Humphrey Lyttelton: Getting the Humph

I meet Humphrey Lyttelton - the jazz trumpeter and chairman of Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, among many, many other things - at the Bull's Head pub in Barnes, London, where he'll later be playing with his band. He is 85 and still drives 20,000 miles a year, gigging and recording Clue. He has just discovered satellite navigation, he says. "All you have to do is type in the postcode and then follow the directions. Did you know you could do that?" He arrives with trumpet in hand, has white, springy hair and is wearing a snazzy, diamond-patterned jumper. "Snazzy jumper," I say. "Where's it from?" He says he has no idea "but you can guarantee I bought it in a sale". Not a free-spending fashionista then, Humph? "I am very stingy with my clothes," he says. He then adds he put on his shoes this morning and guess what? "I found a mouse nest in one of them!" Golly, I say. It sounds like you could do with a drink. Shall I get in a round? He says he might have a soft drink. Soft drink it is then, I say. "When I say soft drink," he says, "I mean a small Scotch not a large Scotch, which is a hard drink." Don't you just love The Humph already? I know I do.

But, then, I guess everyone loves The Humph. National Treasure and all that. I bet even the mouse he evicted from his shoe - "it made its nest from my rubber insole!" - loves him a little bit. How so, Humph? "Maybe it's because I love people too. It's not a one-way thing." Do you feel the lurve? Not generally, he says, because as little of his work is on telly he's not that recognisable. That said, though, "someone came up to me the other day and said: 'I know who you are ... Michael Foot!' So I immediately went and got a hair cut." Do you have any habits so unlovable that it would put your adoring public off, if they knew about them? He thinks for a little while. He finally comes back with: "I don't gouge my ears out with a fountain pen, if that's what you mean." He will always have a fountain pen on him, though, because he loves calligraphy, as his father did before him. He is even, now, president of The Society for Italic Handwriting. (Should I bow? "Not necessary.") He says he often practises his handwriting in front of the television, picking out words and writing them down. He says The Bill is good for this. He likes The Bill but not "what's that one with Trevor Eve?" Waking the Dead? "I get lost. Much too complicated."

We settle in to our "soft" drinks. He is actually quite shy of publicity and has never sought it. Indeed, he's so private that, apparently, even after all these years, his fellow Clue panellists (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer) don't have his telephone number. But he's here today and he agreed to be profiled this month on ITV's South Bank Show. A bit of a turn about, Humph? "I know, I know. My son says I've gone mad!" Maybe, I suggest, you should have bought along Clue's scorer, "the lovely Samantha", to hold your hand. I've always, I tell him, longed to meet Samantha. Her job, admittedly, is eased by the fact that in this "antidote to all panel games", no scores are ever awarded, but still. You have to hand it to her. Was she busy tonight? Has she gone to f meet her Italian boyfriend for an ice cream because, as you once informed us: "Samantha loves to lick the nuts off a large Neapolitan"? Humph giggles. What's so funny, I ask. Who doesn't love licking the nuts off a large Neapolitan? You don't? He says: "I can't remember whose suggestion Samantha was, but once it was suggested to me I said: well, this is an opportunity to satirise and pour scorn on the chairman/scorer relationship. You know, 'Give us a twirl and all that.'" Doesn't Samantha mind? "I think we treat her very well, considering." I'm not sure, actually, that they do. This is a real person with real feelings we're talking about after all. I'd have asked her, if only he'd bought her along.

Humphrey's script is written for him but it's his dead-pan delivery and dead-eye timing that's probably kept the show going for, what is it now? Thirty-five years? "Yes. The next series starts in May, I think. They're like big concerts, recorded in very big theatres. It's hard to get tickets. Sometimes I can't get in." He plays it, he says, "like a deputy head who has been dragged in against his will" and always with the straightest of faces. He claims that sometimes he genuinely doesn't get the double entendres. "I struggle with the single ones." Is he good at Mornington Crescent, though? I am, I tell him. "Oh, that's nice to hear," he says, "because a lot of people are confused by it." Not me, I say. He says: "People always come up to me when I'm signing CDs or whatever and will say: 'What are the rules of Mornington Crescent?' I say: 'You're talking about a game that is on the level of chess, bridge, mahjong. You wouldn't ask me to explain the rules of bridge while I was doing something else, so why Mornington Crescent?'" Indeed, why Mornington Crescent? I mean, in the sense: why not Finsbury Park or High Barnet? "Well, Mornington Crescent is a distinguished underground station because it's a listed building and it's also had a ludicrous career. Trains only used to stop on Fridays or something." Or it was closed, I say. "Or it was closed. We went down and posed for photographs when it was re-opened after a long period of refurbishment. It was a big thing and we all smiled at the camera and picked up a nice comfortable fee ... and it was closed within the week. I was told it was because they had installed one of those lifts where you go in one way and come out the opposite way but they hadn't realised that the opposite way went into a solid brick wall."

