Comedy agent and author
Born: December 31, 1934;
Died: February 8, 2019
Norma Farnes, who has died aged 84, held the title of unofficial custodian of British comedy for over half a century.
She was only occasionally seen in public, while her clients Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes took the stage.
Practicality was not among Milligan’s talents. Her duties to the combustible and frequently depressed Milligan went beyond those of manager and agent to life organiser. “My philosophy in life is just to get on with it, I’m very like that – get on with it and get on with the next thing after”, she stated in 2006.
She was born in Thornaby, “tucked between Middlesborough and Stockton” in her words. The Lancastrian Sykes termed her “a Yorkshire girl straight, stubborn and honest”. Her father Bill, a devotee of music hall, worked for ICI and her mother Amy tended the counter in a department store.
After working in a Middlesborough press agency, and hoping to enter television production, Norma became a researcher on a political discussion programme for the ITV region Tyne Tees, its presenter Jack Clarke would later become her partner.
Heading to London, in 1966 she answered an advertisement reading “Showbusiness personality requires personal assistant”. Initially alarmed to discover this was Milligan, nonetheless, she took the job. “I told Spike I don’t believe in contracts...We just shook hands and that was it. Within [the] first three months, I’d become his manager.”
Their premises, 9 Orme Court near Hyde Park, had originally been home to Associated London Scripts, a “writers’ commune” including Milligan, Sykes, and Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. It became the base for Norma Farnes Management, with Milligan and later Sykes as clients, formed in 1968.
As detailed in her biography Spike: an intimate memoir (published 2003), managing Milligan included arranging payment of his utility bills, ensuring his mistresses paths’ did not cross, and hearing diatribes on immigration that ventured into racism (“Total rubbish, I told him”).
But he was equally capable of unsolicited moments of kindness, recommending his psychiatrist Sidney Gottlieb to John Hyman, a fellow bipolar disorder sufferer whom Farnes married in 1968.
When the marriage ended, Milligan suggested she compile The Spike Milligan Letters from missives she typed up once he’d dictated them, and granted her the royalties to cover her divorce costs. It became an unexpected bestseller in 1977.
By then, writing books had overtaken broadcasting as Milligan’s prime showcase. Farnes was displeased when Pauline Scudamore’s Spike Milligan – A Biography was published in 1985, as its subject had given his consent without prior consultation. Her own Milligan memoir included an eyewitness account of the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a disastrous, unreleased pirate spoof on which Peter Sellers’ ego was so out of control that Milligan was flown to the Cyprus location as a calming influence.
During her marriage, she decided against having children. Italy and the Caribbean were among her favoured holiday destinations. Dividing her time with Clarke between London and Egton Bridge in Yorkshire, she continued to oversee posthumous Milligan publications, and contribute to TV documentaries on both her charges.
Gavin Gaughan
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