Fortunately I didn’t have long to wait for welcoming the writer, broadcaster and musician Neil Brand back to Beyond The Title for another helping of fascinating insights from a varied career in the arts. When doing the research for the interview, it occurred to me that we had failed to cover his extensive radio career throughout the previous episode. In 2004 Brand penned a radio play surrounding Stan Laurel following Oliver Hardy’s debilitating stroke which left him without the power of speech. The popularity of the radio show encouraged BBC Four to make a television adaptation and Neil was excited to pen it. This was essentially a monologue from Stan originally played by Tom Courtney with frequent, indecipherable noises with touching moments. Unfortunately BBC Four lacked the budget to hire Courtney and therefore Jim Norton perfectly suited the role.
One of the ardent themes of almost every comedy is the art of embarrassment. Whether it’s Stan Laurel rolling his eyes at Oliver Hardy or David Brent awkwardly attempting to gain popularity from his staff, embarrassment in comedy has been an ongoing, underlying component since its very inception. It’s these moments of human behaviour that have been fascinating playwrights for centuries. For Neil, he has quite a short tolerance when it comes to embarrassing comedy but nevertheless still acknowledges it as a vital strand of the art. To him, there are degrees of comfort in watching someone squirm and Ricky Gervais’s David Brent is arguably the absolute epitome of this. This is something that he would never actively try himself but still appreciates the art.
It was his friend: the writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet who first invited Neil to appear on Radio 4’s The Film Programme where he was tasked with playing samples of film scores. So much was the popularity of this segment that they invited him back and became the start of a long association with the network. The ability to analyse music from a technical perspective was a liberation for Neil and formed the inspiration for his popular BBC Four series. Yet it was radio which provided the basis for this concept and allowed Neil the opportunity to explore music in this unique way.
In 2015 Neil penned the Radio 4 play A Day At The Races surrounding the life of the legendary Groucho Marx with Toby Jones in the title role. For this, he was forced to be very careful with the material that he used as the Marx family was still extremely protective over Groucho’s legacy. This was a difficult concept to perfect and taught him to tread very carefully surrounding the creative content he produced. With a stellar cast of Toby Jones and Tracey-Ann Oberman, A Day At The Races proved popular with the Radio 4 audience and encouraged Neil to realise that there was still an appetite for the golden age of Hollywood.
In 2022 Neil returned to Radio 4 to pen an updated radio version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles starring Mark Gatiss as Sherlock Holmes and Sanjeev Bhaskar as Doctor Watson. As a writer, the ultimate goal is to transfer your ideas into production and this was the closest possible thing to Neil’s vision which was extremely satisfying. This, together with the stellar cast made for the perfect experience which is probably his proudest achievement other than his son Charlie.
To sum up Neil Brand’s career could be compared to attending to find a definition of art. He has been instrumental to so many different projects, programmes and initiatives that it’s virtually impossible to define what he truly is. Yet especially for the purposes of Beyond The Title, he remains one of Britain’s finest raconteurs with the talent and integrity to back it up. It was a great pleasure to welcome Neil Brand to the podcast and may he return very soon.
Beyond The Title