Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

My lovers’ spat with George Best

I hit it off with Sinéad Cusack – but she fell for the footballer instead

I have started the new year with a new hobby.

I am taking a weekly walk down memory lane – literally. My physiotherapist, Finola, is doing her best to improve my posture and balance in the hope that I fall over less in the future than I have in the past.

Part of her regimen requires me to take regular brisk walks. To add interest to my promenades, I have decided to revisit places I once knew well but haven’t been to in a while.

I started in Oakley Street, London SW3, where I lived with my parents as a little boy in the mid-1950s. It’s a wide, handsome street of Victorian terraced houses that runs from the King’s Road down to Cheyne Walk and the River Thames.

My father liked to say that everyone lives in Oakley Street at some point in their lives. Oscar Wilde and his mother lived there for a time. Scott of the Antarctic lived there with his mother. Bob Marley and David Bowie lived there in the 1970s (at different numbers).

When I first met him, the footballer George Best was living at number 87, the house where Oscar and Lady Wilde had once lived. Donald Maclean, the Cambridge spy, had lived at number 29, in the house next door to ours.

It must be 50 years since I last went into a house in Oakley Street.

In 1973, I visited number 15 to have lunch with Richard Goolden, a lovely old actor, whose claim to fame was playing the part of Mole in the original stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows in 1929. He went on playing the part almost until he died, in 1981, aged 86.

Dickie Goolden was Mole: small, bent, gnome-like and completely delightful. Over lunch, he chattered away merrily about Kenneth Grahame (who wrote the book) and A A Milne (who wrote the play – he knew both of them) and about life in the trenches during the First World War, when he was in charge of the latrines.

He scurried about the house – it was the family home, left to him by his mother. When I told him how much I liked our chicken soup, he ran off to the kitchen and returned triumphantly waving the empty Knorr soup packet at me.

After lunch, he took me into the kitchen and showed me his collection of empty Knorr soup packets – hundreds of them. He did not throw anything away. He took me upstairs to the top room in the house – bare floorboards with old suitcases and cardboard boxes all over the place – and showed me the shelves where he had kept every bank statement and chequebook stub he’d had since he first opened a bank account in 1914.

I am thinking of going to Ireland next, to walk the streets of Dublin, as I did one night in 1970 after a romantic disappointment.

I was in Dublin, aged 22, to be a guest on The Late Late Show hosted by the late great Gay Byrne (1934-2019), then the most famous man in Ireland – by a margin.

His show was huge, and he was more famous than the Pope. Truly.

I remember him as leprechaun-like, very charming and quite unspoilt by his incredible success. For me, though, the excitement of the night was not appearing on Ireland’s most popular TV show. It was meeting the actress Sinéad Cusack at the star-studded post-show party.

Sinéad and I became immediate friends – and found we had been born barely two weeks apart.

We exchanged jokes, theatre stories and our phone numbers within minutes and talked simultaneously, nose to nose, non-stop. Our hands kept touching.

I was bowled over by her. And she liked me. I know she did. For an hour or so, we had a really lovely time together – and then…

And then I introduced her to George Best! Why did I do it? She told me she wasn’t interested in football. I believed her.

George was a fine footballer, of course, but he wasn’t Pelé or Maradona, let alone Messi or Mbappé.

He wasn’t articulate or funny, and he wasn’t that good-looking either. He was rather awkward and scruffy, in fact. But Sinéad said goodnight to me and she went off with him. And, alone, I walked the streets of Dublin.

Sinéad will be 75 at the end of February. I will be 75 at the beginning of March.

Between our birthdays, my friend Sheila Hancock turns 90. She is a wise and funny lady who has been getting some stick in the press for talking up the value of the old-fashioned stiff upper lip.

I am with Sheila all the way. Let’s have more resilience and less bleating and blubbing and letting it all hang out. Keep your woes to yourself. Sinéad fancied George Best. She married Jeremy Irons. Get over it.

George Best – Gyles’s love rival

Gyles celebrates his 75th birthday with Judi Dench, Sheila Hancock and friends at the London Palladium, 5th March. In aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital