Trivia

Played professional football for Doncaster Rovers before achieving fame as a stand-up comedian on TV.

Born in Yorkshire of Jamaican descent.

Was the first black comedian to make the big time on British TV.

Charlie Williams was an English professional footballer who was one of the first black players in British football after the Second World War. Later he became Britain's first well-known black stand-up comedian.

He played 171 times for Rovers in total, but scored only one goal, in a Second Division game away to Barnsley on 24 March 1956.

He was awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1999 Queen's New Year Honours List for charitable services to the community in Yorkshire.

He retired after a final tour in 1995.

He was given a lifetime achievement award at the Black Comedy Awards in 2000, where it was recognised that he had "broken down barriers".

Williams' comedy was often at his own expense, particularly his colour. He used to respond to heckling by saying: "If you don't shut up, I'll come and move in next door to you".

In 2004, he was voted Doncaster Rovers' "all-time cult hero" by viewers of the BBC's Football Focus programme.

In 1972 and 1973 Williams released two singles, That's what I shoulda said (1972) and Smile (1973), released on Columbia.

Charlie Williams was also the host of ATV's popular game show The Golden Shot, along with hostess Wendy King, for a six-month period from late 1973 to early 1974, although he often struggled to hold together a fast-moving live show, and it ultimately had a detrimental effect on his career.

He became famous from his appearances on Granada Television's The Comedians and ATV's The Golden Shot, delivering his catchphrase, "me old flower" in his broad Yorkshire accent.

He came to prominence from 1971, when he began appearing regularly on The Comedians. The show broadcast stand-up routines from relatively unknown but often very experienced club comedians, including Frank Carson, Mike Reid and Bernard Manning. The novel combination of a black man with a Yorkshire accent and his first-hand experience of life in the British working class made him unmistakable.

He reached the pinnacle of his comedy career in the early 1970s, and he was popular enough at this time to be featured as the star of his own one page comic strip in IPC's Shiver and Shake comic at this time.

In 1972, he spent a six-month season at the London Palladium; presented his own show, It's Charlie Williams, on Granada Television.

Following his retirement from football in 1959, Williams tried his hand as a singer in local working men's clubs, but it was his comic chat between the songs that was best received, so he decided to move into comedy full-time.

In 1974, he released the pop single Ta Luv, on the Pye Records label, a song taken from The Good Companions musical.

After leaving school aged 14 (when, according to his autobiography Ee-I've Had Some Laughs, his father died), Williams worked at Upton Colliery during the Second World War, a reserved occupation. He played football for the colliery team, before turning professional and signing for Doncaster Rovers in 1948, having also considered York City and Nottingham Forest, aged 19.

He caused offence to some, and was praised by others, for defending the Robertson's Golliwog trade mark and for saying that immigrants to the United Kingdom should conform to the British way of life.