COMEDY master Tim Brooke-Taylor recalls his first visit to Darlington Civic Theatre was in 1978 and seemed anything but funny at the time because he was playing a serial killer.

“I’ll always remember it was the beginning of a tour and we ended up having six months in the West End. So, I’m always grateful to the Civic for that,” he says.

Brooke-Taylor recalls that the Darlington Theatre’s manager was brilliant because he’d turned up at 11pm when the final rehearsal finished and said, “I’ve got a meal for you.”

“He became God that night,” laughs Brooke-Taylor about a play called The Unvarnished Truth by Royce Ryton where he ends up killing his wife by mistake.

“Then I kill my mother-in-law and a further three women in about two hours and you can’t blame my character for what happens and not knowing quite what to do. Yes, I was an early serial killer in entertainment, but don’t pass that on,” he says.

“At the beginning of the second half, all the men in the cast are sitting down and wondering what to do and standing up to nearly say something and it was funny like an Ealing comedy,” explains Brooke Taylor, who compares the play to The Ladykillers which he’s also starred in.

The anecdote is likely to be included in Brooke Taylor’s An Audience With...

recollections when he’s interviewed on stage by former That’s Life favourite Chris Serle about his five decades in light entertainment.

“We also get the audience to write their questions down and the most challenging I’ve had so far is, ‘Do you think you’re any good?’ I shouldn’t have said that, because someone might ask that again,” he jokes.

The man who moved from organising the famous Cambridge Footlights to mainsteam comedy stardom will undoubtedly be revealing more about “the best thing that ever happened to me”, his 42 years on BBC Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

“When we did the pilot we thought it was so awful that I went to the pub with Humphrey Lyttelton (the host) and we made an agreement that we’d never do the show again. The producer and director makes sure we do have the tunes in advance (when team members sing something like the words of Three Blind Mice to Ol’ Man River), but not the words. If you get it right it’s clever and if you get it wrong it’s funny. It’s one of these shows that you can tour around the country and you do end up saying to yourself, ‘Do let me be funny one more time’. It’s quite nerve-wracking,” says Brooke-Taylor.

He reveals that although the recordings do sound improvised the panelists are given some advance warning of the games ahead.

“You do save some of your best lines for further into the game round and then some bastard comes up with the same joke and I can’t tell you how annoying that is, because you don’t know what each contestant has written down. But the idea is to keep all the balls in the air rather than knock each other down,” he says.

Two of the comedy casualties of the radio show are the late Willie Rushton (who has a plaque at Mornington Crescent London Underground Station in tribute to the show’s game of the same name) and Lyttelton. “The pub opposite the station has been renamed The Lyttelton Arms,” says Brooke Taylor, who pays tribute to comedian Jack Dee for taking over as panel host to the present day.

One of the clips shown on Brooke Taylor’s theatre tour is from a film that the comedian made with Orson Welles and features Rushton.

“I’m playing a frighteningly gay character and early in the film I’m leaving my lover who is Willie Rushton. I’d forgotten all about this until we put the tour together,” he says.

“Graeme Garden and I did a series about the Encyclopedia Of The Air and we did two series. The phone rang and he put it down and said, ‘That was Orson Welles’ and I said, ‘Yes, and I’m expecting a call from the Pope’. But it was him and he wanted us to write and appear in a TV programe he was making. So, I was working with one of my gods,” adds Brooke Taylor, who went on to direct Welles in a film.

“He didn’t really want to make the film, but did so to allow him to make the ones he really wanted to make. We got on well because he’d come to me for the TV project.

In fact, I ended up completely rewriting his part in the film and he put in some little touches of genius. It wasn’t a very good film, but his bits were absolutely terrific.

Sometimes, he was somewhere else and I had to shout at him, ‘Concentrate for God’s sake’. And then I realised that I’m shouting concentrate to Orson Welles, but he used to look shocked, then he would smile and get on with the scene. I was and still am totally in awe of his work. The film started out being called 13 Chairs and then 12 Plus One and was one of these European coproductions which turned out to be the last film ever made by Sharon Tate,” he says.

The man who once auditioned Eric Idle early in the Monty Python star’s career is probably still best-known on TV for The Goodies, with Garden and Bill Oddie, which ran from 1970 until 1982.

“Eric always says the three of us got him into the business, which is nice. We wouldn’t want to bring back The Goodies like Python, but we did do a show ten years ago for the BBC and then did a couple of tours of Australia where The Goodies is still incredibly popular.

“Australian TV showed the series five times a week alongside Doctor Who. The audience turned out to know a lot more about the show than we did. I remember thinking we couldn’t sell out the Melbourne Concert Hall, but we did it twice. It was 5,000 people a night. At the stage door some very attractive Australian women said, ‘Could we have a hug please?’ and we were these three sad old men saying, ‘Thank you very much’. The Goodies was originally written for adults, but ended up taking in all age groups.”

  • An Audience With Tim Brooke-Taylor, Friday, October 3. Box Office: 01325-486555