Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

RIP Little Weed, my first love

I’m bereft – Denise Bryer, the flower’s voice, has died at 93

They say you never forget your first love – a psychiatrist once told me that your first proper intimation of your own mortality comes when you learn that your first love has died.

Well, when I was a little boy, my favourite television programme was The Flower Pot Men, featuring Bill and Ben (the flower pot men) and their friend Little Weed, a flora of indeterminate species (a curious dandelion/sunflower cross) with a beaming smile and a squeaky voice.

Little Weed was only a string puppet and I don’t think she ever said much more than ‘Weeeed!’, but the way she said it enchanted me. When I was five, Little Weed was my first love and now she is dead.

Denise Bryer, the actress who was the voice of Little Weed (and, later, of Noddy, and Kiki the Frog in Hector’s House, and the villainous Zelda in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Terrahawks, and many more memorable characters besides), died in October, aged 93.

I got to know her in the early 1970s when she was married to my friend Nicholas Parsons. She was a funny, feisty, gifted lady, and the voice of my childhood. Of yours, too, perhaps.

The Flower Pot Men was the BBC’s Watch with Mother offering on Wednesday afternoons, which is, I think, why Wednesday has always been my favourite day of the week.

Andy Pandy was on Tuesdays and my mother’s favourite, but not mine. I thought Andy was a bit of a drip in that silly clown’s costume, though I liked Teddy and (you’ll not be surprised to hear) I had a soft spot for Looby Loo. Thursday’s offering – Rag, Tag and Bobtail – never had me hooked, and I had no time at all for Friday’s fare, The Woodentops, about a goody-goody family who lived on a farm. As a child, I thought they were dreary. Revisiting them now, I think there is something a tad suspect about Daddy Woodentop.

These were black-and-white puppet shows. You could see the strings attached to the puppets. On Mondays, we had something different. Picture Book was a show-and-tell activity programme – ‘Do you think you could do this, children? It would be jolly fun if you could!’ – presented by a young and beautiful Irish actress called Patricia Driscoll. I preferred her when she left Picture Book in 1957 to play Maid Marian with Richard Greene in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

She died in 2020, aged 92, just before the pandemic took hold. No wonder I’ve been feeling a bit low.

To cheer myself up, I agreed to take part in an ITV Christmas show called All Star Musicals.

In it, I have to choose a number from a favourite musical (My Fair Lady, in my case) and perform it in a proper production on a real stage to a real audience with a full orchestra and chorus. It’s proved a living nightmare, principally because I can neither sing nor dance. But I have loved it because it’s been exciting working with a dozen dazzling dancers (all in their twenties and so fit it’s frightening).

It’s exhilarating to be taken out of my comfort zone. And it’s therapeutic to be forced to spend a month in a world of song and dance that’s so full-on you quite forget the horrors of the real world. When you get home at the end of the day, you are far too exhausted to switch on the dismal, dreary, ever-depressing TV news.

When my wife heard that I had agreed to take part in this musical adventure, she said, ‘Can’t you say no, just once in a while?’ In fact, I do say no quite often.

I agree to do something nowadays only if it satisfies the 4K test. It’s an old showbusiness rule. Do something only if you can be sure it will give you one of the four Ks – kash, kudos, kicks or knooky. Well, knooky is very much off-limits as a possibility nowadays, and there’s not a lot of kudos associated with appearing on a celebrity talent show on ITV, but there was a bit of kash with this and plenty of kicks.

It’s always easier to say no, but in retrospect it’s usually more fun to have said yes.

In the 1990s, when I was an MP, I got my foot on the lowest rung of the parliamentary ladder working as a parliamentary private secretary at the Treasury, alongside David Amess, the MP for Southend who was murdered in his constituency office in October.

I liked David hugely – you couldn’t not. He had such an engaging smile and such enthusiasm for life. He was so patently decent and so committed to his constituents and to the causes he espoused. In the mid-1990s, when I got onto the second rung of the parliamentary ladder (as a junior whip), I discovered that the powers that be, while liking David, reckoned him too much of an oddball to be considered for even junior ministerial office. Now we can see what a very special human being he was. Truly, given his faith and his story, I reckon one day he could be canonised as a saint.

Green giants: Bill, Little Weed and Ben

Gyles’s memoir Odd Boy Out (Michael Joseph) is out now