Why comedian Andy Hamilton, co-creator of Outnumbered, is heading to Yorkshire

Hamilton (he’s just turned 69) has written for, or appeared in, some of the best radio and TV shows of the last few decades. Everything from Not the Nine O’clock News to Old Harry’s Game, from Week Ending to The Two Ronnies, QI and Have I got News for You. And now, he’s bringing his very own one-man show to Yorkshire, and specifically to The Garden Rooms at Tennants in Leyburn.

He’s not quite sure if he’s been to that part of the county before. It’s not a case of forgetfulness. “We used to come up and see my grandparents quite a lot when I was a youngster – they lived in Bradford – and there were a lot of outings, off and away to all sorts of places in the car. I’m pretty sure that Swaledale must have been one of them, because we seemed to go everywhere else. Those were very happy family times, I loved it – and it was all very different from Fulham, where we lived at the time.”

His entry into the world of entertainment came when he went to the Edinburgh Festival. Andy was reading English at Downing College in Cambridge, and a member of the University Light Entertainments Society. “The idea was that we’d put on a few productions every year, raise a bit of money, which we used to take out shows into places like prisons and old people’s homes. Talk about a ‘captive audience.’ Anyway, we found ourselves doing another revue in Edinburgh, and after one performance a young trainee BBC producer called Geoffrey Perkins came up to me and asked if I’d ever thought of writing for a living? He was very kind, and very encouraging, and…..well, here I am.

He joined the BBC in the mid-seventies and recalls the “very happy times” he had working on programmes like The News Huddlines, with Roy Hudd. “It was such a sad day when Roy died – at the time of the first lockdown, so he never got the memorial tribute that he so richly deserved. He was the kindest, funniest, of men, not a malicious bone in his body, and we all loved him. Brilliantly creative, and what he didn’t know about the great days of variety wasn’t worth writing on the back of a stamp. He’s very much missed. After recording the show, we’d all go to a pub across the way from Broadcasting House, and in the room upstairs some of us would do a ‘turn.’ I loved it, but I realised that writing was perhaps my forte.”

Those early days shaped the way that he still works, almost 50 years on. “I don’t think that the word ‘discipline’ really applies, perhaps ‘formative’ is better. There’d be a couple of rooms, a few desks, a lot of writers trying to grab space, and you sat down where you could – sometimes it was on the stairs – and you wrote. In a fug of smoke, because nearly everyone had a cigarette burning. I know that some writers these days claim to write in a specific place, like their local coffee shop. Well, I can do it just about anywhere – I certainly don’t have a peaceful ‘man cave’ at the bottom of our garden, the kitchen table with family life going on around me is just fine.

“I’m an observational writer – I look at things going on around me, and I think about them, and I get them on to paper. I’m not one who has a notebook with him all the time. Mind you, as the years roll by, maybe I’d better think about getting one, just in case.” Some writers don’t really like deadlines. Andy seems to relish them. Radio 2’s Huddlines was on-the-nail topical, with scripts being written right up until the moment of broadcast, and so was Drop the Dead Donkey, which ran for no less than eight years on C4. “It was a lot of fun and we steered pretty close to the wind. I remember one occasion when a certain newspaper boss of the time mysteriously vanished from his yacht, and there was a stream of tributes to the man – and then certain facts started to come out. There were some pretty serious script re-writes that needed doing rather quickly, believe me! But that was all part of the energy that kept it up there. I never ever appeared in vision, but I was mentioned – because I was supposed to be Joe, the cameraman for the cynical and ruthless Damian Day, and the poor bloke was always backing into a lake, or being hit by a vehicle as Damian (beautifully played by Stephen Tompkinson) did his piece to camera. All you heard was the yell from me when it happened!”

For Dead Donkey, Andy was partnered with other class act writers, like Nick Revell and Guy Jenkin, and he can now reveal that the show will be returning, early next year, but not on TV. “We’re going to be doing a full stage version, and we’ll be re-uniting as many of the old team as we can,” he says, “listen out for developments”.

He’s a little cautious when discussing the disappearance of certain shows from the airwaves, programmes like Mock the Week. “There’s always been a sensitivity about certain topics, and social media these days does mean that it is much easier to create a tidal wave of outrage. I have the feeling that, in five years’ time, we’ll be looking back and saying ‘Early 2020s? Now that was a weird time!’.”

For his Swaledale show, he’ll be giving the audiences a first half of reminiscence and revelation, and, after the interval, he’ll be taking questions from the audience. “It works like this. We put a bucket at the front of the stage – I’m not kidding you – and there’ll be paper and pencils for everyone. You write down your question, and I’ll answer as many as I can. Believe me, it seems to work.”

And Andy, it seems, has found a new audience – for the very young. He’s the voice of Dr. Elephant, the dentist of the Peppa Pig children’s show. “You won’t believe the number of times I’ve been waiting to cross the road, and a nice lady, pushing a buggy, has stopped and said to the child, ‘And do you know who this is?’. I smile politely, and nod, and then I move on, because there’s always a total look of bewilderment on the child’s face. They’re thinking ‘What on earth is going on here? Who is this idiot?.’ Mind you, I’ve always wondered how a dentist elephant does root canal work, so there we are…..”

And he’s never likely to pick up an offer to make a commercial for TV or radio. “I do get recognised a lot because I’m told that I have a very distinctive voice.“I don’t think so, but there we are. And TV ads are very, very lucrative. But do I really want to be known, in perpetuity, as the voice of (let’s say) a pink cartoon rabbit? No, I don’t think so, thanks very much!”

An Evening OUT with Andy Hamilton, The Garden Rooms, Tennants, Leyburn, Saturday June 3, 19.30pm.

Tickets and information: www.swalefest.com