Cryer is happy to be butt of jokes in latest Fringe show
Comedian and writer for the greats loves Edinburgh
weren’t allowed to move. The comedians didn’t stand a chance when up against the exotic naked human statues and Cryer left to write and perform for Danny La Rue at his cabaret nightclub, Danny’s in Hanover Square.
In the early 60s, David Frost came into the club, saw the show and poached the writer. Cryer became part of The Frost Report team and teamed up with Graham Chapman, later of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Along the way he wrote for the likes of Jimmy Logan and Stanley Baxter. “Jim was my first TV writing job, and I remember he was concerned about wearing a kilt. ‘If I wear one, Barry, I’m trying too hard to be Scottish. If I don’t wear one I’m a traitor.’
“Stanley, whom I spoke to recently on his birthday, is a comedy genius. We had great chemistry.”
Cryer never wrote alone (he loved the safety net of a partner), and loved working for the likes of Kenny Everett, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd.
“Frank used to play games with the writers. If you put his catchphrases in the script he’d say ‘I do that’. If you didn’t put them in he’d say ‘Where are they?’ But we loved him because he paid by the minute and Frank could make a page last 10 minutes.”
Did he ever mind making other people seem funny? “No, I was happy being a backroom boy. And you simply couldn’t be a better performer than Morecambe and Wise, for example.”
He adds, wistfully: “Although I think temperamentally, I’m more of a performer than a writer. I still enjoy it enormously.”
In the late 80s, demand for Cryer’s writing faded (“Yet you don’t become less funny as you get older”). But he and an old friend, Willie Rushton, revived their performance careers with the charity show Two Old Farts In The Night.
It was such a success the pair took it to the Fringe and Cryer’s not stopped going since.
But despite his incredible writing CV and enduring performance success (such as with radio hit I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, which evolved into a touring show) Cryer reveals a delightful modesty when asked about how he coped with writing deadlines.
“Denis Norden once said of me: ‘Bas delivers a script by Monday when we want it. It may not be great, but it’s there’.”
And he admits sometimes his material just didn’t work. “I once asked to be taken off the credits of the Larry Grayson Show. I couldn’t get his style, we just weren’t in harmony. But we stayed friends.”
He wasn’t in harmony with a Beatle either.
“At Danny La Rue’s, I was the warm-up man and one night a voice called out from the darkness, ‘This is satire, I suppose.’
“And I said, ‘No, this is nightclub filth, you must get out more.’ This got a laugh. Then I went back to the dressing room and somebody said, ‘You know who that was?’ It was John Lennon.
“Years later, I was working on the Frost show and we found ourselves sitting together in the green room, and he said: ‘I know you from somewhere.’ I told him about Danny’s and he said a strange thing; ‘Was I a pig?’
“Turns out he was on everything, he had been out of it then. But he had become a different man.”
Cryer maintains he hasn’t had to change his writing style over the years. Indeed, his favourite joke is still one he told as a student at Leeds University in 1955.
“A man was driving down a country lane and ran over a cockerel. He knocked on the farmhouse door and a woman answered. ‘I appear to have killed your cockerel,’ he said. ‘I’d like to replace it.’ ‘Please yourself,’ said the woman, ‘the hens are round the back.’”
Yet, he admits he loves the youthful energy of the Fringe. “I may talk about the past but I don’t want to live there,” he deadpans
perfectly. Barry Cryer’s 80th Birthday Roast The Gilded Balloon, The Debating Hall, August 23. Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden – Old Masters, August 16-19, 23-26.
Rob Adams THE a cappella quartet that brings Afropella Night to St John’s in the west end of Princes Street in the afternoons has 20 years of singing together to its credit, and it shows. These are voices whose tones and harmonies blend and dovetail naturally as they sing their songs of worship and welcome.
As a show it’s part travelogue, part thanksgiving and part dance lesson and the informality that comes with the invitation to try some dance steps (no obligation) extends to explanations of the rhythmical and percussion roles each singer plays and introductions to Ghanaian culture and their other lives, which include banking, graphic design and real estate management.
Adaptations of familiar western songs including Amazing Grace, with an intriguing twist, and Bill Withers’ Lean on Me sit easily with traditional Ghanaian, Nigerian and Kenyan items as melodies are embellished with vocalised maraccas and conga drum and the sound of two sticks being struck together, a vocal effect that’s slightly too prominently amplified and whose charm you might find doesn’t endure as persuasively as the others.
All in all, though, it’s a friendly as well as a technically assured presentation. Runs until August 31. JEAN Ross was the inspiration for Sally Bowles, heroine of Christopher’s Goodbye to Berlin and femme fatale of Cabaret, and Jugé Productions’ Muse paints a more intelligent, aware and adaptable picture of a woman who also became the muse for lyricist Eric Maschwitz, of These
‘‘ W‘
e’re singing a hymn of praise to Nicola Sturgeon,’ he reveals. ‘A warm hymn.’
Foolish Things fame, and led a life that slipped with relative ease from performing in Berlin to covering the Spanish Civil War as a respected journalist.
Sophie Jugé, above, plays Ross with a nicely observed imperiousness mixed with an air of resignation, berating the unseen staff of the studio on arrival and moving quickly into Willkommen, from Cabaret, blended with Juan Tizol’s Caravan to denote Ross’s current circumstances and Egyptian birth. It’s a relatively short piece – 45 minutes – but manages to feed in a lot of information on the literally and metaphorically colourful Ross while Jugé adds appropriate songs of the time to her spoken lines.
It’s a good story well told, and sung, with accompaniment from a reeds, keys and double bass trio. Runs until August 29 FIONA Soe Paing’s Alien Lullabies finds the Aberdeenshire-based vocalist and electronica artist’s partnership with New Zealand animator Zennor Alexander entering both weird and rather charming territory.
More nightmare-ish than gently soothing in places, it combines images of postnuclear landscapes and harp-playing insects. It’s graphic and reminiscent of Animal Farm with backing tracks of various weights and frequencies and songs variously whispered and screamed.
Soe Paing emphasises the music’s air of mystery by singing, stage right, from under a wide-brimmed black hat while the screen dominates the stage. Runs until August 23.