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Here's an interview with Tim done as part of the lead up to the ISIHAC tour.
Western Daily Press, August 21, 2007
HEADLINE: Off to a tee
Golf, comedy and Rioja are a few of Tim Brooke-Taylor's favourite things, which makes for some very jolly encounters at the 19th hole.
Next week he embarks on an 11-date theatre tour, and it's certain the golf clubs will be safely installed in the boot.
The tour is a stage presentation of the long-running Radio 4 series I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, and opening night is at the Bristol Hippodrome a week today; it's already sold out.
The radio series is always recorded in front of a live audience, but this tour is solely for the entertainment of everyone there. The shows will not be recorded or broadcast, and Tim assured me that this will have a liberating effect on the team. Without the need to satisfy BBC compliance officers, who knows what wild comical fantasies will be conjured up by him and his chums Graeme Garden, Jeremy Hardy and Humphrey Lyttelton?
The show was invented in 1972, out of the same stable as I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, which was the BBC radio showcase for the Cambridge Footlights class of 1964, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and all. You can also hear my brother's hysterical, piercing laughter on some of the early tapes.
Brother and I shared a house off the Portobello Road with Tim, and the household, including Mary from the basement, would decamp to the Playhouse Theatre every Sunday night for the recording of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and the party afterwards in the Sherlock Holmes pub in Baker Street. Happy days.
Tim was also then working on an ITV series, At Last The 1948 Show, which comedy anoraks claim was the blueprint for Monty Python, so Cleese and Marty Feldman - not to mention David Frost, who produced it - were also regular visitors to our home in W11. I remember fierce games of Diplomacy at the kitchen table in which - no surprise - Cleese was a very bad loser.
Brother had his 15 minutes of fame because the 1948 gang thought his name was hysterically funny. It meant "Dermot Staveacre" was a label that was regularly stuck on to comic characters in At Last the 1948 Show, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again - and even Round the Horne, courtesy of Marty Feldman: "featuring Dermot Staveacre and Renee - thrills and spills on the mighty bacon-slicer!"
Not to be outdone, I used to boast in the pub (still do) that I had once trod the boards with Tim B-T. This was in a school production of Julius Caesar in Buxton, Derbyshire, in 1948. I had a very tiny role, as the servant who comes on to tell Mark Antony that Octavius is outside the city, and is overwhelmed to see the corpse of the murdered emperor: gasp of shock, exaggerated double-take - "Oh, Caesar!" Tim had a better part and got to carry a sword, of which I was rather jealous.
More than 50 years on, Tim and I went back to Buxton to record a series of programmes for BBC Radio 4 - Tim's Comedy Links. This was an ingenious idea, incorporating a golfing holiday with some classic comedy routines from B-T's heroes.
A golf course is a good place for reflection, reminiscence, philosophy and jokes. The maddening absurdity of the game attracts hilarity. As we wandered over the fairways and bunkers of Cavendish Golf Course, Tim recalled his golfing encounters with Stanley Unwin, Richard Murdoch, Peter Cook, Seve Ballesteros, Richard O'Sullivan, Eric Morecambe...
From there, our taxing production schedule took us to the west coast of Ireland, where Tim played 18 holes at Ballybunion Golf Club in company with a builder, a bank manager and a sanitary towel salesman while rummaging through the archives of recorded humorous Irishness..
He's a jolly good sport. It runs in the family. His grandfather was a parson who played centre forward for the England football team in the 1890s. His mother was an international lacrosse player, and because his father, a Buxton solicitor, died when Tim was only 12, she was her son's constant companion and also his comedy touchstone.
They both admired Al Read, brilliant radio comic and Salford sausage-maker, because they knew Mancunian chaps just like him, as well as Arthur Askey. His mum, a fun lady loved by us all, enrolled as matron at a boy's public school, where she became friendly with Arthur Marshall, a housemaster who for decades had had a second career as a light-comedy scriptwriter and had a late flowering as one of the team leaders in Call My Bluff, taking over from Patrick Campbell.
Other inspirational comedy heroes for the young B-T were Richard Murdoch, Benny Hill, Muir and Norden, and PG Wodehouse. His own comedy palette has always been solidly English, optimistic and good-natured, and the bleakness of alternative cynicism passed him by.
The Goodies thrived on imaginative visual gags: I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue celebrates verbal felicity, puns and wordplay, but it's also fuelled by genuine good fellowship. Here are four chaps who enjoy one another's company, without the competitive streak that undermines so much contemporary comedy.
Robert Armin, who played the comic parts in Shakespeare's company, wrote that "one foole cannot indure the sight of another". Mort Sahl put it another way: "Comedians always compete as if there were only one job." It can be a desperate need. Are you listening, Ken Dodd?
Against this, next week's launch of I'm Sorry in Bristol will offer two hours of communal social therapy, celebrating humanity, eccentricity and diversity, and at the same time cocking a well-deserved snook at officialdom and bureaucracy. |
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