Mike Reid with screen wife Pam St Clement filming episodes of EastEnders in Paris. Photograph: Tim Ockenden/PA
What a rotten year it has been for trad comics. First Bernard Manning and now Mike Reid. Is it something to do with global warming? Is Jim Davidson feeling peaky? Actually, despite being the third most famous working men's club comic in the country, Mike Reid had very little in common with Davidson or Manning. For one thing, he was an infinitely better actor and presenter than either of them, as fans of EastEnders and Runaround will testify. And secondly, he was a far worse comic.
Reid was a cracking actor. When you saw him on EastEnders, it was as if he was in the room with you. And don't make the mistake of thinking that just because his two biggest hits were a soap opera and a children's serial, he wasn't a "proper" thesp. Soaps and kids' shows may not be the hardest jobs to do, but they're the hardest jobs to do well, and Reid did them very well indeed. His credits include Doctor Who, Guy Ritchie's Snatch and stunt work in Spartacus and The Dirty Dozen. If there was any justice in showbiz (and there isn't) he should have played Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, Lenny in Pinter's The Homecoming (or McCann in The Birthday Party) and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Reid's stand-up, however, was quite another matter. I once had the bad luck to fork out good money for one of his "hilarious" live videos. The grim memory of watching it still makes me feel glum today. Why was it so depressing? Well, because the jokes were a miserable ragbag of hand-me-down one-liners, for one thing. But mainly because you felt sure there was a far funnier (and infinitely more interesting) man hiding behind the stand-up mask.
Reid got his big break on ITV's The Comedians, that notorious series that introduced a generation of working men's club comics to a generation of stay-at-home fans. The list of comics who appeared on that show reads like a who's who of trad comedy: Russ Abbot, Lennie Bennett, Stan Boardman, Jim Bowen, Frank Carson, Manning, Reid and many more. Before The Comedians, they were virtually unknown outside the narrow confines of the working men's club circuit. Afterwards, they became household names, but most of them remained trapped within the gag-rigid straightjacket of that show.
Media studies nerds love to discuss whether The Comedians was offensive, but the biggest sadness about that style of humour was that it was so impersonal and formulaic. By all accounts, Reid was a lovely fella, despite (or maybe even because of) the time he spent in Brixton prison, following his membership of a Norf London gang. Yet this fascinating hinterland was absent from his stand-up act, which relied on jokes that could quite easily have been cracked by virtually any other comic - and very often were.
The biggest change alternative comedy made wasn't to banish sexist or racist humour (sexism is alive and well on the alternative circuit - the racism has gone underground). It was to establish comedians as the authors of their own material, and transform stand-up into a form of autobiography. At first, it was only really open to middle-class arts graduates - but now a new breed of streetwise comics have adopted this new artform, and found a creative forum in which they can air their own experiences and truly express themselves. Judging by the sincerity and authenticity of his acting, I feel sure Reid could have been one of these comedians. If he'd been born a generation later, he wouldn't only have been a super actor, but a fine comic too.
