Even his rage is comical. After a forcibly tied competition to deliver the longest after-dinner speech of all time, he reports: ‘I am going to have to share a world record with Nicholas Parsons. Of course I’m effing angry.’ Naturally, he subsequently makes a successful solo assault on the record.
He is so eager to please. Kenneth Tynan, at a party on a barge, offers girls money to take off their tops: ‘I want to see some young tits! I want to see something happening!’ None obliges, so Gyles throws himself fully clothed into the river. He stands on his head in front of paying audiences. He solves a contractual dispute with a publisher by touring the country dressed in a Snoopy costume. (‘My second ludicrous weekend in Butlins in Minehead playing Snoopy. The place is hateful — like a prisoner-of-war camp.’)
He advertises Bird’s Eye Waffles and Opal Fruits and narrowly misses, as a young man, being ‘the new face of milk’. He invents games to go on Rice Krispie packets, acquires boardgame rights to Korky the cat, and marks Shrove Tuesday ‘by tossing the world’s tiniest pancake “live” on the Today programme’.
He invents That’s Life! and starts the National Scrabble Championships; opens a teddy bear museum and a doomed theme park dedicated to the royal family; becomes famous for wearing eccentric jumpers and is a close associate of Roland Rat. In the final, Situationist move, he becomes a Conservative member of Parliament in the Major government.
The energy of him! My God. At the beginning of 1980, Brandreth is lunching publishers: ‘The aim is to sell at least a book a week.’ That ‘at least’ is the killer. He’s writing joke books, puzzle books, books of rude quotes with an introduction by Kenneth Williams, books of sarcastic quotes with an introduction by Leonard Rossiter — and this is all aside from the ‘diaries, calendars, games etc’ he’s flogging. In 1983, he takes on the job of writing a sitcom about Billy Bunter, recording that it’s the fifth sitcom he’s now supposed to be writing. Chronological accounts of his days often have him on his third daytime television appearance by the time most of us are getting out of bed.
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