Jimmy Cricket, Northern Irish comedian and TV star famed for his catchphrase ‘And there’s more!’
Jimmy Cricket, Northern Irish comedian and TV star famed for his catchphrase ‘And there’s more!’
Telegraph ObituariesTue, August 4, 2026 at 1:46 PM UTC
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Jimmy Cricket: ‘His round, artless features radiate amiability’ - Harry Goodwin/Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images/
Jimmy Cricket, who has died aged 80, purveyed old-school gags with an ingenuous charm that made him one of the most popular comedians of the 1980s.
A Northern Irishman who settled in England, he traded to an extent on the “Thick Mick” stereotype – on stage he would wear a pair of wellies marked “L” and “R” on the wrong feet – but in such an inoffensive style that he remained as popular with his compatriots as he was with audiences on the mainland.
Much of his act comprised “Letters from Mammy”, in which he read out missives, supposedly from his mother back in sleepy “Ballygobackwards”, that followed an Irish tradition of punning whimsy. (“Dear Jimmy, Something terrible has happened in the village. Somebody threw a bucket of Domestos over the parish priest. But they caught the fellow who did it and he was fined £20 for a bleach of the priest.”)
Performing in ITV’s A Night of 100 Stars in 1990 - ITV/Shutterstock
Cricket was instantly recognisable in his professional uniform of dinner jacket, bowtie and floppy hat. It was the mock-Edwardian dress he had adopted for an appearance on The Good Old Days early in his career and he found that it suited his comic style.
Where his fellow Northern Irish comic Frank Carson would pronounce “It’s the way I tell ’em” as he reduced his audiences to helpless mirth, Cricket would greet guffaws with the phrase “And there’s more” – though to his detractors this was more a threat than a promise.
The catchphrase duly supplied the title for a successful television show, which saw Cricket occupy a primetime slot on ITV; there were four series between 1985 and 1988. And There’s More was a mixture of stand-up and sketches, much of it written by Eddie Braben, formerly Morecambe and Wise’s star scriptwriter. Braben also wrote his radio series Jimmy’s Cricket Team, broadcast on BBC Radio 2 from 1990 to 1994.
Appearing in pantomime with Dana at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, in 1991 - Mike Grimes/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
If Cricket was not to everybody’s taste, he was hard to dislike. In 1985 The Daily Telegraph’s television critic Richard Last, while deprecating his “awful old jokes”, observed: “His round, artless features radiate amiability, devotion to duty and the desire to please. He is a patently nice, gentle man who has worked hard to get where he is… I felt quite guilty at not finding him funnier.”
For his own part, Cricket was proud to be part of a group of comics, along with Carson and Roy Walker, who showed English audiences in the 1980s that there was more to the Irish than the grim catalogue played out on the news every evening.
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The youngest of six children (one of whom died in infancy) of Catholic parents, he was born James Joseph Mulgrew on October 17 1945, and was brought up in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, and later in Belfast.
His mother, Philomena, née Conlon, was a shopkeeper and his father, Frank, variously a publican, taxi driver, auctioneer and undertaker, with a reputation as a local character. On one occasion, Jimmy recalled, Frank gave three GIs a lift in the back of his hearse; when one complained about the bumpy ride as he alighted, “without skipping a beat my dad replied, ‘You’re the first one to get out of there that’s complained.’”
Jimmy left school at 16 and worked in a betting shop before becoming a redcoat at Butlin’s Mosney in Co Meath. He went on to transfer to Butlin’s in Clacton-on-Sea and was subsequently a Pontins bluecoat in Manchester, then worked in factories and as a salesman while he played comedy clubs at weekends.
Cricket, left, with Ernie Wise and Norman Wisdom in 1989 - Mike Stephens/PA Wire
In 1974 he married May Tweedie. “She was unbelievable,” he recalled. “She got a job in a crisp factory so that I could give up the door-to-door selling and concentrate on developing the act. That was probably the game changer for me.” His agent having decided that “Mulgrew sounded too Irish”, he adopted his stage name in homage to Jiminy Cricket, the character in one of his favourite Disney films, Pinocchio.
In 1980 Cricket made his name as a contestant on the LWT talent competition Search for a Star. Though he came second in the final to the impressionist Fogwell Flax, he was launched on an interminable round of television panel games and variety programmes. In 1987 he was the subject of This Is Your Life.
As his television fame faded, he remained in demand as a pantomime performer, and as a touring comedian until shortly before his death. His act remained gentle and family-friendly: “It becomes a sort of a crusade, which I didn’t really intend, I’m just being myself, but I just feel it’s what a lot of the people want.”
With his wife May and family in the 1980s - TV Times/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Latterly he was a regular columnist for the Lancashire Evening Post, and he published his memoirs, Come ’Ere, There’s More, in 2023. In 2015 he was made a Knight of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Francis for his charity work.
Jimmy Cricket is survived by his wife and their two sons and two daughters.
Jimmy Cricket, born October 17 1945, died August 3 2026
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
