Career
He had been a keen football player in his youth and was an apprentice at Liverpool F.C., and signed for Tranmere Rovers as a teenager. Boardman ran a haulage firm before winning a holiday camp talent contest and breaking into television on Opportunity Knocks and The Comedians. Boardman became known for his anti-German jokes, with his claim that "the Germans bombed our chippy" during the Second World War.
His later involvement in football includes being invited by Ron Atkinson to entertain his Sheffield Wednesday and Aston Villa players before the League Cup finals in 1991 and 1994.
An incident during a live edition of The Des O"Connor Show (Thames) in the mid-1980s gained publicity at the time. A joke – about the Second World War reminiscences of a Polish pilot who flew in the Royal Air Force – made play on the word "Fokker", referring to the German Focke-Wulf aeroplanes., even though Fokker was a Dutch aircraft manufacturer and had nothing to do with Focke-Wulf.
Boardman"s racism has led to controversy several times. After telling racist jokes at a Leeds United Player-of-the-Year-Award dinner in 2002 (months after two Leeds players had been arrested for assaulting an Asian student), the club withheld his fee, describing his act as "inappropriate and unacceptable" and barred him from performing at the club in future.
This led to a planned appearance at a Leicester City event being cancelled.
In June 2006 he had a hit with "Stan"s World Cup Song", which reached Number 15 in the United Kingdom Singles Chart. Fellow comedian Peter Kay wrote about him in his second autobiography "Saturday Night Peter". In it he describes his early days on the comedy circuit and being on the bill with Stan who at the time had the nickname Stan "The German Fokker" Boardman.
