Graeme Garden on Barry Cryer: ‘I will miss his laugh hugely. Won’t we all?’

I must have first met Barry around 1967. I was sharing a flat in London with Eric Idle, and he and Michael Palin and Terry Jones had a meeting with Barry. He was part of the comic scenery at the time and I knew his name already, because it used to crop up in credits at the end of shows. He was a larger than life figure, I remember, very funny and was great company, whoever you were.

The first time I worked with him was at the start of Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue in 1972. After the pilot, everyone was quite shellshocked and we went to the pub and solemnly said: “Never again.” The producer said it would be made into a one-off special and that will be the end of it. But the head of Radio 4 heard it, rather liked it, and commissioned a series. At the end of each series we all met in the pub and went “never again!” That became a tradition for the next 45 years.

Mine and Barry’s was a working friendship, really. We didn’t spend a lot of time socialising but we were working together so often that we saw a great deal of each other. In the early days “Clue” was a bit of a side-line but it became much more serious when we realised there was a big audience out there. It turned out to be the granddaddy of all panel shows. It has a strain of silliness that goes back past The Goons even into the Victorian era – it’s very British.

Among my fondest memories are in the last few years when Barry became very deaf. Occasionally when we were all chipping in with a silly title of a film or something, Barry would come up with one that someone else had said two seconds earlier – it used to make the audiences laugh uproariously.

In the 2000s, we did a Clue spin-off series of 15-minute episodes, Hamish and Dougal – in which we played two slightly fey Scotsmen who live in this surreal world where the strangest things happen. We would write together in each other’s homes. I’d later write down our pooled ideas and email them to him and his family would print them out for him – because he was never any good with computers. He used to scribble a lot of his ideas on cigarette packets. He used to call it his file-o-fags.

There again. when you had a voice as great as Barry’s, why not use the phone? He’d call up to ask how I was doing. Every call would end with “By the way, have you heard?” then he’d come out with the latest joke he’d picked up in the pub. He wrote for many great comedians but he had more than just a writing relationship with Kenny Everett. They were good friends. Kenny used to call him “Ba”. Kenny, of course was gay, and once joked: “Oh, Ba, a wife and four children, what a smokescreen!”

People don’t tell jokes in the same way any more. Barry was holding the line on that world of laughter, and he was definitely old-school, but with his feet planted in the modern period. We all talked about wokeness and political correctness and whether you can have comedy without offending anyone ever. We were all concerned about that, but he was generous about young comics, too.

I loved the story he told about Vincent Price. He worked with him on the film Bloodbath at the House of Death, which he co-wrote with Kenny Everett. Price came and did a bit on that. Barry had had black hair when he was young, when he had first worked with Price. By this time he had gone white. He came into the room and Price said: “The child has gone white in the service of comedy.”

The truth is that comedy kept Barry young. He couldn’t not work; telling jokes was his lifeblood. He used to scan the birthday announcements in the newspapers, anyone that he knew was having a birthday he’d phone them up and give them a joke. When he broke his hip, the nursing staff thoughtfully put him in a private room. He asked to be moved back to the ward because that’s where his audience were. I will miss his laugh hugely. Won’t we all? He loved to laugh and he loved the sound of laughter.

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