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My friend Tony Brennan died last week. I’ve written about him a few times on here, as he was the guy who set up the Oxford Revue Workshop, a fortnightly comedy club in the cellar of the Oxford Union (back in the news today for its seemingly brutal ejection of a blind member - if that’s how they treat people who pay the subs then imagine what it’s like for non-members). Fortunately for me the establishment of this comedy club coincided with my first term at University, giving me a space to try out comedy regularly in front of a tiny audience. I met Stewart Lee as a result of this club and we wrote our first sketches together to put on here. I may have become a comedian without this club, but I wouldn’t have had three years to dick around and learn a bit about what I was doing. And nor would people like Stew, Armando Iannucci, Al Murray, Sally Phillips, Ben Moor, Emma Kennedy and many more. Tony, it could reasonably argued, helped change the face of UK comedy buy giving us the space and encouragement to try and fail to make people laugh.
Ahead of the curve, Tony would host each gig with his stand up act. Nearly all of us were still doing sketches. It wasn’t until our third year that Stew started doing stand up in earnest and he and Tony put on a double header stand up show on 15th January 1989 which cost £1 to enter (or 50p if you were a union member, saving Boris Johnson a bit of money for child maintenance). Y
ou can hear Stew’s half of that show by buying it from gofasterstripe.
Though I notice from the poster that Tony was the headliner.
I am preparing a few words for his funeral at the weekend and so jumped down the rabbit hole to those old days at the Jazz Cellar today. I found a couple of old photos on this blog, including one that always made us laugh where perceptive makes me seem huge and Tony seem tiny and another of the audience at one of the nights - including me standing behind the bar. I posted it on Twitter and amazingly three people in the photo got back to me to say they had spotted themselves. We look so young and so 80s.
There were no camera phones then and we took precious few photos of that amazing place or the terrible and slightly less terrible comedy that took place on the stage. To say it is bigger in my memory than that photo suggests is an understatement. There was a time when we were selling out so quickly that we'd put on the same show twice in a night - but given there was maybe room for 40 people in there that doesn't seem such an achievement now. Though there have been times in my career where I'd have been happy to get 40 people wanting to see me.
I managed to track down Tony’s half of the Brennan/Lee gig and so got an aural link back to the place too, including myself occasionally heckling, no doubt annoyed that I wasn’t the centre of attention for once, but I was also proud of my mates for having managed to put together 45 minutes of stand up each.
Unsurprisingly after nearly 31 years the material has dated, though this was the right-on 1980s so not as badly as some stuff that 90s comedians would do. A joke about Yazz taking off her top in order to stop Apartheid (based on her saying that that was the only thing that would make her pose topless) pretty much demonstrates how incomprehensible much of this set would be to today’s audience.
Slightly unsettling to have this wormhole back to the past and of course poignant now that that voice has been silenced.
Tony is remembered by many with much love - he was, in all probability, too nice a man to be a full time comedian and it was the right choice to direct his talents elsewhere, but I am very grateful to him for all that he did to help me realise my dream, and the support and friendship that continued over the next 30 years.
You’re tiny in that photo, Tony, but you were a real giant. Rest in Peace. Thank you for the music.
