The comedy impressionist Mike Yarwood, who has died aged 82, held the record for the most-watched British light entertainment programme of all time (his 1977 BBC One Christmas show attracted 21.4 million viewers, narrowly beating the Morecambe and Wise special that immediately followed) but he later confessed to feeling desperately unhappy and inadequate during the professionally triumphant years when his was a household name.
Yarwood impersonated most of the showbiz stars of the day – Ken Dodd, Frankie Howerd, Steptoe and Son, Max Bygraves, Michael Crawford’s Frank Spencer etc – but his most famous comic creations were politicians and royalty: he poked affectionate fun at Prince Charles, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and John Major. When he was prime minister, Wilson sat reading state papers with Yarwood on television in the next room, telling his wife: “Give us a shout when I’m on, Mary.”
“I pitch a person in my head and I think: ‘You are now that person’,” Yarwood said.
At the end of a quick-fire burst of impressions, he would murmur his catchphrase, “and this is me …” and launch diffidently into song. His voice was unremarkable, but it was interesting to note that if he was impersonating a fine singer – Frank Sinatra, say – his technique, phrasing and range improved significantly.
In 2002 he said: “Early in my career I wanted to be a standup comedian. I wanted to be a star impressionist and then become a comedian and develop my own personality, but it didn’t work because there isn’t really a ‘me’.”
A nervous and shy person, lacking the carapace of confidence and ego that might protect a different performer through the tough times, he seemed unsuited emotionally to life in the public eye and hid behind the meticulously accurate impersonations he created. Hard-working and cooperative in the TV studios – though his perfectionism sometimes made him testy – at home he turned into an alcoholic who destroyed his marriage and alienated his two beloved daughters in the 1980s. Thankfully, the estrangement ended when he got sober, and he was reconciled with his supportive children for the last 30 years of his life.
When he became unfashionable, through a combination of the rise of harder-edged political impressionists such as the Spitting Image team, and his battles with alcohol and depression, his withdrawal was almost total: never has a living star untouched by scandal vanished so utterly. It is quite possible that those under the age of 40 may never have even heard of Yarwood, once one of the most famous men in Britain.
“Everybody who goes on stage has to have a coping strategy,” said his mentor and first producer Royston Mayoh. “I often wondered why he put himself through so much pain. He enjoyed entertaining people, and I think he felt the pain of doing that was part and parcel of it.”
Younger impressionists idolised him in the 1970s. “He was not a satirist, he was an entertainer,” Rory Bremner said. “He had that advantage physically of having a blank-canvas face with not particularly strong features. Therefore he had the ability to become the character. The face changed, the body language changed.”
The journalist Simon Hoggart spoke about Yarwood’s celebrated “Silly Billy” impersonation of then-chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey: “Out of this bruising, ferocious, very-pleased-with-himself politician, Mike Yarwood created a lovable pantomime figure, and that’s one reason why Healey’s memoirs were incredibly successful; what people were buying was not Denis Healey’s memoirs, they were buying Denis Healey as performed by Mike Yarwood’s memoirs.”
Yarwood was born in the Cheshire village of Bredbury, his parents having moved from the nearby town of Stockport when the second world war broke out. His father, Wilf, was a fitter and his Irish mother, Bridget, a former nanny. Mike attended Bredbury secondary modern school, where he excelled at football, at one point considering a professional career. Much later he became a director of his local club, Stockport County.
He started work as a junior dispatch clerk with a mail order firm, then became a trainee salesman for a dress company, all the time honing his impersonations in front of the mirror in his bedroom at home. The breakthrough came when he met Mayoh, then a TV cameraman who also wrote scripts for the BBC children’s show Crackerjack!. Guided by Mayoh, he began performing at local hotels, pubs and clubs.
His first TV job was as a warm-up act for ATV’s Comedy Bandbox, and he appeared on the show itself in 1963. His live work took off, and in 1964 he did 18 weeks in a Great Yarmouth summer show, followed by a Christmas season at the Royal Court theatre, Liverpool, supporting Dodd.
His growing reputation, particularly as an impersonator of Wilson, led to an acclaimed spot on ATV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, also in 1964, and a short-lived BBC One series, Let’s Laugh, in 1965. Two years later he was one of the stars of BBC Two’s Three of a Kind, and in 1968 he graduated to his own show, Will the Real Mike Yarwood Stand Up?, on ATV. This was followed by The Real Mike Yarwood? the following year, and in 1971 he moved to the BBC for the wildly successful Look – Mike Yarwood! which ran for six series and two specials until 1976. That was also the year he was appointed OBE.
In 1969 Yarwood married Sandra Burville, who was in the pop dance troupe the Gojos, and the couple went on to have two daughters, Clare and Charlotte.
His best-known series, Mike Yarwood in Persons, ran on BBC One for four series and seven specials from 1976 to 1981. For the last two years of the series Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and as Yarwood could not capture her, Janet Brown was brought in to fill the role. He made an ill-advised move back to ITV for Mike Yarwood in Persons (2), which ran from 1982 until 1987, but Yarwood’s kid gloves approach and nice-guy persona started to look quaint as a grittier era dawned. His confidence badly shaken, the alcohol addiction became overwhelming, and by the end of the 80s he had simply … gone from the screens.
There were a couple of TV profiles of him over the years, and he guested on Have I Got News for You in 1995, but the most notable of his extremely rare appearances in more recent years was as the subject of John Fisher’s Heroes of Comedy (2002). On it he talked frankly about his drinking. Fighting back tears, he said: “I missed my first daughter’s first birthday because I was so hungover. I hate thinking about that.”
Clare said: “There’s a whole blurred period when it was at its worst, and after my parents split up it very much fell on the shoulders of Charlotte and myself to support Daddy because I think my mum, bless her, had taken all she could at that point. So Charlotte and I became like parents to him and tried to help him through.”
In 1986 he was banned from driving after being found nearly three times over the drink-drive limit. In 1990 he had a heart attack at his home in Weybridge, Surrey, and gave up alcohol completely the following year. In 1999 he underwent treatment for depression at the Priory Clinic. He remained close to Sandra, who remarried.
“People say ‘Mike, you’re not on telly any more’,” he said. “No, but the important thing is, I’m sober and I’m happy. If I never step on stage again, I’ve had a wonderful life.”
• Mike (Michael Edward) Yarwood, impressionist, born 14 June 1941; died 8 September 2023
