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IARRANGE to meet Barry Cryer in the Loft Bar at the Gilded Balloon, where you will find him from tomorrow until Wednesday afternoon during his annual trip to the Fringe. The 80-year-old comic and comedy writer, who is a walking encyclopaedia of showbusiness, greets me with a giant smile and a warm hug but tells me he hasn’t got much time.
He’s performing at the Gilded Balloon Gala in the evening and he has a technical run-through of Old Masters – his gags and music show with Ronnie Golden, which starts the next day. “Are you nervous?” I ask him. “Everybody in this business who says they don’t get nervous, they are either lying or not very good,” he says.
“All the greats I have worked with, they are all nervous. They were all pacing up and down backstage before they went on.”
He tells me he was once waiting in the green room of the Parkinson show with Bob Hope.
“He said to me: “What is this guy Parkinson like?’
“I said to him: ‘He’ll probably interview you from a kneeling position. You’re Bob Hope.’ But he said to me: ‘Yes, I am Bob Hope, but if I don’t make them laugh in the first two or three minutes people will say, ‘Oh, so that was the great Bob Hope.’ I have never forgotten that. It made me like him even more.”
Whenever you talk to Barry Cryer you wonder if he has ever forgotten anything. He has worked with everyone – from Hope to Morecambe and Wise, to Peter Cook, to the Pythons and Kenny Everett, not to mention all the Fringe comedians he has got to know over the past 20 years.
They call him Uncle Bazza, and he loves it. And he’s always available to chat, to offer help or to share stories. “If you want name drops you know where to come,” he says.
Although the Fringe has grown massively since he first came to Edinburgh, some things about comedy stay the same. “It’s a naked game,” he says. “If you are a singer you have got a band, you’ve got music. You can get away with being OK. If you are a comedian you are naked. You are on your own. If you don’t make your audience laugh you think they don’t like you.
“But I wouldn’t want to be starting in comedy now. There are so many stand-ups and you get people coming up here and thinking they are going to get a TV series straight away.”
Cryer got his first job writing comedy in 1957, on a 17-day trip to London to find work. In those days, comics worked alongside strippers and dancers, doing material written by a team of backroom gag writers.
“Soho became my playground,” he says. Cryer met his wife Terry, who was a dancer, way back then. And they have been together ever since.
“I always say I’ve been dogged by good luck all my life,” he says, adding: “My wife says I shouldn’t say that.”
Cryer became part of the early 1960s satire boom, joining the team that wrote That Was the
Week That Was.
“People say: ‘You wrote for everybody.’ But I always say: ‘WE wrote for everybody. I never worked alone. There was always a gang. The whole of the Monty Python team worked for David Frost.”
Cryer himself came up to Edinburgh very early on, first with Willy Rushton, then with pianist Colin Sell. He has been performing with former Fabulous Poodles guitarist Ronnie Golden for the last 12 years, specialising in agerelated comic ditties with titles such as Stannah
Stairlift and Peace and Quiet. “Only Nicholas Parsons is older than me
Jokes are jokes, but material is a different matter. You don’t nick anybody else’s material. That is
out of order
now,” he says. “But we do get young people coming to see our shows as well. Which is great.”
Edinburgh is a good way of keeping up with the comedy scene. “What happens here is every year you realise something else has happened. It goes in cycles.
“There was the death of the old sexist, racist stuff, and quite rightly so. Then you had the 70s, Ben Elton and all that going on.”
He doesn’t rush around trying to see everything but tries to go to shows by people he knows well: “a night here and a night there”.
Last year, Cryer performed with old collaborator Colin Sell. But he’s delighted to be working with Ronnie Golden again this year. “We’re the odd couple. The first time we did it people said: ‘We didn’t realise Barry Cryer could sing.’ Ronnie said: “Of course he can. He used to be black.”
This year the Gilded Balloon is holding a comedy roast to mark his 80th birthday. A roast is a comedy tradition which began with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, where a group of comedians come together to insult one of their friends. “I know the time and I know Alexei Sayle is hosting it. But that’s all I know,” he says. “Roasts don’t normally work in this country but they work in America – where it is old comedians insulting each other.” He and Ray Cameron, fellow writer on The
Kenny Everett Show and father of Michael Mcintyre, once came up with a idea for a show called Court in the Act – in which comics would act as lawyers in a mock courtroom. It was based on the idea of a comedy roast – but didn’t take off in this country. Cryer is starting to look at his watch. It is coming close to the time for him to leave – but I want to consult the oracle so I ask him to explain what he thinks a joke is.
“Jokes are stories that grow organically. None of us writers claim to write jokes. An elephant walks into a pub… My own theory is that something happens in real life, then someone says it would be funnier if this had happened. Then someone else says – now if that was in Paris… and the joke grows.
“When someone claims to have written a joke I say: ‘Did you write it… or did you buy it?’. Jokes are jokes, but material is a different matter. You don’t nick anybody else’s material. That is out of order.
“Jeffrey Archer stole ten minutes of material from me once. He had seen me somewhere and then I went to some sort of corporate lunch and he did exactly the same story, word for word. Afterwards he said to me: ‘Barry, I changed it a bit in the middle, what do you think?’
“Three weeks later I was at a Punch magazine lunch and my friend Alan Coren said: ‘Jeffrey, have you ever met Barry Cryer?’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘No’. Put that in, won’t you?”
With this Cryer looks at his watch again and dashes off. And it’s true. He does look nervous.
The next day I run into him again at the same spot.
“Did you get enough out of me, Claire? Did I drop enough names?” he asks me. “I’m always talking about other people, aren’t I? You’ll never get me talking about myself.”
Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden – Old
Masters, Gilded Balloon, until 26 August, tomorrow 4:15pm. Barry Cryer’s 80th Birthday
Roast, Gilded Balloon, tomorrow 7:30pm.
It’s a naked game. If you are a singer you have got a band, you’ve got music. If you are a comedian you
are naked.