For some reason or other, many of us on this side of the Irish Sea tend to prefer our heroes being low-key, understated, and with a blow-dried sense of humour. Such was the case with a great English gentleman born exactly a century ago. Humphrey Lyttelton may not sound like the name of someone you’d expect to have a cape and superhuman strength, but he certainly managed to inspire and lighten up the lives of millions in a long and colourful career.
Born on May 23 1921 at Eton College, as the son of one of that school’s house masters (and grandson of Viscount Cobham), Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton would have been expected (particularly with a name like that) to amble through life as a doctor, lawyer, judge, or politician. A love of a certain genre of music would soon put paid to those assumptions: on his 15th birthday he managed to persuade his mother to buy him a trumpet, and he thereafter taught himself the instrument. Later that year he would form a jazz quartet at Eton, whose members included a certain Ludovic Kennedy. On leaving school he worked for a time at a steelworks at Port Talbot in South Wales, and then served with the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War. While in the Guards he saw action in Italy: it was said that during the landing at Salerno he advanced from his boat up the beach with a revolver in one hand and a trumpet in the other. On VE Day, May 8 1945, he took part in the celebrations in London city centre, playing his trumpet from a wheelbarrow – a performance that was captured purely by accident by a BBC reporter nearby: Humph had unwittingly made his radio debut.
On demobilization, seemingly determined to confound his family’s expectations of him, this Old Etonian spent two years at Camberwell Art College, and then worked for a time on the Daily Mail as a cartoonist. It was always to jazz that Humph would return, though, and he would play his trumpet in various venues throughout the forties, finally forming his own band in January 1948, with the help of fellow Mail hack Wally Fawkes (better known as the cartoonist Trog). His jazz exploits at this time led to a meeting with Louis Armstrong in that year’s Nice festival. Armstrong would later remember Lyttelton to his circle as “that cat in England who swings his ass off“. The following decade he would open the hugely popular Humphrey Lyttelton Club at a basement on Oxford Street. He composed over 120 pieces for the band – one of which, Bad Penny Blues, would later make the pop charts in the spring of 1956 – in Lyttelton’s words it ‘climbed to No 19 in the British Top 20, stayed there for six weeks, and then fell back, exhausted.’ The song’s style of piano playing would later inspire Paul McCartney and John Lennon when they wrote Lady Madonna. Such was Lyttelton’s reputation that he would work well with a range of other performers, from Acker Bilk and George Melly to Elkie Brooks and Radiohead. When the BBC had its big radio reorganization in 1967, one of the big shows on the schedule of the newly formed Radio 2 was Best of Jazz, which Lyttelton would host for more than forty years.
For many of Humph’s radio fans, however, it is for his accidental comedy career for which he is best known, and, indeed, still sorely missed, more than 13 years after he left us. I myself started listening to his BBC Radio 4 broadcasts when I was a teenager, long before I even knew anything about his jazz background.
In 1971 comedians Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, on being asked by friend and BBC radio producer David Hatch about another season of their well-received revue-type sketch show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, said that they preferred to do something different and not quite so taxing, to bear the appropriate title I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Their proposed spoof panel show, to be recorded at London’s Paris Theatre on November 16th that year, would involve a number of silly games, invented by Garden, and mostly entailing music and word play. Garden would be in one team with Jo Kendall, while Oddie would be in the other with Tim Brooke-Taylor, and the Old Etonian jazz trumpeter would be the show’s chairman. It appears that after the recording everyone involved reeled back in shock, and gave a collective verdict of “never again”. On being asked if there was any chance of their efforts being broadcast, Hatch replied ‘None – except possibly after lunch on Boxing Day, when the listeners are all drunk.’ What saved Clue from disappearing down the BBC’s enormous memory hole was the reaction of Radio 4’s then Programme Controller, Tony Whitby: he listened to the recording, loved what he had heard, and immediately commissioned a whole series of the show – to begin airing in April 1972, and to feature Lyttelton sharing the role of chairman with comedian Barry Cryer. For the second series in 1973 Humph took on the role of Clue chairman permanently, and Cryer replaced Jo Kendall as a permanent panellist, while Bill Oddie left after Series 2, to be replaced by Willie Rushton from the third series onwards in 1974.
That the show survived for as long as it did is partly down to the Clue team not over-egging their pudding: until 1990 they only put out one season a year (though there was no series in 1977, 1980 or 1988), and thereafter it ran for two seasons per year. There’s also the sheer infectious silliness involved: who, after all, can fail to laugh uproariously at rounds like One Song To The Tune of Another, Sound Charades, Just a Minim, 84 Chicken Cross Road, Late Arrivals and, of course, Mornington Crescent? The main attraction of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue was, though, its original chairman. Neither Graeme Garden nor the show’s inaugural producer David Hatch could ever remember which of them came up with the idea of Humph hosting their programme, but it turned out to be a brilliant choice. Lyttelton had long been known for his dry, deadpan sense of humour, and this, coupled with an amazing ability to pretend convincingly not to know what was going on around him, allowed him to generate even more laughs than the show was always going to get anyway. Who else could get away with such smutty innuendo involving his fictional scorer, the Delightful Samantha…?
Samantha has to nip out now to spend time with her new gentleman friend. They’re going on a driving tour of Wales. She says he’s looking forward to showing her Cardiff and Cardigan Bay, before going on to Bangor in the back of his van.
The show’s former gagwriter, Iain Pattinson, would later say that Lyttelton had unwittingly invented the role of deadpan comedy panel-show chairman – and who could disagree? After all, without Humph’s example, would we later have had Clive Anderson or Angus Deayton and their imitators?
Humph stayed with the show for fifty seasons, from the spring of 1972 to the winter of 2007. In early 2008, though, problems with his heart meant that that spring’s season of Clue was cancelled, as was Best of Jazz, and he died after an operation on April 25 that year. Clue was revived the following year, with Jack Dee later taking on the role of chairman, but, though he has unquestionably tried his best, the fact is that Lyttelton’s shoes are just far too big for anyone to fill. One has to wonder how much longer Clue can survive, given that since Humph’s death we have also lost three other crucial members of the show’s personnel in Tim Brooke-Taylor, Jeremy Hardy, and Iain Pattinson. Then again, it’s hard to conclude one way or another: the same question was asked about the programme when Willie Rushton died in 1996 – though Rushton himself had said that he doubted the show could survive Lyttelton’s loss, so who knows what the future holds for this comedy vehicle?
In the meantime, it’s well worth remembering and celebrating this giant of British music, broadcasting and comedy. To I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue‘s current producer Jon Naismith, he was the Jazz Musicians’ Jazz Musicians’ Jazz Musicians’ Panel-Game Chairman, but to the rest of us he was Humph, a much-loved, drily humorous, self-effacing, and supremely talented performer, who kept up his sense of humour to the very end – as was evident in his last live performance of Clue, in Salford in early April 2008:
Listen, I’ll tell you something: if I’d known at 7 o’clock in the morning on 23 May 1921 that I would ever live to sit on a stage here in Salford, reading this codswallop, I’d have turned around and crawled back in!
Based in Birmingham, Dan is a writer and actor
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