Source: The Independent

It was impossible to meet him for an hour without absorbing his compassion, intellect and humanity… or without collapsing into hysterical giggling.

Jeremy travelled a few miles from his native Farnham to study politics at university in Southampton, and upon leaving began writing for the BBC Radio 4 sketch show Week Ending, in 1983. He often explained that despite this, he did have experience of manual labour, having spent one day as a car park attendant.

Two trends drifted within his orbit, to shape the rest of his life. A “cabaret” circuit developed, firstly around London, in which comics would perform their own material, usually on a bill with jugglers, magicians and acts of a truly bewildering nature.

At the same time a largely youthful campaigning culture grew, in opposition to the values of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party. Jeremy briefly joined the Labour Party, and remained active in the movements of that time, such as those in opposition to apartheid, and supporting the miners’ strike.

Jeremy made an immediate impact on the new comedy scene, partly because his jokes were so crisply crafted. He was a vegetarian, he said “because meat is murder, though I see fish as justifiable homicide”.

More importantly he looked so at ease on stage. Wearing a cardigan and acting out his “lower middle class” upbringing, he was instantly comfortable, even at venues such as the notorious Tunnel Club in Bermondsey, where acts were regularly sent on their way under a barrage of flying bottles.

Jeremy always succeeded at the most chaotic of clubs with the roughest of crowds, maybe because he never looked down on any part of them.

In 1986 he was offered his first regular TV slot, as a boom operator offering wistful opinions on And Now, Something Else, with Rory Bremner.

This made him a star booking for some comedy clubs, but he shortly made the decision to stop performing at the clubs, despite the guaranteed audience and income, and instead perform his own show. Now he had space to craft the most eloquent of rants on every issue, no matter how trivial, no matter how profound.

About middle-class parents he said: “They give their kids names like ‘Hosepipe’ and ‘Ottawa’, and say ‘their problem is they’re so bright, that’s why they get such low marks at school, because they’re bored, and they’re not getting stretched because of the other children, that’s why they set fire to them’.”

In 1988 he won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival, and three years later he was voted top comedy club performer at the British Comedy Awards.

This growing popularity and prestige took place as he followed an unorthodox route for someone acquiring fame. Instead of networking with influential agents and producers, he became a key figure in campaigns for prisoners who had been wrongly convicted, such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.

Many performers take part in fundraising benefits for causes and charities, but Jeremy would consult lawyers, assist and befriend the wrongly imprisoned, and coordinate the routine of a campaign. He became a patron of Medical Aid for Palestine, and helped several organisations for refugees. It is fitting that he adopted his daughter Betty from a Romanian orphanage, and first met his wife Katie while making a film about Palestine.

In the 1990s he became a regular guest on Radio 4’s Newsquiz, on which his genial, mischievous, charming vitriol became the highlight of the show.

Impersonating the modern “world” traveller, he said: “We found this wonderful little place off the beaten track, not in any guidebook, a fantastic village that only appears every two hundred years. Lovely people, tiny, no bigger than your thumb, poor but unhappy. We were invited into someone’s house and they spoke no English and we ate their hallucinogenic insects and had sex with them and stayed for 10 years and it all came to £10 a head.”

It is often asked if comedians are the same off-stage as on-stage, and in Jeremy’s case he was, but more so. He displayed an outrageous sense of mischief that would confound the modern habit of declaring a joke “offensive” by taking it out of context.

At the memorial for his close friend Linda Smith, a fairly pompous celebrant asked us each to take a flower, and “cast it into the sea, taking the moment, as we do so, to pause, and – think of Linda”. To this, Jeremy said: “Thanks for that advice, as I was going to take that moment to think of General Franco.”

In his forties, Jeremy became a regular guest on I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, that displayed him at his most impish, and he acquired a cult following for his compellingly diabolical singing. In particular, his attempt to sing the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah”, to the tune of “When I’m Cleaning Windows”, in a George Formby voice was gloriously ridiculous.

