Forgotten at home...but still famous in Europe

A tribute has been unveiled in Cleethorpes to a variety hall comedian who remains a star across much of Europe nearly 50 years after his death.

Freddie Frinton is largely forgotten in the UK, but a farcical sketch he recorded in the 1960s is a staple of New Year TV in Germany, where it screened every year.

In Dinner For One, he played the manservant of an eccentric old lady who invites all her friends round for dinner, unaware she has outlived them all. So the poor retainer impersonates them, but drinking the wine of the absent guests makes him increasingly intoxicated.

Frinton performed the sketch in the variety theatres of the North in the 1940s and 1950s, eventually buying the rights from writer Lauri Wylie.

In 1963, German television station NDR recorded performance, which is shown every year on New Year’s Eve. It is also shown across Scandinavia (it is a December 23 staple on Norwegian national television) and has been aired hundreds of times. In one year alone it was broadcast 19 times on various channels.

Frinton is probably better known in the UK, if at all, for the BBC sitcom Meet The Wife, in which he played Thora Hird’s husband. The show ran for five series from 1963. It was written by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolf, who went on to create On the Buses, and a DVD of surviving episodes is out next month. (Order)

Frinton died in 1968 at the age of 59 and has now been honoured with a blue plaque, unveiled yesterday by North East Lincolnshire mayor Christina McGilligan-Fell. Although born in Grimsby, Frinton made his name in Cleethorpes before war broke out.

Here is Dinner For One:

Published: 28 Sep 2016