Remembering Gerry Goddin, Comedy Writer & Man Of Mystery, Who Died 10 August 2020

Gerry Goddin At Cafe Rouge Clifton Gardens, February 2010. Photograph courtesy of John Random

2020 has been a truly rotten year, existentially, for the community of NewsRevue comedy writers, performers and directors that I befriended nearly 30 years ago when I started writing for that show in 1992.

In January, we lost Nick R Thomas

…then, in March, Chris Stanton died

…and now, sadly, Gerry Goddin has also died.

I started writing for NewsRevue in order to become a comedy writer, not an obiturist. WILL YOU PLEASE STOP DYING, YOU LOT? IT’S NOT FUNNY.

Gerry tended to write gags and quickies more than sketches and songs. He was, for example, a regular contributor to The News Huddlines on Radio 2.

I have raided “The Stanton Files” and uncovered a couple of Gerry’s pieces. Here’s one of his quickies:

A quintessential Gerry Goddin quickie.

The “unfortunate” politician being lampooned was Hartley Booth, who had resigned his upwardly-mobile position in the light of suggestions that he had an affair with one of his researchers in early 1994. The commercial being parodied was the J.R.Hartley advert for The Yellow Pages:

I think Gerry wrote rather a lot of parodies of that advert – certainly NewsRevue had no shortage of such gags on a regular basis in the 1990s.

It was a moving moment, finding that sketch in Chris Stanton’s spring 1994 file. I can visualise Chris performing that quickie, using the voice that he went on, years later, to immortalise in his role as headmaster Mr Flatley in MI High:

But I digress, slightly.

I think of Gerry as having been around and about at NewsRevue from my earliest days there, in 1992. But I don’t see his name on the very earliest running orders I can find.

I have a feeling, digging deep into my memory, that Gerry was a relative novice comedy writer around the time that I got started and that he perceived us as people who were at a similar stage, starting down that road at a similar time.

What all this makes me realise, of course, is that although I have known Gerry for a long time and have probably spent more time in his company than I spent with any of the other deceased NewsRevue folk I have been writing about lately, I hardly knew Gerry at all.

It seems that none of us really knew Gerry.

He seems to have no next of kin. He seems to have abstained from talking to any of us about his life prior to comedy writing in the early 1990s…

…which makes the first 40+ years of his life a bit of a mystery to us all.

I think he once mentioned to me that he had Irish roots. I know that he had been a heavy smoker and recall that he was addicted to (prescription) nicotine chewing gum when I first met him. I think he might have had struggles with drink at one time; I don’t think he drank at all during the years I knew him.

I know that he lived in Ealing for a long while and ended up living in Northolt at the end of his days. I knew he lived in Ealing because, about three months after I met Janie, a small group of us, including Gerry, took our lives into our own hands by going to see Ben Murphy at Up The Creek in November 1992 – Janie and I ended up dropping Gerry off in Ealing afterwards, not too far from Janie’s place.

But Gerry did have glory periods for NewsRevue – some directors liked his material more than others – and at times Gerry was more prolific with material than at other times. Here is a running order from 1995, rich with Goddin material.

Sadly most of Gerry’s archive is probably lost to posterity, unless the Random archive (which I hope we will examine antemortem) yields more fruit than the Stanton archive did.

But I did find one more Goddin sketch in the Stanton files – written jointly with Brian Clover, Spring 1995:

A lot of Tory ministers must have been resigning at that time

After our 1990s NewsRevue era, Gerry became a stalwart of our periodic Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners, which started soon after Ivan’s untimely demise in 2000. I describe those dinners (and Gerry’s fairly regular role in them) in the second of three events in the piece you’ll find by clicking here. We were going to have a 20th anniversary “Ivan” this spring, but of course that wasn’t to be.

While not being forthcoming about himself, Gerry was nevertheless always keen to put people together and encourage collaboration. It was through Gerry that I met Helen Baker; Janie and I enjoyed many hugely pleasant evenings in her company and in the company of her wine tasting pals. At one of those (the last we attended, as it happens) Gerry put in a surprise appearance as guest impresario/songwriter of a musical piece intended for Eurovision – click here or below:

So Gerry wrote serious songs too. Who knew? Well, that charming gang at The Cabin knew. Perhaps they didn’t know that Gerry wrote for NewsRevue and The News Huddlines.

I don’t suppose that any of us really knew Gerry. I don’t suppose that Gerry wanted any of us really to know. Which is infuriating in a way…and sort of funny…and sort of sad…

…yet my life was enriched by having known Gerry. The world is at least one line shorter…or do I mean shorter of one-liners?…now Gerry has gone.

Gerry Goddin.

2 thoughts on “Remembering Gerry Goddin, Comedy Writer & Man Of Mystery, Who Died 10 August 2020”

  1. Thank you for writing this. We only got to know Gerry a little bit through lockdown when we helped out where we could. He’s always kept to himself but the few interactions we were lucky enough to have were always pleasant. Reading this post has made us appreciate more about the secret Life of Gerry.

    Chisel & Asfa (neighbors)

  2. Mark Keegan sent me (and several fellow NewsRevue writers from “The Class Of ’92”) the following reflections:

    “Thanks to Ian for a warm and funny tribute to the enigmatic Mr. Goddin. The accompanying photo from Mr. Random’s lens provides conclusive evidence that not only was Gerry a very funny man but he was also able to balance half a dozen wines glasses on his head.

    “I can also confirm that, in later years at least, Gerry was not entirely tee-total. During the 1990’s when I first met Gerry I never saw him drink anything stronger than a coke. However, when he started doing his stand-up gigs he would sometimes ask for a pint of bitter when offered a drink. After he did a stand-up course at the City Lit, Victoria and I went along to his showcase and I recall he drank 3 pints after the show which was the most alcohol I ever saw him consume.

    “I was living in Acton during the 90s so would often give Gerry a lift back to Ealing but he always asked me to drop him off a couple of streets from where he lived. One night on the way home with Gerry I was waiting to pull out at a junction when I got rear-ended by Channel 4 presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy. In the impact Gerry’s glasses case (with glasses inside) vanished. It was several months later that I found them wedged under the passenger seat. In the meantime,Gerry had had to shell out for a new pair which he was not best pleased about.

    “I could never make up my mind whether Gerry’s reluctance to talk about his past was because he was concealing one that was colourful or to make up for one that was bland. Over the years I knew him he made a couple of allusions to his possible involvement in things which would make the former more likely. I once asked him if he could drive and he made reference to the incident in the 1980s where someone crashed into the gates at Buckingham Palace. Gerry being Gerry,
    to this day I am still unsure whether he had been the driver, he’d had a similar accident or he was just having a laugh…”

    Mark

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