Comedian Bernard Manning dies

Controversial stand-up comedian Bernard Manning died in hospital today. He was 76.

Manning was being treated at North Manchester General Hospital.

A spokesman for the hospital said: “He died here at 3.10pm today.”

Showbiz agent Mickey Martin, a close friend of the comedian, led the tributes, telling the Manchester Evening News his death was a sad loss.

Manning was born in 1930 in Ancoats, one of Manchester's poorest suburbs, the second of three brothers and two sisters.

“We had absolutely nothing,” he once recalled. “One cold water tap in the house, no bath, outside toilet”.

Manning left school at 14 to work in a tobacco factory, and then in his father’s greengrocers, before becoming a singer with the Oscar Rabin band.

He was set on the path to fame and subsequent notoriety with a 1971 Granada TV series, The Comedians, based on an act developed at his club.

Manning had been rushed to hospital with a kidney problem two weekends ago.

He had been receiving dialysis and there had been positive signs, his son Bernard junior said.

But he had to cancel a show at his famous Embassy Club – for the first time in six decades as an entertainer.

Last month he attended his own ’wake’ – a gathering of 600 friends and fans at the Hilton Hotel in Manchester, to celebrate his life for a proposed Channel 4 show called This Was Your Life.

He heard tributes from colleagues on the 1970s show The Comedians but told the audience: “I’m going to be with you for a long time yet!”

Film director Michael Winner, who paid for Manning to perform at a party, said: "I thought he was the funniest man in the world. He was the last of the comedians who put the PC brigade behind him.

“He took no notice of them and just got on with the job of being funny. It was ridiculous that he was somewhat ostracised. His audience included all the people that he made jokes about. None of them gave a damn because he was just so funny.

“When he met me, he just said ’Michael Winner, the most hated Jew in Europe’. And I just thought it was very, very funny.”