Tim Brooke-Taylor
Comedy star of the BBC’s ‘The Goodies’ and ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’
TIM Brooke-Taylor, who died aged 79 of Covid19, became a television favourite in the 1970s cult comedy series The Goodies, but earned a more enduring niche in the nation’s affections as a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
That, too, became a cult, as Brooke-Taylor lined up with the other regulars, two fellow public schoolboys Graeme Garden and Willie Rushton, alongside Barry Cryer.
As the programme billing explained, they were given “silly things to do” by the chairman and jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton.
By the time the show was launched in 1972 as “the antidote to panel games”, Brooke-Taylor was already an established television personality by virtue of his co-starring role in The Goodies with Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie.
In this the threesome were running an agency that offered to do anything at any time, with Brooke-Taylor as the patriotic frontman, Garden the clever backroom boffin and Oddie the aggressive, Bolshie eco-warrior.
The show ran for nine series between 1970 and 1983, and with highlights including a kitten called Twinkle demolishing the Post Office tower and choruses of The Funky Gibbon, was acclaimed one of the BBC’s most imaginative and inventive comedies of its day.
In the meantime BrookeTaylor had been making a name for himself on the rumbustious weekly sketch show
I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (1964-73).
With Barry Cryer and John Junkin, he co-starred in Hello Cheeky (1973-79), another quick-fire comedy series that relied heavily on puns, and which transferred unsuccessfully to ITV in 1976.
But it was I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, launched in 1972, that was to prove Brooke-Taylor’s most enduring radio success.
The younger son of a solicitor, Timothy Julian Brooke-Taylor was born on July 17, 1940, in Buxton, Derbyshire, and educated at Winchester College. On leaving, he taught at a prep school in Hemel Hempstead for a year.
As a consequence of the death of his father when he was 12, Brooke-Taylor was obliged to seek a local authority grant in order to study at Cambridge University where he met John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Bill Oddie.
A keen amateur cricketer, Brooke-Taylor turned out for the Lord’s Taverners XI against the MCC President’s XI in 1975, and published a witty book, Tim Brooke-Taylor’s Cricket Box, in 1987.
His earlier anecdotal survey of the British Empire, Rule Britannia, appeared in 1983.
In 1980 he was installed as rector of St Andrews University. He was appointed OBE in 2011.
Tim Brooke-Taylor married, in 1968, Christine Weadon, who survives him with their two sons.