This piece is a response to the news that Nick R Thomas has died. It culminates with two personal memories, including a sound file of one of my favourite Nick R Thomas comedy pieces.
The above photo is borrowed from Nick R Thomas’s Facebook account; his own choice of signature image.
I met Nick in 1992, when I first started writing for NewsRevue. He was a seasoned comedy writer by then, having been writing News Huddlines, Week Ending and various other stuff of that kind for a couple of years.
Like many of the regular NewsRevue writers at that time, Nick encouraged me and other keen amateurs when we joined the NewsRevue pack. Many of us got involved at that time or, as I think was the case with Nick R Thomas, cemented that collaborative writers friendship around NewsRevue in the early 1990s. We started to describe ourselves as “the class of ’92”.
Most of us had become less actively involved with NewsRevue by the turn of the century, but kept in touch with each other through occasional dinners known as Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners, in honour of the first of our cohort to pass.
Although Nick R Thomas had moved to Bournemouth, he was for some time one of the more regular attendees at those dinners and was great company at those, presumably taking an infeasibly late train home quite often or occasionally staying up in London to join us.
I think the last of his visits to one of those dinners was in October 2017, which was a special Class of ’92 gathering to review old material…
Sadly, Nick was not well enough to join the NewsRevue 40th Anniversary party last year:
But actually I’d like to end this piece with two very personal memories of Nick.
In the autumn of 2016 a friend had a show at the Canal Cafe Theatre (about Brexit of all things), so I arranged to go on a Thursday and did a shout out to the NewsRevue crowd that I intended to stay on and watch NewsRevue that evening as well. Nick turned up unannounced and we spent a very enjoyable late evening together at NewsRevue – it felt like the years rolled back, although of course we were not looking out for our own material in that week’s show in November 2016. Click here or below for my write up of that evening:
My second memory is of Nick as lyricist…but not businessman. In the early 1990s, many of us were approached by the west-country singer/comedian Ben Murphy for material. Ben performed and recorded much of our stuff.
Ben always needed badgering for the money, but (until the inevitable, final small bad debt) always paid me in the end, in order to obtain more material.
I always assumed that everyone else from NewsRevue must have been handling Ben the same way.
But I recall a conversation with Nick R Thomas some years later (probably around 2004 when we had the 25th anniversary of NewsRevue), when Ben’s name came up and Nick told me that Ben had never paid him. Nick had always assumed that no-one got paid by Ben. I’m not sure how often Nick sent Ben yet more material without first receiving (and banking and clearing) Ben’s cheque for the previous batch.
I think this story proves that Nick was a natural for the arts, whiereas I was a natural for commerce.
Anyway, what does survive (something money could not retrospectively buy) is Ben’s recording of one of my favourite Nick R Thomas lyrics; The Bald Song.
Nick R Thomas was a fine comedy writer and was one of the good guys. I, together with a great many others, will miss him.
Oh, my goodness. This is very sad. Any idea what happened? Nick and I were fellow public speaking/humour bloggers, and I learned a lot from his posts. He gave me some good public speaking advice once.
Thanks for this comment, Jason. I have sent you a reply privately.