Barry Humphries: Fiercely intelligent, kind, and endlessly entertaining

Sir Les reciting his Ode To New Zealand as Phil Gifford watches on.

They say not to meet your heroes. To my lasting joy, Barry Humphries was a fiercely intelligent, kind, endlessly entertaining, exception to the rule.

He became my favourite comedian when I was living in England in 1969 and saw him, as Dame Edna Everage, on British television. I would never have imagined that a decade or so later I’d find myself dancing with Edna across the floor of a TV studio in Auckland.

In 1982, when producer Ricki Stratful from TVNZ rang and asked if I’d like to interview Humphries as himself, as Dame Edna Everage, and as Sir Les Patterson, for a one-hour show to be called A Knight, A Dame, and Barry Humphries, I almost dived down the phone line saying yes.

Humphries, who was born and raised in Melbourne, but lived most of his adult life in London, was a man of diverse tastes.

He penned the words for a cartoon strip, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie in Private Eye magazine in England for several years until the magazine’s editor baulked when McKenzie’s adventures, as a gauche Ocker in England, started to include details of a lesbian dental nurse who interfered with female patients when they were anaesthetised.

On the other side of the coin, he also wrote expert art criticism for The New York Times.

When we spent time alone in 1982, he was kindness personified to me. After telling him how much I’d loved the Barry McKenzie cartoon, he spent an hour recalling word for word what he had written for the strips that went unpublished after his ban.

We talked a little about his background, which included a brief spell in the early 1960s when he and his second wife, a New Zealander, had lived in Auckland. He’d performed well-received lunchtime solo performances then at the university, but a return in 1972 to give a lecture during orientation week hadn’t been so successful.

“I couldn’t resist,” he said, “asking if they ever wondered why, as rebellious, unconforming, youth, they found the need to all adopt uniforms involving head-to-toe denim.’

The only time he was slightly unhelpful was when I asked whether he would like to see the questions I was planning to ask him, and if there were any he would like to suggest. He waved a languid hand in the air and said, “Oh, just wing it, dear boy, wing it.”

On the night the show was taped, in front of a live audience in TVNZ’s Shortland St studio, I didn’t see him until he emerged as his first character of the evening, a former Australian politician, Sir Les Patterson.

Les swaggered out in a powder-blue crimplene suit covered in dubious stains, a cigarette and a wine glass in one hand (in real life Humphries had long since stopped drinking), the other groping a young woman in a brief, skin-tight red dress. “That’s my research assistant, Philip,” he slurred. “I’ll introduce you to her later when I find out what her name is.”

We shook hands. I hadn’t noticed that he’d slipped his hand into the pocket of his suit jacket, which must have been, from the feel of the handshake, full of lanolin. In the middle of the greasy grip I felt his middle finger tickling my palm. His eyes shone with glee at the mischief he was creating.

Only 12 minutes of the brilliant 30 minutes of Sir Les he provided made the cut, but enough was left for the audience to learn he’d had left his position sitting on the Australian Cheese Board “because those little flags get up your arse”, that he’d had a few drinks and so was “as full as a Catholic school”, and how, when he came home after an international conference, Lady Gwen Patterson would “just stand me in the front lawn and hose me down”.

Then he recited An Ode to New Zealand, which included the lines, “I get carried away, and quite frankly I drool/ when I’m standing downwind from a boiling mud pool/ Or casting for trout down below Huka Falls/ with the icy cold water creeping up to my ... knees.”

I loved the Les Patterson character and, what I still find so extraordinary about Humphries, is that Sir Les was not even his most popular creation. Madge Allsop, Edna’s downtrodden “Kiwi” companion and former bridesmaid, deserves a mention. A dear old pensioner called Sandy Stone was a great invention, but Dame Edna Everage was his claim to world fame, a former Melbourne housewife who had morphed into self-proclaimed nobility, able to gate crash the Royal Box at the 2013 Royal Variety Concert with impunity.

At TVNZ as Dame Edna, he greeted me on camera with a lipstick-smearing smooch on the cheek and later swept me into his arms so we could foxtrot to a live studio band playing us out under the credits.

Becoming one of world’s most popular drag acts is a long way from Barry McKenzie, for whom Humphries coined the catchphrase “Hard on the heels of villains, soft on the lips of sheilas” for a 1978 movie. A book of the McKenzie comic strips, published in London in the 70s, would be banned in Australia, the Ministry of Customs and Excise saying it “relied on indecency for its humour”.

In a quiet moment before the 82 interview, I mentioned what a range of lifestyles Humphries covered in his comedy characters, from the raging chauvinism of Sir Les, to the easily outraged gentility of Dame Edna.

He smiled knowingly. “Ah yes, always keep them guessing, Philip, always keep them guessing.”