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Myth no.1:
He took a million pies in the face.

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Verdict: untrue.

He didn't. There is no way he could have done.

Nevertheless, Bernard Higgins was the target for a prodigious amount of messy ammunition over the course of his long, successful, and dauntless career as a slapstick clown. A constant recipient of custard pies, he'd also get splattered with extravagant amounts of other gunge every time he performed. The man's appetite for taking mucky punishment was a phenomenon: he became the stuff of legend through forever being on the wrong end of stuff.

The origin of the million myth was an over-puffed P R piece from 1976 for 'Higgins Unchained', one of several theatre shows he headlined during the 70s and 80s. A press release made the claim that Higgins was "on course to take a million pies in the face", and the phrase took hold.

This was around the time of Higgins' greatest popularity when new productions were frequently mounted to showcase his talents. For roughly two decades through his forties and fifties he enjoyed a sustained run of fame. Nearly every year Londoners could count on seeing him star in a live production, and in each one he'd get seriously messed-up - usually over and over again.

I'm old enough to recall the hot summers of the late 1970s: in my memory they commingle with Higgins' messy epics. Could I ever forget queueing for returns outside The Earlsham Theatre on those sultry evenings, the joy of securing a ticket to see him perform, and then - despite the distance to the stage from my cheap seat in the stifling balcony - the thrill, shock, and wonder at watching Higgins, semi-undressed in long-johns, take his trademark tumble from a dangerous height into a tiny bath of chip-shop batter, and then watch him emerge, slicked all over like a seal in his slimy coating, his underwear battened to him?

But if we play the numbers game for real, is it possible to calculate exactly how many pies Bernard Higgins might have received during his career?

I'm helped out here by Vernon Dangerfield, a full-time statistician and respected part-time historian of slapstick comedy. Vernon sets some ground-rules: 'For simplicity's sake,' he e-mails me, '- let's count every time Higgins might have got some item of mess on him as a "pie".'

I agree, and when later he and I speak on the phone Vernon whisks me through the clown's biography: the decorating act Higgins performed with Smudgie Wallace during the dying days of British music hall (Higgins' first venture into messy comedy while still in his early twenties); his time as understudy to The Utter Nutters at The Victoria Palace Theatre before taking over as one of the foursome when Ted Totteridge retired (more nightly paste); some comedy stunt-work and character roles on TV; his first small part as a hapless hospital porter in one of the 'Carry On' films - a break which led him to become a series regular; and then - following the success of his live show 'Crackers' at The Earlsham Theatre in 1970 that established him as a star - the long list of reputation-enhancing vehicles at this venue and others throughout the next two decades.

Vernon reminds me that Higgins had virtually invented a new genre: a type of live theatre variety show that comprised six individual slapstick comedy sketches, each one featuring himself, in which he was supported by a small company of comic actors serving as his straight men. He starred in seven productions of this type of show over the years. Typically, Higgins would play a baker, decorator, fireman, billboard man, waiter, or plumber - any identity where there was the comic potential for mess. These scenes were interspersed with acts from the cabaret or circus - such as jugglers, tumblers, fakirs, or body-balance duos - performed on the forestage with the front-cloth lowered, while upstage, behind it, the scenery was being changed, and, backstage, Higgins frantically showered off the gunk from the previous entree before quick-changing into the costume for the next.

While Vernon rattles off the dates and details of Higgins' career, he's totting up the likely numbers of pies - or pie equivalents - Higgins would have had flung at him in each show, then multiplying these by the number of known performances. A bit of interpretation is needed when Vernon comes to consider the three large-scale theatrical slapstick spectacles, or comedy-dramas, that Higgins created for himself later in his career: 'Right Said Fred' in 1979; 'Higgins Alone' in 1981; and his swan-song, 'The Master' with The English Panache Theatre Company (EPT) at The Uranian Theatre in 1992.

'In those shows he was basically covered in goo from around twenty minutes in till the curtain came down, getting more of it all the time,' Vernon says, pondering. 'How should I quantify it? Is that one pie or a hundred?'

As an example, he reminds me of the wow-inducing sequence he and I had separately seen many times during the eighties in the comedian's astonishing one-man show, 'Higgins Alone', where - already dirtied with an array of gloop - he became trapped inside a transparent shower-stall that slowly filled to above his head with pink blancmange.

'I'd say he earns ten for that,' Vernon insists.

'So, the million pies claim is wide of the mark?' I ask.

'Assuming you lived to 85,' Vernon says, '- you'd need to get around one point three pies in your face every hour, every day and every night from the moment you were born.'

'Vernon ' I say, tentatively, '- have you factored in that during Higgins' early days in music hall there'd have been at least thirteen performances a week?'

'Oh, I've allowed for that,' Vernon reassures me. 'Twice nightly and an extra matinee on Saturdays.'

We try to get our heads around the practicalities - for starters where and how Higgins would have laundered his gunked-up costumes - and agree how hard it would have been.

'He'd have had to have been properly tough to do a slosh act that frequently. And Sundays, he was back on the train to the next town,' Vernon adds. I can practically hear him shaking his head from side to side in awe.

'Tell me then, Vernon,' I dare ask, '- what's the figure?'

'Shame,' Vernon tuts, '- I can't find any information on how many takes were needed for the stunt he did on the hospital trolley in that "Carry On" '

Oh dear, we're off on a tangent, but I'm as fond of reminiscing about Higgins' performances as Vernon is, so I pitch in with: 'I know! It really was him on that runaway gurney.'

Vernon exhales in wonderment. 'Absolutely genuine,' he says, '- it bumps down a flight of steps and pitches him into an ornamental pond. But do you remember when he made regular appearances in that Terry Scott programme?'

I tell him I do. Memorably funny, every week on TV Higgins played a put-upon policeman who underwent some kind of demeaning accident.

'Well, unfortunately there's no record either of whether it took more than one go to get the shot of him stuck in the mud by the river,' Vernon continues. 'It looked like he genuinely couldn't get out. The stuff was all over him by the finish.'

Vernon and I digress for quite a while, recalling other gags from that series, including when Higgins was trapped inside a revolving cement mixer.

'Okay, so the stuff they used was probably porridge,' Vernon concedes, '- but even still - you can see him being turned over and over in it'.

I bring Vernon back to the question: how many pies?

'Well, as I say,' he qualifies, '- I can't make it a one-hundred-per-cent precise figure '

'But those years he wasn't playing in London, you've added in the performances when he was in summer season or pantomime?' I prompt him.

'Of course, I have,' Vernon says, sounding affronted. 'There's ample evidence he performed his usual papering routine each time he did panto. No exaggeration - he must have spent every Boxing Day soaked through to his skin with wallpaper paste.'

'Then how many messings in total during his career?'

Vernon adopts a magisterial tone. 'One hundred and thirty-five thousand, nine hundred and forty-one,' he pronounces.

'One hundred and thirty-five thousand, nine hundred and forty-one?!' I yelp back down the line.

'Give or take,' Vernon says.

For a moment I'm speechless. 'It might not be a million, but that's a totally a s t o n i s h i n g figure,' I gasp.

'It was the wrong question, really,' Vernon says. 'Not: "did he take a million pies?" - but: "would he have liked a million pies?"'

I prompt him: 'And the answer?'

'Yes. Oh yes, indeed he would.'



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Myth no.2:
He did a thousand push-ups a day.

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Verdict: true.

