TIM Brooke-Taylor has never been to Selby.

"The nearest I ever came to going there was when Graeme [fellow Goodies star Graeme Garden] got married at Selby Abbey, but I was abroad at the time, so I couldn't go," he recalls. "But Graeme said it was a lovely church."

On Sunday night, 74-year-old Tim will visit the old mining town for the first time for An Audience With Tim Brooke-Taylor at Selby Town Hall, an evening when he will reminisce on a career in comedy that has taken him from the presidency of the Cambridge Footlights, through the television series At Last The 1948 Show and The Goodies, to more than 40 unbroken years as a panellist on BBC Radio 4's I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

Along the way he has worked not only with fellow fellow Cambridge Footlights alumni John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Bill Oddie, but also Marty Feldman, Barry Cryer, I'm Sorry cohort Graeme Garden, The Beatles' producer, George Martin and Orson Welles, more of whom later.

Anecdotes aplenty abound to be assimilated into one show, and to help him do so, Tim will be in conversation with broadcast journalist and former That's Life presenter Chris Serle, who steers the show with questions for Tim and later by taking further questions from the floor.

"It's a comparatively new venture for me, which came about because of a charity do I did with Chris," says Tim. "It was so enjoyable, which I know sounds self-indulgent, but it's not so self-indulgent when someone is firing questions at you, and it's more fun for the audience because I'm not blasting away at them, where they might wriggle with embarrassment."

Tim has always preferred to perform in groups rather than solo, which makes the role of Chris and the audience all important in the chat show.

"I find the comedy is funnier in groups; there are great stand-ups but I love seeing people bouncing words off each other. That's why it's more rewarding to do these shows with Chris, who changes the questions as we go along, so that keeps me on my toes."

Audience participation takes the form of Tim inviting them to write down questions to be answered the second half. "The thing is, if they write them, they're much ruder than if people just put their hand up. Sometimes they've surprised me; sometimes it's their prejudices that are exposed and sometimes it's my own."

Much publicity has surrounded this autumn's rediscovery of footage from At Last The 1948 Show, the ITV series that Brooke-Taylor made with Cleese, Chapman and Feldman in 1967 and 1968. It was this show– and not Monty Python, who subsequently appropriated it – that gave the world the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, the one that has trapped Yorkshire in a stereotypical image ever since.

The grainy black-and-white sketch is sure to make an appearance at Selby on Sunday. "I come from Derbyshire, so all Yorkshiremen are a pain in the neck and we have a chip on the shoulder about them," says the Buxton-born Brooke-Taylor, not entirely seriously.

"In the Seventies, I was asked by five different different publishers to write about Yorkshire because I'd picked on the county, but then Yorkshiremen were not at their best in the Seventies, were they. Geoffrey Boycott! But I've since met some very nice Yorkshiremen and I've had to change my attitude, which is rather annoying."

Doing these question-and-answer shows has sharpened Tim's thoughts on past deeds. "Suddenly things come up in your mind, like when I was watching the Cilla TV drama and I remembered that George Martin recorded our first LP in 1963, when one or two lesser people were working with him, like The Beatles," he says.

And then there was Orson Welles, with whom he and Graeme Garden worked on the obscure 1969 film 12 + 1. "Graeme took a phone call, put the phone down and said, 'that was Orson Welles'. 'Oh yeah,' I said, 'It will be the Pope next'," recalls Tim. All's Welles that ends well, however, and they did end up doing the film. "Willie Rushton played my boyfriend, which I'd forgotten," he adds.

Has Tim ever been tempted to write his autobiography?

"I've been offered deals, but I think the interesting ones are written by those with nasty things to say, like Roy Keane's new book. My book would be too happy," he says. "Though I did like John Cleese's idea of writing his thoughts down one side and those people he mentioned would write their version on the other side – and it would have been good to write our versions before we knew what he'd written."

Instead, Tim Brooke-Taylor will continue to bring happiness and mirth through his humour at 74, affirming that laughter is still the best medicine. Would his doctor agree? "Well, if I could get an appointment...."

An Audience With Tim Brooke-Taylor, Selby Town Hall, Sunday, 8pm. Tickets: £18 in advance on 01757 708449 and at selbytownhall.co.uk or £20 on the door from 7.30pm.

 

Did you know?

Tim Brooke-Taylor was born into a family of Buxton lawyers and studied law at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He never practised as a solicitor but later played a dodgy lawyer in three episodes of Yorkshire Television's Heartbeat.

Did you know too?

The Goodies continues to be aired everyday on Australian television.