Sophie Farrah hears how learning poetry has helped Gyles Brandreth survive the lockdown, and why slowing down is not in his vocabulary...
When Gyles Brandreth and I met, he was due to be setting off on a nationwide tour of his successful one-man show, Break A Leg!, but due to the government-enforced lockdown, the famously energetic actor, author, ex-MP, broadcaster, and all-round entertainer has since been grounded.
This, of course, hasn’t stopped him.
“As I am over 70, I have been asked to self-isolate for months. Initially, I thought; what on earth am I going to do? There are only so many episodes of Frasier and Murder She Wrote. So, I decided that I would learn a poem a week and encourage others to do the same. Learn just two lines a day and in a week, you can learn a complete sonnet. I thought, even an old codger like me should be able to do that!”
Stick to just two lines a day, he advises: “Keep repeating them as you pace about your home, take a shower, do the dishes, wash your hands, etc. Master them, and then repeat them the next day before you start on the next two. You’ll emerge from your splendid isolation with a whole repertoire of party pieces.”
To further encourage us, Gyles has been taking to his social media accounts daily, dressed in one of his iconic jumpers from the 1980s, to record himself reciting poetry. A recent hit was a video of Gyles and none other than Dame Judi Dench reciting Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussy-Cat together at Dame Judi’s kitchen sink.
“It’s to remind people to wash their hands thoroughly by taking at least 20 seconds to do so, so we chose to time our 20 seconds by reciting the first verse of one of our favourite poems. We’ve both known it since we were small children – it’s a good idea to start by re-learning a childhood favourite.”
With a career that has spanned from being a Whip and Lord Commissioner of the Treasury in John Major’s government, to starring in his own award-winning musical revue, Zipp!, in London’s West End, doing nothing is not a concept that Gyles is familiar with. In 2019 he founded Poetry Together, a free initiative that encourages schools and care homes to each learns a poem off by heart and perform it together over tea and cake. The Duchess of Cornwall attended one of the initiative’s tea parties.
Gyles also released his latest book at the end of last year, which has undoubtedly inspired his current linguistical lockdown challenge. Dancing by the Light of the Moon explores the power and pleasure of learning poetry by heart and contains over 250 poems to read, relish and recite.
“The book came about because I’ve always said that poetry is good for you, but then I was challenged by a friend to actually prove it. So, off I went and visited various people, including neuroscientists at Cambridge University, and discovered all this interesting stuff about how if you speak poetry to unborn babies in the last three months of pregnancy – and newborn babies as well – it can improve their language skills. They will be able to read better, write better – it’s remarkable,” he says.
“There’s also plenty of evidence for the benefits it has for older people too. People think that their memory goes with ‘senior moments’ but the memory doesn’t go, that is to do with recall. It’s all in there, but the computer is very full so it’s slow, and bringing it to the surface at the right time is very challenging. But you can go on learning poetry. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that makes new memory function and you grow as many new cells there in your 70s as you did at the age of 17. Essentially, your brain is a muscle – if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
In a time before lockdown and when whispers of social distancing were only just starting to circulate, Gyles and I bumped elbows and shared a bowl of walnuts at his kitchen table in Barnes, in the house that he has shared with his wife – writer and publisher Michèle Brown – for the past 34 years. But despite the decades spent together, it was by no means love at first sight. With Barnes, that is…
“At first I wasn’t keen on moving here at all. I used to say it was halfway to Southampton,” he laughs.
“In those days you could tell from a telephone number where you were, and I paid a vast amount of money to have the same telephone exchange here so that people wouldn’t know we’d moved. But very quickly, we fell in love with it.”
Gyles is now very much involved in local life; he is a patron of the Barnes Music Festival, an ambassador of Barnes’ OSO Arts Centre and Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre and he was instrumental in bringing the WWT London Wetland Centre to Barnes as chairman of the Barn Elms Protection Association.
When commitments close to home aren’t keeping him busy, Gyles’ professional life most certainly does. He is a star of Channel 4’s Celebrity Gogglebox, a veteran of BBC’s QI and Have I Got News for You, a reporter on The One Show and a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Just a Minute. He has appeared on stage in productions ranging from panto to Shakespeare and notably, in 2011, he played Lady Bracknell in a theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Last year, he launched the podcast Something Rhymes with Purple with Countdown’s ‘Dictionary Corner’ star Susie Dent which has since had over one million listeners who are invited to uncover the hidden origins of language and share their love of words.
“I love rediscovering old words and I love new words that are coming on the scene, like ‘YOLO’. Words that we haven’t heard before are fun. I love that the English language is ever-evolving - it’s the richest language in the world.”
Despite the fact that we are still in the midst of lockdown at the time of writing, there is clearly no stopping Gyles. He is currently recording the voiceover for a Channel 4 series with Sheila Hancock called Great Canal Journeys, which embarks from the Thames, as well as podcasts, virtual charity quizzes, other television commitments, and writing a new book. At the age of 72, Gyles is as busy as ever, and there is no sign of him slowing down.
“People often ask me why I am still working at my age. I say that I have to, that I need the money – I’ve got three children and seven grandchildren, and I’ve discovered over the years that money is the one thing keeping me in touch with them!” he laughs.
“In all seriousness though, why should one be slowing down? What is the reason? I think that slowing down is risky – you’ve got to keep going. Life is for living.”
“My role model is Nicholas Parsons, he was the host of Just a Minute for more than 50 years and he was still working at the age of 96, so that means I’ve still got a good quarter of a century to go!”
Dancing by the Light of The Moon is out now, published by Penguin Michael Joseph, £ 14.99. Gyles’ Break a Leg tour has been rescheduled to late 2020/2021; for dates and tickets see gylesbrandreth.net/2020-tour
