Barry Cryer, comedian and writer who was the cornerstone of the hit radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue for half a century – obituary

Barry Cryer, who has died aged 86, was one of Britain’s most talented comedy scriptwriters, a calling he successfully matched with appearances on television and radio panel games, most notably Radio 4’s anarchic weekly show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

Starting as a stand-up comedian at the Windmill Theatre in the 1950s, he suffered so badly from a disfiguring form of eczema that he turned to writing instead. With his trademark shock of white hair, bulbous nose and ferocious eyebrows, Cryer later returned to the microphone, and as well as his radio dates had become a popular after-dinner speaker and regular pundit on the business of being funny.

Acclaimed as the grand old man of British comedy, he rather relished his hybrid status. Frank Muir called him a “good old workhorse”, while the younger generation of British comics regarded him as a folk memory incarnate or, as one of them put it, the “boilerman” of the business.

“I don’t know what rung of the ladder you’re on, but you’ve got it right,” Ronnie Corbett once told him. “Stay there.” Yet although he remained a comedy fixture for more than 30 years, Cryer maintained he had no real talent. “I feel a complete fraud,” he claimed, “I never intended to be a writer. I wanted to perform but I just didn’t have enough sparkle.”

What he did have was a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ad-libs and anecdotes, which he deployed on television shows such as Blankety Blank, Give Us A Clue and Punchlines, as well as radio regulars including Just A Minute and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, for which he was originally cast as co-chairman with Humphrey Lyttleton.

Cryer furnished material for performers as diverse as David Frost, Danny La Rue, Tommy Cooper and Kenny Everett. Usually working with a partner, most notably John Junkin, he co-wrote sketches for most of the popular television and radio comedy stars, including the two Ronnies (he devised the newsdesk format that opened and closed their television show), Morecambe and Wise and Les Dawson.

But his relentless participation in all this merrymaking attracted criticism from at least one corner of Comedy Central. In 1985 the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck turned on Cryer, his fellow speaker at a charity lunch. “I’m speaking slowly so Cryer can write this down,” Tarbuck declared. “Go on, write it down.

“Last time I had dinner with Cryer,” Tarbuck added, “a week later he was doing my act.”

Barry Charles Cryer was born on March 23 1935 in Leeds. His father, Carl Cryer, an accountant and prominent local freemason, died when Barry was four. At Leeds grammar school young Barry had hopes of becoming a journalist, but the editor of his local newspaper pointed out that he was too old to start as a teaboy and too young to write articles. 

Instead he won an exhibition to Leeds University and read English Literature, but having spent most of his evening singing in jazz clubs and participating in student theatricals he failed his first year exams and left, taking a series of menial jobs before joining the council’s highways department as a clerk.

In 1956 he produced the university’s rag revue at the Leeds Empire, where his comedy act was spotted by Stanley Joseph, who ran the theatre with his brother, and offered a two-week booking at the City Varieties. Although this led to further bottom-of-the-bill bookings in other provincial theatres, Cryer soon returned to Leeds where he was offered a job as a stagehand at the Empire theatre where he had started.

Moving to London the following year, at the suggestion of the magician David Nixon, Cryer still hoped to break into professional comedy, but suffered recurring attacks of the skin complaint psoriasis. This mutated into a severe case of atopic eczema, requiring hospital treatment. Eventually he accepted a three-minute spot as comic at the Windmill Theatre. “Bruce Forsyth was top of the bill,” he recalled, “and I was bottom. After a season I knew I didn’t have what it takes.”

Later in 1957 Cryer made his radio debut in the talent show Search For A Star. He won his round but was unable to take part in the finals – held at the BBC studios in Manchester – because the Windmill would not release him.

After further attacks of psoriasis, he left the Windmill, and in 1958 was cast in the West End musical Expresso Bongo. In 1960, working from a bedsitting room in north London, he started to write gags and scripts, some of which were used in revues at the Fortune Theatre. When the entertainer Danny La Rue saw his material, he invited Cryer to write a show for his new nightclub, launching a partnership that lasted 13 years.

Having had four of his sketches accepted for The Jimmy Logan Show, Cryer co-wrote See You Inside (1963), a revue he remembered because one of the sketches was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, “the only person in Britain,” as Cryer pointed out, “to imagine that Jackie Kennedy would be annoyed at being impersonated by Moira Lister”.

In 1964 Cryer began his long association with David Frost, writing material for A Degree Of Frost and Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life before becoming a full-time writer and warm-up man on The Frost Report. After two seasons, when Frost himself moved to ATV to make The Frost Programme, Cryer went with him. In 1967, with Graham Chapman, Cryer co-wrote a sitcom for Ronnie Corbett – No, That’s Me Over Here.

Throughout the 1970s Cryer continued to write for a wide range of television shows including the ill-fated Now Look Here (1971), Marty, Back Together Again and The Les Dawson Show (1973). In Jokers Wild, which he hosted on ITV, he wrote material for Tommy Cooper, Max Bygraves and Frankie Howerd.

In 1976 Cryer returned to performing with the short-lived Hello Cheeky, an ITV spin-off from a BBC radio show that failed to make a successful transition to television.

The following year Cryer struck a rich radio seam when he joined the Radio 4 panel game I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, in which he was teamed with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Willie Rushton. Although dismissed by one critic as “a collection of parlour games played by a collection of ageing 1960s humorists”, the show has now run for well over half a century. In the first series in 1972 Cryer had shared the role of chairman with Humphrey Lyttleton, but the producers decided he worked better as a panellist, a role he filled from 1977 for more than 40 years.

On television in the 1980s he wrote for the comedians Kenny Everett and Russ Abbot, remaining in constant demand as a writer and after-dinner speaker. In 1991 Cryer returned to the stage to appear with Willie Rushton at the Edinburgh Festival, playing to full houses in the revue Two Old Farts In The Night. Later the pair toured with the show.

Cryer won many industry honours for his comedy writing, including Baftas, Writers’ Guild and Royal Society of Television awards. He was appointed OBE in 2001 and in 2018 the British Music Hall Society gave him a lifetime achievement award. He published a volume of memoirs, You Won’t Believe This But. in 1996, and a collection of anecdotes, Pigs Can Fly, in 1999.

In later years he was a stalwart of The Oldie, much in demand to act as MC at the magazine’s award lunches and dinners – at which frequently a cry would go up from the audience imploring him to tell one of his extended parrot jokes.

He reflected on having turned 86 with a characteristic wry gag: “My longevity is due to cigarettes and lager. I can’t account for it. It’s just a number. I don’t know how long I’ve got left. I don’t even buy green bananas.”

He never learnt to drive, and listed the study of public transport among his recreations.

Barry Cryer married, in 1962, the singer Terry Donovan, whom he met while working at Danny La Rue’s club, and who survives him with their three sons and a daughter.

Barry Cryer, born March 23 1935, death announced January 27 2022     

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