Richard Digance

Fear of Frying by Richard Digance

Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, 1996

Try this short quiz:

What does Richard Digance like to drink? What’s his favourite food? What are his hobbies? What’s his favourite television programme? Who does he support? What kind of car does he drive? And who are his favourite comedians?

If you didn’t know the answers it’s hardly surprising. Few people do. Because Richard Digance is probably one of the most famous unknown quantities in British entertainment.

The Man Behind the Guitar

By normal showbusiness and TV standards he has never been and never wants to be a household name. after twenty-three years in the business it is still his stage persona rather than the man himself his armies of fans are most familiar with. This is mainly because he puts his talent into his shows and keeps his private life to himself. He restricts his TV appearance to the stuff he really wants to do, like Celebrity Squares because he is a big fan of Bob Monkhouse, and he only tours when his material is fresh. No quote in a newspaper was ever supplied by Richard Digance. Papers as far as he’s concerned are only good for crosswords, football and cricket reports, and untrained kittens…

But to answer just a few of those questions: Richard Digance loves to tour and he loves to return home. He is also president of the East London branch of the RSPCA, owns two rivers in Devon and Scotland (but won’t go to one of them because otters have set up home on his stretch and he doesn’t want to disturb them); he has a racehorse that never wins, supports West Ham who don’t win very often either; he owns a greetings card company and a marketing company; and has his own digital recording studio where he quietly gets on with various projects.

What spare time he has is spent mostly with family and friends at his home in the New Forest, playing snooker and cards, especially poker which he loves (there is a rumour that he is a bad loser), and strolling down to the pub with his dogs. He bever watches himself on TV and his favourite food is bread and butter pudding. He also enjoys clay pigeon shooting and has recently taken up golf. His favourite drink is tea and his favourite TV programme is Rumpole of the Bailey. He has also become interested in astronomy. As for his influences, his favourite comedians, he says, are Tony Hancock, Arthur Haynes, Victor Borge, Steve Martin, Bill Cosby, Billy Connolly and Victoria Wood.

Roots

So how did it all begin? With a bout of glandular fever back in 1965, which coincided with a crush the young Digance had on a certain young lady called Margaret.

He’d always loved going along to listen to the local youth club band (The Small Faces) and his cousin Mick had taught him enough chords on the guitar so he could play Not Fade Away. Unfortunately, Margaret did not return his ardour, besides which, while Richard’s back was turned, she had gone all folky. Although his passion for the girl was to fade, his new interest in the music she liked didn’t. The songs of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan replaced the youth club sound in his affections and when he went to Glasgow to work as an apprentice boilermaker, he first saw Billy Connolly at the college folk club as well as Gerry Rafferty and Barbara Dickson.

“Billy Connolly was brilliant,” Richard recalls, “and the girls hung around him like flies round shit. I fancied some of that but the first time I got up and sang for a free pint of beer, I didn’t pull anything, the song was crap and I didn’t play Glasgow again until I returned there in 1975 with Elkie Brooks.”

Ken, Bernard, Basil… and Jim

Nevertheless he’d got the bug, and various jobs ensued to pay the rent while Richard learnt his trade – window dresser, music publisher’s clerk, ambulance driver for the PDSA in Essex. The last ‘proper’ job he had was as a bread delivery van driver.

After a brief period spent touring the country in a duo called Pisces with his best pal John O’Connor, and even briefer stints under contract to a variety of record labels, Richard Digance finally turned fully pro in 1973, and his fourteen years on the job training began in earnest.

For many years he toured 365 days a year to anywhere that would book him, staying in damp little guest houses (“Ken Dodd slept here you know”) where he would boil old guitar strings in a saucepan to make them sound as new. Some people might look back on such times with nostalgia, bit Richard Digance doesn’t: “I just couldn’t understand why things were so dire. I’d go down well as a support act, return to the town months later and play to nobody.”

In the mid-70s he made the attempt to move from folk singer to writer, joining the BBC as script writer where Bernard Braden and Basil Brush among others got the credit for the laughs he provided. So he took a job as a radio presenter for London Capital Radio where he stayed for six years, becoming a qualified producer and writing, editing and compiling his own programmes.

Unfortunately a series of blunders led him to the brink of unemployment until Jim Davidson, already familiar with his show on radio, came into his life.

