The Oldie

Happy 100th Birthday, Ian Carmichael!

My jolly, boozy evening with the comedy great in his Rolls-royce

- During the pandemic, Gyles is performing a different poem every day on Twitter (@Gylesb1) and Instagram (@gylesbrand­reth)

I have been celebratin­g the centenary of one of England’s greatest comic actors, Ian Carmichael – born in Yorkshire on 18th June 1920, died in Yorkshire on 5th February 2010.

He has been my boon companion during lockdown. I caught a couple of his 1950s Boulting Brothers gems on TV ( Brothers in Law and I’m All Right, Jack) and then discovered, by chance, in a cardboard box waiting to go to the charity shop when it reopens, a complete set of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries he made for the BBC in the 1970s: 20 hours of unadultera­ted bliss.

His performanc­e as Dorothy L Sayers’s aristocrat­ic sleuth is impeccable. Now I am frantic to rediscover his 1960s The World of Wooster, in which he played Bertie and Dennis Price was Jeeves.

Given that he was the son of an optician and went to school in Bromsgrove, how he came to corner the upper-crust silly-ass market is a mystery, but he was like that in real life as well as on screen. I worked with him in the 1970s and his every other word was ‘Right-oh’ or ‘Toodle-pip’.

His was only the second Rolls-royce I had ever travelled in (the first belonged to the sleaze baron Paul Raymond of the Raymond Revuebar, but that’s another story) and Ian drove it with a gay abandon that was mighty exhilarati­ng at the time, but nowadays would doubtless (and rightly) have him arrested.

I recall him driving me to an aftershow party late one summer’s night. Windows down, slightly squiffy, one hand on the wheel, he raced along the highways and byways of Oxfordshir­e, happily singing his favourite numbers from The Globe Revue of 1952. ‘This is the life, eh what, old bean?’

It most certainly was.

TV seems to have changed a bit since Kenneth Tynan first said ‘f***’ on the box during a late-night chat show back in 1965. In recent weeks, I’ve been having a lot of fun with my friend Maureen Lipman taking part in the Channel 4 series Celebrity Gogglebox. Mary Killen and Giles Wood (of this parish), the regular Gogglebox stars, should have warned us. These days, it’s almost impossible to find a TV programme that doesn’t feature the ‘f’ word – and worse.

On Gogglebox you don’t get to choose the programmes you watch. You take what you’re given, and much of it (if you’re a couple of oldies like Maureen and me) leaves you reeling – or at least feeling a tad out of touch.

In a fascinatin­g fly-on-the-wall documentar­y called Ambulance, we met two ladies who were in their early seventies, like us. One of them had been involved in an accident and her friend called the emergency services for help. When they turned up, the friend took a fancy to the young paramedic who helped them into the ambulance. ‘He’s got a nice arse,’ she remarked appreciati­vely. ‘I bet he’s got a nice cock as well,’ quipped the other.

Is this the way women in their seventies are thinking and talking nowadays? Apparently so.

In 1967, after watching an episode of

Till Death Us Do Part that included 44 uses of the word ‘bloody’, Mary Whitehouse declared, ‘This is the end of civilisati­on as we know it.’ For better or worse, it turns out she was right.

And speaking of bad language, it’s true that Mrs Whitehouse’s campaign to promote decency in British broadcasti­ng was going to be launched under the banner ‘Clean Up National Television’ until someone took a second look at the poster. You couldn’t make it up.

Inspired by my heroine and role model the actress Olivia de Havilland, 104 on 1st July, I have got myself a tricycle. ‘It may change my life,’ I said to my wife. ‘It may kill you,’ she answered, tartly.

Since Dame Olivia, the last surviving star of Gone with the Wind, became The Oldie’s Oldie of the Year as she marked her own centenary in 2016, we have kept in touch. She kindly invited me and my wife for ‘champagne and canapés’ at her home in Paris (her two Oscars discreetly placed on the sideboard) and sends me the occasional email. The other day, she sent me a snap of her outside her house sitting on a tricycle.

‘Wow!’ I thought, ‘If Errol Flynn’s Maid Marian can ride a trike in her 104th year, I can ride one in my 73rd.’

Supplied by Jorvik Tricycles of York, it’s arrived and it’s a beauty. So far, I’ve managed only to go round and round the lawn in circles, but I haven’t yet fallen off and soon I shall be taking it onto the smaller streets of south-west London. It has a basket for the shopping and I have a helmet for my head.

Who wants to be a masked man risking his life on public transport? I’m heading for the open roads on my sky-blue tricycle. Poop-poop!

 ?? The World of Wooster, ?? Thank you, Jeeves and Wooster: Ian Carmichael (left) as Bertie; Dennis Price as Jeeves, 1966
The World of Wooster, Thank you, Jeeves and Wooster: Ian Carmichael (left) as Bertie; Dennis Price as Jeeves, 1966
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