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Like
Ted Ray,
Charlie Chester was among the last generation of comedy performers to come up
through music hall. He was born Cecil Victor Manser on 26th April 1914 in
Eastbourne, Sussex, where his father ran a sign-writing business. His mother
was a singer, and young Cecil followed her lead and was a boy soprano at seven
years. By his late teens, he had tried his hand
at comedy and also had his own accordion band.
After short
engagements as a grocer's errand boy and then as an embroidery firm's
messenger, Cecil adopted the stage name Charlie Chester and made a bold
attempt to make it in music hall. His was not an easy route to success,
however, not least owing to his striking resemblance to top comic, Max Miller,
who, sensing an imitator, had him banned from the circuit initially. Chester
was not to be dissuaded, however. Charlie
knuckled down to radio work and appeared regularly in pantomime. He
supplemented his income at this time by writing songs, some of which were
recorded by top artistes, including the celebrated Flanagan and Allen. As the
Second World War became a painful reality, "Cheerful" Charlie
Chester became a member of ENSA (officially Entertainments National Service
Association, though also known as Every Night Something Awful!) and dedicated
himself to entertaining British troops overseas, notably in France before the
Dunkirk evacuation. He served the remainder of the conflict with the Irish
Fusiliers and juggled this with starring in Stand Easy, a radio comedy
show which he wrote and performed with fellow army personnel - among them
future stars such as Arthur Haynes - broadcast to the troops and relayed back
home to Britain. This proved a terrific springboard for Chester, who was very
much in demand as the war drew to a close. Stand Easy continued for
several years after Chester's return to civvies, and its popularity was such
that crowd control was necessary when the show went on regional theatrical
tours.Charlie
Chester's involvement with It's A Knockout was limited to the first
season. On the occasion of the show's tenth anniversary, he looked back, with
his tongue somewhat in cheek: "Let me tell you about Cheerful Charlie
Chester's own programme, Take Pot Luck, that ran for years back in the
50s. It was the first programme ever, if you don't mind me saying so,
based on competitive fun. Fun and gimmicks. Years before The Generation
Game and Knockout. I'm an ideas man, y'see. Started all these
things. I devised dozens of the first games in Knockout, did you know
that? Before they started getting cleverer. Before all the Continental things.
It was me and Ted Ray at the beginning, you'll remember. But we got the chop
in favour, so they said, of multi-lingual compères. So we missed out on all
those trips abroad. We would've loved that." Take Pot Luck is
indeed credited as being the first 'give-away' game show, with television sets
as regular top prizes. Chester's claim to have devised the games for the
original series was undoubtedly a little white lie from one of entertainment's
great self-publicists, but It's A Knockout was clearly a programme that
he enjoyed his part in. Chester's career
high point was undoubtedly in the Fifties, but when comedy tastes moved away
from vaudeville towards satire and 'university' humour, he showed great mettle
and diversified. He wrote children's books, an autobiography - "The World
is Full of Charlies" - and also thriller novels (under the pen-name Carl
Noone); he appeared in Shakespeare and stage farces; he became president of
the Grand Order of Water Rats, a theatrical organisation with a long history
of working for charity.
He would even go on to write a history of the organisation, which he had
published in 1984.
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