Johnny Speight and Alf Garnett
“I didn’t invent Alf Garnett, I just grassed him up.”
Johnny Speight, who died last week at the age of 78, always maintained that his most famous creation was as much documentary as fiction.
“I get most of the material for Alf standing around in pubs, all I really am is a recorder,” claimed the man who made Wapping famous.
His sharp ear for East End dialogue and wit was honed as a boy in east London, and a lifetime of observation.
And if he despised the spoutings of bigoted Alf – in later years, misguided critics would criticise the show itself as racist – he realised that the best way to puncture prejudice was through the common sense and humour of his cast of cockney characters.
Speight was born in Canning Town on June 2, 1920, the son of a London docker, and left school at 14.
“I hated school,” he said. “We used to think you were lucky if you got TB because it got you off. If one of the
kids had it, we’d get him to breathe all over us, or spit in our sandwiches.”
The obstinately healthy Johnny was soon out at work in a variety of jobs, working for East End firms while practising his real love, jazz, in a succession of bands at night.
He played drums in the Syncopated Rhythm Boys, Howard Wynn-Jones and his Big Broadcast Band and Johnny Speight and his Hot Shots before war intervened.
Back in London in 1945, he returned to a succession of hated jobs – among them a spell as an insurance salesman – before he fell, almost by accident, into his true love, writing.
Johnny had become a voracious reader and was constantly coming across the witty sayings of writer and philosopher George Bernard Shaw.
“They were so funny, I imagined him to be a stand-up comic, like Tommy Trinder!” he admitted.
But one day, leafing through Canning Town Library, he came across a whole shelf of books by the prolific author.
“I thought: ‘Blimey, he writes books too!’” he laughed.
He started devouring Shaw’s work.
“It was like a divine revelation,” Speight recalled. “It was as though a light had been turned on and every dark recess lit by sweet reason.”
Johnny’s reading now turned to the modern classics of Chek- hov, Ibsen and Strindberg and he wrote a succession of worthy but very dull plays on the evils of capitalism before finding his true place in literature.
He began writing for the new generation of radio comedians, most, like himself, recently returned from active service.
Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Arthur Askey, Morecambe and Wise. The list of artists who benefited from his sharp comic eye was endless.
And he began to work with Galton and Simpson, writers for the immortal Tony Hancock and creators of Steptoe and Son.
A bigot is born
But it was in 1964, with a one-off play in the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse series, that Alf Garnett was born and Speight found fame and riches.
The resultant series, Till Death Us Do Part, ran in various guises until the BBC scrapped the final series of In Sickness And In Health in 1995, bowing to complaints about Alf’s foul language
and his utterings on lesbianism and Aids.
Many of the people who watched Alf never really got the joke and neither did the BBC.
Dennis Main Wilson, producer of the first series, said: “There was something about the way the studio audience laughed at certain lines. It’s likely a large proportion of the 20 million who watched did so for the wrong reasons.”
But Johnny resolutely defended the need for Alf. After the show was cancelled, he said: “It was legislating against people’s thoughts … all debate was being stifled.
“I didn’t invent Alf, he was created by society. Unfortu-nately, the world is full of Garnetts, not just in the working classes, in the middle and upper classes too.
“If you make fun of them, people are more inclined to think about it. If you never mention it, it just goes on.”
It was a dash of East End plain-speaking and common sense the BBC would have done well to listen to.