Norman Collier
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Norman Collier (born 25 December 1925 in Kingston upon Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England) is a long-serving comedian. He is best known for his legendary 'faulty microphone' routine and for his amazingly lifelike chicken impressions.
[edit] Career and reputation
Collier grew up in Hull in a working-class family. While working at BP's chemical factory in Salt End, east of Hull, Collier started making his workmates laugh with improvised comic routines during breaks (and all too often outside them). Encouraged by his line managers, he started to work the northern working club scene, with steady success through the 1960s. He first came to national media attention after a successful appearance at the Royal Variety Command Performance in 1971. Though occasionally appearing on television thereafter, he made his main reputation on the northern club circuit, and was highly regarded by many fellow comics. (Notably Frank Carson, Les Dawson, and 'Little and Large', who were regular house, and family wedding, guests.)
To casual television viewers, he is best known for two routines: one in the guise of a northern club compere whose microphone is working intermittently; another adopting the noises, gestures and movements of a chicken, using his outturned jacket to suggest the fowl's wings. However, the 'soundbite' demands of television work have never reflected the detailed and large-scale routines that have characterised Collier's club work and which brought him enormous success through the 1970s and 1980s. (He was never a participant, for example, in the 1970s ITV gagfest series The Comedians.) His reputation among working-class clubgoers and fellow professional comedians has always been excellent; however, those who have never ventured inside a working men's club and imagine they know the comic's work from a few unrepresentative minutes of television are unlikely to understand how he has stayed constantly in demand for over 40 years.
In 1970 he won an ITV series called Ace of Clubs, in which club entertainers were pitted against each other, performing their full routines in front of a panel of judges. Collier easily won the final by a unanimous decision of the panel.
[edit] Style
Collier's style is very much in the traditional northern-comic school, based on absurdist situational monologues rather than a 'series of jokes', and shows a notable influence of the 1950s star Al Read. Unlike some comedians of the 1970s, Collier did not rely on any racist material; however, his zany set-pieces have often drawn on northern working-class archetypes.
Norman Collier is married with three children, several grandchildren, and a growing number of great-grandchildren. He lives in Welton, a village west of Hull.
