| Twice Brightly | |
| Author: | Harry Secombe |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Comic novel |
| Publisher: | Robson Books |
| Release Date: | 1974 |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages: | 224 pp |
| Isbn: | 0-903895-23-4 |
| Dewey: | 823/.9/14 |
| Congress: | PZ4.S4448 Tw PR6069.E25 |
| Oclc: | 3074314 |
Twice Brightly is a comic novel by Harry Secombe, fictionalising his experiences as a recently demobbed Welsh serviceman and army comic returning from the battlefields of North Africa and Italy and struggling to make a living in the British Variety Theatres after the Second World War. The lead character is a Welsh comic called Larry Gower, Secombe's alter ego. The title is a pun on the phrase "twice nightly". Upon release in 1974 the book was the first novel of his to be published.[1]
For young servicemen who had spent six years fighting fascism, postwar Britain was a drab, oppressive place. For a young and untried army comic keen on the Marx brothers and Jimmy Cagney, a Yorkshire Variety theatre in February was a vision of Hell itself.
It was dramatised as a 60-minute Radio 4 radio play by Harry's son David Secombe in 2006, first broadcast that year and repeated on Saturday 19 May 2007. This ended with Gower as a success, leaving for London to take part in "Crazy People", a play by his fellow ex-soldier and comic Jim Moriarty - this is a fictionalisation of the initial stages of the Goon Show, and Moriarty (deriving his name from the Goon character Count Jim Moriarty) is a fictionalised Spike Milligan.
The novel became the first ever known book be reviewed in print by a member of the British royal family, with the then Prince Charles giving the work a positive review in the weekly comic magazine Punch in 1974.[2]