He did. (Not all of them were push-ups, but Higgins would complete one thousand and one various exercises daily.)

Long before exercise was fashionable or widespread, and at a time when his fellow comedians would have been unworriedly puffing through packs of Embassy Filter and downing pints in the stage door pub, Bernard Higgins saw the need to maintain his fitness so that he could perform his physically demanding routines. Prior to turning forty, he'd developed a taxing programme of exercises, and he maintained this regime with unwavering discipline until he retired. Push-ups, sit-ups, burpees, lunges, and wrestlers' bridges were all part of his daily effort, and - according to a somewhat scrappy profile of Higgins in the now-defunct magazine 'Titbits' - he'd do hundreds of each.

The article, from 1981, was accompanied by photos of him exercising in the gym he'd equipped in the basement of his house in Putney, south-west London - an almost unheard-of thing to have done at the time. He was then appearing nightly in his gruelling one-man show 'Higgins Alone'. Years later, when Higgins' longest-serving assistant, Stephen Adlington, gave an interview to the London gay press, he revealed that his boss only ever worked-out in his underpants, but in 'Titbits' we see Higgins sporting a pair of the then fashionable scoop-sided micro-shorts in garish yellow, and an orange stringer-top singlet, hoicking some formidable-looking weights around.

He was then 50, and in great shape for his age: solidly muscular, broad-shouldered and deep-chested ('chunky', you might say), and although he didn't have the kind of washboard stomach a fitness fanatic would aspire to nowadays, he was - in the phrase of the time - 'nicely built'. But then his physique and athleticism had always been part of his appeal; that, and his looks.

His jawline was strong, and he had the suggestion of a cleft chin, but any hint of heroic Superman was undermined by otherwise concave features that included a pixie-ish snub nose and forever startled, playful eyes. His face was topped by short, slightly wavy brown hair that receded flatteringly, so that altogether his looks were pleasing-looking: conventionally manly, but not intimidatingly handsome. He resembled the friendly repair man for whom your Mum gets a brief, fluttery crush.

The 'Titbits' article underscored how important it was for Higgins to keep in top shape for his one-man show, describing it as: 'a nightly endurance trial that requires all his strength and mental and physical stamina.' Having seen this tour-de-force performance myself I can only say that for once this wasn't public relations hot air: you really couldn't believe how the man could get through his ordeal on a single occasion, let alone undergo it six nights out of seven, for three straight months.

He had started work on this solo epic immediately after finishing in 'Right Said Fred', another successful theatre piece that had run during 1979. It was a physical comedy show that took its cue from the lyrics of the hit pop song of the same title.

Each of this show's three acts were characterised by a different and distinct brand of slapstick. The first act was knockabout - the harsh humour of whacks, blows and bumps - when, following the song to the letter, Higgins, playing Fred, the bumptious foreman of a crew of incompetent removal men, attempts to shift a bulky upright piano to the room above. The two most spectacular of the many bruising stunts he carried off was when the piano appeared to trundle over him as it careered down a flight of stairs, and - balancing on a wobbling ladder, pickaxe in hand - he brings the entire ceiling crashing over him in a pyroclastic flow of plaster dust, taking a fall of two metres in the process.

The second act was based around the comedy of humiliation, both social and physical. Set in a doctor's consulting room, Higgins' Fred is revealed with both arms in plaster as the result of his earlier tumble and unable to undress for his medical without assistance. Stripped to his underpants, he submits to an examination which for Higgins meant allowing veteran actor Richard Verney (playing the physician) genuinely to squeeze his testicles at every performance.

Act three marked a return to messy comedy when Fred - restored to health, and now a decorator - instructs his lanky and gormless young apprentice (Robert Staplehurst in the original cast) on doing some paintwork, except that it was performed in a style known as 'authentic', meaning that the paint they threw over one another in an escalating battle was actual white emulsion and not a prop substitute.

The show closed in November, and during the Christmas that followed, Higgins was contracted for panto in Reading, reprising his standard sticky wallpapering routine.

This is all to give a flavour of the relentless work-rate Higgins had been putting himself through when early in 1980 he began developing his solo piece, a venture that then took more than a year to reach the stage.

Performing a one-man show had long been Higgins' ambition, and a production company - Slapstick Productions London & Touring (SPLAT) - was now prepared to back the idea, despite the lengthy and costly development the show required. The green light came when a London theatre, The Delgrade, signed to stage the finished production.

As a result, throughout 1980 Higgins honed the script that he had co-written with comedian Harry Hoobey, and by June of that year, in a disused film studio near Staines, Middlesex, he began try-outs of the show's physical gags on a mock-up of the set.

The premise for 'Higgins Alone' was almost deliberately preposterous. The curtain would rise on a smartly furnished, split-level apartment, and - after a daringly long time when nothing happened - a twitch of a coverlet that lay over a sofa would develop into a full-scale scramble, and Higgins would emerge from beneath in only his underwear, bleary and confused.

'Hmm ... nice digs. Where am I?'

A repeating film sequence would start playing on a giant screen built into the top of the set. It quickly becomes clear that these are out-takes for a television commercial for a brand of men's underclothes. Panning back from a close-up of Higgins happily puffing away on a pipe, the shot reveals that he's in fact sitting on top of a moving barge on a snowy day in nothing but his Y-Fronts and singlet - strapline: 'You need never wear anything else!' But - either by tripping, knocking his head against the sound boom, or (in a risky gag) colliding with a low bridge - he ends up falling into the canal in every take. He's wrecked the shoot and the ad campaign.

On stage, Higgins tries the door handles.

'That's queer!''

He's locked in! And from this point onwards he's subjected to a series of messy assaults by various mechanical means: trapdoors, collapsing balcony rails, robotic arms that emerge from the walls to push fat, gooey pies flat in his face. The advertising company is exacting a revenge for his incompetence.

The intention had always been that Higgins should break the 'fourth wall' convention to chat away across the footlights - among the many entertainer's skills he possessed was a gift for stand-up, plus an easy, relaxed rapport with his audience - but when performing 'Higgins Alone' he'd always give nods and winks about the ludicrousness of the MacGuffin, implying he knew full well the only reason the theatre-goers were there was to see how much mucky maltreatment he could endure in one go.

Developing a muscular back wasn't just a physique obsession for him, but a safety measure that allowed him to survive some of the astonishing stunts he pulled during the first act of 'Higgins Alone'. Every audience would gasp when a robotic arm gave a final push to a ladder Higgins was climbing, causing him to crash land flat on his back from nearly three metres high onto what appeared to be a solid oak table.

And this was just one of many punishing knockabout gags he'd set himself up for during this act - for instance, he'd already taken two tumbles down the thirteen steps of a spiral staircase, once rolling forwards, the next time rolling backwards, after also having been knocked off a balcony when a wrecking ball swung onto his backside. He couldn't have conceived of these stunts - let alone performed them - if he hadn't maintained a high level of muscularity and fitness.



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Myth no.3:
He had been a professional wrestler.

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Verdict: untrue.

He hadn't.

If, at the height of Bernard Higgins' fame, his name came up in conversation there was a good chance someone would say, 'He used to be a wrestler, didn't he? It's how he can take those falls.'