But he loved the standup above all else. He told me several times: “When I’m alone, backstage, in the moments before doing my own show, I feel I truly am me.” And he consistently attracted large audiences, over a 30-year period, despite hardly ever being on television.

Those on the right, who rejected him because of his political stance, misunderstood him in the same way as those on the left who admired him because of his political stance.

Maybe his appeal was that he represented a humble riposte to pomposity. Wherever that pomposity came from, he would sever it mercilessly. He wasn’t funny, then political, then funny again. He was funny and political, a clown and a commentator, all at once.

And this made him, for those of us lucky enough to know him, the most amazing friend, because it was impossible to meet him for an hour without absorbing his compassion, intellect and humanity, but above all it was impossible to meet him for an hour without collapsing into hysterical giggling.

Three days ago, clinging to the last gasps of life, he contemplated appearing at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, where he regularly attracts crowds of thousands. “I could do it”, he said, “But I’d be like Stephen Hawking, only not as funny.”

The outrage of his death at the age of 57, is that the world has been robbed of decades of wonderful jokes. And millions of people, whether they knew him personally or as a figure in a cardigan in front of a microphone, have lost a wonderful friend.

Ubiquitous political activism

In the words of journalist Alex Macdonald, “The death of Jeremy Hardy marks the passing of one of the few genuinely funny and radical comedians (Middle East Eye 1 February 2019). He was ubiquitous on demonstrations against war, austerity, and in support of striking workers.”

One of his greatest political passions was Palestine, and in 2003 he was the subject of a documentary,  Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army, in which he travelled to the West Bank as part of the International Solidarity Movement to be a human shield.

Jeremy Hardy and Tony Blair

Jeremy Hardy said of of Tony Blair, when interviewed by Middle East Eye, at the 2016 demonstration marking the release of the Chilcot report into the Iraq War: “I think he’s insane, I think he’s a fanatic, I think he’s a narcissist.”

Jeremy Hardy and Boris Johnson

In September 2016, Jeremy Hardy compered the launch of a book by his close friend, the poet and actor Heathcote Williams, titled Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare. “He hates Boris Johnson in a way that everyone should,” said Jeremy. “It’s prose, but it could only have been written by a poet, and it would utterly destroy Boris Johnson, if he had the attention span to read more than a couple of paragraphs.”

Jeremy Corbyn on the death of his friend Jeremy Hardy

“Jeremy Hardy was a dear, lifelong friend. He always gave his all for everyone else and the campaigns for social justice. You made us all smile. You made us all think. Rest in peace, Jeremy.”

Source: mikemarqusee.co.uk

What seemed to drive him, was the idea that it makes no sense to have fun in this world, if you’re not prepared to insist that fun should be equally available to all of humanity.

Usually described as ‘writer and activist’, for Mike this phrase was nonsense, as each activity was meaningless unless they combined with and enhanced the other.

His life as a glorious mix of disparate cultures began on his first day, born in New York in 1953 to white Jewish parents, who became civil rights activists travelling to Mississippi to oppose segregation, and one day he came home from school to find Martin Luther King in the living room.

His attitudes were shaped partly by a youth spent in 1960s New York, when defiance of authority moulded every corner of culture. So as well as organising campaigns for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, he was embroiled in the battle for fun. He was captivated by the music, poetry and occasional spliff of the times, and developed a special affection for sport.

All aspects of this background landed with him, when he came to live in England in the nineteen-seventies. He joined the Labour Party, becoming a prominent supporter of Tony Benn, and more fundamentally became obsessed with cricket.

One product of this fusion was a book that helped to transform sports writing, Anyone but England, an account of the game that lauded its beauty while raging against the snobbery and racism that had spewed from those who’d controlled it throughout its history.

This was a blasphemy that must have burst a million arteries amongst those in charge of English cricket. Books about cricket were supposed to depict glorious summers and splendid figures and never stoop to ask grubby questions such as why the MCC supported apartheid, or why the odd England captain admired Hitler, because this was cricket. Anyone but England was cricket’s equivalent of a scientific breakthrough that smashes all previous laws. And he was American! The impertinence!

