Comedian

Born: November 10 1965;

Died: October 15 2017

SEAN Hughes, who has died aged 51, was a stand-up comedian, actor and writer who won the Perrier Award (now the Edinburgh Comedy Award) in 1990; for many years he was one of the team captains on the BBC TV music panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Yet Hughes deliberately retreated from his enormous early success; he gave up performing for almost seven years, and when he returned to comedy he avoided television and crowd-pleasing stadium shows in favour of darker, more involved narratives at smaller venues.

Hughes belonged to the first generation of comics to follow those who gained public attention in the early 1980s, composed of a mixture of “alternative” comedians from the Comedy Store in central London, and Cambridge Footlights graduates (such as Fry and Laurie). He, and contemporaries such as Stewart Lee, Harry Hill, Steve Coogan and Rob Newman, began working when stand-up was thus growing in popularity, but when young comedians were still eager to experiment with the form – and in particular to distance themselves from the stereotypical comic of the 1970s Northern club circuit.

READ MORE: Comedian Sean Hughes dies aged 51

“We went in to comedy not to make money,” he told one interviewer. “The next generation went in to make money… a lot of comedy has become like speed dating.” Hughes, despite his longstanding run on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, thought that the plethora of television panel shows had been damaging. “I love all the guys involved with it, but I cannot stand Mock the Week. I just think it’s disgusting.”

He also regretted the growth of “cosy” comedy, which concentrated on “six good 10-minute chunks”. “Comedy is supposed to make people feel good about themselves, not just ‘ha-ha, next one’.”

Hughes’s own work very often dealt with narratives, often – particularly in his postmodern sitcom, Sean’s Show – with elements of surrealism. He was not afraid to incorporate pathos and large themes; his 2013 show Life Becomes Noises was a two-hour meditation on his relationship with his parents, which did not flinch from examining his father’s alcoholism and death.

His Perrier-award-winning show at the 1990 Edinburgh Festival, A One Night Stand with Sean Hughes, took as its central conceit a thinly-disguised version of Hughes himself, as a wistful, slightly bemused Smiths fan, waiting by the telephone in his bedsit. It was a persona developed on Sean’s Show, which ran for two series on Channel 4 in 1992 and 1993.

The programme was set in what purported to be Hughes’s houses in Muswell Hill and later Chelsea. But the realism of this domestic setting, and Hughes’s character as a baffled, Morrissey-obsessed misfit, were constantly undermined by frequent references to the fact that it was a sitcom. In one episode, frustrated by his love-life, Hughes announced that he is going to write the script himself.

Quotidien problems (his crush on Susan, the unwelcome attentions of Angela, “who I definitely did not lead on”; grasping builders; a trip to the hospital) mixed with brilliant surreal notions; a spider which was the reincarnation of Elvis Presley, Windsor Davies popping round to set jelly in the bath; phone calls from God and, in the second series, footballs constantly flying in from Stamford Bridge.

John Hughes was born in Archway, north London, on November 10 1965, one of three sons of a mother from Cork who was a traffic warden and a father from Dublin who, when sober, was a driving instructor. When he was six, however, he moved to Firhouse in Dublin, where he attended a Christian Brothers’ school in Ballyroan.

“I got a lot of stick, like, ‘Shut up, you Brit,’ and I felt like an outsider from very early on,” he later said. One brother was athletic; the other went to business school and was regarded as the brains of the family. Sean became fascinated by comedy, and listened to tapes of Steve Martin, Billy Connolly and his great hero, Richard Pryor.

He began at the Comedy Store in 1987 and quickly made an impression. When he performed A One-Night Stand at Edinburgh three years later, he was just 24, and the youngest-ever winner of the Perrier. Television followed (as, in 1991, did a small part in The Commitments as a record producer).

From 1996 until 2002, he was one of the team captains (with Phill Jupitus) on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, a comedy show masquerading as a pop music quiz. Hughes’s expertise in this area was unfeigned (as was his devotion to The Cure and The Smiths), and he easily reached for sly references in lyrics to poke fun at the musicians who appeared as guests. Nick Heyward of Haircut 100, for example, was greeted with the question: “What was it about the lake that frightened you so much?”

After touring Australia with the caustic American comedian Bill Hicks, with whom he became friendly, Hughes grew more and more disillusioned with large-scale shows and abandoned stand-up. He wrote two novels: The Detainees (1998) and It’s What He Would Have Wanted (2000), both rather darker than reviewers had expected from his previous work. He later claimed that he could have done an advertisement in an afternoon and made twice as much money.

He also occasionally continued to perform in straight roles, notably as the encyclopaedic library-based friend of Peter Davison’s character in The Last Detective (2003-2007) and in a short stint on Coronation Street in 2007. In 2002 he was the lead in a disappointing film adaptation of Spike Milligan’s Puckoon. He popped up in Casualty and was splendid as the voice of Finbar the Shark on the CBeebies series Rubbadubbers.

His most recent shows, which both toured, were Penguins (2014) and last year’s Mumbo Jumbo, which featured at the Glasgow Comedy Festival.

Hughes was universally liked by his fellow performers, and readily engaged with his fans. Besides music, he was an obsessive fan of Crystal Palace, and a keen smoker, drinker and vegetarian (all traits which he mocked in his routines).

He died, apparently of heart failure, on Monday morning; it had been reported that he had been receiving treatment for cirrhosis of the liver. His last tweet, on October 8, said simply “In hospital”.

ANDREW MCKIE