The notion that he'd wrestled for a living developed after he'd become well-known for a particular comedy sketch. Some years before Graham Chapman did a similar spoof on 'Monty Python', Higgins played a grappler where the only opponent was himself, and with a frenzy of some genuinely impressive gymnastics and an unsparing parody of the absurdities of a pro-wrestling show ('Give! Give!' / 'No ref! No ref!') he'd inflict all manner of violence against his own body - choking his own throat, smashing his forearm onto his chest, and repeatedly throwing himself to somersault across a specially built set that was made to look like half a wrestling ring.

He'd developed the act while he starting out in the retreating world of music-hall, frequently performing it as a solo in the first half of a show before teaming up with Smudgie Wallace later in the bill to give their decorating entree and be splattered with wallpaper paste.

Yet the skit outlived wrestling's days on TV. It became a standard part of Higgins' routine that audiences would expect - hits-from-the-first-album style - in every show. He revived the sketch many times, even incorporating a version of it into the final act of 'Higgins Alone'.

When he performed his auto-wrestling moves in his one-man show the stage was ankle-deep in all sorts of gloop and goo, the accumulation of the messy ammo for which Higgins had been the sole target during the previous three hours. Shattered custard pies, the contents of entire buckets of tapioca or maple syrup, jelly, ice-cream, and plain old flour-and-water paste strew the floor in sufficient amounts that it was necessary to incorporate a panel of Perspex across the forestage to prevent inundation of the stalls. Each time Higgins flipped himself over he'd splash into this semi-liquid midden and set off a minor tsunami of gunge.

At this stage of the long evening Higgins would quite often be having a genuine battle in trying to keep his underpants up - the only item he'd by then be wearing because they'd be so filled and weighted down inside with slosh. His audience's laughter would redouble at seeing him cling feverishly with one hand to the overwhelmed waistband while he went through the wrestling mime with the other, and then to swap hands over in a frenzy whenever the stage business demanded.

(His other entirely real battle would be with the stuff that had got in his eyes - a debilitating hazard - and on some of the times I saw the show, Higgins needed to break out of character and quick-as-a-flash grab a rag that an assistant stage manager proffered from the wings. It was a sobering reminder of the very real discomfort Higgins was prepared to endure in order to amuse his fans.)

For the record, Bernard Higgins never worked in a professional wrestling ring. He had left school aged 14, at the end of the second world war, and worked in a variety of jobs in his home-town of Dunstable, Bedfordshire - including baker's assistant (was this the origin of his fixation with flans and pies?). On turning 18 in 1949 he was called up for National Service, serving in The Royal Navy at a base in Gosport, Hampshire. There, he'd amaze his comrades and officers with examples of his developing talent for comedy stunt work, and due to this was chosen to feature as the light-hearted relief at the conclusion of an otherwise deadly serious outdoor display of military hardware to NATO officials when he pedalled an ice-cream vendor's bicycle cart at full pelt off a 6 metre-high ramp into Portsmouth Harbour.

His first foray into showbusiness came after he was discharged. In May 1951 - then aged 20 - he managed to get a job at The Little Theatre, Eltham, south-east London, in a revue called 'Helter Skelter'. He was a dancer in the chorus.


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Myth no.4:
He took three hours to get clean after a performance.

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Verdict: untrue.

Although by the end of most of the shows he starred in, Higgins was seriously messed-up, and showering off all the gunk could be difficult, in practice he didn't need quite as much as three hours to achieve it. However, for other reasons that I'll explain later, Higgins would often linger in his dressing room after a performance, typically not leaving till past one in the morning.

Again, the basis of the myth was a publicity release, on this occasion from 1982 for the first revival of 'Higgins Alone' - a year after its initial run. Stoking interest by playing up the element of nightly endurance by its star, the piece was laid out as a mock inventory of all the mucky items for which Higgins was the target during his lengthy one-man performance, finishing with the claim that the lot took three hours to clean off.

The show's title was valid: Bernard Higgins was truly alone on stage for three acts, with each act running just under an hour. Even in the two intervals he never left the stage, but remained visible, the victim both times of gags that kept him trapped inside a transparent box into which showered either water (the first time) or pink blancmange (the second) until he was completely submersed - a process that took more than twenty minutes. Many in the audience, mesmerised, would stay to watch these slow-motion spectacles rather than leave their seats.

It was mammoth evening for everyone - audience included - though patently a nightly marathon for Higgins. The curtain call wouldn't come until nearly three and three-quarter hours after: 'Hmm ... nice digs. Where am I?'.

And yes, once a show was down he would need to take a good while to get completely clean (as anybody who has ever tried to comb tacky globules of drying flour-and-water paste from out of their pubic hair will testify) - but three hours was an exaggeration.



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Myth no.5:
His gunge cost a grand a night.

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Verdict: true.

(Or true, provided we're talking about his one-man show 'Higgins Alone', for which by the third and final time the production was revived in 1989 the nightly bill for gunky ammo had reached to just over one thousand pounds.)

'Higgins Alone' first opened on Monday March 30 1981 at The Delgrade Theatre, London, after a year-long gestation, and a rumour developed that the amount of gloop needed for each performance was costing £650. The production company SPLAT was later keen to itemise and quantify the components for publicity purposes '260 litres of chocolate sauce! 390 litres of baked beans!' but was coy about the price-tag, possibly due to worries the figure could inflame the perception that their enterprise was 'wasting food'. Eight years later, due to inflation, £650 had risen to £1,001.

I've seen a copy of the press release for the revival of 'Higgins Alone' and have amused myself trying to match the gunge-y items it lists with my distant memories of where and how these might have been aimed at Higgins during the show.

'6,500 litres of water,' it says for starters.

That's easy. Before Higgins got messy, he got wet. The first act, as I have said, was largely knockabout; this was the sequence where he tumbled down the stairs, fell off a balcony, thumped onto an oak table, received a wallop on his bum from a wrecking ball, and - while trying to make his escape by means of requisitioning the chandelier as a trapeze - suffered an alarming mid-air collision with a bookcase. Though in between this activity - at a point when he was engaging with his audience in comic banter - he would keep getting distracted by a short cylinder that protruded from the floor. Unable to resist examining it, he'd unscrew its cap and instantly be hit in the face with a jet of water that no amount of stamping upon, sitting upon (broad comedy reaction: 'Ooh! Now that's a deep clean!'), or holding down with febrile thumbs would then be able to quash. For several minutes he would get soaked. Thereafter in the first act whenever he scrutinised some object, no matter how unlikely - a framed portrait, a telephone, a piece of sculpture - it would squirt at him. This tranche of jokes concluded with outright craziness when one, then two, then countless and simultaneous jets of water burst out of arbitrary positions in the walls and began following Higgins around, keeping him as their target wherever he went, even erupting from the floor when he sought refuge under a table.

These gags might account for half of the water, the remainder of the six-and-a-half thousand litres was what must have showered out over him during the first interval when he apparently became locked inside the transparent shower cubicle. By then he'd have taken off his singlet to mop his sopping hair. I would never move from my seat but always stayed to watch, open-mouthed and alarmingly aroused. I can't overstate how daring and elemental it seemed at the time to be allowed just to stare at Higgins' fine body, clad only in clingingly wet white underpants, the water continually raining over him and rising ever higher: the sight was just viscerally sexy.

'- 26 custard-filled flans,' the list continues.

These would have been deployed at any time in the show's second or third acts, though I can't summon up the circumstances of each single one. In my blurred memory weighty pastries, sloppy with filling, could appear suddenly at any time through camera-shutter-fast / seen-and-gone traps in the walls, as if in some Magritte-inspired nightmare. All of these pies were destined to be thwacked via extending arms into Higgins' ever-receptive face, crotch, or bum.

