Neville King

Neville King spent his working life on the club circuit in England, the fairs and the working men’s clubs, night after night, city after city.^[5] And for eleven of those years he also showed up on the biggest variety show British television had, every single week.^[7] That’s the honest shape of most working ventriloquists’ careers: the living happens on the road, and the fame happens somewhere else entirely. Pull up a chair. I want to tell you about the granddad nobody could resist.

A pub, an old man, and an act

King grew up in Radford, in Nottingham, and asked his parents for a ventriloquist dummy as a boy. He made his first bow at a Methodist church harvest festival, the kind of small, local stage this whole trade is actually built on.^[6] Whatever that first figure looked like, it isn’t the one anybody remembers. In 1954 King and his then wife June built the figure that carried his whole career: a cantankerous old granddad, modeled on a real old man the two of them ran into outside a pub in Sheffield.^[7] They named him Old Boy. Old Boy is the reason anybody outside his own hometown ever heard of Neville King.

Distant voice, and one more trick up his sleeve

King worked what the trade calls distant voice ventriloquism, throwing his voice out into the room rather than only down into the figure on his knee.^[2] Ventriloquist Central’s tribute pages record one more piece of stagecraft besides: an act built around his old man dummy that he would, mid routine, substitute for a live performer, a little person standing in for Old Boy without the crowd catching the switch.^[2][3] That isn’t a gimmick you fall into by accident. That takes rehearsal, timing, and a completely straight face.

Eleven years on the biggest stage in variety

In 1964 King joined The Black and White Minstrel Show and stayed with it for eleven years, into 1975.^[7] A year into that run, in 1965, he stood in front of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the Royal Variety Performance, Old Boy under his arm.^[7] By the time Ventriloquist Central built its tribute to twentieth century ventriloquists, King had his own entry on the page. By the time the site built its roster of working twenty first century performers, he was still on the list, his own website address printed right there in the listing.^[2][4]

Where he actually made his living

Television made King recognizable. The clubs made him a living. A reader wrote to Distant Voices in the spring of 2010 asking whether any footage of King survived, and the magazine's own answer says it best: he did a fair amount of TV work, but he was mainly a live performer working the clubs in England.^[5] He took Old Boy further afield too, to Australia, Malta, Canada, and Monte Carlo.^[6] His last booking was in November 2007, an Equity benefit show for the Salvation Army in Beeston, not far from home.^[6]

The send-off

King died at Nottingham City Hospital in August 2009, a month after a stroke, at eighty one.^[1] Jimmy Tarbuck and Tom O’Connor sent him letters while he was in the hospital.^[1] His agent of twenty years, Brian Hart, put it about as plainly as an agent ever puts anything: "I hated artists because they are a horrible lot, apart from Neville King. He was a lovely guy. If you were a friend of his, you were a friend."^[1] His wife Joanie said he had the whole hospital staff laughing right up to the end, because as she put it, he always used to say you should have a laugh every day.^[1]

His headstone in Nottinghamshire gives his birth name first, Neville Parnham, and under it the name everybody in this business actually knew, Neville King, entertainer.^[1] Under both names, one line: he lived for love and laughter. For a man who spent his whole working life making a wooden old-timer say things that got a room roaring, that's exactly the right epitaph.

Built out of a real old man met outside a pub in Sheffield, and Old Boy still outworked most acts that started life in a proper workshop. Eleven years on the Queen's telly and he never once forgot which one of them was the granddad.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy