ALMOST 50 years after a chance encounter in a London nightclub propelled his career skyward, comedian Barry Cryer’s as enamoured with his craft as ever.
The 76-year-old, whose new show Butterfly Brain comes to Bishop’s Stortford next Saturday (Feb 18), still relishes the roar of the crowd as much as he did half a decade ago.
Back then, while a writer and occasional sidekick for veteran drag queen Danny LaRue, Barry and fellow star Ronnie Corbett got their big break when David Frost visited one of their shows.
Impressed with what he saw, the future talk show host recruited the pair in 1966 for his new satirical project The Frost Report, a follow-up to the acclaimed That Was The Week That Was (TW3).
Barry – who is best known to modern audiences as a long-serving panellist on Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – found himself writing for a host of big names like Marty Feldman and the soon-to-be Monty Python team.
But at the time, he had no idea of how indelible a stamp his colleagues would leave on the face of British comedy – or how long own his career would continue to soar in the decades that followed.
He told the Observer: “I’ve had a lot of good luck all my life, in the sense of being in the right place at the right time. [Ronnie and I] met David and, as a result, he went into David’s new show as a performer and I went in as a writer.
“Already, Frost was very well known through TW3, but this was a new venture and all the doors were open to you if you were a Frost writer. It didn’t feel like pressure, but you knew you were in a very good place.
“We were just ‘the gang’ - we were all together as writers for David. I met the Pythons long before they were the Pythons; they were just your mates.
“Even when they launched Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I just thought ‘this is great, our mates are going to be doing a new show’. You never thought it was going to be ground-breaking and world-famous, with books and films.
“I’ve never written alone, actually; I’ve always had a partner. I’ve got a bit of an inflated reputation – interviewers always say: ‘you’ve written for everyone’ and I always explain that we all did.”
The Frost gang went their separate ways soon afterwards, with their former leader taking his career in an altogether more serious direction, but links had been forged that would last a lifetime.
In the years afterwards, on top of his collaborations with legends like Morecambe and Wise, Les Dawson, Tommy Cooper and Kenny Everett, Barry would continue writing for old pal Ronnie Corbett in his partnership with Ronnie Barker.
By today’s standards, with stand-ups like Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais regularly courting controversy, such names evoke memories of a time when comedy was altogether gentler.
But while Barry admits his contemporaries are often seen as “conservative with a small ‘c’”, he argues the public and performers alike still have a healthy appetite for a dose of good old-fashioned silliness.
He said: “I’ve spoken about this to mates of mine like Tim Vine, Al Murray and Dave Gorman - and although Al plays a certain character, the xenophobic Pub Landlord, they just don’t go along with this [nastiness] - they don’t like it. You can’t generalise.
“We often do a stage version of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, and we get families, students and all sorts. There’s something out there that people want – we do wordplay and nonsense, nothing remotely satirical or aggressive.
“Our chairman Humphrey Lyttelton used to say ‘never lose touch with silly’, which I thought was very wise. In some ways, there’s always been this great tradition of absolute nonsense in English humour, from Alice in Wonderland or Gilbert and Sullivan to people like [Spike] Milligan.”
Fans of unrepentant absurdity have plenty to look forward to in Butterfly Brain, which sees Barry rattle through 26 topics based on each letter of the alphabet in a single evening. He’ll be joined by Colin Sell, who has played piano on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue since its second series.
Barry said: “The show is never exactly the same two times running – the alphabet is a lovely, free-wheeling formula, I think. I like to ramble, and if I’m boring myself I’m boring the audience so I don’t stick to the same script every night.
“I get a buzz from being on stage – Doctor Footlight, they call it. You just go out there in front of real people with no editing. It’s just great. I’m 76 now, turning 77 this year, but I remember Richard Herring recently saying to me: ‘I hope I’m still enjoying it when I’m 77!’”.
Barry Cryer: Butterfly Brain opens at 8pm and tickets are £18. See www.rhodesbishopsstortford.org.uk or ring (01279) 651746.
