I was clearly not alone in there being a certain degree of complex aesthetic approval of the late and very very great Tony Slattery as a teen in the 90s – in fact, since the news broke of his fatal heart attack at the weekend, the ‘my god he was dishy’ tributes have been so prevalent, and so beside the point with a comic mind of his speed and filthiness, that I’m getting the business out of the way right here in the first paragraph. As a teenage lad, watching him flirt with Josie and Mike and whoever else came within his sphere on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, any questions I had for myself about my somewhat burgeoning sexuality were intensified by a man so handsome, so dashing, and so provocative.

I remember catching him flogging the musical ‘Radio Days’ on some chat show, maybe Pebble Mill At One, and my god, the raw talent on display in his performance of ‘Who’s Been Polishing The Sun’! I have never seen a greater, more perfect performance of any kind, from that one chance viewing it’s remained emblazoned on my mind.

Also, while my teenage contemporaries were listening to Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, I could recite Tony Slattery’s improvised song about loving turtles word for word. And I still can to this day:

“I think sometimes, I drink too much, I think I drink too much gin,
Then I find myself falling in love with a shiny terrapin.
I like to call it Josie or Myrtle, but really I want to mount a turtle!
Tell me what I do before I go mad… CHA CHA CHA!“

Ultimately, of course, I found that I fell decisively on the dull, cis side of things, having realised that mine was really the only nice penis in the known universe… but although my blood remained un-pumping at the thought of giving him a kiss, I never stopped loving Tony Slattery.

In my long-ago double act with Paul Gannon, we had a sketch, mainly written by Paul, in which a job interviewer obsessively wants to know if I, the interviewee, was GAY. It sounds kind of awful in a noughties way, but the comedy came completely from the acknowledged fact that there’s nothing at all wrong with being gay, it just so happened that I wasn’t, despite the interviewer’s creepy desperation to know for sure. As the dispute picked up speed to the sketch’s conclusion, amid the overlapping dialogue I always managed to throw in an unscripted observation about how despite being straight, ‘the young Tony Slattery’ might have given me pause, and it always seemed to get the biggest laugh of the item. Maybe because it was true. 

Tony wasn’t well at the time I was originally putting together SOUPY TWISTS, the official celebration of two of his closest friends and collaborators, SIR THANK YOU VERY MUCH Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie CBE, and despite many attempts, I did regret not getting to reminisce with ‘Slat the Rat’ about the Cellar Tapes days. I loved how his background belied the usual prejudice against Oxbridge comedians, he was proof that it wasn’t all privileged toffs, he got where he was by pure brilliance, for all that others got more screen time. And now I’m immersed in preparing the paperback version of the official Fry & Laurie story for this spring, I am regretting even more not reaching out to my old improv idol for a belated interview, for all that I had no real room to expand on the text, any excuse should have motivated me to make it happen. 

However, I have had the luck of meeting Tony Slattery numerous times over the years. The first ever time was attending the last night of Vivian Stanshall’s Stinkfoot on the Thekla (AKA The Old Profanity Showboat) in Bristol in 2010. He was the narrator, stepping in as sub for Fry, a role he filled many, many times over the years. It was a glorious show, but sharing a ciggy with Tony afterwards was the highlight. I recall Vivian’s daughter Silky talking about him like a favourite uncle, this sad news must have hit her pretty bad. 

A far more relaxed time was spent with Tony at the 2019 Chortle Awards, for which Soupy Twists was up for a ‘best biography’ gong of some kind, and lost out to Billy Connolly. But he had clearly read my book, and was full of praise, and despite it being a losery kind of a night, me and my wife-to-be and Tony and his entourage made the most of it barracking from the back row, as it were. Shame his attempted gag which seemed to involve standing on stage and stabbing himself in the forehead didn’t seem to work, unless the aim was purely to make the entire room gape in terrified astonishment, but that was somewhat Slattery. He certainly got a reaction. 

And so my love for him continued, despite not being remotely sexy, and it continued with every fresh episode of his Rambling Club podcast, which has helped fuel the current feeling of absolute stunned grief. Was it Bill Bailey who complained of Diana Spencer’s car crash ‘But I was watching that!’? That’s part of the current woe, this guy was 65, and was entertaining me week by week from his virtual shed, thanks to Allan and Paul and the loving team around him. He’d got past the stuttering not-quite-the-right-medicine stage which I had seen him power through a few times in recent years in live events, and was now just a fountain of the old naughtiness and erudite intelligence. There was so, so much more to pour forth. And now the stream is stopped up for good. 

I will work hard to squeeze in some element of tribute to Tony in the new edition of Soupy Twists, despite the size difficulty. Because he was as important to the teenage me as Stephen and Hugh themselves, and their friendship never foundered, right to the end, with Stephen providing the voice for Tony’s podcast’s “possibly haunted” bingo machine. May his spirit of swish dirty comic brilliance continue to haunt us all for the longest time.