Skip to content
Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Frankie's On Call!

Frankie Howerd

ITV · 1992 · 30 min

A veteran comic works the room at a Nottingham hospital.

Watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Frankie Howerd’s final television series took a simple premise: drop a veteran comic into highly specific workplaces and let him work the room. For Frankie’s On Call!, he sets up shop at Nottingham’s University Hospital, running through his stand-up routines for a crowd of doctors and nurses at the Queens Medical Centre. The setting gives him a captive audience for his signature asides, loaded pauses, and feigned outrage at their reactions.

Filmed in early 1992, this set captures Howerd during his final late-life revival. After finding an unexpected new following with university students following an Oxford Union appearance, he booked this run of four location-based television specials. He died in April of that year, two months before the series was broadcast. The performance relies entirely on his enduring mechanics, bringing decades of well-worn stage timing to a quiet hospital room.

The set list

2 bits

  1. A man in our road went to Amsterdam for a sex-change, paid two thousand pounds, and came back without a sausage.

    Shared as part of his comedic views on medicine delivered directly to an audience of healthcare workers.

  2. Feeling poorly: 'Woke up this morning and felt funny. Whaddya mean, about time?'

    Self-deprecating health complaint combined with rapid mock-indignant interaction with audience reactions.

How it plays

Tone
Mock solemn, indignant, and bawdy
On stage
Characterized by his droopy basset-hound jaw, mock solemnity, rolling eyes, hands on hips expressing indignation, and sibilant catchphrases.
Pace
Deliberately meandering; jokes 'went round the houses, down the trousers, up the whasssits' where the punchlines were secondary to the pleasure of seeing them arrive.
About
medicine, illness, sex-change operations

What the critics said

Praised by The Independent as an exit worthy of 'a prince among fools,' noting that while the routine was familiar, it retained the timeless pleasure of his classic comedic delivery.

In the room: Performed before an audience of hospital staff.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: comedy.co.uk, tv24.co.uk, independent.co.uk, en.wikipedia.org.

Backstory

Filmed for hospital staff at Nottingham's University Hospital just three days before Howerd died on April 19, 1992, and broadcast posthumously in July 1992.

Details

Released
Taped
Queens Medical Centre, University Hospital, Nottingham
Runtime
30 min
Where
ITV
Director
Dennis Liddington
Topics
Before
Frankie's On Fire! (1992)
After
Frankie's On Board! (1992)

More from Frankie Howerd

If you liked this