Originally Posted by
ralphy
Obit in the Daily Telegraph.
GEOFFREY ROWE, who has died aged 73, was a Cornish stand-up comedian known as Jethro, with an act so blue that he subverted the conventions of mainstream comedy with his old-school observational style and politically incorrect humour
Starting out as an amateur pub entertainer in Cornwall in the 1970s, Jethro found national fame on television spinning off-colour stories during guest appearances with Des O’Connor and Jim Davidson.
Even when the bad language was cleaned up for television, his routine – riffing on overweight women, incongruous sex, bodily parts and functions, not to mention black and gay people – eventually cast him beyond the pale for family viewing.
For Jethro, wives were a recurring theme, as in the following gag – told on Des O’Connor’s show, in deadpan style with a pronounced West Country twang, the host apparently helpless with laughter:
“… She’s on the plane now.”
“Where’s she going?”
“She isn’t going anywhere. She’s takin’ inch off the bottom of the kitchen door.”
Not that Jethro confined himself to the domestic hearth: “I went to the doctor’s and she said, ‘Jethro, you’ve got to stop masturbating’; and I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘I’m trying to examine you’. ”
Yet despite the casual misogyny, blasphemy, sexism, racism and homophobia, his live-performance videos and audiobooks continued to sell in their thousands.
A master of precision timing, the rotund Jethro could work an (overwhelmingly older) audience in a manner redolent of northern comics at working-men’s clubs. Perhaps against expectations, his humour seemed to travel, even as far as Australia, where he enjoyed a sizeable following.
In character, Rowe would draw on his rural background to present himself as a yokel or at best a bearded West Country farmer directly out of central casting.
Indeed, much of his humour was of the farmyard variety, with gags about flatulent beasts of the field, rutting and tupping, interleaved in the course of his stage performances with sonorous renditions of country and western standards, accompanying himself on guitar.
Inevitably, even his core audience in the South West divided between ardent admirers and those who deplored what they considered the negative image of the Cornishman that Jethro perpetuated. One Anglican vicar was so distressed to find that the unboundaried comedian had agreed to stand as a godparent at a baptism in his church that he refused to officiate.
A running gag in Jethro’s live set concerned his imaginary friend Denzil Penberthy from Camborne. His stories about Denzil reached their apotheosis in “Train Don’t Stop Camborne Wednesdays”, perhaps his single best-known routine.
The son of a farm manager, Geoffrey McIntyre Rowe was born on March 8 1948 at the village of St Buryan, Cornwall. His father conducted the local male voice choir and his mother played the chapel organ.
When he was seven, an accident involving a cartload of mangels left him with one leg shorter than the other and a lifelong limp. On leaving Cape Cornwall School in St Just, he was apprenticed as a carpenter and went to work as a timber man, erecting props in the Levant tin mine.
At the age of 18, Rowe joined an operatic society in St Just as a bass-baritone. In the 1970s he played rugby at prop forward for Penzance and Newlyn, known as the Cornish Pirates, and became an accomplished clay-pigeon shooter.
In the evenings he sang traditional songs in Cornish pubs. “One night I ran out of voice,” he recalled. “I couldn’t sing any more, so I just told a joke instead … funnily, it went down a storm.”
Taking the name Jethro – a corruption of Geoff (or Jeff) Rowe as well as a nod to a character in the American 1960s television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies – he launched himself as an amateur stand-up in the 1980s.
He was spotted on local television by Des O’Connor’s agent John Miles and booked for his first nationwide TV appearance on the Des O’Connor Tonight show in 1990, followed by a return booking for the Christmas Eve show later that year.
As Jethro, he appeared regularly on Jim Davidson’s Generation Game, on two occasions showing contestants how to make a Cornish pasty. A series of multiple out-takes, excised when he and Davidson dissolved into uncontrollable laughter, also featured on “blooper” compilations.
Reckoned wittier than other near-the-knuckle comics like Roy “Chubby” Brown, he was widely admired in the entertainment business. Dawn French considered him “supremely gifted”, and the comedian Richard Herring, while astonished at much of Jethro’s material, conceded that “his stuff isn’t as horrible as that of some of his contemporaries. Which is a bit of a negative positive.”
He hosted two TV specials under the title The Jethro Junction on HTV in 1995 and in 2001 appeared on the Royal Variety Performance in the presence of the Queen, screened on ITV.
In 1993 Jethro released his first video, A Portion of Jethro, which sold 150,000 copies in two months. A further nine video titles followed, with DVD sales of more than four million.
Although latterly rarely seen on television, at his peak Jethro sold more than 250,000 theatre seats a year at venues across the country. To help audiences deal with his Cornish accent, he would pretend to be drunk, slowing and slurring his delivery.
Rowe was an accomplished horse breeder, and a seven times winner at the Horse of the Year Show. His string of horses included the brood mare Flying Iris, a sister to Best Mate, and Celtic Swing’s stallion offspring, Rocamadour. He also worked for charity, and in 1995 walked from Land’s End to his home on the Cornwall-Devon border, raising £20,000 for a new cancer scanner.
Having retired last year, he was reportedly fully jabbed, but died in hospital after contracting Covid-19. In a Facebook tribute, Great Western Railway announced that “the train does indeed now stop at Camborne on a Wednesday … Except for today as we are running a rail replacement service due to improvement works.”
Rowe is survived by his long-term partner Jennie and his two sons.
Geoffrey Rowe (Jethro), born March 8 1948, died December 14 2021
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