Laughter at good old days

In the spotlight on Sunday evening was Goody Tim Brooke-Taylor, ready for a leisurely meander down memory lane.

He began with the radio show he has inhabited for the past 40-odd years, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

“We did the pilot in 1972 and I remember going to the pub with Humphrey Lyttleton afterwards and he said ‘will you promise me we’ll never do that again’. It was terrible!”

The programme that took a series or two to get going, to ‘settle down’, has been entertaining a loyal band of listeners for more than four decades now.

Besides the humour, perhaps one of the reasons for its longevity is that sense of pulling up an armchair to the fireside with old friends.

Jazz musician ‘the Humph’, who died in 2008 at the age of 86, became the UK’s oldest panel game host at its helm.

Brooke-Taylor said: “I used to go and see Humph’s band and wish I could be him and then suddenly we were on Sorry I Haven’t a Clue together.

“There was an original Humphrey Lyttleton who was part of the Gunpowder Plot and was hung, drawn and quartered in Guildford.

“Humph used to say, ‘I don’t mind the hung, drawn and quartered bit, but Guildford?’”

Brooke-Taylor, the son of a lawyer, was born in Buxton in 1940. One of his earliest memories was of being expelled from school at the age of five-and-a-half.

“You could tell I came from a legal family because they said ‘you weren’t expelled – you were asked to leave’.”

His family must have breathed a sigh of relief when it all came good, and he got into Cambridge University, but he didn’t find it plain sailing.

“On the very first day I just thought they were all so smug and up themselves, and I’m not just talking about David Frost! It was very surreal.”

In all seriousness, he owes a great deal to David Frost, who was in the generation ahead of him at Cambridge and gave him a break into television.

Famously, Brooke-Taylor was president of Cambridge Footlights at a time its membership included John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden, and it was with Cleese, Chapman and Marty Feldman that he made At Last the 1948 Show for Frost’s Paradine Productions.

‘In conversation’ with television presenter Chris Serle, the latter asked him if he regretted the fact he’d missed the boat with his peers and close friends who made up the Monty Python brigade – he’d been too busy working on the Marty show, starring Feldman, at the time.

“Not really, and in all honesty, my writing probably wouldn’t have been good enough,” he admitted. “Although they’re all multi-millionaires now... “

Luckily The Goodies, that prime time hit of the 1970s, had come along instead and made him a household name. Clips from it still had the power to make Hexham laugh – loudly – today.

Favourite was a 1978 skit that blended a Thatcher prime ministerial hopeful with a West End play fresh out that year, Evita, and two office workers, Marge and Tina, talking politics.

Cue: Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed Eva Peron style, singing ‘Don’t cry for me, Marge and Tina’.

In an event liberally sprinkled with old telly footage, there were clips of Brooke-Taylor’s bit parts in the 1971 film version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, a One Foot in the Grave Christmas special and the 1969 film The Thirteen Chairs .

This last one, while dire, was notable for two reasons. One was it co-starred Orson Welles, “but the other, sad, thing was that the leading lady was Sharon Tate, who was murdered before the film even came out. She was a lovely person.”

The evening ended the way it had begun, though, with belly laughs stoked by the absurd.

This time round it was the late, great Spike Milligan adding coke to the fire in footage taken from a This is Your Life telly tribute to Brooke-Taylor.

With a towel round his shoulders and shaving foam on his face, Milligan told Eamonn Andrews a job agency had asked him to come along.

Reading from a card, he said: “They gave me the words to say ... Tim Brooke-Tiddler is a funny man. Turn to him and grin.”