Malcolm Hardee is one of the raddled giants of what was once known as alternative comedy. His statue in the Hall of Fame bears the legend Never Compromise on one side, Always Take the Drink on the other. But while he cut his teeth in the Comedy Store 20 years ago alongside Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle, he never followed them into TV. Perhaps it had some thing to do with his inability to keep his zip fastened.
Instead he plugged away at the live circuit. After making his name with the Greatest Show on Legs, his naked dance troupe, he opened two much-loved but infamous comedy clubs, the Tunnel Club and Up the Creek, where he continued to expose himself to the punters, particularly when he couldn't be bothered with the trip from stage to urinal. Jo Brand once described him as an "appalling trampy old mess" - and she used to be his girlfriend.
So there was plenty to remember at this bash for the old roué's 50th birthday, and a capacity crowd who were determined to play their part.
Fittingly, the bill was a look back to the early days of alternative comedy/cabaret, when anything went. There were bizarre one-trick ponies like Chris Luby, a Battle of Britain type who impersonates aircraft and military bands, and the Bastard Son of Tommy Cooper, a nipple-ringed bloke in boxers and fez who wires himself up to a generator and acts as a human light socket. Rubbing shoulders with them were frankly rubbish turns such as Ivan Steward, a beanpole in a referee's outfit who shouts a lot and deliberately fluffs his punchlines, and the Fast Show's John Thomson, trying our patience with too much stale foolery from his Bernard Right On and Jazz Club routines ("Pissed as a rat," was Hardee's verdict). They used to say that the alternative thing about alternative comedy is that it isn't funny, and Thomson seemed determined to uphold the old ways.
But there was plenty of sparkling stuff, too, particularly from the perennially up-and-coming Boothby Graffoe, who now has his own Radio 4 series, and Brendan Burns, a fearsome Aussie punk who looks like a cross between Johnny Depp and Quentin Willson and talks about sex a lot. So did everyone, in fact, but that seems to be the way they like it in Greenwich.
In the end, of course, it was Hardee's night. Finished with compering, he closed proceedings with the Greatest Show on Legs, all three members past their prime and the worse for wear, but all the funnier for that. After a kit-on dance to Michael Jackson's Thriller, with rubber bands pulling faces into grotesque approximation of the pop star's, we got the full monty - the legendary Balloon Cha-Cha, a sort of low-rent fan dance that ended with Hardee and his partners naked, swaying and unashamed.
A drunken evening that ends with a striptease - now that's a birthday party.
