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Marty Feldman

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Marty Feldman was born in the East End of London in 1934. After starting in showbusiness as a jazz trumpeter, by the age of 20 he decided to pursue a career in comedy and formed a writing partnership with Barry Took.

They wrote a few episodes of The Army Game and the bulk of Bootsie and Snudge, both comedies for ITV, and the BBC radio show Round the Horne, which starred Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams.

The sketch comedy series At Last the 1948 Show featured Feldman's first screen performances alongside Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Feldman was co-author the famous Four Yorkshiremen sketch, which debuted on the show, and was subsequently script editor on The Frost Report , where he co-wrote the ‘I know my place...’ class sketch.

David Frost claimed Feldman was 'too grotesque', but Marty himself said his bulbous eyes - left protruding after a botched childhood operation for his Graves' disease - helped provide 'the right packaging for my job...the right packaging for a clown.’

In 1968 Feldman was given his own series by the BBC called Marty, it featured Brooke-Taylor, John Junkin and Roland MacLeod with John Cleese as one of the writers. The series was a hit overseas, allowing him to launch a launch a film career. His first feature role was in Every Home Should Have One – but his best-known role was as Igor in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein.

Feldman was married to Lauretta Sullivan from January 1959 until his death in December 1982, suffering a heart attack in Mexico City while filming Yellowbeard. He was 42. He is buried in the Hollywood Hills Cemetery near his idol, Buster Keaton.

Marty Feldman on the nature of comedy

BBC releases fascinating 1969 documentary - watch here

The BBC has released a rare 1969 documentary in which Marty Feldman examines the nature of comedy.

Now available on YouTube, the 42-minute film features interviews with fellow comics such as Eric Morecambe, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Sandy Powell and writers Johnny Speight, Denis Norden and his own long-term collaborator Barry Took.

Fedlman and Morecambe

It was made following the success of Feldman’s Bafta-winning BBC sketch show but before he found Hollywood success in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.

In it, he speaks about his motivations for doing comedy, in an analysis that will feel familiar to modern comedy fans but that was rarely aired at the time.

After explaining how he started his showbiz career in Dreamland in Margate as a ‘Red Indian fakir act', he tells viewers: ‘Making people laugh was just something you did because you wanted the approval it brought you. Maybe because you just enjoyed it.

‘Now, about 25 years later, I still feel the same. I'm a comic because I enjoy it. But with the pressure of having to be funny all the time, I find that I enjoy it less and less.

‘Comedy performing, for me anyway, is a kind of neurosis which I exploit. You plagiarise your inadequacies, your hangups, and you make comic capital out of them. After all, it's not normal to parade yourself in front of other people and invite them to laugh at you.

‘All the comics I've met felt themselves to be somehow social freaks, at odds with their environment because of their background or maybe the way they looked.’

The film was first broadcast on June 7, 1969, under the title No, But Seriously… as part of the occasional documentary series One Pair Of Eyes – an ironic title given Feldman was known for his distinctive bulging eyes.

The series of personal films was commissioned by David Attenborough, who was BBC Two's director of programmes at the time.

Watch it in full here: