Watch out, Mark Blacklock’s about… to tell you about a very interesting book collection.
Strange to recall, but for 20 years from the early 1980s, a short, grinning, bearded mischief-maker dominated the ITV prime-time schedules. Jeremy Beadle developed, produced and co-presented Game for a Laugh, a format built around practical jokes and stunts, in which ‘the public were the stars’.
Game for a Laugh was a success, running from 1981–85 and spawning the Cilla Black-fronted Surprise Surprise as a spin-off. But Beadle’s solo endeavour, Beadle’s About, which ran for ten years from 1986, was even bigger. For this show, members of the public volunteered their loved ones to be filmed by secret cameras, while their cars were destroyed, or an alien invasion staged on their lawn. At the climax of the drama, a disguised Beadle would arrive on the scene and pull back the curtain. Beadle’s About drew a peak audience of 15 million. To top that, in 1990, he came up with You’ve Been Framed, which ran continuously until 2022.
There’s a version of TV history that would read these formats as the seedbed for much of what followed, from Balls of Steel to Jackass. Game for a Laugh looks quaint compared to the psychological and physical challenges we watch now, and access to YouTube has made candid camera shows redundant. But Beadle understood before most producers that we all want our 15 minutes of fame.
I grew up with these programmes, and loved Beadle’s puckish sense of mischief. He didn’t look like anyone else on TV. He’d been born with Poland syndrome, a rare disorder which meant his right hand was underdeveloped. He was a ball of energy, and wore medallions and flashy suits. His popularity curdled, however, as the tabloids turned on him in the time-honoured British manner. ‘The fact that people don’t like me has nothing at all to do with me,’ Beadle once remarked. ‘It’s because they feel guilty about laughing at the practical jokes I play. So they transfer their guilt on to me.’
By the dawn of the new millennium, I’d transferred my affections to a different type of prankster. The dramaturg and actor Ken Campbell was notorious for his multifarious capers, including a spoof letter campaign purporting to originate with Trevor Nunn, then director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, announcing that it would be changing its name to the Royal Dickens Company. I hunted down his spoken-word performances, both live and recorded. Campbell delivered monologues on the brilliance of Jackie Chan’s acting talents, and proposed the adoption as a world language of the pidgin spoken on the Pacific island of Vanuatu. To demonstrate his point, he translated Macbeth into it. ‘I’m not mad,’ he frequently stated, ‘I’ve just read different books.’ And the motherlode of such books led back to Beadle.
Time and again in his spoken-word pieces Campbell referred to ‘an incredible library’ to which he had access. This library, he told Ian Macmillan on Radio 3 in 2007, ‘was nothing like a usual library, which is 90% the usual stuff, but an immense library of the peculiar’. Campbell named this singular book hoard the Beadlean, after its collector.
Campbell told McMillan’s listeners that he had first met Jeremy Beadle in the late 60s. Both were then players on the fringes of the counterculture, Campbell as an actor and director, Beadle as an editor charged with launching the Manchester edition of Time Out (the late Time Out founder Tony Elliott remembered first meeting Beadle in late 1969: ‘The door flew open and this person somersaulted into the room, literally did a forward roll. He stood up, clutched his balls – that was a very characteristic gesture – and coughed, and introduced himself.’)
Campbell had been seeking copies of the out-of-print works of Charles Hoy Fort, the compiler of tales of inexplicable phenomena after whom the magazine the Fortean Times is named. He’d tried all the second-hand bookshops in London to no avail. A couple of days later, ‘a cheery young man’ arrived at his front door and gifted him a copy of Fort’s collected works. That man was Beadle. (Allegedly. This may have been a bit of myth-making.)
Elliott remembered the Beadlean library in its embryonic form. ‘Even back when I first knew him and he was still living with his mum, Marge, and step-dad, Harry, in this weird block near Victoria Station, you used to go back there with him and he had this tiny bedroom completely stuffed, floor to ceiling, with files and cuttings and clippings.’ Using this archive of research material, Beadle had worked in his pre-TV days with the American publisher Irving Wallace as the London editor of The People’s Almanac 2, a vast compendium of miscellany.
Behind the popular image of Beadle as a clown there was a much more interesting figure. A polymath with a hunger for research, someone who devised formats for TV and radio, an esotericist, a writer, a cartoonist. A practical joker, certainly, but one who doubtlessly knew of the cultural significance of tricksters.
By the late 80s, and with his significant television earnings behind him, Beadle had expanded his library to 22,000 volumes, all of which he’d read. According to Elliott, ‘He must have had a 1,000 square foot, maybe 1,500 of a doubled-height library, filled with shelf after shelf of material.’ It contained such an extensive collection of erotic literature that the Wallaces’ book The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People was researched there. There was a significant true crime section: Beadle was a noted student of the Jack the Ripper murders.
As a writer who cut his teeth at Bizarre magazine, the sister publication of the Fortean Times, and with my own unhealthy interest in true crime, I’d long dreamed of visiting the Beadlean. Campbell, who died in 2008, just months after Beadle, had described it as being ‘on a secret street in north London’, so there was little to go on.
I dug out a copy of the book Seeker!, by Jeff Merrifield, about Campbell’s life and work. Sure enough, Beadle was in the index. Merrifield recorded that in 2001, a copy of his PhD thesis had been deposited at the Beadlean – ‘the size of a normal branch library’ – by Campbell’s daughter, Daisy.
Daisy told me about her visit: ‘It was Easter Sunday, so his entire, extended family was there. There were real Godfather vibes going on.’ Beadle led Daisy to the library itself to deposit the book and showed her around. ‘There was a whole section where he had arranged everything by days of the year. He said to me, “When’s your birthday?” I gave him my birthday and he went straight to a folder and there were newspaper cuttings for that day.’
Bonnie Beadle, Jeremy and Sue Beadle’s daughter, was photographed by Hello! magazine inside the library with her dad and sister. ‘It was hidden behind a fake wall in our house. You pressed a light switch and the wall would open. It was so epic, and terrified lots of people who had no idea it was there. The part of the house where the library was had actually been an indoor swimming pool, which my sister and I were quite sad to have covered up for a library – now as an adult I think it was totally epic to have our own library!’
Like so many of the great historical libraries, the Beadlean, once located at the family home on Camlet Way in Hadley Wood, near Barnet, no longer exists. ‘Sadly,’ Bonnie told me, ‘When he passed, the house was too big for just myself and my mum and we moved. The library was dispersed, but all the books were stamped saying they had been part of his library.’ The stamp read ‘Property of Beadlebum. OK?’ His grave in Highgate Cemetery is marked with a stone carving of a stack of books, and records his professions: ‘Writer, presenter, curator of oddities.’
Nigel Burwood, the owner of Burwood Books in Wickham Market near Ipswich, had undertaken the clearance of the Beadlean. As well as the significant true crime holdings, Nigel told me, ‘there were also many books about jokes and humour, a category which is actually hard to sell, unlike murder. It was a great library of a great collector and researcher – it took about a week to clear.’
The last remaining titles from the Beadlean listed by Burwood Books include Beadle’s appointments diary for 1998: ‘References to family commitments, charity events, dinner and party arrangements, and a mention of an engagement at a London restaurant with Bob Monkhouse are included. Five Waitrose recipe sheets and slips from two puzzles loosely inserted. Photograph of the Vision executives doctored with a felt-tip pen.’
The highlights of the true crime remnants are four typescripts of Jack the Ripper books, including Patricia Cornwell’s notorious Jack the Ripper – Case Closed which identified the painter Walter Sickert as the murderer. A number of titles – such as Alleluia I’m A Bum and Bogus Law Reports – have between their pages a copy of Beadle’s original hoax calling card, still circulating in the books he loved. The reference reads, ‘has the words ‘MY CARD’ printed on it but is otherwise blank.’
