Of course he's known to us as the author of the best book in the World when it comes to the Goons; but we wondered what else he had done in his writing career, so here it is:

I got into writing entirely by accident. The starting point was The Goon Show. This famous BBC radio comedy series was running in the 1950s when I was still at school, and I heard a number of them at the time. During the 1960s I started recording repeats, and swapping tapes with other collectors: and because I like to know the original dates of recordings and any other pertinent information I set about making a list of all the shows. This was meant entirely as a private reference for myself and a few friends.
 
I managed to get some information from the BBC's files, and produced a reasonably accurate typewritten list. (I should say that it wasn't just a matter of copying out the BBC's information, which was often confused or plain wrong - hardly surprising with performers like the Goons).

There the matter rested until 1974, when I decided to update the list and correct the errors which new acquisitions had shown to exist. I, and my friends and colleagues Tim Smith and Peter Copeland, revised the information and did new research, producing another much more complete typewritten list. On the prompting of various friends I sent this to a publisher, Robson Books (choosing them because they had recently published a book of Goon memorabilia).

They showed an interest, and I set about revising the list yet again, and writing a text about the history of the show. While this was in progress I was approached by the late Jimmy Grafton, who had been involved with the Goons in their early days, and had helped to get the show on the air. He suggested combining his memoirs with my book, and this is what happened, with the book being published in 1976 under the title The Goon Show Companion.

For all I knew that was the total of my writing career - after all, I hadn't even set out to write a book in the first place. Jimmy Grafton, though an agent himself (he was Harry Secombe's agent, among others) asked his friend Roger Hancock to act as agent for both of us on the book. Roger is the younger brother of the famous comedian Tony Hancock, and the founder of a well-known agency. Roger agreed to take it on and, when the contract was ready and I went in to sign it, talked to me for a bit to find out who I was and what the book was about.
A couple of weeks after the book was published, Roger rang me up and suggested I write a similar book about Tony Hancock - "If you can write it, I can sell it", he said. Considering I had come out of nowhere, it was quite a compliment.

I set about researching Tony Hancock: this time the nuts-and-bolts research in the BBC files was easier, partly because the information contained fewer errors, but also because this time I knew how to go about it. I was also able to see all the existing telerecordings of 'Hancock's Half-Hour' thanks to the BBC Film Library (at that time few people had seen them since their last repeats in the 1960s). I did a number of interviews (the Goon book had been done without interviewing anyone), and produced a book which gave the history of Hancock's performing career, together with a complete and detailed listing of all his broadcast appearances.

The book was published in 1978 as Tony Hancock - Artiste by what was then Eyre Methuen (they are just Methuen now); I worked with Geoffrey Strachan, who has been my publisher on most of the subsequent books, and who has always been a great help.

The next book arose out of my wondering whether a book on Monty Python's Flying Circus would be a practicality. Roger Hancock, who knew the performers involved, suggested that I should cover the entire generation of comedy which arose from Oxford and Cambridge Universities after 1961, starting with Beyond The Fringe, and taking in That Was The Week That Was and The Goodies as well as the Pythons. This came out in 1980 under the title From Fringe to Flying Circus. For that book I interviewed 22 people: for the next one I got rather more ambitious and interviewed 70!

It was Geoffrey Strachan who suggested a book about theatrical Variety - the post World War One successor to the old Edwardian Music Hall - pointing out that a) there was hardly anything written on the subject, and b) that if I was going to do it I ought to do the interviews as soon as possible in view of the age of the people involved.                 Next page jump link