Obituary: Tim Brooke-Taylor, actor and writer who helped shape modern comedy

Tim Brooke-Taylor holds up the OBE presented to him by Prince Charles in 2011 (Picture: John Stillwell - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

BACK in 1962, a bunch of Cambridge students came up to the Edinburgh Fringe with a revue called Double Take. It went down well with critics and audiences, but few could have imagined just how completely those undergraduates would reshape British comedy in the years ahead. They had intended to come back to Edinburgh with another revue the following year, with a cast that now included Bill Oddie, but they got the chance to put it on in the London West End, which led in turn to a short run on Broadway, radio and television.

John Cleese and Graham Chapman, of course, became part of the Monty Python legend, while Oddie and Brooke-Taylor joined up with Graeme Garden as The Goodies.

The Goodies were never quite as cool or subversive as the Pythons, never quite as dangerous – their idea of terror was a ‘giant’ kitten marauding across what is clearly a very cheap model of London, knocking over the Post Office Tower, emerging from the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Not since King Kong rampaged round New York had the world seen such a spectacle.

Tim Brooke-Taylor, right ,with long-running comedy partners Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden – AKA The Goodies (Picture: BBC)

While the Pythons delivered a series of anarchic, unrelated sketches without punchlines, The Goodies served up unrelenting silliness within the format of a sitcom – The Goodies were a sort of agency, with the marketing line ‘We Do Anything Anytime’. They were enormously popular, not just with hip young audiences, but across an age range, including children. Oddie was the hirsute hippy-dippy one, Garden the ‘intellectual’ with glasses and a cord jacket and Brooke-Taylor might have formulated the concept of “nice, but dim”, patriotic and dapper in his Union Jack waistcoat. Brooke-Taylor would later replace it with a Scottish saltire one when he became a very active and committed rector at St Andrews University in 1979.

In 1972 Brooke-Taylor and Garden became regulars on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, a new panel game that Radio 4 marketed as “the antidote to panel games”. Witty and clever rather than fall-off-your seat hilarious, it found an appreciative audience and continues to do so to this day, with Brooke-Taylor still involved until very recently. It was partly scripted, partly ad-libbed.

The youngest of three children, Timothy Julian Brooke-Taylor was born in 1940 into a family with a strong tradition on his father’s side of becoming lawyers, though his maternal grandfather was a minister, who had played football for England in the 1880s. His mother was an international lacrosse player. Brooke-Taylor went to Winchester College public school, where his housemaster wrote in his report: “No doubt, if his A-Levels fail, Tim could become a film star, or, as he would probably prefer to be, an old-time music-hall comedian.”

He had a short spell as a teacher and then went to Cambridge University, initially reading economics and politics, before bowing to family tradition and switching to law. It was at Cambridge that he met Cleese, Chapman and Oddie, and also Graeme Garden, who was a few years younger and succeeded him as president of the Cambridge Footlights revue group.

The success of the 1963 Cambridge Footlights revue led directly to the BBC radio programme I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which ran from 1964 to 1973, which in turn led to television and At Last the 1948 Show, in 1967, 19 years late apparently.

The Four Yorkshiremen sketch is probably one of the most celebrated sketches in British comedy and is now most readily associated with the Pythons. But it was written by the core team from At Last the 1948 Show – Brooke-Taylor, Cleese, Chapman and Marty Feldman – and was originally performed by them on that show.

Although much of the material from the shows is now missing, the original Four Yorkshiremen sketch survives with the four men in their bow-ties and white dinner jackets, drinking fine wine, reminiscing about their humble beginnings. Feldman: “We would have been glad of the price of a cup of tea then.” Chapman: “Aye, cup of cold tea.” Cleese: “Aye, without milk or sugar.” Brooke-Taylor: “Or tea.”

With his misaligned eyes (strabismus) and rather manic presence, Marty Feldman was a unique comedy presence and Brooke-Taylor served as his co-star on the sketch show Marty in the late 1960s. Brooke-Taylor and Feldman also wrote for the show, as did most of what was about to become the Monty Python team.

Brooke-Taylor’s comedy went off in a different direction with The Goodies, which was not so much surreal, as just silly and unashamedly childish, with elements not just of slapstick, but of Hollywood cartoons brought to life. The loose format of an agency where the team do anything provided a lot of scope. The tone was set at the outset when they approach a big flashy car and then from behind it wheel out a bicycle with three seats. A flashing lamp is then fitted to Brooke-Taylor’s head.

The Goodies ran for nine series, 76 episodes, from 1970 to 1982. Brooke-Taylor later starred in several sitcoms, including Me and My Girl, voiced the animated dog Barney for children’s television and in 2006 he returned to the Edinburgh Fringe with Graeme Garden for an evening of anecdote and reminiscences in The Goodies Still Rule OK!, as well as appearing weekly on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. He is survived by his wife Christine and their two sons.

BRIAN PENDREIGH