Overnight Success at Last

It was 1983. Dave Peacock, Chas’s other half, had invited Richard to appear in a concert for Ethiopia at the Victoria Theatre and, although he had more or less retired from stage work, he was lured back by the chance of meeting his hero Eric Clapton who was also on the bill – as was Jim Davidson. They immediately hit it off. Jim was about to fly off to the Middle East and invited Richard along. As they travelled the Arabian desert they formed a firm friendship and from there they flew straight to the Falklands in the aftermath of the war, entertaining the troops in sub-zero temperatures in tin huts, portacabins, aircraft hangars and battleships. (He is now the proud owner of an acre of land in the Falklands, presented to him for services rendered, where he plans to build a multi-storey car park as soon as the sheep can figure out how to work the lift.)

This was followed by three British tours and two summer seasons together, a collective trudge of three hundred performances. After eleven years of toiling unnoticed around Britain’s folk clubs, missing the boat while the likes of Jasper Carrott, Mike Harding and Billy Connolly rose to national stardom, Richard Digance had finally arrived.

Within six months he had filmed his first TV special A Dabble with Digance for Thames TV, recorded A Digance Indulgence for Radio Two and TVS signed him up for his own series, Digance at Work. Since then his TV and guest appearances on variety shows have become too numerous to list, but he is now one of the most popular headline acts in Britian, and one of the very few entertainers today who can sustain a sell-out tour of the country. His 1988 tour, for instance, netted him more money than the previous thirty as support act put together. To celebrate, he bought himself a snooker table.

Chatting with his Mates

It is in his capacity as solo stage performer that most of his fans will know him. But even they might be surprised by the breadth of his other accomplishments. Fear of Frying, for instance, is not his first play: Sex, Spangles and Sensible Shoes toured Britain in 1994 starring Michael Melia (Eddie Royal of EastEnders). In addition he has written several books for children as well as three novels. He also works conscientiously to improve his guitar playing, although he can already manage classical concertos very nicely thank you, as well as anything else from ragtime to Nellie the Elephant. Not a lot of people know that he has also duetted with Brian May of Queen, Status Quo and The Moody Blues, as well as accompanying Elkie Brooks and Buffy St Marie.

You may not meet Richard Digance personally (though if you write to him he always does his best to write back), but if you share the same sense of humour and the same tragedies, he classes you all as his mates, meeting up from time to time to enjoy a chat, share a few laughs and reminisce a bit over common ground.

Besides, too much over-familiarity between performer and audience would ruin the relationship, and we all have friends we seldom see, don’t we? All the more fun to be had when we do catch up. In the case of Richard Digance, on stage or off, that’s what it’s all about.

PS

Another of those where I can no longer remember where all this background info came from – a press release from the touring company itself, I imagine. There’s certainly little personal input, though I do like a good stand-up comedian with a guitar. There were several who influenced me when I was taking my first tentative steps onto the sticky old JCR carpet where my college folk club held their evenings: Jasper Carrott, Mike Harding, Billy Connolly, Jake Thackray and Fred Wedlock to name but a few. (The latter had even turned up at my junior school in Bristol, and I remember some lively singalongs in the classroom at a time when I guess he was doing teacher training of some sort before he went legit full-time, eventually reaching his apotheosis as ‘The Oldest Swinger in Town’.)

Richard Digance was of this ilk, though for some reason I was less aware of him at the crucial time – maybe he wasn’t on TV enough, or made fewer albums. If he was mainly on radio I would barely have come across him at all. But from what little I’d seen, I liked his style, he was laid-back and cheeky with the common touch, all those things you enjoy in a clubbable, unthreatening stage persona, and his tastes were sound: Rumpole of the Bailey, Victor Borge, Billy Connolly, Victoria Wood, and a love of animals. So it was only when I was typing this piece up again for the website that the alarm bells started to ring. Best mates with Jim Davidson ey? Oh dear. The programme in which this article appeared is even illustrated with a picture of Mr Digance playing guitar alongside a journalist, labelled “Richard with one of the few pressmen he trusts”. That journalist is Gary Bushell. I obviously don’t know either Mr Davidson or Mr Bushell personally but I’ve heard enough to know that I have no interest in hearing anything further from either of them.

I’ve always been very sceptical of that old adage which suggests you can tell a lot about a person from the contents of their bookshelves. Some, maybe, but not much. But perhaps we are more reliably defined by our friends. Unlike books, those friends have agency. They talk back. A circle of friends can be more persuasive, more of an echo chamber, more a talking shop. And you don’t stay friends for long with people whose views or characters or personal morality you find objectionable; you stay closest to those whose values you share.

Of course, it could well be that I’m making far too many negative assumptions here, and that grounded, nuanced, and emotionally mature individuals are perfectly capable of dealing with a wide variety of people and meet them on their own terms without prejudice, judgement or fear, taking what emotional sustenance they need from the relationship, and quietly but firmly rejecting the rest. But if you are one of those people, all I can say is well done you. It must feel wonderful.