'- 273 kilos of flour.'

'Only 273?' is my reaction. I recall the stuff was everywhere. Mixed with water it formed the viscous paste that filled the jugs which cantilevered swiftly and sinisterly from out of the set's walls, and which - assisted by other extending robotic prongs that could draw back Higgins' waistband while he was distracted - would be tipped in swamping quantities down inside his underpants. And on the two occasions Higgins managed to escape the shower stall by squeezing through a narrow gap at the top, it was dry flour that lay in a trough at the bottom of the two metre drop on the other side, ready to coat his wet or blancmange-sticky body.

But I haven't accounted for the flour-bomb dust-storms that exploded at random moments, nor the downward pouring shaft of flour that enveloped him as he raised one arm towards the gods in acknowledgement of the ovation that swelled when he was called back centre-stage for a third time at the curtain call (his other hand couldn't let go of his over-filled and gravity-challenged underpants). This assault would prompt the audience to turn to one another in astonishment. After all he'd been through, surely he couldn't take yet more mess? Oh yes, he could.

'- 52 litres of tapioca pudding'.

In the second act, Higgins became trapped on the set's balcony when the spiral staircase linking it to ground level dislodged. Before our eyes, the stairs would pivot so that what had been their underside became their top side, transforming the structure into a corkscrew waterslide. A hopper dropped from the fly to just above this helter-skelter and deposited a splurge of sticky tapioca into it. Because this was now the only way down, Higgins had to plunge in headfirst and take the gooey joyride.

'- 390 litres of baked beans'.

'Higgins Alone' included many incredible visual moments, but the topmost coup-de-theatre came in the third act when through the screen of an apparently functioning television set there was a sudden projectile explosion of baked beans. The volume of one-and-a-half domestic bathtubs spewed across the width of the stage with enough force to knock the star off balance. Once he'd struggled to stand there wasn't an inch of his body that wasn't covered in sliding tomato sauce and haricots. Thereafter the floor was up to 13 centimetres deep in slime.

'- 260 litres of chocolate sauce.'

The chief technician at The Delgrade, Ted Monk, gave an interview to The Standard newspaper around the time of theatre's fortieth anniversary in 2018. He let slip that for reasons of cost, the material in the follow-up gag to the bean splurge wasn't real chocolate sauce. What cannoned out of the ostensibly smart sound system speakers (and all over baked-bean-coated Higgins) was in fact boiled cornflour coloured with brown poster paint.

'- 2,600 litres of pink blancmange.'

When Higgins was locked for a further time inside the transparent shower stall, this is what steadily spattered out over his head for twenty-four minutes (the duration of the second interval). Similar to the chocolate sauce, it was in fact a solution of cornflour with coloured dye.

I'm trying to remember how Higgins received the remaining items on the list:

'- a syrup tart;' (did he sit on this?);

'- 2 blocks of vanilla ice cream;' (my memory is that emerging prongs deposited bricks of ice cream front and back down Higgins' underpants. I've a mental image of subsiding, but initially rectangular protrusions inside those overstuffed Y-Fronts, and of thick milky rivulets dribbling persistently down his thighs thereafter);

'- 7 litres of mashed potato; - 6 litres of mushy peas;' (simply dropped on him from the fly tower when he selected these items from a menu);

'- 13 litres of porridge'; (ditto, except that - if I'm correct - the deluge was followed by a drizzle of golden syrup that targeted his head);

'- 6-and-a-half mashed bananas;' (I recall him pulping bananas on a paper plate and that the sticky mixture then got flipped into his lap by a spring);

'- 1.3kg of marmalade;
- 13 eggs;
- 780 centilitres of vanilla-flavoured whipped milk pudding;
- 520 centilitres of lime jelly;
- 91 centilitres of black treacle;
- a jumbo packet of cornflakes;
- a jumbo packet of soapflakes;
- 533 grams of cocoa;
- 650 grams of biscuit crumbs;
- 1.43 litres of caramel sauce;
- 7 litres of wallpaper paste;
- 6 litres of chip-shop batter;
- 13 bags of fine sawdust.'

I'm fairly certain most of these last items appeared in the closing minutes of the epic show. They were laid out on a low and improbably lengthy table which ran on casters and emerged - and kept emerging - from an aperture in the set's wall until it bisected the stage completely.

Having obeyed a command from a disembodied voice, Higgins had just performed a version of his energetic auto-wrestling act in the accumulated sea of gunk, but now the spooky voice simply said, 'You know what you need to do.'

Higgins would at first look perplexed ('The heck I do! '), but it would then dawn on him that he was being told to mess himself up with the ammo that was trundling out across the stage, and after poking his tongue out at the voice in child-like defiance, he would capitulate, and - taking up these items one by one - would sullenly begin to throw them over himself, sticking his head in the bucket of wallpaper paste, for instance, before straightening up to have it empty all over him, or holding the cornflakes above head height to cascade likewise.

And in between these self-inflicted gungeings he'd reprise certain of the wrestling moves and throws, somersaulting or belly-flopping into the sloppy midden each time before returning to the table to select another item for damage, so that the sequence would go something like: fall, pour the cracked eggs down the underpants; writhe in the muck as if fighting off a hand - his own - that's trying to strangle him, empty a bag of sawdust over chest and hair; splash-land, stand, squeeze a tube of caramel sauce directly into the face; and so on, continuing this ceremony of self-abasement until the stage lights slowly and finally dimmed.



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Myth no.6:
He wore out 2,600 pairs of Y-Fronts.

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Verdict: true.

He did (or thereabouts).

Bernard Higgins' underpants got so gunged-up it wasn't worth washing them. No detergent would satisfactorily remove the stains from egg yolks, treacle, plum jam or chocolate syrup that he received in swamping quantities when he was appearing in his one-man show 'Higgins Alone' (and besides, the waistband become so distended due to the weight of the paste that had been poured down inside they wouldn't have been wearable a second time), while the pairs he wore for 'Right Said Fred' were so mired by real emulsion paint, glue, and varnish the only option after a performance was to bin them. And since he needed to commence every performance in impeccably white cotton underwear it was necessary for the theatre wardrobe to supply the star with a new pair each night. That he would require 65 pairs of underpants to get him through the eleven-week run was an additional boast on the inventory the production company put out as publicity for the first revival of 'Higgins Alone'.

Bernard Higgins was famous for his underpants. If you had a ticket to one of the shows you could guarantee that at some point you'd see him either lose his trousers or strip down to his kecks.

As an over-eager fireman in his first big hit show 'Crackers', in a sketch he'd revive in later productions, he'd end up stripped to long-john all-in-ones and be wearing only these for the stunt-fall into a dangerously small bath filled with batter.

At the conclusion of 'The Bernard Higgins Show' in 1972, arriving onstage last to take the curtain call, he'd fling off the towelling dressing gown he was wearing (the evidence of having quickly showered after the previous messy sketch) to reveal just a pair of his usual Y-Fronts, and in unison the other 18 members of the company surrounding him would hurl the contents of buckets of they'd concealed behind their backs, plastering him in paste in as many different shades of colour.

