Another Legendry British Comedian Dead
Hi,
He may have not been everyone's favourite but he was certainly popular with most of the British population. Someone commenting on his death said he had left instructions for his head stone to be inscribed with "I would rather be here than at Old Trafford" He was a Manchester city supporter all his life.
Q) When is the best time to sell an Irishman a block of land?
See the answer below.....
Here is part of an obituary from one of the British papers
Manning's many critics tended to see him as a contemptible moral coward who played to the prejudices of his predominantly white male audiences in venues where the underdog had no chance to respond.
Yet he also had some surprising admirers, including the historian AJP Taylor, the footballer David Beckham, the singer Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, and the comedian Stephen Fry, who wisely confined his admiration to Manning's "technique". ("He's a poof, of course," Manning observed, "but he's got great taste.")
There were some who argued that by confronting people with their own prejudices, expressed in their most extreme and unpleasant form, he was actually performing a service to community relations. The violent far-Right was said to be embarrassed by him, and he was never prosecuted under Race Relations or Public Order legislation. At a personal level, too, Manning did not quite live up to the racist image.
He had happy relations with his black neighbours, sent a sick Asian child he heard about locally on a no-publicity trip to Disneyland, gave money privately to anti-racist groups and was a major benefactor of Jewish charities in Manchester. Darcus Howe, the black writer and social commentator, recalled meeting Manning in 1999: "He asked me straight up where I was from, and I told him, Brixton. He smiled, and said he'd been there once, so he could be my daddy. And I kind of liked that... We parted friends. I felt a little sorry for him."
A) When the tide's out