Humphrey is actually terribly aristocratic. He is even a cousin of the 10th Viscount Cobham, for whatever it's worth. Humphrey's mother, Pamela, was bought up in a stately home, Babraham Hall in Cambridgeshire, where her father was Lord Lieutenant of the County. He remembers his childhood visits to Babraham. "It was a large house. Very distinctive. But what I remember most is that it had a very peculiar yet lovely smell. I've no idea where it came from but every now and then I get a whiff of something near and get a surge of nostalgia." Is the house still there? "Yes, but it was taken over a long time ago by the Ministry of Agriculture. It had a huge stuffed bear in the dining room and lots of rather miserable looking heads of antelopes and a buffalo. My grandfather was quite explosive but, every now and then, he had a sort of melancholy look which looked rather like the buffalo, but he didn't have to be separated from his body to achieve it."

His father, George, was an Eton schoolmaster whose own father "owned half of Worcestershire" and also had a family seat, Hagley Hall. In 1960, when Humphrey was firmly established as a jazz musician, a newspaper asked him: "You don't think coming from one of the great families of state that you might have opted for something other than the circus side of life?" I have this cutting and read it out to Humphrey. "How pompous!" he cries. Wait until the next question, Humph. It goes: "Supposing you were to die tomorrow, would your final thought be, 'Thank God I was a jazz trumpeter rather than a diplomat, an educationalist, or a master surgeon?'" "I hope I said yes," he says. You said: "Yes, three times over. I am very fulfilled." He says: "Oh good."

Humphrey was brought up at Eton, along with his four sisters: Diana, Rose, Helen and Mary. Were you spoiled as the only boy? "No, beset. Beset!" he cries. It was girls everywhere. "There was my mother, my four sisters, their always large and obnoxious friends, a nanny, and an assistant nanny or nursery maid." Did you have any horrid nannies? "Not really, no. The one who was with us the longest was Nanny Viggers. I have quite happy memories of her although I was brought up in the belief that the human backside was specially designed to withstand corporal punishment. I was quite often given the slipper." Did Nanny Viggers wear a uniform? "Yes. I remember the belt. She was small and plump and wore a tight belt across her middle. It gave her the appearance of a cottage loaf."

His first memories of registering music go back to the nursery. "The nursery maids would be constantly singing the tunes of the day. I was always very interested in instruments. I could play quite complicated tunes on this little dulcimer thing. Then, at the age of eight, I started learning the drums from a former drum-major who had retired. It was he who first took me up to the barracks at Windsor." His only escape from the nursery was to get out on his bike. "And because I was fascinated by military bands - and love them to this day - I used to go up and listen to the music at the barracks. It was only a couple of miles away. And to get there easily, I'd hang on to the back of a truck or lorry or the bus. The bus would go 35mph, or so, up Windsor Hill. Nowadays, can you imagine it?" No. "It was terribly thrilling." I bet. Times change, we agree. He adds: "I first recorded with my band on wax!"

It was drums then mouth organ and, finally, the trumpet, "because I started hearing records of what they used to call 'hot trumpet playing'. There was a man called Nat Gonella who was Italian, but a pure cockney, and he used to sing like Louis Armstrong. I got hooked on his records and the hot choruses he played. It gradually dawned on me that that was the sound I wanted. I did play the cornet for a while but that was too short. It was like somebody very tall wearing a hat with a tiny brim. It didn't fit."

The Second World War intervened (he was in the Grenadier Guards) and "then I made my leap into a very different world". He went to art school where he studied illustration (he was a cartoonist at the Daily Mail for a number of years) before joining a band full-time. His father probably did want him to be a schoolmaster, but understood. "He could be brought to tears by poetry, just as I could by music." He even had a top 20 hit in 1956 with one of his own compositions, "Bad Penny Blues". "I went off on holiday having recorded it and didn't get the time to hear it back. If I'd heard it, I'd have vetoed it." Oh? "It was mixed by Joe Meek, who went on to be legendary in the pop world, but he got a distorted sound from the piano and over-recorded the drum effect. I rung up my agent at the time, who told me it was Number 19, and I've kept my mouth shut ever since."

That hit allowed him his house in High Barnet, where he still lives. His wife died last year, so he lives alone now, apart from that naughty mouse. He copes well, he says. He has his calligraphy. He has his music. And he makes a very good scrambled egg. "I learnt how to cook it as a fag at Eton. I was Lord Carrington's fag - Peter Carrington, as I knew him - and I made scrambled egg for him. He denies it, but he's wrong." He now makes it in the microwave. The trick, he says, is to stir all the time and not get distracted by The Bill because "by the time you get back it will be like a biscuit." Anyway, he has to go now because he needs to rest before his set. I say I'm going to stay for the gig. He says I don't have to. I say I want to. And I'm glad that I did. Humph and his band are terrific. I just wish he'd bought Samantha along. Maybe she's at her vehicle-maintenance class because she is, as I understand it, "always keen to strip down a little Austin for a full service". I'm not sure I'd prefer that to the nuts, but maybe we'll talk about it, should we ever meet.

Humphrey Lyttelton appears on ITV's 'South Bank Show' on 25 March