The following year, towards the end of his vehicle 'Higwash', so as to rinse off the gunk he'd accrued in a previous no-holds-barred pie-fight sequence, he'd make himself comfortable by the footlights in a zinc tub full of soapy water and get busy with the loofah while chatting amiably to the audience. It was clear he wasn't fully naked because we'd seen him step into the bath wearing a pair of his trademark underpants, and - wet - these clung to him revealingly when at last he stepped out.

The style of underpants he became associated with - the ones he'd worn in successive productions throughout these decades - weren't fashionable even at the time. They were high-waisted Y-Fronts made from cellular white cotton (also known as Aertex), the type bought from Marks & Spencer's for Dads to wear. I can only assume Higgins chose these because they bestowed a geeky everyman quality, or even something a little pathetic: nobody could look dynamic in them, and Higgins was always professionally keen to embrace anything that added to his comical diminishment.

But it was in the interview that Stephen Adlington - Higgins' longest lasting and most loyal helpmeet - later gave to the gay press that produced a figure that later became inflated with re-telling. I quote:

"MV [Matthew Venice, interviewer]: And just how many underpants did he get through in his career?'

SA: I'd say that if you add up all the performances of his gungiest shows and allow for try-outs and rehearsals, it must have been 1,690. That's quite a lot of messy Y-Fronts, isn't it?"



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Myth no.7
He would dive from his bedroom window into his swimming-pool.

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Verdict: true.

He did. Bernard Higgins had a swimming pool installed in the garden of his home in Putney. Every morning - summer and winter - immediately after waking, he would step out onto the windowsill of the upper-storey bedroom and dive in. At his specification, the pool had been dug unusually deep, so the high dive was probably safe, but it still caused alarm to his suburban neighbours in Chelverton Road - especially since he took the plunge in his underpants.


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Myth no. 8
He was a monster.

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Verdict: untrue.

Bernard Higgins may have been driven, ambitious, and obsessive, but he was always mindful of those around him - including his wife.

Bernard Higgins met Joan Richards when they were both dancers in the chorus at The Little Theatre, Eltham, during his first job as a performer. They married a year later in 1952 when he was 21. (Joan was five years his senior.) As travelling performers they spent much of their time apart and only had short periods actually living together. In under seven years they had separated permanently, yet they continued to keep in amicable contact and never divorced. Higgins purchased his house in Putney once stardom brought its rewards, and with her husband's help, Joan bought a small flat in Morden on London's southern outskirts, remaining there separately until she died in 2010, aged 84.

Then was he difficult to work with? Not usually, according to Ted Monk, who was the chief technician at The Delgrade Theatre when 'Higgins Alone' was playing. In his interview to The Standard, Monk recalled that on more than one occasion during the show's various runs the theatre's temperamental boiler broke down. The first time it happened Monk went to tell Higgins that the water which he'd have pouring over him in the locked shower-stall stunt would be stone cold.

'Oh, don't worry about that, Ted!' was apparently the star's response, '- I swim outdoors every day.'

But was Higgins an egoist? Unquestionably, he enjoyed the limelight as well as the adulation of a live audience, yet when performing his one-man show 'Higgins Alone' he would acknowledge his highly drilled team of assistant stage-managers and stagehands who - behind the set, with needle-sharp timing - had the exacting task of operating the many traps, levers, pulleys, and other trick devices that enabled Higgins to receive blocks of ice-cream down his underpants, be hosed with oil, showered with flour, or deluged with chocolate sauce. With decent generosity, he always encouraged them to make an appearance on stage at the curtain call to share his applause. (Well - a brief appearance at least.)



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Myth no.9
He was a saint.

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Verdict: untrue.

Bernard Higgins could be benevolent and magnetic, and - judging by the evidence of some wacky home-movie footage that was available for a while on YouTube - he must have been genial company.

Appearing to have been shot in the 80s, possibly outside a pub, the clip showed Higgins with a group of six other men on a sunny day, gathered round a table that's loaded with pints. They're an unlikely assortment: half are beefy, beery blokes (from his backstage team, perhaps?) while the others are the sort of effete, willowy young men that Higgins preferred to employ as his assistants (it's possible to identify Stephen Adlington amongst them). Despite this, they seem to be having a great time. Higgins - the centre of attention - is already stripped down to his vest or singlet (what Americans call a tank-top), although if it is a pub garden they must have occupied a secluded corner because - apparently egged on by his entourage (there's no sound) - he swiftly removes his shorts, and, revealing his customary Y-Fronts, proceeds to perform a urinary jape that's wholly W&M and deeply WTF.

He takes a glug from a pint of beer, and with impeccable timing afterwards, he lets go of an equal amount of liquid so that it bursts out at his crotch. He takes another swig and seconds later another splash pushes through the wet patch on his bulge to splatter at his feet. And when he then picks up a full glass and proceeds to swallow the pint without interruption, the corresponding stream runs out of him for the entire time, issuing through the material as if he's turned on a hose. The clip ends while his companions laugh and applaud, so there's no way of knowing how Higgins coped afterwards with his saturated underpants.

But while he could be anarchic fun at times, on other occasions he was not always considerate. He was an obsessional perfectionist with his work, and this led to him make impossible demands on his production staff.

When he was in development for his one-man show 'Higgins Alone' he earned a reputation for seizing on the tiniest detail that dissatisfied him, demanding re-designs and rebuilds whenever necessary, and rehearsing gags over and over again to the point of his - and his team's - fatigue. The daily process was arduous. His hard-pressed stage-management squad were forever mopping away gloop from the floor and washing down the scenery to set back for another try while Higgins was once again in the shower, and he expected to work twelve hours or more at a time.

However, he could never be accused of shirking. When 'Higgins Alone' was running he'd arrive at the theatre as much as four and a half hours before curtain-up, and - in the company of the stage manager - insist on making a round of inspection that took in every one of the backstage tricks, traps, and devices to ensure they'd function on cue during the performance. In fairness, this wasn't finicky interference, but a necessary safety check: particularly with the high falls he took, he risked injury every night.

The early arrivals at the theatre were one thing, but the late departures were another. As you may imagine, entertaining guests in his dressing room till one in the morning would test the patience of the theatre crew who were anxious to lock up and go home.

And despite being decent to his estranged wife, he was no angel in the remainder of his private life. At the height of his fame he became notorious for the number of 'assistants' surrounding him. For some years, a continuously changing coterie of young men became resident in his Putney home. They vied to become his favourite, and Higgins wasn't above setting one against the other, seeming to thrive at being the mini-Emperor of a court beset by jealousy and manoeuvrings.

Even Stephen Adlington, his enduring companion, was driven to quit on at least two occasions. In his interview to the gay press, Adlington intimated he had never expected a monogamous relationship with Higgins, but that having to compete with an endless stream of fresh young admirers drove him to exasperation at times. Yet the bond remained strong. Adlington - twenty-one years Higgins' junior, who'd been just twenty and a wardrobe assistant on 'The Bernard Higgins Show' when the two first encountered each other in 1972 - remained with the comedian during his retirement, and once Higgins' wife Joan had died in 2010, he was finally rewarded for his devotion with a civil partnership.



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Myth no.10
He had a ten-inch penis.

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Verdict: true.

(Or almost.) Its' dimensions were never precisely verified so perhaps ten inches exaggerates the case, but his packet was famously eye-popping, and everyone who saw him completely naked agreed he had a simply gargantuan knob.

