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
msn.comwho 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.
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