Career
Hardy was born in Farnborough, Hampshire. He attended Farnham College and studied Modern History and Politics at the University of Southampton. He started his stand-up career in the early 1980s, and won the Perrier Comedy Award in 1988 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He is best known for his radio work, particularly on The News Quiz, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and his long-running series of monologues Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation. His experiences in Israel during the Israeli army incursions of 2002 became the subject of a feature documentary Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army (2003), directed by Leila Sansour.
He made his television debut in the late 1980s in various comedy shows including Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), and has presented a television documentary about the political background to the English Civil War as well as an edition of Top of the Pops in 1996.
His off-key singing is a long-running joke on the radio panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
Hardy's politics are not always popular with the Radio 4 audience - in an appearance on Just A Minute in 2000 he earned boos from the audience and a reprimand from a fellow panelist, the former Liberal MP Sir Clement Freud, when Hardy responded to the subject 'Parasites' by talking about the Royal Family.
Hardy used to write a regular column for The Guardian but was fired as the Guardian felt his column did not have enough jokes.
His outspoken support for the release of Danny McNamee, who was convicted in 1987 of involvement in the Provisional Irish Republican Army's Hyde Park bombing of 1982, led to accusations (which were later retracted) that Hardy was an IRA supporter. Hardy made clear that he supported McNamee (whose conviction was overturned in 1998) as the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Hardy also supported Irish nationalist Róisín McAliskey, the then-pregnant daughter of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, when the former was accused of involvement in an IRA mortar attack in Germany, and put up part of the bail money to free her.
He was married to American-born actress and comedienne Kit Hollerbach, who featured alongside him in the radio sitcoms Unnatural Acts and At Home with the Hardys. They adopted a daughter in 1990. They separated in 2003 and are divorced. He now lives with film-maker Katie Barlow. In an edition of Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation on BBC Radio 4 "How to be Afraid," broadcast on 9 September 2004, Hardy suggested that members of the BNP, and anyone voting for them, should be "shot in the back of the head," sparking complaints and causing Burnley Borough Council to cancel a show scheduled on their premises due to fears that it could be disruptive in a town that has a recent history of racial tension.
He was a close friend of comedian Linda Smith, and publicly eulogised her in many media when she died of ovarian cancer on 27 February 2006. Hardy wrote her Guardian obituary.
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