The book was shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year Award, and praised around the world by figures such as Pakistan captain Imran Khan. But its greatest effect was in enabling thousands of cricket fans, who’d always felt uneasy about English cricket’s imperial image, to proclaim a corner of their peculiar game.

For Mike, cricket was probably the ideal spectator sport, because it allowed time to dwell. A day watching cricket with him was an extraordinary education, as he’d discuss which province in India the batsman came from, then the role that region played in winning independence, its architecture, the poetry the batsman read, then why all this contributed to the reason he got out to spin bowling.

His next book on sport analysed the figure that did most to unite the defiant culture of his youth in both sport and politics. Redemption Song – Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties ricochets between Vietnam, Alabama and knocking people out, each strand shaping the others, culminating in the thrilling scene in which Ali stands in a military office, refusing to cross a yellow line as his name is called out to be drafted into the army, declaring “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.”

He employed a similar combination of admiration and enquiry for Chimes of Freedom, on Bob Dylan’s influence on the sixties. Then he confronted an institution arguably even more challenging than the cricket authorities; the state of Israel. ‘The Story of an Anti-Zionist Jew’ flashes between a personal account, and a history of the Middle-East that manages to embrace the prophet Amos.

It begins with his shock as a schoolboy at a Jewish Sunday School, when a young soldier who’s fought for Israel in the 1967 war is introduced to the class.

“He told us the Arabs are ignorant people, who go to toilet in the street. I’d heard this language before, from bigoted white Southerners towards blacks. I raised my hand and said this seemed to me, well, racist. Angrily the teacher turned to me and said there would be no discourtesy to guests in the classroom.”

This incident began a lifelong tussle with Zionism, never as raw as when he was accused of being a ‘self-hating Jew’ for opposing the ethics of the Israeli regime. He enjoyed quoting the Jewish son of a friend who was accused of this, and replied “No you misunderstand, it’s you I hate you bastard.”

Throughout each project he played prominent roles in campaigns such as Stop the War, and in local groups opposing cuts in his area of Hackney.

In 2000 he left Labour, assessing the radical change he supported was unlikely to be advanced by an organisation led by Tony Blair.

His partnership with Liz Davies, who he’d met when they were both in the Labour Party, was much more impregnable, and the constant pride they exuded for each other was almost implausibly heartening.

In 2007 he was told he had multiple myeloma, a cancer diagnosis that created a new subject for enquiry. Amongst the articles he wrote on his illness was one called The Bedrock of Autonomy, describing the multitude of characters that led to his treatment being possible, written while on an IV drip. It includes “all who contribute to the intricate ballet of a functioning hospital, the Irish physician Frances Rynd who invented the hollow needle, those who built and sustained the NHS… the drip flowing into my vein is drawn from a river with innumerable tributaries.”

One of his most frustrating times was when he was in a ward for 3 days with only one other patient, who appeared to have no interest in any subject at all. Eventually this chap noticed a headline in the newspaper about the Chinese army shooting at Tibetan monks and said “That’s terrible.” Mike thought ‘at last I’ve got something to discuss with this bloke’, until the other patient said “I mean, you can’t just let monks run all over the place like that.”

Despite this, throughout his illness Mike continued to write, speak about and be fascinated by William Blake, Kevin Pietersen, Indian poetry, the campaign against the Bedroom Tax, ways to confront UKIP and the corporate nature of the Indian Premier League, and how they all collide with and impact upon each other.

And he could convey his thoughts in a manner so inspiring they could make you thump the table and yell in public.

Because what seemed to drive him above all, was the idea that it makes no sense to have fun in this world, if you’re not prepared to insist that fun should be equally available to all of humanity. But there isn’t much point in contending for a fairer world, unless in the process you’re not prepared to have an enormous amount of fun