- Opened the "Embassy Club" in 1959 and ran it right up until his death.
- Has one son, Bernard Manning Jr., born 1960.
- Had a younger brother, singer Frank Manning who helped him run a club in Newquay.
- Uncle of actress Francesca Manning.
- Controversial British stand-up comedian, notable for expressing offensively racist views. It is not known whether he held these views himself or whether they were part of his act.
- Was voted 17th Worst Briton '100 Worst Britons'.
- He claimed, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph's Allison Pearson, that his paternal grandfather came from Sebastopol, and changed the family name from Blomberg.
- Manning's wife, Veronica Finneran, died of a heart attack on 11 November 1986, aged 57. His son Bernard Jr. had already moved out of the family home, so Manning moved back in with his mother.
- In 1994 two black waitresses at a charity dinner at a hotel in Derbyshire took exception to Manning's act and appealed to an industrial tribunal against the management of the hotel for racial discrimination. They lost, but later had the decision overturned at appeal; they were awarded an undisclosed sum.
- In 1959 Manning borrowed £30,000 from his father and bought a dilapidated billiard hall on the A664 Rochdale Road, and turned it into the Embassy Club. Rather quickly Manning's income substantially increased. The club played host to many other acts, and Manning claimed that the Beatles performed there early in their career.
- He had Russian Jewish ancestry on his father's side, as well as roots in Ireland, and was brought up a "strict Catholic".
- After much work in comedy clubs and northern working men's clubs in the 1950s and 1960s, he made his television debut in 1971 on the Granada comedy show The Comedians. He compèred The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which began in 1974. In this period Manning's material was often accepted as being "harmless banter".
- He named his house in Alkrington "Shalom", the Hebrew word for "peace".
- In 2003 Manning was initially reported to have been booked to play a BNP rally. He denied this, telling the Daily Mirror: "It's a lot of bollocks. I don't know where I'm working. Speak to my agent. I don't know about any BNP nonsense. I would not do it anyway. Do you think I'm fucking barmy?".
- He left school aged 14, worked in a tobacco factory and joined his father's green-grocery business, before joining the British Army to do his National Service.
- On returning from Germany to England, Manning continued to sing professionally, and also worked as a compère. He was an effective singer of popular ballads and fronted big bands in the 1950s, such as the Oscar Rabin Band, which included appearances at the Ritz Hotel.
- In October 2002 he participated in a Great Lives program for Radio 4. He chose to honour the Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa.
- For many of his later years, he was a teetotaler and a diabetic.
- He had a starring role in a comedy quiz show Under Manning, produced by Southern Television in 1981. The series was poorly received and short-lived, and by the 1980s Manning had fallen out of favour with television companies, either because of changing tastes or his failure to compromise with television companies.
- Manning gained a high profile on British television during the 1970s, appearing on shows such as The Comedians and The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club. His act became controversial as attitudes changed, with the result that Manning was rarely seen on television in the last few decades of his career. However, he continued to perform at live venues until his death.
- His brother John had died in 1944 at the Battle of Arnhem and in 1995, his elderly mother and two remaining brothers, Jackie and Frank, also died.
- Manning had little thought of entertainment as a career, until posted to Germany where, in his self-written obituary (in which he claimed to have guarded Nazi war criminals Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer in Spandau Prison, Berlin, just after the Second World War), he began to sing popular songs to entertain his fellow soldiers and pass the time.
- From 1999 his son, Bernard Manning Jr, managed the club, shortly after his father had a mini stroke and became deaf in one ear. He considered his father's act inappropriate for bookings and sought to turn the club into an alternative comedy venue.
- His appearances on the northern Working Men's Club circuit continued, playing to packed audiences which he claimed sometimes included people from ethnic minorities. Manning never toned down his act, but he had a minor television career revival towards the end of his life, including Channel 4 taking him to Mumbai to perform.
- Over the years he began to introduce humour into his compering. This went down well, and Manning slowly moved from being a singer and compère to a comedian.
- In interviews with journalists, Manning would remind them of his appearance with Dean Martin in Las Vegas and meeting the Queen.
- In March 2007, he was ranked 29th on the list of the 100 Greatest Stand Up comedians in a poll conducted by Channel 4.
- In 2010, BBC Four commissioned Alice Nutter to write a biographical drama based on Manning's life. The screenplay was completed but cuts to the channel's budget led to the piece never being filmed.
- The writer and performer Barry Cryer said when Manning died: "The thing about Bernard was that he looked funny, he sounded funny and he had excellent timing. It was just what he actually said that could be worrying.".
- Manning's family and friends said that his controversial ways were all an act. He lived next door to an Indian physician's family, who have appeared in many newspaper articles over the years to defend Manning as a "perfect gentleman". Satya Rudravajhala, the poet widow of Visveswara Rao Rudravajhala, wrote a eulogy that was published in the local paper, the Middleton Guardian, conveying the family's sentiments.
- Having been admitted two weeks earlier for a kidney complaint, Manning died in North Manchester General Hospital at 3:10 pm on 18 June 2007. He wrote his own eulogy, which appeared as an obituary in the Daily Mail two days later.
- He considered tampons and disabled people unacceptable subjects, although he was challenged on Joan Rivers's show by guest Rupert Everett when he told a joke about a wheelchair user. Manning swiftly responded: "If your brains were dynamite, you wouldn't have enough to blow off your own hat." This left Everett speechless.
- Manning's detractors criticized his style of humor, with television presenter Esther Rantzen commenting that "for me, he's always been the villain of comedy".
- On stage, Manning frequently misdated the '79 death of punk rocker Sid Vicious, presumably to try to make it sound more relevant. In 1983 he said it was "last summer" then in later years he said it was around the time of the 1984 miners' strike.
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