Barry Humphries: Gloriously Uncut, Archive on 4
Sometimes you need light and laughter to balance out the darkness of news.
Enter with a swish of her feather boa Dame Edna, and the inimitable Sir Les Patterson… creations of the late Barry Humphries. This trip through the archives was in the company of lifelong fan and fellow comedian Rob Brydon.
Brydon was such a fan that he wrote Humphries a letter saying how much he enjoyed his work. When they met, Humphries said: “A handwritten letter”. He was genuinely pleased.
When he was five his mother asked him what he wanted to be. There was a perfectly timed pause before he replied: “A genius”.
Later she used to say: “Don’t look at Barry… he’s drawing attention to himself.”
Brydon said that alongside his comedic skill, there was his ability to write – the memoirs are worth a read, he added.
I loved Edna chatting about her old friend Madge – “My sidekick... She stood at my side and I kicked her”
Growing up in Australia, Humphries described himself as “a conscientious objector to school”. Later he followed in the foots of Dali into Dadaism.
At university, he once presented a piece called Pus in Boots that consisted of an old pair of boots filled to the brim with bright yellow custard.
You also need to listen to the story about how he got banned from Quantas airlines.
Brydon takes us through four of his comic creations and unearths old footage about how they evolved.
Humphreys revelled in the use of Australian vernacular – the kind of things that repulsed him in his youth. All those ways of chatting about vomiting and going to the toilet: “Parking the tiger, yodelling on the lawn, the technicular yawn, the liquid laugh, syphon the python.”
He used his characters to say the unsayable.
“I still see myself as a Dadaist even when I try to be respectable. I like to cause deep offence as it pleases me. It means I’m alive,” he said.
I loved Edna chatting about her old friend Madge – “My sidekick... She stood at my side and I kicked her.”
This is a raucously funny journey through the archives featuring chats with people who knew the comedian – a man who called out the absurd or pompous, no matter how uncomfortable.
It’s a story told with great fondness and a serious amount of laughter.