Sean Hughes: comedian dies aged 51

Sean Hughes, the Irish standup comedian, author and actor, has died aged 51, his former agent said.

Hughes, who won the prestigious Perrier comedy award in 1990 and was a team captain on BBC TV’s music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, died on Monday morning, RBM Comedy said.

Hughes had been unwell and tweeted on 8 October that he was in hospital. It has been reported that he was being treated for cirrhosis of the liver.

Nica Burns, the director and producer of the Edinburgh comedy awards, formerly the Perrier awards, said: “Sean was the youngest winner of the Edinburgh comedy award. He was a huge talent – a great comic and writer. He will be missed.”

Hughes made a name for himself during the British comedy boom of the early 1990s. Like other Edinburgh festival favourites such as Steve Coogan and Jack Dee, he was soon a television regular. Sean’s Show, presented by Hughes from a TV reconstruction of his north London flat, ran for two series on Channel 4. In 1996 he landed a regular role as a team captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, hosted by Mark Lamarr.

He also became a popular author with Sean’s Book, a collection of short stories, poems and journalism, and the dark revenge thriller The Detainees. Hughes began to take dramatic roles too, starring alongside Peter Davison in the crime series The Last Detective, and playing the jester Touchstone in a 2005 West End production of As You Like It alongside Helen McCrory and Sienna Miller. He also made a dozen appearances on Coronation Street as a married man who tried and failed to woo Eileen Grimshaw.

In 2012, Hughes addressed his father’s death in a strikingly unsentimental Edinburgh festival show, Life Becomes Noises. His father was a horse-racing fan and Hughes, dressed as a jockey, delivered an emotionally frank set in which he talked about his difficult childhood and his father’s alcoholism.

Hughes was born in Archway, north London, the second of three sons. The family moved to Ireland, where Hughes said he was bullied for his cockney accent and “felt like an outsider from very early on”. “My parents didn’t know how to pigeonhole me,” he told the Guardian. “I was from a poor working-class family and I wanted to do standup. They felt I had delusions of grandeur. I worked part-time in a supermarket and when they offered me a full-time job my parents couldn’t understand why I didn’t take it.”

Hughes returned to the theatre in 2015, playing the good-natured but proud station master Mr Perks in a popular London production of The Railway Children. He had recently begun a podcast series called Under the Radar.

Fellow comedians paid tribute to Hughes. Al Murray said: “Sean Hughes won the Perrier the summer I decided to try being a comic. He was being daft, meta, ironic and Byronic all at once after a decade when standup had reinvented itself. He made standup look fun, glamorous and above all a creative place where you could play.”

Steve Coogan said: “Sean paved the way for people like me. He was a year younger but he charmed the pants off everyone with a disarming fresh approach to comedy. He bared his soul. All the women were in love with him and all the male comedians wanted to be him. He seemed natural and made more orthodox comedy seem tired. He was 24 when he won the Perrier award at the Edinburgh festival and had the world at his feet. And nobody disliked him. Maybe success came too early. So sad to hear of his passing. He was the apotheosis of a golden era when new comics almost tripped into their profession. It was never a career choice. He was an artist. I’ll miss him.”

Bill Bailey said he was “shocked and saddened to hear the news. I gigged with Sean quite a bit over the years, and we bonded over a shared love of dogs. He was a very funny comedian and great company.” Jenny Eclair said: “I last saw Sean on a Storage Hunter special – there was a huge amount of laughter. He was a cross between a curmudgeon with a poet’s soul and a glorious boy who was destined never to grow old. We will miss that voice.”

Aisling Bea paid tribute: “I first met Sean before I started standup. We were doing read-throughs of new BBC comedy scripts for ‘the industry’ and we’d have to take it in turns to do characters or the stage directions, which was the most boring part. During Sean’s turn to do stage directions, he began doing them in dramatic voices and with whispers and accents. Even though it wasn’t the most professional thing to do, we were all cracking up and it became the best part of the show. His mischievous pixie quality and love of silliness will be sorely missed.”