With a sly allusion to its heft, in his review for 'Higgins Alone', critic Milton Wheldrake wrote: 'Appearing in only his underpants, Mr Higgins confirms his stature as a comedian of the greatest prominence'.



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Myth no.11
He was an exhibitionist.

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Verdict: true.

How could he not have been? He loved showing off his body and needed only the slightest excuse to remove his clothes.

Of course it was natural that for the one-man wrestling skit which first brought him to public notice his costume should have just been a pair of trunks (although Higgins liked to tell the story of how a prim theatre manager in the north of England once insisted that he had to put on a dance support underneath so as to smooth away every last suggestive outline). But thereafter it seemed he never missed an opportunity to get his kit off, a tendency that reached its zenith with the epic length of time he spent undressed in 'Higgins Alone'.

In the final, exhausting half hour of this, his one-man show, Higgins would tease his audience with an almost / nearly / not-quite full-frontal exposure. His underpants - the only item he was wearing - would by this time be so filled and weighted down with gunk there was a genuine risk they'd slip off entirely.

Apparently preoccupied with other business (such as swinging from a light fitting or wrestling with his own body) and never spoiling the comedy by turning his own gaze to the focus of interest, Higgins appeared to have a sixth sense of when it was necessary to intervene, freeing a hand at the last nanosecond to yank the waistband back up to position each time it plunged to danger levels. It was a game of peek-a-boo. On the first occasion that it looked like gravity was going to win he'd stop his Y-Fronts' descent at the moment his pubic hair began to be revealed; the second time not till all his pubes were on show; then with each succeeding instance he'd refrain from hauling up his underpants till the auditorium had been given sight of further and further lengths of the shaft of his smeary cock. Audiences loved it, but you suspected that Higgins loved it even more.

Even in his early sixties, Higgins starred in a show called 'The Master' which culminated in a lengthy striptease and slapstick sequence. Since he had devised and co-written the piece Higgins largely only had himself to blame for the indignities heaped upon him. The climax left Higgins clad in nothing more than the skimpiest of bikini briefs made of almost sheer black nylon and whose pouch barely contained the notoriously outsized genitals. For some, the sight was too much. Reviewing the show for a Sunday newspaper critic Nick Davis complained: 'Each time the yawning gaps at the sides of Higgins' G-string stretch yet further apart the front rows shy away from a flash of swollen, hairy scrotum.'


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Myth no.12
He was a masochist.

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Verdict: true.

Simply - he must have been. What other kind of person would script a stage show that required themselves to appear in six different slapstick-y sketches in which the messy ammunition for each one was hard-sticking flour-and-water paste, necessitating the use of a scrubbing brush in the shower during the frantic minutes between appearances (as was the case in 1985 for 'The Bernard Higgins Fun Show'), particularly when their body was hirsute? And who else would elect to have a wrecking ball slam into their backside, pitching them through a balustrade to tumble more than two metres to the stage floor below?

Referring to this stunt from 'Higgins Alone' in the article that appeared in Titbits in 1981, the journalist, Mike Peebles, asked: 'Does it hurt?', to which Higgins answered, 'You know, I need to go through it for real a bit, otherwise nothing's at stake and the audience loses interest.'

He was still wanting to go through it for real when he was 61. That year, 1992, Higgins played in 'The Master' at The Uranian Theatre, London - a show he had co-written with Colin Spilman (who'd once been a clown at The Tower Circus, Blackpool). Difficult to categorise, its' publicity described the piece as a 'serious play with serious slapstick', yet you could be excused for seeing it as another vehicle for displaying Higgins' prodigious ability to withstand downright nasty treatment. His physical powers may have been starting to ebb but his compulsion to undergo an ordeal in front of an audience seemed to burn as fiercely as ever.

The play was set on a summer night in a large house in London, the home of Thirsk, an overbearing, successful businessman, where Higgins - playing a character called 'Higgins' - appears to be the guest-of-honour at dinner. Thirsk's amanuensis, Bridge, and his manservant, Foster - both kitted out in impeccable black tie - wait the table but exude menacing protectiveness towards their boss. In expansive, post-prandial mood that scarcely conceals contempt, Thirsk makes great show of treating Higgins as an equal while losing no opportunity to vaunt his power and wealth.

For an after-dinner entertainment, Nicky, a young male stripper, is produced from underneath a serving-platter lid to dance provocatively as he removes the few already revealing clothes he's wearing. Thirsk submits the fully naked boy to a pitiless groping and offers him to Higgins, who politely declines. Bridge and Foster then each produce dildos of intimidating size, from which Nicky recoils, complaining they weren't mentioned in his contract. Higgins gently takes Nicky's part in the row that follows, and after the boy is dismissed a chilly atmosphere descends.

Bridge serves coffee but spills some in Higgins' lap. Scalded, Higgins has to rip off his trousers. But Higgins suspects it is not an accident when Foster, offering a replacement cup, then drops milk in his crotch.

'Getting messy is my job,' Higgins says. 'If you want to see me messed-up you must pay for it.'

'I see,' Thirsk replies. 'Then I'll hire your services.'

Their negotiations are conducted on paper. The plutocrat delivers a hand-written list of what he expects Higgins to do, and in return the comedian scribbles out his fee. Blanching, Thirsk agrees, and gives instructions to his henchmen. They don boiler-suits and lay out a tarpaulin, buckets of water and bags of flour which they proceed to mix together to a paste.

When all is prepared, Higgins undresses to his underpants and is viciously and relentlessly assaulted with flour-paste pies by Bridge and Foster. He is then subjected to the 'walk of shame' - made to hold a leaking bucket of paste above his head and to traipse up and down, while at the completion of each lap whole buckets of the mixture are poured sequentially down the front, back, and sides of his Y-Fronts. At the point at which the weight of paste inside causes the underpants to slither downwards, Higgins turns his back and drops on all fours, his slimy, naked arse pointing towards the audience.

'More?' Thirsk enquires. 'Can you take more?'

Higgins replies from the floor, spitting paste from his mouth. 'If you pay,' he says.

Bridge produces a giant, transparent syringe which Foster fills with pink gloop (blancmange again?) and pushes into Higgins, compressing the plunger unsparingly.

With the syringe empty, Thirsk again asks, 'More?'

'If you can afford it,' Higgins says.

'What happens to you, what you wear - these will be my decisions,' Thirsk growls.

Higgins' reply concludes the first act. 'Fine,' he says. '- but my fees increase. For this sort of work, I charge by the minute, and my rate is one thousand and one pounds. Let's see which gives out first: my tolerance, or your wallet.'

The interval needed to be twice as long as normal to accommodate a complicated set change and Higgins' cleaning up.

The second act takes place in Thirsk's dungeon, the stage now dominated by a Perspex drum which is large enough to contain a full-grown man, suspended within a steel framework. Bridge and Foster, in boiler-suits, are finishing arranging other hardware. Thirsk enters and irascibly inspects the scene.

When Higgins' entrance finally comes, he's a revelation. He appears in a form of ludicrous drag: high heels, blonde wig, fishnet tights, basque, suspender-belt, and the aforementioned sheeny micro-briefs. He and Thirsk proceed to have a dispute about their respective status, with the businessman claiming that although they are both masters in their respective fields, Higgins' eminence is only derived through inuring himself to abasement. Replying with a long speech (which Higgins would deliver expertly), the performer eloquently defends the role of the clown and extols the qualities it takes to be a successful one.

