I became aware of Barry in the early 1960s, through the comic strip he wrote for Private Eye, The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie, about the worst aspects of Australians living abroad. I remember its co-founder Richard Ingrams saying Barry was the man who gave the magazine its initial sales boost. Then I was doing a TV programme in the Establishment Club with John Betjeman and he’d just seen Barry’s one-man show and said I had to go and see this man, he was terrific. So not long after he’d moved to London Barry was the talk of two key places.
I met him soon afterwards. He was a very charming man with a little edge that you had to watch out for. He would suddenly cut into your chat, and out of nothing, mention your tie or your lack of tie, then go off into this spin, and you’d just think, where’s this going – you never knew – but it was hilarious. He had a real gift. He told me he’d started doing this on trips, or on the way back from school football games in Australia – he was the entertainment in the back of the bus imitating people, like teachers, and making everybody laugh. He got the hang of comedy that way.
Barry educated himself from a very early age. He was very keen on music and reading and later he became a massive collector, particularly fascinated by first editions. He was also always drawing and painting and his parents hadn’t been very interested in all that. He was a complicated mixture, in one way out of vaudeville, in another way a private intellectual.
When I went to his home in 1989 to interview him for The South Bank Show, it was more like a library and a gallery. I knew I had to be careful. If I stepped in the wrong direction, a waterfall of beautifully bound volumes or a parcel of paintings could be knocked over, or fall on my head. But he was very anchored there, quite sane and straightforward, wanting to show you around to share his love of these things. He was all, do you know this edition? It’s wonderful. Or: do you want to borrow that?
We usually had poets, writers, actors or musicians on The South Bank Show, but I wanted to do something different with Barry as he’s such an original person. I’d suggested that I would interview him and then Edna, and on camera he made it a brilliant piece of television. He anticipated things that Edna would say, she would refer back to things – Barry made it really clever. At that time a comedian was thought of as somebody who just made you laugh, whereas now we know it’s somebody who can make you think. Barry was very much at the forefront of that.
There was a genius to characters like Dame Edna and Les Patterson. Barry wasn’t a mimic or an actor. He inhabited these people – it wasn’t even improvisation, it was immersion. As Les, he was suddenly this hilariously horrible person spitting and farting, and when he got on stage as Edna, he suddenly felt unleashed. I remember getting him to present a South Bank Show award. I announced him, and of course, he wasn’t in the room, then he peeped around one of the doors – “Hello!” – came on, and destroyed me.
He could be cruel, but you had to ride with it, and of course, it was very funny at the same time. He always gauged how far he could go by the reception he was getting. If it was going well, he pushed it further. He did his writing in front of an audience. They were part of the material.
I met him over the years at parties and the first nights of plays, and he always liked to chat. It sounds awful but he was a perfectly ordinary, nice bloke. But when he went into being somebody it was like flipping a coin. I don’t think he was in control of it. He just let it rip. I last saw him at an event at the Palladium a few years ago and he hadn’t lost any of his powers. He was in his suit, the normal Barry Humphries – but you knew you had to watch your step.
