JOKING APART:
Barry Cryer – writer, broadcaster, wit and raconteur – tries on a new hat later this month when he finally gets a degree. He talks to Sheena Hastings.
ARRY has breakfast late on Saturdays. His boiled egg and soldiers are fresh on the plate as I arrive mid-morning at his home in deepest outer London. Hatch End is a place of comfortable, substantial but un-showy abodes and well-tended gardens beyond the Tube.
Getting to him across the city is much more exhausting than travelling from Leeds to the capital but, to borrow a phrase, he’s worth it.
London may no longer deserve to be called The Smoke, but this part of suburbia still suffers from a slight pall, possibly generated single-handedly by B Cryer Esq. He’s an (almost) admirably unrepentant old-school chain smoker.
Well maybe not a chain as such... perhaps the frequency is more like those white lines relentlessly painted very close to each other down the centre of the road. The sight is quite literally mesmerising – and you do start to count.
I don’t say a word, but the 78-year-old preempts any comment: “I’m not going to give up now, am I, but I’ll stop while you’re here if you want...”
He shrugs affably, stubs out the cigarette and appears to be addressing the egg. His lovely wife Terry, who’s pottering around in the kitchen, laughs slightly at his gallant offer. The egg, dimly visible across the table, doesn’t respond.
You just couldn’t be so mean to Barry, a man who has, during nearly six decades in showbusiness, given the nation so much pleasure. He’s to be hugged, treasured and certainly not reconstructed for the PC world.
He works at writing comedy with a pad at the large kitchen table and – a gleeful discovery – the evidence is there before my very eyes of ideas scribbled on fag packets. If he kept enough of them they’d make a great installation at Tate Modern.
Barry Cryer has spent more than half a century either performing his own material or writing for the greats of British comedy.
He’s a dreadful name dropper by his own admission, but it just so happens that he has worked with almost everyone, and yes, one of his best friends is Sir Bruce Forsyth, who he met at Danny La Rue’s West End club back in the 50s.
In those days, Brucie was worried he wouldn’t make it, and plan B was to run a tobacconist’s, says Barry. He’s a living, breathing anecdote machine, a human jukebox.
Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Willie Rushton, Kenny Everett and American stand-ups like Richard Pryor have all collaborated with Cryer, who was born and brought up in Harehills, Leeds.
He’s been a fixture on Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue for 40 years, and one of his favourite modern comedians is the show’s host Jack Dee, who eventually took over following the death of Humphrey Lyttleton in 2008.
Cryer has also written many amusing