I was intoxicated by the actor’s delicious story about drugs and Samuel Beckett
In 1970, I was writing my first regular column for the Manchester Evening News: ‘Gyles Brandreth for the Young in Heart – Every Tuesday’.
The newspaper’s editor, Brian Redhead, advised me, ‘If you have an interesting name to drop, put it in at the top of your piece. Otherwise, you may find you’ve lost your readers before they get to it.’
So. When I was having lunch with Bill Nighy the other day, he told a theatre story I hadn’t heard before and it made me laugh out loud.
Years ago, at the National Theatre, word got round that the director Michael Rudman was planning a new production of Waiting for Godot. An ambitious young actor, seeing Rudman in the corridor one day, Nighy said to him, ‘Michael, I want Estragon.’
Rudman replied, ‘If it’s drugs you’re after, you can try the Lyttleton lighting box.’
As regular readers will know, I have a weakness for name-dropping. It’s almost pathological.
At the same lunch, the great Sir Ian McKellen mentioned how it was, when he was 13, that seeing Ivor Novello and Olive Gilbert together on stage, in Novello’s musical King’s Rhapsody, engendered his first erection.
I was almost as excited at a similar age when I had my first brief encounter with a British prime minister. Remarkable, you may think, given it was Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
Imagine then how I felt the other day when, on the same morning, I found myself face to face with not one prime minister, but two.
I have met Sir Keir Starmer on various occasions (and always liked him), but this was my first moment with Afioga Fiamē Naomi Mata‘afa, the first female prime minister of Samoa.
We were all three going to the Commonwealth Day Service of Celebration at Westminster Abbey.
As my prime ministerial double bubble made their way to their places at the front of the Abbey to await the arrival of the King, I went in search of the BBC commentary box.
I was there to sit alongside newsreader Reeta Chakrabarti and help out with the television coverage of the event.
I had assumed our BBC team would be in a cramped Portakabin of some kind, behind the building. Not so. We were inside the Abbey itself, stationed in a beautiful side chapel – and not any old side chapel but, by extraordinary coincidence, the side chapel dedicated to – and containing the tomb of – the man who gave me my name.
My full name is Gyles Daubeney Brandreth, because my father claimed family kinship with Sir Gyles Daubeney (1451-1508), first Baron Daubeney, Knight of the Garter, soldier, diplomat, courtier, politician.
It seems this original Gyles-with-a-y also suffered from the family name-dropping weakness. He knew Edward IV. He attended the coronation of Richard III. He was Master of the Mint and Lord Chamberlain to Henry VII.
His son, Henry Daubeney, was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the celebrated summit that took place in 1520 between Henry VIII and Francis I of France.
In 1538, Henry Daubeney became first Earl of Bridgewater but, despite having two top-drawer wives (one, Elizabeth Neville, kinswoman to Edward IV; the other, Catherine Howard, daughter of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk), he failed to have any children. His titles died with him.
In my late pre-adolescence (around the age Ian McKellen was when getting his first erotic charge from Ivor Novello), I spent a good deal of time at the local library, poring over copies of Burke’s Dormant Peerage, working out how I might establish my right to reclaim the family titles.
I thought it might be fun to mention some of this during my Commonwealth Day broadcast with Reeta – gently name-dropping my forebear’s association with Edward VI, Richard III and Henry VII, as their descendant, Charles III, processed down the nave to take his place at the front of the Abbey.
‘Sorry, Gyles,’ said our producer, kindly. ‘We’re a bit tight for time today.’
Before I go, I have one more name to drop, and it’s a corker. At the West End première of the documentary telling the life story of his wife, Twiggy, my friend the actor Leigh Lawson introduced me to his friend the film star Dustin Hoffman. Dustin, now 87 but still looking good, was effortlessly charming and handled my effusive gushing with great grace. Leigh, 80 in July, was on good form, too. Not surprisingly. Flapjack Press have just published Now and Then, a first collection of Leigh’s poetry. The poems are dazzling.
Leigh got to know Dustin when they appeared together in London in The Merchant of Venice in 1989. Dustin’s Shylock was acclaimed, but the Hollywood star was disappointed the audiences never gave his performance a standing ovation.
During the run, Laurence Olivier died and, on the night of his death, the news was broken to the audience at the end of the play – when they all stood to honour and applaud the great man’s memory.
‘God,’ muttered Hoffman. ‘In this country, you’ve got to die to get a standing ovation.’
Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now
