Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Anything Goes for me and my chums

The joy of returning to the theatre with Christopher Biggins and Bonnie Langford

In my neck of the woods, it’s back to normal. How’s it with you?

On the bus and the London Underground, I am still wearing a mask, but other than that, everything is much as it was before the pandemic struck – except that my office-worker friends really don’t want to return to their offices for more than two days a week and I am suddenly conscious of how very expensive it is to eat out.

I am going to the theatre again and loving it. With my chums Christopher Biggins and Bonnie Langford, I went to a packed-to-the-rafters Barbican and we had the night of our lives at a beyondbelief brilliant revival of Cole Porter’s musical Anything Goes. It is running until the end of October; even if you have to come down from Aberdeen or fly in from Antrim, go, go, go. It’s that good.

It will make you feel glad to be alive.

I have even started going to parties again. The sparkiest so far has been the Australian High Commissioner’s summer drinks. The only disappointment of the evening was to find that the Australian cultural attaché was not in the least like Sir Les Patterson. There was no dribbling or spitting, which was probably a good thing because we had to come in from the garden to shelter from the rain and were huddled together, unmasked.

Our Prime Minister’s father was a fellow guest and told me a story I’d not heard before about how his boy Boris got his name. It’s actually the PM’s second name (his first is Alexander). He has it because shortly before his birth, in New York in the summer of 1964, a chap called Boris showed young Stanley Johnson (then 23 and studying economics at Columbia University) and his then wife (Charlotte, 22) an unexpected kindness. Something to do with helping them get a seat on a Greyhound bus.

Charlotte was about to give birth and Stanley told Boris that, by way of thanks, their baby when it arrived would be named in his honour. Stanley is a man of his word. Stanley also told me that if the baby had been a girl, she would have been called Doris.

Coming and going at the party, some people were bumping elbows and a few were offering socially-distanced namastes, but most were back to shaking hands.

I gave the actor Simon Callow a proper luvvies’ hug and he rewarded me with a proper luvvies’ story – about the great and joyously eccentric Sir Ralph Richardson and, again, amazingly, it wasn’t one I had heard before.

Sir Ralph, then in his late seventies, was appearing at the National Theatre and, during a break in rehearsals, was sitting at a table alone in the backstage canteen. A young actor approached the great man and asked if he could get him a cup of coffee. ‘No, thank you,’ replied Sir Ralph. ‘No coffee – but I’ll take a cup of hemlock if they’ve got one.’

During lockdown, almost everyone I know has been writing a childhood memoir, and many of them are being published this autumn.

I have read an early copy of one of them that I can recommend without qualification: it’s called Will She Do? and tells the story of a girl from a council estate in Tottenham in the 1930s whose father was employed as a gas-meter reader and whose mother was a seamstress and barmaid. The girl is now Dame Eileen Atkins, 87, and it turns out that she is as subtle, honest and brilliant as a writer as she is as an actress.

In case no one else does, let me recommend my own boyhood memoir, too. It’s called Odd Boy Out, and between now and November there isn’t a literary festival in the land at which I won’t be popping up to promote it. If you happen to see me at a signing, please come and say hello.

These events can be awkward for authors. My very first book was published 50 years ago and I still have nightmares about my first book-signing. It was at Selfridges in London, and the line of shoppers stretched from the table where I was sitting in the book department, through the food department, out into Baker Street and around the corner into Oxford Street.

There was a reason for that. I was sharing the table with another first-time author and she sold more than a thousand copies of her autobiography that day. I sold 11 copies of my book: four to my mother, four to my father, two to the deputy manager of the Selfridges book department – for customers who, apparently, had specially asked him to put them by – and, yes, one to my fellow newbie author, the very beautiful Italian lady seated on my left.

She was the actress Sophia Loren.

‘It’s not me! He’s the one who’s obsessed with breasts!’ Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out (Michael Joseph), is out on 16th September