A quick-change man from the variety halls who built a career on a gallery of voices and catchphrases. On film he is mostly a guest: several parts, a few minutes each, and in Yellow Submarine rather more rhyme than we wanted.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to Yellow Submarine (1968) with your eyes shut and you can hear Dick Emery's whole method. He is the Lord Mayor of Pepperland, and he is Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., the Nowhere Man, a small furry academic who cannot finish a sentence without a rhyme. Several parts, several voices, none of them his own, in a film where the four Beatles are also being done by other people. It is the sketch-show habit carried into a cartoon: never one character when three will do.
That habit came from the halls. His parents were a music-hall double act, and after the war he came up through the Windmill Theatre, radio and variety, then television alongside Tony Hancock and Michael Bentine. The Army Game (1960–61) got him a BBC contract, and The Dick Emery Show ran from 1963 to 1981, eighteen series of quick changes: recurring types, each with a catchphrase, several of which passed into ordinary speech. Mandy was the best known. The films were sporadic. The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) gave him an uncredited moment alongside Peter Sellers; The Big Job (1965), as the bungling bank robber Booky Binns, is the one generally cited as his strongest film work; Ooh... You Are Awful (1972) packaged the television characters for a cinema audience.
What worked was timing and the hapless figure: the man who has got it wrong and realises it a beat after everyone else. What has not worn well is the material around the characters. The vox-pop sketches ran on double entendre and social types, and the later view, which we think is a fair one, is that a good deal of the comedy about women and sexuality reflects the attitudes of its decade rather than making a joke of them.
In Yellow Submarine the trouble is different. The Nowhere Man is the film's pet, and it lets him rhyme for far longer than the joke lasts; we were charmed for a verse and then found ourselves waiting for the band to come back, because a voice designed for a two-minute sketch has been asked to hold a scene. Emery does the voice well. The film does not know when to let him go.
He once told Roy Kinnear, who acted with him often, "I don't just envy the confidence that other comics seem to have, I resent it," and added that the chip on his shoulder was his father's before it was his. We would not build a theory on one remark, but it fits a comedian who kept changing costume and made his name playing men who had lost their nerve. If you want him at his best, start with the sketches rather than the films. On screen he is a flavour, not a meal.
Biography
Dick Emery (1915–1983) was an English comedian and actor. Born Richard Gilbert Emery in Bloomsbury, London, he began performing after the Second World War, auditioning successfully at the Windmill Theatre. His television career started in the early 1950s with appearances on programmes such as Educating Archie and Hancock's Half Hour. He collaborated with Michael Bentine on After Hours and It's a Square World before starring in the long-running The Dick Emery Show on BBC from 1963 to 1981.
Emery was known for a range of comic characters, including the catchphrase-spouting Mandy. In film he appeared in The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963), The Big Job (1965) and Ooh... You Are Awful (1972). He provided voices for Jeremy Hillary Boob, the Lord Mayor and Max in the Beatles animated feature Yellow Submarine (1968). He was the half-brother of actress Ann Emery.
