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Seventeen years after his untimely death, the BBC is to broadcast a revealing documentary about the late US comedian Bill Hicks. Nathan Bevan looks at the confrontational star’s legacy of laughter and talks to two Welsh stars whose lives he changed

He was the controversial comic whose searing honesty and acerbic humour made him as divisive as he was revered.

But while his firebrand philosophising and scathing social satire won him as much adoration as it did scrutiny from the censorial so-called ‘moral majority’, Bill Hicks’ star would never burn as bright as after his death 17 years ago, aged just 32.

Posthumously, this edgy US stand-up who challenged mainstream socio-political conventions with his withering anti-establishment rants took on another mantle altogether – that of the righteous evangelist preacher come to save the world from itself, and maybe win salvation for his own soul in the process.

You’ve only got to look at his taped performance at London’s Dominion Theatre nearly 20 years ago – Hicks appearing on stage in a black stetson, long leather coat and silhouetted by raging flames – to see why, while he never claimed to be a messiah (more just a very naughty boy), those in authority who’d become the butt of his well-aimed barbs might have been a little worried.

And the possible consequences of railing so savagely against the hypocrisies of modern America weren’t lost to Hicks either, the Georgia-born comedian often ending shows with his own mock assassination at the hands of some unseen lone gunman, thereby echoing his own conspiracy theories about the shooting of JFK in Dallas 1963.

But in the end it wasn’t a sniper’s bullet sanctioned by some shadowy government cabal that did for Hicks, rather a year-long, painful battle with pancreatic cancer.

But even that couldn’t stop the performer, who continued to tour up until a month before passing away at the home of his Southern Baptist parents in Arkansas in February 1994 – and it’s that period which helped produce the most incendiary example of Hick’s talent.

Rant In E-Minor, a live CD recorded after he’d been diagnosed with the disease but not released until several years later, showcases the kind of searing, scalpel-sharp honesty that could only come from a man with literally nothing left to lose.

Everything from America’s foreign policy and its war on drugs, to organised religion and the anti-abortion lobby was up for attack, illustrating a fearless pursuit of free speech that trampled upon overbearing political correctness and attempted to make audiences question the ‘accepted truth’ disseminated by the media and to think for themselves.

However, trying to get his fellow countrymen onside had clearly become a constant source of exasperation to him.

“I remember someone in the audience saying to me, ‘Hey buddy, we don’t come along to comedy clubs to think’,” Hicks once despairingly told an interviewer.

“So I was like, ‘Gee! Where do you go to think? Maybe I can meet you there instead’!”

In fact, it was on these shores that the funnyman found far greater success – possibly because he’d had plenty of time to ruthlessly hone his act by then – becoming a figurehead for an emerging generation of gig-goers for whom comedy had become the new rock and roll.

For upcoming Rhondda stand-up Wes Packer, Hicks was a revelation and the main reason he wanted to make others laugh too.

“I’ve been a massive fan of his ever since I first heard his routines as a fairly youngish teenager,” says Packer, who scooped the prestigious So You Think You’re Funny competition at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006.

“Up until that point the most abrasive stand-up I’d seen was Eddie Murphy, so Bill totally blew me away.”

After which the 34-year-old from Porth began snapping up everything Hicks had produced, even old VHS copies of his guest slots on local cable channels in the States.

“Sadly I never got the chance to see him live but it’s testament to the strength of his material that a lot of what he said about US troops in the Middle East and the budget deficit is just as relevant today as it was 20 years ago,” he adds.

“Bill was very much the comedian’s comedian and I’m always bumping into other stand-ups who are still in awe of him.

“He took up the baton from ground-breakers like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor before him and just ran with it.

But the adulation didn’t stop at other comics – Cardiff filmmaker Justin Kerrigan being such a Hicks devotee that he wrote the adoptive Texan into his Welsh-set debut feature film in the hope more people might be turned onto his work.

“I was at film school in Newport at the time and Bill just became an instant hero of mine,” says Kerrigan who made the lead character in his 1999 BAFTA-nominated drug culture comedy Human Traffic a Hicks obsessive incapable of starting the day without an injection of his gallows humour.

“Bill spoke from his heart and told the truth as he saw it, no matter what the outcome.

“For him, comedy wasn’t a means to an end – he never cared about being anything other than a stand-up and wasn’t trying to get his own TV series or become a film star.

“He had something to say and had no choice but to go out there and say it,” he adds.

“He was a sane man in a mad world and I guess, in terms of commercial success, he paid the price as a result.

“Today though Bill’s regarded by many as one of the best comedians of all time – but, for me, he’s top of that list,” says Kerrigan.

American – The Bill Hicks Story airs on BBC Four later this month