Remembering Barry Took
Michael Vestey
Barry Took, who died earlier this year, will be remembered and praised at a memorial service for him in St John's Wood next Wednesday. He was a deeply influential figure in radio and television comedy for many years, as a writer, broadcaster and adviser, before the genre sank largely into
dumbed-down vulgarity and focus groupled mediocrity. He had an instinct for comedy as all the best writers have and didn't need research to come up with ideas or to assess a programme's quality.
With his comedy partner Marty Feldman, Took wrote one of the greatest radio successes, Round The Home with Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams, using the camp theatrical slang called polari, under whose disguise they would slip in risque homosexual double entendres and suggestive remarks, much of which went over tIie heads of many of their listeners — and BBC censors — who nonetheless found it hilarious. I certainly didn't understand what they were talking about when I listened in my youth but hearing excerpts again I find the humour endures, which is always a good sign.
For television he wrote episodes of Boorsic and Snudge. Rowan and Martin's Laugh In in America, contributed to the surrealist Monty Python shows, helping to bring the team together in the first place; wittily arid urbanely fronted television's Points of View before chairing the News Quiz on Racio Four for 17 years, to mention just a few. My greatest regret is that I never met him. When he gave up the News Quiz I sensed an agist plot at John Birt's BBC. In this column I lamented his departure and found I didn't take to his replacement, Simon Hoggart, good though he is, and some of the panellists who followed.
He wrote to me saying that the decision to leave was entirely his; he just felt like a change. From then on we corresponded. Sometimes the phone would ring on a Saturday morning and he'd fulminate about some new, incomprehensible example of Birtism at the BBC, and each time we agreed we must meet. Somehow, it never happened though I could have made more of an effort, something I curse myself for.
He went public in the mid-1990s describing the then BBC chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Birt and their acolytes as 'buffoons', remarking that programme quality had been swamped by an excess of bureaucracy. The 'smug' Hussey, he said, was playing about at management when the business of the BBC was broadcasting. How he would now delight in — and despair at — the Pythonesque sight of Lord 'two motorways' Birt planning our transport system. Later, unbeknown to me, a combination of domestic problems and a stroke had set him back, which I only discovered by reading an interview with him in the Telegraph.
I phoned him and he sounded quite good, stumbling over just a few words, and I was encouraged enough to think he would fully recover. He once sent me a copy of a letter he'd written to the then culture and media secretary Chris Smith, complaining about how Hussey had 'brought the android Birt from London Weekend Television to run the BBC and the rot had set in. Good people were made redundant
and those left are virtually leaderless and frightened for their jobs. The situation is chronic.'
Commenting on Smith's reply he wrote, Pretty bland of course ... Talking of bland do you know BLAND (Sir Christopher) the new chairman of Governors? He struck me as a complete prat when we met recently. His wife is twice the man!' A column about Radio Two using more contemporary popular music to attract younger listeners and my reference to a commercial radio boss by the name of Riley who'd pointed out in the press that his mother didn't like the changes — I had called her 'Old Mother Riley' — prompted this, 'A cracking good piece in this week's Spec. Loved -Old Mother Riley" etc. — quite cheered me up.'
He had a streak of melancholy you find in funny men and the following year he was rather pessimistic, 'It's too late to stop the rot but I can't tell, You know how sad I am that what I once loved is now a wasteland.' I sent him a copy of my comic novel Waning Powers about the BBC, and he was delighted, describing it as a 'knowing picture of life in the BBC. I never experienced the sex but recognise a lot of the rest.' I think I inscribed the book to a 'genius of comedy' and he came on the phone saying he thought that was going too far. Before I could reply, he murmured quickly, 'Well, maybe not.' He was, for a generation or more, certainly a pioneer of comedy.
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