A tribute to our dear friend Barry Cryer

Graeme Garden

Barry and I worked together for 50 years on I’m Sorry I Havent A Clue, and our gleeful spin off You’ll Have Had Your Tea with Hamish and Dougal. Barry was Old School; in his stand up act he told jokes. He loved jokes and he loved an audience. He was never comfortable with computers, so he communicated by phone, and he would phone anyone he knew on their birthday, and always had a joke for them that he’d probably heard in the pub.

He was loved by his audience but also by his colleagues. The younger generations of comics adored him because he enjoyed their work and made sure they knew it. He kept up to date and made contact with the younger comedians he admired.

From his early days at the Windmill theatre to writing for Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Tommy Cooper, Kenny Everett, Morecambe and Wise and many others, to his stage tours and work on radio and TV, he never stopped, and in the last months he started a new podcast with his son Bob which has received some lovely reviews in the press. That would have pleased him enormously.

Jack Dee

There cannot have been anyone from the world of British comedy in the last sixty years that Barry Cryer didn’t know, work with and have an anecdote on. As such, he became an honorary uncle to countless comics, always keeping up with who’s doing what in the business and very often seeking out shows to go to in small out-of-the-way venues. Few professionals maintain such zest for their craft that they will do this into their senior years. And few continue to work so relentlessly as he did, performing his cabaret show with long-standing friends and associates Colin Sell and Ronnie Golden as well as, of course, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. “I do the shows for free. It’s the travelling I get paid for” he once explained to me.

It seems an obvious thing to say, certainly to anyone lucky enough to know the man, but Barry had an insatiable passion for jokes. It was a frequent treat to answer the phone to that familiar voice and a line that would typically have gone something like “There’s a priest in the confessional box and someone comes in and sits down behind the screen. After a couple of minutes the person still hasn’t said anything so the priest knocks on the side of the confessional. There’s no response, so a minute later he knocks again and a bloke’s voice says: ‘You can knock all you like, there’s no paper in here either’. This would be followed by his famous gravelly chuckle and the simple valediction “I’ll give you your day back”, at which point he’d hang up. I confess that one of my ambitions was to be able to tell Barry a joke that he hadn’t heard. I tried often and, although he was generous enough to laugh enthusiastically, I suspect I never really achieved that goal.

One of Barry’s favourite euphemisms was that he was “Popping out for some fresh air” and off he’d go for a smoke by Stage Door. Perhaps, notwithstanding the laughs and the gags, that is how I will choose to think of him when I remember that he is not there anymore.