Thirsk is dismissive and orders the action to start. He tells Higgins that to earn his money he has to endure sixty seconds at a time of whatever Bridge and Foster wish to do to him, and that once the time is up and he wants to risk a further minute's punishment he must indicate his intention by removing a piece of clothing. (His wig and shoes are excluded from the tally; the tights count as one.) The plutocrat brags he's confident Higgins won't last out till he's almost naked, but that if he ever does reach the point where he only has one garment left on there'll be different rules.

In the first minute Higgins is made to lie down in a transparent-sided, coffin-sized box that see-saws over a fulcrum at its mid-point. Bridge and Foster aim power-hoses straight at Higgins, half-filling the box with water before showering their captive with packets of soap suds, and setting the contraption rocking back and forth. Higgins' head is submersed with each descent. It's the bubble bath from hell. When the clock display on the giant screen to the rear reaches 00:48 Bridge and Foster drain the box, raise a sliding panel at the box's head end, and Higgins slips out backwards onto a mound of dry flour. Does he want to continue? Slowly, deliberately, Higgins peels off his soaking stockings to indicate he does.

For the second minute-long trial, Higgins is made to hang upside down from a trapeze and swing from side to side above the playing space while his tormentors target him with oil guns - aiming runny, amber-coloured engine oil directly at his face and crotch. Six seconds before time's up, Foster releases a critical catch, and the trapeze - with Higgins on it - crashes onto a bed of soot. More? Oh yes - when, blackened, he clambers to his feet, Higgins unhooks the dirtied basque and drops it to the floor.

Now that he's in just his tiny knickers and suspender belt it looks like religious iconography appropriated by high camp when, for his third minute of torture, Higgins is restrained by handcuffs - arms outstretched crucifixion-style - high up on the scaffolding framework. Bridge and Foster bring on an industrial shredding machine, line up its chute towards Higgins, and, once a klaxon sounds and the clock exhibits 00:00, they turn on the switch and begin emptying various arbitrary items into its hopper: seven cartons of yoghourt, six bags of flour, a vast bunch of bananas (stalks and all), a basketful of spinach, cauliflowers, 13 kilos of raw potatoes, yams, durians, putty, plaster of Paris, and axel grease. Each offering explodes inside the engine and instantly the liquified, desiccated materials shoot out in an arc, splattering with force all over Higgins. For the final six seconds a cascade of fine sawdust rains down on him from the flies.

Has he had enough now?

No. He takes off the sticky suspender belt, and stands there defiantly in only the minuscule briefs, his face obscured by sticky, mashed-up bits of things that never usually mix together, and with gobbets of this unholy grey-brown melange rolling, slipping, tumbling down his coated body. Not an inch of him is clean, but he's ready for worse.

Thirsk is both impressed and unnerved. He says their duel will magnify and become a bitter test of nerves: Higgins must then enter the drum and remain there until either the comedian can stand no more and pushes the 'stop' button, or when he - Thirsk - calls a halt should his game threaten to cost him more than he's prepared to pay.

As soon as Higgins has climbed into the drum the seconds start counting down. Bridge and Foster empty a bucket of emulsion paint through the hatch after him, slam the lid, and pull a switch. The drum begins to revolve. We catch glimpses of flailing limbs amidst the churning, slapping whiteness.

The torture is incessant. Thirsk consults his watch and gives instruction to his henchmen. Bridge and Foster stop the drum's rotation, open the hatch and drop a bucket's worth of black sump oil inside, and then re-start the machine, transforming the mixture it contains an uneven, streaky grey.

While the drum continues to turn, Thirsk instructs his servants to shovel up all that's lying around on the floor the spilled flour, oil, soapflakes, soot, sawdust, the variegated mixture out of the shredding machine and empty the lot in batches into the revolving machine. They do this. Each time the drum is stopped, Thirsk shouts up, 'Had enough?'

And each time, Higgins' voice calls back 'No!'

While Thirsk looks anxiously on, the stage-lights slowly fade to black as the drum turns, turns, turns, and turns.

That Bernard Higgins had an appetite for punishment is pretty much incontrovertible, and much of what the audience saw in 'The Master' couldn't be faked - for instance, the discharge from the shredding machine visibly hit him - but did he really go through every single thing that he appeared to, or was any of it faked? Were there limits to the amount of pain and humiliation Higgins could take?

I was able to make contact with Jason Parry, a member of the production team at The Uranian Theatre in 1992 while 'The Master' was playing. Also, I tracked down Quentin Rhodes, who, having been something of a super-fan of Higgins (a bit like me), got to know the man in person and went on to become a friend, being regularly invited backstage to the comedian's notorious post-show parties. I asked them both the same questions. Firstly, in 'The Master', did Higgins actually remain inside that revolving drum all the time it was blending the oil, paint, and other muck, or was there some 'saw-the-lady-in-half' type trick to it?'

'I'm not certain,' Jason Parry told me, '- I was a sound engineer at the time, and wasn't involved with the set or the props side, and I can't remember every technical detail of a show from nearly thirty years ago, but I seem to recall there was an escape hatch at the back of the drum. As soon as the paint got poured in Higgins climbed through it, and a dummy replaced him. He was already mucky enough for the audience to believe he'd been through it when it came to the curtain-call.'

But when I put the same query to Quentin Rhodes, he was emphatic that the stunt was: 'Absolutely one-hundred per-cent genuine.'

He elaborated: 'Bern was inside that drum for real till the very finish, rolling round and round with all that muck slapping over him. He did have a stop button in there but it was what they call "practical" in the theatre - because it actually worked. He'd press it when he'd had enough and that was the S M's [stage-manager's] cue to fade the lights to bring down the show.'

And what about the giant syringe loaded with gloop? Was Higgins really penetrated with it? Did pink blancmange genuinely get squirted into his rectum in front of an audience?

'I don't think so,' Jason Parry said. 'I know there was a production meeting when the designer and the props man were discussing how to do it. I believe the props guy came up with a device that could look as if it were being filled completely, but that when you pushed the plunger whatever was inside got diverted to a concealed chamber so that nothing came out of the nozzle. It was easy for the actors to fake on stage.'

Quentin Rhodes' account contradicted this.

'I was never allowed into Bern's dressing room at The Uranian like I had been at The Delgrade, so I never saw what happened with my own eyes,' he conceded, '- but Bern swore to me it was real. He described the preparation he had to do before each show. Apparently, it took him over half-an-hour to douche, and he had to make sure he was well lubed-up. And he let me know the nozzle went right in and that it hurt like hell because the actor doing it was heavy-handed, and he said that so much gunge went up him there were several times he couldn't make it back to his dressing room and he had a little accident on the way.'

We were having a phone conversation.

'Do you want to know something else?' Rhodes asked, teasingly.

'Yes please.'

'It had to have been real,' Rhodes whispered, '- because Bern knew 'The Master' was likely to be his last big show and he must have wanted to fulfil an ambition. He told me that all his life it had been his dream to be fucked on stage.'



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Myth no.13
He held orgies in his dressing-room.

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Verdict: true.

He did.

Mutterings, rumours, and tittle-tattle about the comedian's private life were rife when he was most famous. Why did blokey, chunky Bernard Higgins surround himself with so many epicene boys, people wondered? A version of the truth would escape from backstage and be amplified by Chinese whispers in the interlocking worlds of the London theatre and slapstick comedy until it achieved contagious spread. After a while, everybody thought they knew.

