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Tim Brooke-TaylorTim Brooke-Taylor
as the
Narrator
Brighton, Windsor and Grimsby

Tim was born in Buxton, Derbyshire. His father was a solicitor, his mother a lacrosse international and his maternal grandfather a parson who played centre forward for England in the 1890s.

After a bad educational start - he was expelled from his first school at the age of five and a half - he went to various schools in Buxton and then onto Winchester College. Before going to Cambridge he taught at two private schools - one in Hemel Hempstead and the other, one of his old schools in Buxton, Holm Leigh - but only subjects he knew very little about.

In 1960 he began an economics and law degree course at Pembroke College, Cambridge and, as a result of a promise he made to the Derbyshire Education Committee in return for a grant, he joined the Footlights Revue Club. It was in the Footlights that he first met, wrote and performed with Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Trevor Nunn and others.

The Footlights revue of 1963, Cambridge Circus, transferred to London and then, via New Zealand, to Broadway. The cast returned to England where they made several radio series of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. Its successor, a relatively unscripted show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, is still running 37 years after its beginnings in 1972. Tim has recently been touring with a stage version of the show hosted by Jack Dee.

He has appeared in many television and radio shows, but will probably always be best known as a 'Goody'. The triumvirate of Tim, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden made nearly 80 episodes of The Goodies for BBC Television. He and Graeme, with Bill on video, have staged two highly successful Goodies stage shows in Australia in 2005, a run at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006 and a UK tour in 2007. Tim and Graeme also appeared as Goodies at a comedy festival in Sydney in October 2009. Three very reasonably priced Goodies DVDs are currently available. The Goodies also produced several best-selling books and records. Who can forget 'Funky Gibbon' - well, we can try.

Tim has continued to work on radio and television and recently appeared as a mad chaplain in the sitcom TLC, Absolute Power and as a dodgy lawyer in Heartbeat and a soon-to-be-dead doctor in Marple.

He is proud to have served as rector of St Andrews University, and was highly delighted when the university awarded him an honorary doctorate. Dr Brooke-Taylor was also, briefly and fairly disastrously, a director of Derby County Football Club and will always be, in good and bad times, a devoted fan. Perhaps as a result of this, he is also proud to be an honorary doctor of the University of Derby.

His golf handicap is currently 17. In 2001 and 2002 Tim recorded his dream job for the Discovery Channel, playing 30 different golf courses in Golf Clubs With Tim Brooke-Taylor. He is married to Christine, having met as two terrified beginners on a ski slope in Switzerland, even though they both lived in Derbyshire, but has no intention of saying: "And they've been going downhill ever since". They have two surprisingly tall and married sons, Ben and Edward. And they are adoring grandparents of Lily, Robin and Charlie.

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All cast biography information reproduced on the TimeWarp site with permission.

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