Barry proves great comedy is timeless

When the man in question has been a warm-up man for Noel Coward, written sketches for Stanley Baxter and been insulted by John Lennon, attendance at his show is almost obligatory.

Writer and performer Barry Cryer is back in town for two Fringe shows, appearing in a double act with musician Ronnie Golden and as the subject of a comedy roast, in which comic friends will do their utmost to trash his very being.

The eighty year-old may have a few shar-pei-like wrinkles but still has the energy of a spaniel pup. And he says he’s looking forward to being roasted alive. “It will be fun,” he says in all seriousness.

As for his performance show with Golden, Barry doesn’t offer too many content clues, except one. “We’re singing a hymn of praise to Nicola Sturgeon,” he reveals. “A warm hymn.”

Be prepared to divide your audience right down the middle, Barry.

“Well, we’ll love that,” he says, grinning. “And of course, it may be seen as a hymn - or sarcastic humour depending on your politics.”

Leeds-born Barry Cryer is well used to audiences being delighted and derisory. He moved to London in the late Fifties and became a ‘turn’ at the famous Windmill Theatre in Soho, where the audience came to see the strippers, (who bizarrely weren’t allowed to move.)

The comedians didn’t stand a chance when up against the naked statues and young Barry left to write and perform for Danny La Rue at his cabaret nightclub, Danny’s in Hanover Square.

In the early Sixties, David Frost came into the club, saw the show and poached the writer. Cryer became part of The Frost Report team and teamed up with Graham Chapman, later of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Along the way he wrote for the likes of Jimmy Logan and Stanley Baxter. “Jim was my first TV writing job, and I remember he was concerned about wearing a kilt; ‘If I wear one, Barry, I’m trying too hard to be Scottish. If I don’t wear one I’m a traitor.’

“Stanley, whom I spoke to recently on his birthday, is a comedy genius. We had great chemistry.”

Barry never wrote alone, (he loved the safety net of a partner) and loved working for the likes of Kenny Everett, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd.

“Frank used to play games with the writers. If you put his catchphrases in the script he’d say ‘I do that.’ If you didn’t put them in he’d say ‘Where are they?’ But we loved him because he paid by the minute and Frank could make a page last ten minutes.”

Did he ever mind making other people seem funny? “No, I was happy being a backroom boy. And you simply couldn’t be a better performer than Morecambe and Wise, for example.” He adds, wistfully; “Although I think temperamentally, I’m more of a performer than a writer. I still enjoy it enormously.”

In the late Eighties, demand for Barry Cryer’s writing faded (“Yet you don’t become less funny as you get older”). But he and Willie Rushton revived their performance careers with the charity show Two Old Farts In The Night. It was such a success the pair took to the Fringe and he’s not stopped going since.

But despite his incredible writing cv and enduring performance success (such as with radio hit I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, which evolved into a touring show) Cryer reveals a delightful modesty when when asked about how he coped with writing deadlines.

“Denis Norden once said of me; ‘Bas delivers a script by Monday when we want it. It may not be great, but it’s there’.”

And he admits sometimes his material just didn’t work. “I once asked to be taken off the credits of the Larry Grayson Show. I couldn’t get his style, we just weren’t in harmony. But we stayed friends.”

He wasn’t in harmony with a Beatle either.

“At Danny La Rue’s, I was the warm-up man and one night a voice called out from the darkness; ‘This is satire, I suppose.’

“And I said, ‘No, this is nightclub filth, you must get out more.’ This got a laugh. Then I went back to the dressing room and somebody said; ‘You know who that was?’ It was John Lennon. Years later, I was working on the Frost show we found ourselves sitting together in the green room and he said: ‘I know you from somewhere.’ I told him about Danny’s and he said a strange thing; ‘Was I a pig?’ Turns out he was on everything, he had been out of it then. But he had become a different man.”

Barry Cryer maintains he hasn’t had to change his writing style over the years. Indeed, his favourite joke is still one he told as a student at Leeds University in 1955.

“A man was driving down a country lane and ran over a cockerel. He knocked on the farmhouse door and a woman answered. ‘I appear to have killed your cockerel,’ he said. ‘I’d like to replace it.’ ‘Please yourself,’ said the woman, ‘the hens are round the back.’”

Yet, he loves the youthful energy of the Fringe.

“I may talk about the past but I don’t want to live there,” he says, deadpan.

•Barry Cryer’s 80th Birthday Roast The Gilded Balloon, The Debating Hall, August 23.

•Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden – Old Masters, August 16-19, 23-26.