'You know what goes on, don't you?' a supposed insider might whisper over a gin in The Salisbury or The King's Arms, 'He lines them all up after a show and buggers each one in turn.'

To find out the reality, I meet up with Quentin Rhodes. He knew Higgins sufficiently well to give a first-hand account of what actually occurred in the slapstick star's dressing room.

Firstly, I need to explain that Higgins had a group of almost obsessional fans, and that during the first run of 'Higgins Alone' in 1981 some of these would write to him asking if there was any chance they might be allowed into his dressing room immediately after a performance to watch him clean himself up. Surprisingly - either out of generosity, or through seeing a commercial opportunity - Higgins agreed, and on June 11, the Thursday of last week of the run, six of his super-fans were invited backstage. Quentin Rhodes was one of them.

'He made us pay - the old so-and-so,' Rhodes recalled. 'Twenty-six pounds! That's the equivalent of a hundred and four pounds today - and this was on top of what we had to shell out for our seat in the stalls. Anyhow, while Bern was still taking curtain calls one of his so-called assistants materialised - Jasper, it may have been - and ushered us through the pass door, so we were already waiting in dressing room no.1 before Bern came in. And when he did ... '

'What did he look like?' I asked, filling the silence when Rhodes is uncharacteristically lost for words.

'I can barely describe it,' Rhodes gasped. 'He didn't even look human. The sheer amount of gloop and sticky stuff he had all over him it was extraordinary. Some poor stagehand was having to follow him every inch of the way with a mop and bucket to clear up all muck that was rolling off his body. And close to, you could see how badly it had got in his eyes - they were red and streaming, as well as weary-looking. It was all in his mouth, too. It must have been horrible. What that man put himself through! Oh yes, and he was still genuinely having to hold his underpants up.'

'What did he say to you?'

'That was it, he was such a gentleman - deeply polite and grateful that we'd come, apologising for not shaking hands. But I suppose because there he suddenly was, our idol, just inches in front of us, almost naked, and looking exactly as we'd expected him to look after nearly four hours of getting messed-up - only sort of exaggerated, super-double-plus, if you know what I mean - the other five fans got tongue-tied. But I've always been a gobby old queen, so I just started chattering away like I always do. "Oh, Mr Higgins," I said, "- thank you so much. I'd seen the show six times already, but tonight you were more amazing than ever." And a funny thing - it was as if he was insecure because he replied with: "So was I okay?", and "I didn't let you down?". I'd never expected him to be like that.'

'And what happened then?' I asked.

'Well, another one of his assistants offered us champagne,' Quentin Rhodes recalled. 'And then we all stood there - or sat down (can't remember which) - and watched everything as he limped into the shower and began getting cleaned up.'

'Was it a bit weird, just watching?'

'Well, yes,' Rhodes answered me, '- because the first thing he did was let his underpants slip right off, and of course we all pretended not to look but actually everyone had a sly peek right away. And then we had to pick our jaws up off the floor, because - not joking - even coated all over with god-knows-what you could see it really was a whopper. And then once he was under the shower, what came to mind was what hard, hard work it was, because two of his assistants - who were in shorts and vests - had to get in there with him and help. They were scraping combs through his body hair to try to dislodge the sticky bits of residue from the flour, and they were actually scrubbing him all over with nailbrushes to remove those bits, plus the oil and soot. He was red raw by the finish. It took them over an hour. I know it was long after midnight by the time we left because I missed my last train.'

'And nothing else happened on that occasion?'

'No, not then,' Rhodes stated. 'Each year when there was a revival he had one or two of those type of evenings - inviting fans backstage and I went to most of them, but it was strictly best behaviour time whenever the punters were in.'

'But you began to get to know him better?' I prompted.

'That's right,' Rhodes confirmed, '- due to being one of the regulars, and perhaps because I'd always be the one to step in and keep the chat going like I did that first time, he sort of took to me, and we became mates.'

'And lovers?'

'Absolutely not. No,' Rhodes answered me quickly. 'It was clear from the outset I wasn't going to be one of his "assistants". As the old joke goes, I met those who were close to him, but I never got to penetrate his inner circle.'

Rhodes continued while I snickered. 'Yes,' he said, '- by the final time he revived "Higgins Alone", he'd often call me up and say, "Here, Quents " (that's what he called me) "- I could sneak you in tonight, if you like, and you can watch from the wings." He was a dear. But it was on those occasions that I r e a l l y got to see what went on backstage afterwards.'

'And?' I said eagerly.

'By this time,' Rhodes giggled, 'it was like I was part of the furniture. They behaved as if I weren't there. And by "they", I mean his assistants, which by then were all totally different to the ones I'd seen eight years previously - though I think Stephen Adlington might have been around once more.'

'Then was it true?' I pounced. 'Did he really fuck every one of them?'

'Wait,' Rhodes simpered, relishing his moment of controlling the story, '- what would always happen was this. It was a ritual. Bern would get back to his dressing room, looking like I described - shattered, and with muck all over him everywhere. And his main assistant - let's say it was Stephen - would have prepared this huge pie, like an open flan, filled with custard or flour-paste, or some other sticky stuff. It'd be laid on one end of the table in the middle of the room. And Bern would ask something such as, "Did I do alright tonight?', and each time Stephen - or whoever - would say to him, "No. You weren't good enough. You were rubbish."'

Rhodes continued: 'So then Bern would look crestfallen, and mumble "What's my punishment?" And Stephen would grab the back of Bern's head and push his face hard into the pie so that his bum was sticking out over the other end of the table, and his underpants would usually drop down at the same time if they hadn't come off already. Then whichever of the other assistants had first managed to get a stiffy would whip out their cock and jab it into Bern without so much as a "May I?", and as soon as they'd spunked the next assistant who was ready would force entry and do the same. All the while, Stephen or somebody would be holding Bern's face down in the pie, scraping it back and forth. Every one of the boys in the room would fuck him at least once each night - two or three times if they could manage it, and there were always at least six of them. That's why Bern never left his dressing room till one in the morning.'

'And did Higgins himself ever climax?' I ask, baffled.

'Never,' Rhodes said with emphasis. 'I never saw him get a hard-on when I was there.'

'And he still had the gunge on him all the time the boys were fucking him?'

'That's right,' Rhodes confirmed. 'He didn't get into the shower till it was over, and by then it was starting to dry like concrete.'

'Why do you think he wanted that treatment?' I asked.

'I'm playing the amateur psychologist here,' Rhodes offered cautiously, '- but my view is that by the eighties - by the time he was doing his one-man show - he'd become insatiable. He needed public punishment so badly that no amount could satisfy him. Performing painful stunts and getting gunk all over him in front of an audience for nearly four hours wasn't enough. Being brutally fucked afterwards by a gang of femmie boys while he was physically exhausted and totally messy was the closest he could get to gratifying his craving.'

'His craving for degradation?' I suggested.

'Yes,' said Rhodes, '- his craving for degradation.'


My much younger self knew nothing of this at the time, and perhaps I'm glad I didn't. All I knew, waiting in the moments before the curtain rose in the seat I'd jeopardised the month's rent to pay for, was that less than a hundred feet away, behind that curtain, a talented, charismatic, and deeply sexy man was stripped to his underwear and also waiting, destined to receive to an overwhelming gungeing. And I always imagined, always hoped, that his excitement was equal to mine.



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