My naughty nights in the world’s raciest sex clubs
GYLES BRANDRETH was just 22 when Lord Longford asked him to join his Pornography Commission. Now revel in the hilarious results, as told in this first extract from his ribald memoirs ( it was dirty work — but someone had to do it )
PEOPLE sometimes seem amazed that I go on working in my 70s, writing and going out most evenings to do a show or host an awards ceremony or give an after-dinner speech. I say it’s because I agree with Noel Coward: on the whole, work is more fun than fun.
My wife Michele says it’s because I only think I have any worth if I am working. there is something in that (she is always right), but there is more to it, too.
I am middle class, as most of my family have been for the past 200 years. Not upper-middle class (none of my sisters were debutantes), not lower-middle class (we never called a napkin a serviette), just bang-in-the-middle middle class.
It’s a mistake to think that the middle classes are always well off. they aren’t. My father, Charles, a good man and a successful solicitor, died when he did — in 1981, aged 71 — because he had run out of funds. Essentially, he died because he had reached the end of his rope and couldn’t hang on.
Dear sweet lovable Pa, as we all called him, sent me not only to the fee-paying Lycee Francais but also to Bedales, whose fees rivalled Eton’s. My sisters went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, because that was the boarding school to which English middle-class girls had been sent for 100 years.
From first term to last, paying the school fees was a nightmare. As a senior partner in a mediumsized firm of London solicitors, Pa was earning good money, but he always spent more than he earned and as a consequence was never free from anxiety.
Pa was worried about money from the moment he got married until the moment he died.
He had a humorous, engaging and persuasive manner and he used it to the full — negotiating with the bank to extend the overdraft, negotiating with the tax man to delay the tax, negotiating with one of his father’s rich schoolfriends for ‘another small subvention’ to help tide him over while he was waiting, Micawber-like, for something to turn up.
Something did turn up now and again. Relations died and left legacies, but none ever quite enough.
At home, on the kitchen wall, I have a verse from the Book Of Proverbs: ‘A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond and want like an armed man.’
At THE age of 18 I won a scholarship to Oxford. I arrived there in 1967 with a mindset (and agenda) dating from the late 1920s.
My contemporaries were dancing to the beat of Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. I was humming the Charleston and setting my sights on achieving the glittering prizes that had meant so much to my father’s generation — becoming editor of Isis, directing the OUDS [Oxford University Dramatic Society], being elected President of the Oxford Union.
Within 48 hours of my arrival, I
had joined the Union, joined the OUDS, and managed to meet the editor of isis. How i got hold of his name and address i don’t know, but i did.
And so when, a few months later, the Sun newspaper came to Oxford and ran an article on ‘The Tomorrow people’, i was featured. michael rosen, playwright and poet, and Diana Quick, ‘generally talked about as the best actress at Oxford for years’, got a fair look-in, but mine was the top photograph, and there was a quote from me as the main headline: ‘i’d like to be a
sortof Danny
Kaye and then Home Secretary.’ i was 19.
in fact, i never managed either. After i left Oxford i did whatever work came along. i was writing books. i was making TV programmes. i was hosting my first panel show on radio 4.
it was called A rhyme in Time and starred Cyril Fletcher, the prince of Odd Odes, Graeme Garden from The Goodies, and my childhood favourite from Take it From Here, June Whitfield.
i launched the National Scrabble Championships. in Trafalgar Square i organised the world’s biggest Christmascracker-pull.
On the Today programme, i tossed the world’s tiniest pancake.
On the front page of The Times — the newspaper pa took — i was described as ‘the high priest of trivia’. i was profiled in the New Statesman — disobligingly.
RALPH STEADMAN, the great caricaturist, drew a cartoon of me as a slavering dog chasing its own tail. in private Eye i was described as ‘appalling’ and ‘revolting’.
i carried on regardless. i spent three months touring the UK dressed up as the dog Snoopy. i read poetry in the late-night God slot on Anglia TV. By way of contrast, to exercise my comedy chops, i took a booking as the support act to Bernard manning at his club in manchester.
i shared a dressing room with the two topless go-go dancers and the stripper. She was fun. Before she went on, she made me fix the sparkles to her bottom with a pritt stick.
Was i mad? perhaps. i was like a spinning top. Whenever the phone rang, i never asked who it was, i simply said yes.
One day, in may 1971, when i answered the telephone the voice said, ‘is that Gyles?’ ‘yes.’ ‘it’s Frank Longford here.’ pull the other one, i thought to