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SPIKE MILLIGAN, June Whitfield, Frank Muir... a chat with Gyles Brandreth crams in more dearly departed comedy favourites than a crowd shot from An Audience With...
The Mp-turned-entertainer is an affable cove; witty and charming with a seemingly endless supply of wholesome anecdotes. So you might be surprised to discover where he learnt his stagecraft.
“In my early 20s I thought I’d be a stand-up comic like Cyril Fletcher,” Gyles confides, referring to the That’s Life purveryor of odd odes. “He persuaded his agents to get me work and told them to drop me in at the deep end.
“So they got me on as a support act to a Northern comic. Cyril said, ‘If you can survive that, you can survive anything’.and that was how in the early 70s I found myself in a Manchester club called the Embassy where I was supporting Bernard Manning...
“I was a callow youth and I was sharing a dressing room with a stripper. I was 22, I don’t think I’d ever seen a naked person close up, certainly not like that!
“She asked me to help with the sequins on her bottom. I had to apply the glue and put on the glitter.
“I did all this very respectfully as we were colleagues. She was very popular and she earned her money. I was a disaster! None of it worked, I lost my nerve.at the end of my spot I did a headstand on the basis that everyone loves a headstand – they didn’t notice. I’d lost them.
“The next night, Bernard Manning took me to one side and gave me a masterclass in how to pace and deliver my material.and his simple tips transformed it! I learnt everything from Bernard Manning – but don’t use that as a headline! His material was, of course, totally unacceptable and I don’t use bad language but his timing was phenomenal. He was likeable too.”
And astute.the more the audience laughed the more they drank.
Brandreth’s life-long love affair with entertainment legends began with a crystal set radio.while other boys listened to pirate DJS, Gyles lapped up BBC comedy.
“People like Jimmy Edwards on Take It From Here, and Ron and Eth who were the Glums,” he recalls fondly. “Eth was played by Junewhitfield and I fell in love with her voice. Then I went to the cinema and fell in love with Hayley Mills.”
Gyles, 72, drops names as casually as
Danny Dyer drops ’is aitches, usually attached to the kind of rib-tickling tales you’ll hear on his new theatre tour, Break A Leg,
“celebrating entertainers I’ve known”.
In the days before email, the young Oxford University student found a simple way to meet his childhood heroes – he wrote to them. Everyone from James Robertson Justice to Frank Muir and Sir Michael Redgrave accepted the keen young undergraduate’s invitation to supper.
Roger Moore gave him “a masterclass in raising an eyebrow – I mastered the left but couldn’t master the right. Roger said there was a simple explanation, ‘You’re half the actor I am’.”
As president of the Oxford Union, Gyles asked Fanny Craddock to address the students. “She was a complete star,” he says. “A cross between Mary Berry and Jeremy Clarkson. She invited me to her Christmas party and everyone in showbiz was there, Frank Carson, Lionel Blair...
“Fanny and Lionel were christened Butch Casserole and the One-dance Kid.”
Gyles, dapper in his striking St George’s cross cufflinks, is as bright as he is engaging, crafting his sentences for maximum comic effect. Just like another of his hero Williams, who introduced him to R Just A Minute.
Gyles became a regular panelist teenage following as a result. “It sa tickets 11-plus,” he says. “Some th an age restriction, it isn’t. It’s suitab people who have passed the 11-plu
In 1968 he put on a production o Cinderella at Oxford, with Eliza M Buller, later head of MI5, as the Fa
His eye was caught by undergrad Michele Brown, who auditioned as and ended up as the better half of marriage.the couple, with three gr children, live in Barnes, south-west
Gyles is a modern Renaissance m books, theatre, journalism,tv (mo Countdown and Tv:am), politics…
He was in panto with Barbaraw 1991 when the news broke that he a break from showbiz to become a Conservative MP, prompting one w suggest he was moving from panto He was MP for Chester for five yea
Brandreth, a hugely loyal man, tr