“I do not see my job as keeping our rulers on their toes; I’d rather see them hanging by their feet.” So wrote Jeremy Hardy in his final column for the Guardian in 2001. Hardy was one of the country’s most prominent political comedians, a winner of the Perrier award (the so-called “Oscars of comedy”) in an era when Frank Skinner, Steve Coogan and Sean Hughes parlayed the prize into showbiz ubiquity. Not so Hardy, who won a devoted following with his radio work but did not flourish on TV – thanks in part to his truculent politics.

Those found their best expression in his live work, and in his activism – but there was no hiding his leftwing commitments on The News Quiz and even I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the well-loved Radio 4 shows on which Hardy was a panellist. On the former, Hardy could flex the satirical muscles he had honed in his standup. (“The only way you can ever accuse a Conservative of hypocrisy is if they walk past a homeless person without kicking him in the face.”) On the latter, he became celebrated for his excruciatingly off-key singing in the show’s Pick Up Song round. “It is a matter of concern to me,” he complained, “that I have spent 27 years thinking of witty and insightful things to say about important matters … and yet the best response I ever get from an audience is for singing badly.”

Also on Radio 4, the comic hosted 10 series over 20 years of his monologue Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, counselling listeners on subjects including How to Be Truly Free, How to Be a Leader of Men, and How to Die. Even in these, Hardy’s trenchant views on current affairs frequently surfaced. A later series, Jeremy Hardy Feels It, spoke more intimately about emotions – sadness, fear, hope – at a time when, even in his live work, he was edging towards a more personal perspective. “You get more introspective as you get older,” he told one interviewer. “Now both my parents are dead, I’m reflecting on my own life a lot more.”

Hardy embarked on a comedy career just as a new politicised generation – the so-called alternative comedians orbiting around Alexei Sayle – were taking pop culture by storm. In the mid-80s, Hardy starred (as Jeremy the socialist boom operator) in the BBC2 sketch show that launched Rory Bremner’s career, Now – Something Else, before securing the Perrier in 1988.

For many in that period (Fry and Laurie, Emma Thompson, Eddie Izzard), Perrier attention acted as a springboard to superstardom. But a TV vehicle for Hardy and Jack Dee, Jack and Jeremy’s Real Lives, flopped on Channel 4. The BBC’s If I Ruled the World (created by Richard Osman) – a panel show parodying politicians’ behaviour – fared better, and Hardy was disappointed when it was axed after only two series. Notwithstanding his occasional panel show appearances, in many hangdog interviews (lightly-worn miserabilism was one of his favourite poses) Hardy expressed jaundiced views about making TV and the compromises it entailed – unlike radio, his comfort zone and natural home.

Now and then, he railed against the higher visibility of inferior talents: “When the comedy comes on [TV], and you see all the people earning a bloody fortune, doing stuff that’s been written by writers, you think ‘oh God’, it’s like a slap in the face.”

But Hardy was too principled to chase that kind of fame, and in any event, remained a popular live act, in the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue shows that toured the UK from 2007, and in his regular standup shows. The latter made few concessions to comedy fashion. Hardy seldom returned to the Edinburgh fringe, the commercialism of which he found distasteful. His shows remained rambling and conversational; his politics unapologetic and to the fore. But the jokes were good, and the personality (militancy and mildness all in one package) tailor-made to attract fans from a wide demographic: Hardy was for decades middle England’s best-loved anarcho-syndicalist.

His career wasn’t without controversy. The News Quiz audience once booed him for calling the royal family “parasites”, and Burnley council cancelled a gig after Hardy called for supporters of the BNP (which had six seats on the council) to be shot. He was later criticised – by his friend and comrade of many years Jeremy Corbyn, no less – for making a joke about the Labour MP Kevan Jones’s mental health.

Then there was the 2003 film Jeremy Hardy Versus the Israeli Army, documenting the work of the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine. The Guardian’s reviewer, Peter Bradshaw, wrote of Hardy that “Britain might just have found its very own Michael Moore”, but shooting for the film was fraught in the extreme: Hardy was among more than 30 British protesters who became trapped in Bethlehem amid gunfire and shelling after the Israeli army refused to let consular officials through checkpoints. For all his anxiety about that experience – amply demonstrated in the film – it was on the frontline of the struggle for social justice, as well as on the standup stage, that Hardy felt he most belonged.