Joe Kent-Walters on his 'scary' working men's club alter ego Frankie Monroe

A gruff-voiced trickster, with lank hair, wild eyes and a face smeared in nappy rash cream, belting out songs, doing bits of magic, cracking jokes and pilfering wallets, Frankie Monroe is an old school, showbusiness relic who's sold his soul to keep the variety turns in his working men's Rotherham club preserved, transforming it into a Hell portal in the process.

Though undeniably weird, what's perhaps striking is that Frankie has already tasted mainstream success, winning the 2023 BBC New Comedy Award and best show at this year's Leicester Comedy Festival. Moreover, his creator, 26-year-old Huddersfield native Joe Kent-Walters, is signed to the big comedy agency Avalon, whose clients include Russell Howard, Frank Skinner, Al Murray and Dave Gorman. Yet in Frankie's pint-pickled marrow, he's a freak.

“I grew up at the Fringe wanting to see the cult shows, [Rob Kemp's] The Elvis Dead, Sam Campbell, Legs with Julia Masli, Mr Chonkers” Kent-Walters explains. “Especially late-night, around the Cowgate, where there's real drinking and nightlife going on, that's always been the battleground for the weirdos.”

Although you can discern the scary oddballs of sometime Fringe favourites The Mighty Boosh and The League Of Gentlemen in Frankie's greasy DNA, with just a dash of the celebrated Northern eccentricity of Vic and Bob, Phoenix Nights and John Shuttleworth, Kent-Walters initially arrived at the festival in 2017 as a theatre performer, equating live comedy with stand-up only.

But seeing “The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society, another late-night show at the Monkey Barrel, I realised all the stuff I grew up loving had its roots in live comedy,” Kent-Walters recalls. “That was Year One in comedy for me.”

He and long-time friend Mikey Bligh-Smith then underwent the obligatory Gaulier clown training in France, having come under the mentorship of Luke Rollason and Christian Brighty, the previous generation of leftfield Fringe acts who've lately graduated to Disney+ and Radio 4. Performing with Bligh-Smith in 2022 as The Lovely Boys, it was here that Monroe's prototype, Uncle Willy, first creeped festival audiences out.

“They're both weird but they don't think that in their heads. There's a showbiz optimism and they're master of ceremonies” Kent-Walters explains. Gaulier “broadened my definition of what comedy is and made me look at physicality and incongruity. Because at its heart, comedy is a trick.”

Monroe was also more directly inspired by the “ghostly old men” the comic encountered drinking in Huddersfield's working men's clubs as a teenager, “guys who said things like 'you can't kid a kidder!' They loved getting one up on you.”

As part of the BBC award, Kent-Walters is receiving broadcast development help. But he doesn't necessarily see Frankie fronting a sitcom. He already hosts variety nights and pub quizzes around Leeds where Kent-Walters is based, the more esoteric acts on the live circuit “having to get quite entrepreneurial quite quickly”, particularly outside of London.

Thankfully, the act's audience interaction keeps it “alive” for him. “You've got to have your jokes but there are responses you can never predict”.

Monroe, he suggests, is mutable, “a mask”.

“Just a couple of layers of Sudocrem gives me enough separation from myself that I can be really confident and just do whatever I like” Kent-Walters smiles. “No matter how bad Joe is feeling, Frankie's always ready. I'm mild-mannered and nice in real life, so maybe on stage is where I purge any dominant masculine energy? If that's healthy or unhealthy, I don't know.”

He likens winning the televised BBC final in Glasgow to feeling like a “rock star” and hopes to support Frankie with a band in future shows, having played music since he and Bligh-Smith were in a college group together.

For the last three winters, Kent-Walters has been working as a garden centre Father Christmas, “learning how to get audiences comfortable, letting them know they're with a safe pair of hands”, before appropriating the costume for “twisted cabaret at night… that the garden centre don't know about”.

And it's with a similar disconnect that he “forgets how scary Frankie is. “It's not an original thought that both comedy and horror rely on the release of tension, and I like to play with both genres simultaneously. But he always feels quite friendly to me. Thinking about it though, that probably adds to the derangement.”

Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!!, Monkey Barrel Comedy, 11:25pm, until 25 August