Gyles Brandreth

This September we are joined in-person once more by one of the most natural and gifted comic performers, writer and star of Just A Minute, Gyles Brandreth. Gyles joins us to celebrate his new autobiography, Odd Boy Out, an extraordinarily revealing account of growing up and coming of age in an apparently well-to-do but always strapped-for-cash middle-class English family.

It’s a story about the ordinary things – family life, happiness, ambition, and love, but it is also about adventures – meeting princes and presidents, visiting Death Row in America, exploring the sex clubs of Copenhagen. It is a story of a boy blessed with wit and what he got up to and the people he met growing up in the most wonderful city in all the world in those extraordinary years after the Second World War.

Yet it’s also a kaleidoscopic portrait of Britain from the 1950s onwards, featuring a cast drawn from politics, the media, swinging London, stage and screen, from Laurence Olivier to Twiggy. At root it’s a powerful and passionate exploration of childhood – how our heritage, our parents and our upbringing make us who we are.

‘I am what my childhood made me.’

But what is that exactly, Gyles?
Who are you? And why?

Please note, this event is now taking place on Tuesday 21st September.