He is, in short, a rare talent. I reckon that in the past quarter-century he has written around five million words: in itself, not a remarkable feat, but a high proportion of those words — and as this is an age that venerates statistics, let’s say, for the sake of argument, 3.8 million of them — will have been funny. Unlike almost all other comic writers, he is extremely consistent. One or two others we could name ramble on whimsically as they have done for decades, extrapolating one joke out of their one idea and nursing it lovingly like a half of lager, in the approved Punch style. The Tony Years demonstrates an alternative method: throw in as many gags as you can, and don’t worry where the next ones are coming from. Craig has never been thrifty with his ideas, which may be why he inspires the admiration of so many of his fellows. ‘Genius,’ says Boris Johnson on the cover of this book. ‘Brilliant,’ says Julie Burchill. ‘Outstanding, endlessly inventive and irresistible,’ says Lynne Truss. ‘A national treasure,’ says Helen Fielding. These are all funny and talented people, and funny and talented people only give praise with the greatest reluctance. If I had read ‘ “A national treasure” — Helen Fielding through gritted teeth’, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
Unlike 1966 and All That, which was new material written for a different publisher, The Tony Years is a bunch of old pieces, and a sequel of sorts to his book of three years ago, This is Craig Brown. There’s Telegraph stuff here, Eye diaries, previously uncollected Wallace Arnolds (but curiously no Bel Littlejohns) and, for the first time, some book reviews — all of it supposedly sharing the underlying theme of Blairness. It’s a fairly ropy conceit, as almost everything Craig has written since 1997 shares that theme: he’s a journalist, and reflecting the times is his job. But This is Craig Brown contained more timeless material; calling this one The Tony Years allows him to include a wider variety of pieces, many of them drawn from the 600,000-odd words he has written since the last book. It’s a glitteringly funny collection.
What amazes me is the way he uses the same techniques over and over again but always manages to come up with new and surprising jokes. In almost every Eye diary, he makes the joke that the writer sees everything and everyone in the world as a reflection of his or her own brilliance, and every time it makes me laugh. There are certain people he just finds intrinsically funny: Simon Dee, Clodagh Rodgers, Beverley Nichols, Michael Fabricant, Reginald Bosanquet, Nobby Stiles. Several of these are long forgotten or even long dead, and it’s possible that readers younger than, say, 35 may not have the slightest idea what he is going on about. At the same time, though, I can no longer think of Harold Pinter without hearing in my mind John Sessions impersonating him reading Craig’s parodies of Pinter’s poems. Recently I was reviewing a book about the Queen Mother by one of her equerries, and in one chapter Sir Roy Strong walked into the room. And I went off into fits of laughter, because Sir Roy is now a Craig Brown character, and impossible to think about with a straight face. How much better it is to be reading and enjoying this book than to be in it, as Boris, Julie, Lynne and Helen will probably all confirm.
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