Jeremy Hardy remembered: Standup comedian and Radio 4 panellist who skewered the establishment for decades

Jeremy Hardy was renowned, if not notorious, for his unapologetic left-wing attitudes, but it was his well-spoken stage persona which made him such an entertaining standup comic.

His strident diatribes about Conservative (and more moderate Labour) politicians would have been a lot less funny if they’d been delivered by an angry firebrand. Instead, Hardy came across more like an amiable sociology lecturer. It was this contrast between material and delivery that gave his comedy such a sharp edge.

Hardy was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, in 1961, the youngest of five children. He was educated at Farnham College and read history and politics at Southampton University. After graduating in 1982 he contributed material to Radio 4’s long-running satirical show Week Ending, then began performing sketches and standup on the London comedy club circuit, subsidised by the Conservative government’s enterprise allowance scheme.

When Hardy started out, this “alternative comedy” circuit consisted of just a handful of ad hoc comedy clubs. Within a few years, there were dozens of such clubs in London, and many more around the country. Hardy was a key figure in this comedic revolution, in which comics wrote their own material, and sexist and racist jokes were shunned. He became a perennial performer on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe where, in 1988, he won the Perrier Award, Britain’s most prestigious prize for up-and-coming comics.

“When I won it, for a couple of days I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, I am going to be really famous now and I can’t deal with this!’”he recalled, a few years later. “Looking back, I think, ‘What a deluded and arrogant little twat!’”

During the Nineties and Noughties the comedy circuit became less political, as a broader audience discovered standup and Margaret Thatcher made way for a succession of centrist prime ministers. Hardy’s polemic humour consequently became less fashionable. He never abandoned live standup, but he now became more prominent as a broadcaster than as a club comic. He appeared on TV alongside Jack Dee in Jack and Jeremy’s Real Lives, as a team captain on the panel show If I Ruled the World and had a cameo role in Blackadder Goes Forth.

However, it was on the radio that Hardy was most at home, appearing in 10 series of Radio 4’s Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation. He was best known as a regular on the topical comedy show The News Quiz and the more absurd I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, where he became (in)famous for his off-key singing. He also starred in Unnatural Acts and At Home with the Hardys, alongside his wife, American comedian and actor Kit Hollerbach, with whom he adopted a daughter (the couple eventually separated and subsequently divorced).

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Despite his hard-hitting reputation as a socialist polemicist, Hardy was also an astute observational comic. Some of his best jokes were about growing older in a world obsessed with youth. “When you’re over 30 you still want the same things – you just want them delivered,” he said. “They say life begins at 40, but I think it just takes you 40 years to realise it’s already started.”

However, politics remained his main passion, in Britain and Ireland, and also further afield. In 2003 he fronted a documentary called Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army, in which he travelled to the West Bank and Gaza to report on the brave campaign of the International Solidarity Movement – a group of activists protesting against Israeli policy in the occupied territories.

Hardy had initially considered a career in journalism, so it was fitting that he became a columnist for several newspapers during his career, including the Evening Standard and The Guardian. His journalism was often unashamedly serious, and his final column for The Guardian summed up his uncompromising stance. “The increasingly humorous tone of the news media is not an illuminating, penetrating, invigorating or even uplifting trend, but a whimsical levity calculated to reassure us that nothing really matters anymore,” he wrote. “I do not see my job as keeping our rulers on their toes. I’d rather see them hanging by their feet. Perhaps I should have been more ironic, but then you might have thought I didn’t mean it, and I did.”