Gyles Brandreth is a clever man — in his youth a scholar of New College,
Oxford — who for the past 40 years has made a living out of playing the
fool. He camps it up, wears silly woolly jumpers and compiles absurd books
with would-be amusing titles — The Irish Kama Sutra, Wit Knits (“my first
book about knitting patterns”) — doomed to be discarded soon after purchase.
He dresses up in animal costumes. He owns a teddy-bear museum. He runs the
national Scrabble championships. When all else fails, he will — literally —
stand on his head to get a laugh.
In 1992, in one of the most unlikely comic sub-plots of the last Conservative
government, Brandreth was elected Tory MP for Chester. He survived only five
years before being swept away in the new Labour landslide of 1997, but his
diaries of that period, Breaking the Code (1999), proved unexpectedly good.
In the long, dismal drift of the John Major ad-ministration towards
disaster, Brandreth could always be relied upon to see the funny side. It
was as if the tragedy of Macbeth had been retold from the point of view of
the porter.
Unfortunately, the charm of that volume (the self-deprecating tone, the
gallows humour, the novelty of an essentially frivolous man operating in a
world of deadly seriousness) does not survive into this much more extensive
diary selection, covering the years 1959-2000. Now Brandreth invites us to
be interested in him as a person — in the relentless quest for
self-promotion that has gripped him since prep school, in the funny stories
he has picked up in the theatrical world, in the famous people he has
carefully befriended. Few readers, however, are likely to find him quite as
fascinating as he finds himself, even though he has ruthlessly edited his
journals down to only 2% of their original length.
No fewer than 100 pages are devoted to the Brandreth schooldays. “Tonight I
took part in the Petersfield Rotary Club Schools’ public-speaking
competition and, happily, came first,” begins a typical entry from the
1960s. Or, again: “This morning, at 11 am, I bounced on the school
trampoline. (A surprisingly pleasant sensation.)” The next 100 cover the
Brandreth gap year in America (“New England is very beautiful…there is a
picture-postcard loveliness all around”) and, of course, his glittering
career at Oxford, culminating in the inevitable presidency of the Union. By
the time he is 22, Brandreth has hosted his own television programme,
acquired an agent and a book deal, and been deluged with offers from Fleet
Street. His favourite adjective is “jolly”; his favourite punctuation mark
“!” or even “!!”. He is what, in my university days, we used to call “a
hack”.
There are occasional notes of criticism. “Gyles, you are far too amusing for
your own good,” Norman St John-Stevas warns him one evening at the Union
Society. “Take care.” But the bumptiousness and callow self-regard are so
relentless that when Brandreth’s career, post-Oxford, fails to take off,
even Richard Dawkins might start to believe there is a God. It is not that
Brandreth doesn’t try hard — he tries all the time — but, in the grown-up
world, limitless energy and a desire to show off can take a man only so far,
and there is an awful lot of running just to stand still. “Thirteen TV
programmes in 48 hours,” he boasts in August 1984: “two stints at TV-am and
11 episodes of Countdown. Plus Tell the Truth, Babble, Star Choice and now
The Railway Carriage Game. And a new jumper for each occasion…”
The years pass, but there is a weird failure to develop, either professionally
or emotionally. Brandreth in middle age sounds exactly the same as he did
aged 11. His books — he claims to have written more than 120 — have not got
better or more memorable. His basic act — dressing up as a dog, say, or a
dinosaur — remains the same. He is the perennial king of the
after-dinner-speech circuit, performing to sales conferences in provincial
function rooms for a mid-level fee — the Heathrow Penta Hotel, the Carlton
in Bournemouth, the Park in Gosforth, the Crest in Coventry, the Imperial in
Torquay…The recurring names have a kind of Pinteresque poetry. Even
Brandreth occasionally recognises that this is not the glittering career he
envisaged (“it’s life at the shallow end of the pool, I know that”) but his
confidence seldom flags.
It may be that the diaries have done Brandreth a disservice and he is a more
complex man than he is allowed to reveal. “At my wife’s request I have kept
the references to our marriage and to her and our children to a minimum…I
hope that my published diary is, in fact, reasonably discreet.” This may
speak well of Brandreth the family man, but it is a disaster for Brandreth
the diarist. One cannot imagine any of the five diarists whom he cites as
his favourites — Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Noël Coward, Harold Nicolson
and Henry “Chips” Channon — submitting to such a bland regime; if they had,
their diaries would have been as quickly forgotten as this one is destined
to be.
True, Brandreth can occasionally be nasty, in the manner of Alan Clark or
James Lees-Milne (“why do blind people smell?”), but soon we are back in the
land of the bland theatrical anecdote (“a new John Gielgud story, told to me
tonight by David Hemmings…”). Unfortunately, these rarely turn out to be new
at all: there are more old chestnuts stuffed into this book than you will
find in the biggest Christmas turkey. If you have never heard the one about
Gielgud (or whoever) being asked by the young actor at rehearsals whether
Hamlet sleeps with Ophelia, and receiving the response “Only on tour”, then
you are in for a treat; if you have heard it, prepare to greet many similar
old friends.
Brandreth edits his political diaries down to 109 pages and inserts them here
without acknowledging that the material was published a decade earlier. The
last section relies heavily on his post-parliamentary career as a celebrity
interviewer for the Sunday Telegraph; again, whole passages are reprinted
that have been published before. Brandreth is a terrible creep — not that
there is anything wrong with that in a diarist: so was Channon — but his
creeping yields little insight. One of the reasons he agrees to help
fundraise for the National Playing Fields Association is that, “the Duke of
Edinburgh is president…I might get to meet him and I’d like that”. He does
indeed get to meet him, and to interview him, and eventually writes a
tedious book about him (Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage), but
their encounters are as harmless as any royal PR man could wish for.
I fear the title of this book is entirely characteristic: an overfamiliar joke
(“I never travel without my diary: one should always have something
sensational to read in the train” — Oscar Wilde) that promises more than it
delivers. There is nothing in these pages that is sensational at all.
Something Sensational to Read in the Train by Gyles Brandreth
J Murray £25 pp720
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