Barry Cryer Same Time Tomorrow, by Bob Cryer

This is a lovely, funny and often moving biography of the comedian Barry Cryer (1935-2022) written by his youngest son. Each chapter is preceded by one of Cryer’s well-worn jokes, which I could easily hear in his distinctive, warm gravel tones. There are more great jokes peppered through the text, as well of bits of showbiz history and gossip. 

There are, too, some shocking moments such as the time Cryer tried to end his own life and was saved by his neighbour Douglas Camfield — then assistant floor manager on TV shows such as Garry Halliday and later a celebrated director on Doctor Who and other drama. But really this is a history of a hardworking, professional writer and performer plugging away at his trade as the entertainment world changed around him.

In early 1961, while still relatively green, Cryer and his friend Ted Dicks (no relation to Terrance, though their credits sometimes get muddled up) began writing for revue show This is Your Night Life. The show was headed by Danny La Rue, who we’re told described himself as a “female impersonator” rather than “drag artist”, and it was performed at Winston’s nightclub in London where La Rue had been in residence for some years. 

“Shows usually started at 12.45 am, meaning they often finished around 3 am. Almost all the performers, including Danny, had jobs in other West End shows and came to Winston’s afterwards” (p. 108)

The cast of This is Your Night Life included Terry Donovan, who Cryer married in 1962. Their son describes them cycling from their home in Maida Vale to rehearsals for Danny La Rue during the day. Terry would then cycle to her evening show in the West End and her husband would be off to a stand-up gig at the Players’ Theatre. They’d then head to Winston’s for 11 pm for their next performance, get home in the not-so-small hours and then do it all again, night after night after night. It’s exhausting and thrilling and mad. You can smell the cigarette smoke and tiredness.

Cryer Jnr says his dad was an almost perfect match for revue shows of this kind, given the OED’s definition of revue as “a light theatrical entertainment consisting of a series of short sketches, songs, and dances, typically dealing satirically with topical issues.” The fit was almost perfect because, “to my knowledge Strictly Come Dancing never called” (p. 78). 

To Cryer Jnr, that’s because revue matched his father’s love of “professional amateurism”, that mix of spontaneity and chaos where it seems as if the wheels might come off at any moment. I know exactly what he means, having grown up on Cryer Snr’s work with Kenny Everett on TV and hearing him on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on the radio. In fact, Cryer Jnr is good on why the late-night revue show on stage morphed into the panel show on radio and TV.

“The Theatres Act of 1968 meant that the Lord Chamberlain no longer had the power to censor the West End and a new kind of liberated and more confrontational voice was now being heard. Innuendo, that great staple of cabaret and Danny’s nightclub shows, not to mention one of Dad’s great weapons (if you pardon the, ahem, innuendo), was now seen as quite quaint.” (p. 174) 

The panel show, and Kenny Everett, allowed the informal, wheels-coming-off to continue in new guise.

Given Cryer Snr’s prolific career, of the many shows in different media mentioned in the book there’s a single, brief reference on page 182 to Better Late…, a revue show broadcast over nine weeks on BBC Radio 4 in the summer of 1970, filling the gap while Any Answers? was on holiday. 

By Cryer Jnr’s reckoning of revue shows as given above, that mean it was a bit quaint, though BBC’s audience research reports from the time suggests that listeners were still uncomfortable — even outraged — to hear politicians being very lightly mocked.

Cryer didn’t write for the series; he was one of the performers led by Peter Reeves. Reeves also co-wrote the scripts with his friend Terrance Dicks — NB not, this time, Ted.

So, here’s some of what I can add about this long-forgotten revue show:

Better Late… was a kind of summer holiday for Terrance, who’d just completed work as script editor on Jon Pertwee’s first series as Doctor Who — the final episode of closing story Inferno, directed by Douglas Camfield (and, uncredited, by Barry Letts) was recorded on 29 May and went out on 20 June. Terrance duly commissioned scripts for the next series of Doctor Who and must have co-written this revue show while waiting for those scripts to come in. 

On Tuesday 7 July, Robert Holmes delivered his scripts for what was then called The Spray of Death, the debut story of Doctor Who’s 1971 series. The following day, Reeves, Cryer, Elizabeth Morgan and Bill Wallis, with producer John Dyas and I assume co-writer Terrance, rehearsed the first episode of Better Late… ahead of recording in the Paris studio at BBC Broadcasting House that evening, accompanied by the Max Harris Group and announcer David Dunhill. The show went out at 7.30 pm the following evening.

The pattern was basically the same for the next eight weeks.

Sadly, Better Late… no longer survives in audio form but the scripts are (mostly) held by the BBC’s Written Archives Centres. Since the revue show was topical, a lot of the material must have been written the week of recording and transmission, and skips in page numbering on surviving script pages suggests that a lot more material was written than used. The scripts also include many handwritten rewrites — refinements and rephrasings, whole jokes added or cut, the swapping of roles between performers. The sense is of a lot of work, right up to the last possible moment.

Terrance formally accepted draft scripts from Don Houghton for what was then called The Pandora Machine — the second story of the 1971 run of Doctor Who — on 2 September, the same day he was in rehearsals on the ninth and final episode of Better Late… The following week, finished on Better Late..., he completed edits on the scripts for The Spray of Death so it could go into production, received a storyline from Malcolm Hulke for the third story in the run, and commissioned Bob Baker and Dave Martin to write scripts for the fourth story.

So, he finished work on the 1970 series of Doctor Who, which had been something of an ordeal, plunged into this demanding radio series and then went straight back to Doctor Who. Exhausting, thrilling, mad!