He toured for two years with Laurel and Hardy towards the end of their careers. He said he could always go in and talk with them and they told him about Hollywood and their work there. When Oliver Hardy watched his show in Nottingham in 1952, he persuaded Worth to drop the ventriloquist routine and concentrate on becoming a comedian, which he then did. His first stage act without ventriloquism was in Newcastle. He continued to include ventriloquism in his cabaret act through his career, performing much of the material that he had used during the war. This included three appearances in the Royal Variety Show.

After appearing a number of times on Variety Bandbox, Worth gained his own radio show, Thirty Minutes Worth. He took his scripts seriously and did not ad lib. He said he built a style of dithering in his shows without even realising it.

Worth's first television appearance was a five-minute standup on Henry Hall's Guest Night in 1955.^[1] He became well known to the public and even appeared at the London Palladium, after which he took the show to Manchester, the main place for variety in those days, for eight weeks. In 1960, the television programme The Trouble With Harry was broadcast. John Ammonds and Worth wrote the pilot script in three to four weeks. A series of six programmes was commissioned, and was written by Vince Powell, Ronnie Taylor and Frank Roscoe.

He made this style his own by creating a character with whom the public could connect. He once said, "If Harry (the character) ever looked directly at the camera, or the audience, it would all be over". The character was Harry and everyone saw Harry as Harry.

He is now best remembered for his 1960s series Here's Harry, later re-titled Harry Worth, which ran for 10 years and over 100 episodes (the longest running British sitcom of the time, and still one of only a handful to run for over 100 episodes). The opening titles of Harry Worth featured Worth stopping in the street to perform an optical trick involving a shop window: raising one arm and one leg which were reflected in the window, thus giving the impression of levitation. Reproducing this effect was popularly known as "doing a Harry Worth". The shop window sequence first used in Here's Harry was filmed at St Ann's Square, Manchester, at Hector Powes tailor's shop. The idea for this was suggested by Vince Powell, who had done it himself as a child.