Freddie Frinton

After an unpromising start in life being raised by foster parents and named Frederick Coo, he started work in a Grimsby fish processing plant where he entertained his colleagues with parodies and jokes, before being fired. He moved into music hall (vaudeville) where he enjoyed modest success and renamed himself Freddie Frinton.

During the Second World War he made his breakthrough as a comedian and in 1945 first performed the sketch Dinner for One in Blackpool. As he had to pay a royalty every time he performed the sketch, in the 1950s he bought the rights to Dinner for One, which turned out to be a very prescient decision.

At the age of 55 he became a belated success as a plumber in the television comedy series Meet the Wife, which ran for 40 episodes. In October 1968, at the age of 59, Freddie Frinton died suddenly.

This would be the end of the story of a not very well remembered English comedian, were there not a surprising postscript. In 1963, Frinton recorded Dinner for One in English for Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), German television in Hamburg, and bizarrely it has become a New Years' tradition for the sketch to be shown (several times) every New Years Eve on television in Germany and Scandinavia (which is why the great majority of results of a Google search on Frinton's name are of sites in German).