Tim Brooke-Taylor: He was such a Goodie

Actor, writer and comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor, from Cookham in Berkshire, played a patriotic coward in The Goodies and was a regular panellist on Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. And in one of his last interviews before he sadly died on 12 April from coronavirus, Katie Jarvis asked her own comedy hero how it felt to be a legend

- Katie Jarvis

“How does it feel,” I asked my comedy hero, Tim BrookeTaylor, “to be a comedy hero?” I missed the really early stuff, like On the Braden Beat and At Last the 1948 Show, but The Goodies... I still laugh remembering the punch-lines.

So how does it feel? “I think the answer is slightly mixed,” he said. “Because it’s lovely when people recognise me. But then rather elderly people say: ‘I used to be allowed to stay up to watch you.’”

It’s odd how many anarchic comedians started life so very conventionally. You know: parents who were bankers, insurance salesmen, solicitors... Packed off to boarding school, then on to Oxbridge. Is there something in that, I asked Tim (son of a coroner, while his mother was a former international lacrosse player).

He said: “Well, that’s possibly so… if you can take it on logically rather than just being mad, if you see what I mean. I used to write for Spike Milligan and he was slightly out of control. Like the last show, he didn’t even turn up. But he was also brilliant.”

Tim once wrote a sketch for him about a peer of the realm living in a council house, shooting at china birds flying up the wall. He explained: “Then Spike wrote in a bit where a butler came out of a cupboard and said: ‘Time for your heart attack, sir.’ I would never have written that but it was a touch of stupid genius that made me laugh.”

I say ‘conventional’; but that’s slightly unfair. After all, wasn’t it true that Tim was expelled from primary school at the age of five?