly released and upcoming. Harding is such a unique character, even offstage, that his reply should have been obvious. The USP? “That’d really be my own individual view of the world” he said.
But as he explained, that alone is not enough to make a show. “It’s about linking others to it. You can lead them into your comic world, and if they like it, they’ll stay with you. Be true with what you do, because it’s all very well to lead people into the world, but it has to be a true world- or they won’t want to know.”