At age 11, Hardwick was admitted to boarding school with a scholarship. Already in his school years, Neil wrote, directed and often starred in many of his own plays. At age 18, he was drafted to work in the UK nuclear energy commission. Additional studies at King's College, Cambridge, led to a change in profession. There he found philosophy and the world of theatre at a new level.[2]
After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Hardwick moved to Finland in 1969.[3] He started his career as the voice of the English language school tapes of Finnish primary and high schools in the middle 1970s, and to the children of the 1960s and 1970s he became famous as the policeman of the children's language program Hello Hello Hello (1975).[3] Hardwick's reputation as a Finnish director and keen-eyed depictor of the Finnish lifestyle stems from the YLE TV2 comedy seriesTankki täyteen and Reinikainen.[4][5] In Reinikainen, the protagonist is an elderly single policeman from the countryside, who is transferred to a city, where his verbal skill, cunning and nonchalant attitude often defuses dramatic situations and saves the day. His most artistically ambitious work is the TV series Pakanamaan kartta, dealing with total short term memory loss and ecoterrorism.[6]
Hardwick has directed several revues and humour shorts, but is at his best as a depictor of the pathetically humorous daily life of the small man. He has also patiently acted as a bridge builder between the Finnish and English cultures, brought plays to Finland, and explained the Finnish lifestyle in British TV programs. He has repeatedly voiced his exasperation with the nanny state mentality of Finnish TV,[6] but has also said that Finland is the only country where he "is someone". Hardwick is one of the few well-known immigrants to Finland who have learned the Finnish language fluently. His liberal views on immigration brought him into the negative attention of the late Helsingin Sanomat caricaturist Kari Suomalainen, whose nativist and anti-immigration views were at odds with Hardwick.
During 1995 Hardwick served as Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Academy of Fine Arts.
The voice of his son, Sam Hardwick, can be heard in a number of Nightwish songs [7]
