As a member of Mudcat's youth wing, I can confirm that I was a big fan back in the early sixties. I became aware of him from those Saturday Morning Matinee films when we were living up in Barrow in Furness at the time (while my Dad was training for the first commission of HMS Dreadnought). Of course, George Formby died around that time - in 1962, if I recall rightly. Looking at clips of him on YouTube, I am still impressed by his liveliness and his delivery of cheeky songs. There were some good writers supplying material to him too - isn't "Leaning on a Lamp Post" a Noel Gay song? He was a seemingly unaffected man, who just knew, "I had something people seemed to like" and got on with it. At the end of the day, it is that natural empathy which marks out the greatest entertainers more than any amount of skill.