He's a wise fool
	He had a hard youthtime ... but in five years, from his first professional appearance, he became a TVstar, flew to America for a ten-minute Guest Spot on the Ed Sullivan show, was featured in a Royal Variety Show at the London Palladium, and also was invited to provide fun for the Royal Household at Windsor.

If you ever happened to meet Norman Wisdom in a bus, or a train, he would be practically conspicuous by his absence, likely to be 'kipping' quietly, without snores, in a corner. This ability to cat-nap, when and where he can, is one of the secrets of the vitality that keeps him going, on and on, with the energy of a mouse going round in a cage. There isn't very much of him, regarding size, so maybe that helps in the matter of using up energy, but what little there is does treble duty! His own name for himself is 'The Gump', the nitwit who does everything wrong for the best of good reasons. In this he has much in common with the cinema's most famous clown, Charlie Chaplin, who arrived at fame and fortune in Hollywood films, many years ago. Little Norman has often been compared with Chaplin, and their lives have run in parallel directions, in many ways, as far as their careers are concerned. When he was small Chaplin was a poor boy who lived in Kennington. When Norman Wisdom was small, he was a poor boy too, living in the little back streets of the Paddington district of London. Norman's Dad was a chauffeur. Norman and his brother travelled with their parents, on jobs,

and at one time, the Wisdom boys went to school in Oban, in Scotland. Chaplin remembers more of his mother... who looked out of the front window of their Kennington home and taught Charlie much of the mime, or mimicry, that had very much to do with his early success . . . describing people walking along the street. Wisdom remembers his mother as an equally gay character, in a slightly different way... a woman being very busy getting her sons cracking on the matter of food and money, both of them obtainable from nearby jobs, at street-stalls, and any other jobs they could find for themselves. The Wisdom family was domiciled in Kent when young Norman got his first job, as an errand boy-at ten shillings a week. He beat all his competitors, in the errand-boy job, because he had a bike that helped... and in no time at all he progressed to another errand-boy job that paid twelve shillings a week. From being an errand boy in Kent Wisdom progressed to becoming a learner-waiter, in London until the day he let fall a trayful of breakfast for a rather important client... after which he and his chum decided they would go to sea, and hitch-hiked their way to Cardiff. Norman went to sea, as a cabin boy in a ship bound for South America.

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This article was edited by Maud Miller of Hulton Press and was taken from the GIRL Film and Television Annual 1. Printed in the UK in 1957.