A Warm Hand on Your Opening

It is with great sadness that we learn that Barry died today [April 22, 2023], aged 89, following hip surgery. There will be many eulogies for his inimitable comic sense, but more than mere humour, more than satire… ‘To me he shares the tears of things as well as the laughter,’ as Sir John Betjeman once wrote.

In A Warm Hand Barry Humphries and his co-writer for the last 50 years, Ian Davidson, rifle through a boxful of hilarious memories, anecdotes and the best of the scripts, unmasking Dame Edna Everage, Les Patterson, the appalling Lance Boyle and Barry’s other creations, to reveal the comic genius within.

Originally ill at ease at being himself, this dandified Salvador Dali of the stage delved deep to discover his expansive repertoire of character and innuendo, which blurs the boundaries between surrealism, satire and plain bullying. 

Pre-eminent is Dame Edna, the cunning-linguist who reels in her audiences with cutting-edge wordplay and so humiliates them that we fear there will indeed be ‘tears before bed-time’. But then the crying pathos of her poor victim’s life yields to its comic possibilities which she pursues as relentlessly, so to ensure that in the end our only tears are those of helpless laughter.

Illustrated with 22 photographs, many of them in colour, this is a book for all who have enjoyed more than half a century of Barry Humphries’ penetrating art, including would-be writers, actors, directors, producers – anyone with an interest in an insider’s view of how he came to take the worldwide stage by storm. 

‘The greatest music hall artist to survive into modern times’ John Barber in the Telegraph

‘Never have I heard such a tornado of laughter’ Felix Barker in the London Evening News

‘Barry Humphries is the heir to Max Miller’s territory, but his eavesdropping androgyny gives him the edge’ Peter Nicholls in The Listener


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Davidson first met Barry in 1966 in London. He is a British scriptwriter who has acted, directed and produced in television and the theatre since graduating from Oxford a few years earlier. After performing and writing with Michael Palin and Terry Jones at University, his first BBC writing credit was for That Was the Week That Was in 1963. Subsequently, he became an actor at The Second City improvisational theatre in Chicago. Returning to the UK, he worked as a film director for Ned Sherrin and David Frost, and then began a lifelong association  (between 1966 and 2013) with Barry Humphries as a writer and director. Ian appears, briefly, in many of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus episodes (first aired by the BBC in 1969) – notably as a Dead Indian On a Pile of Dung and as an MP who constantly interrupts a sketch to tell everyone that it’s his first time appearing on television. He was Script Editor on The Two Ronnies from 1978–83, and with Peter Vincent wrote seven series of the Ronnie Corbett sitcom Sorry! With Vincent he also wrote for Dave Allen, The Brittas Empire and Comrade Dad, and from 2013, When the Dog Dies for BBC Radio Four, while with John Chapman Ian wrote French Fields for Thames Television from 1989-1991.