Gyles Brandreth: The song and dance man

A whistle-stop tour of 100 musicals in 90 minutes? It could only be Gyles Brandreth, the would-be producer of Waiting for Godot: the Musical. Paul Taylor meets the former Conservative MP

When he was a child of six, Gyles Brandreth used to have his hair stroked by TS Eliot. It was in the smells-and-bells High Anglican church of St Stephen's in Gloucester Road, west London. The future TV-am stalwart, Teddy Bear Museum founder, garish jumper-sporter, Tory MP for Chester and whip in John Major's second, ill-fated administration was already heavily into multitasking. Pedalling on his tricycle between ecclesiastical venues, the Infant Phenomenon was a leading vocalist in the choirs of Holy Trinity, Brompton (next to the Oratory) and of the church at the foot of High Street, Kensington. Giving the tonsils a rest, he merely served as an altar boy (and read the occasional lesson) at St Stephen's, Eliot's church of choice.

"I think of him every night when we get to the Cats bit," reveals Brandreth, tucking into a pre-show pizza in a restaurant near the Duchess Theatre, to where he has transferred his Edinburgh Festival hit, Zipp! – a hilarious, deeply silly (and oddly touching) cross between Forbidden Broadway, The Reduced Shakespeare Company (it's a beat-the-clock bid to cram 100 musical shows into 90 minutes) and Just A Minute. "I think, well, it's quite exciting to be performing a spoof of a musical based on Eliot's poems in a theatre owned by the composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber." (There's a shrine to Lord Lloyd-Webber and much mock-devotion of his icon in Zipp!, but nothing sufficiently lèse-majesté to risk eviction.)

"I'd say," avers Brandreth, "that there's a bit of Barbra Streisand in us all." It would take quite a while, I reckon, to locate the Streisand streak in, say, Geoffrey Howe. "Comedy certainly wasn't big in the Conservative Party in my time," he concedes.

Brandreth's translation to the musical stage is not entirely surprising, but it does seem an unexpected career move so soon after Tory politics. It emerges that it's partly because it keeps him, for the moment, out of politics that Zipp! has been given the seal of approval by his wife Michelle, who seems to be a kind of Prince Philip to his Queen ("She's not as politically incorrect as Prince Philip," says Brandreth, who knows the prince well).

He lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1997. Four years later, he found himself covering the general election for Sky News andThe Sunday Telegraph. "One evening I came in after spending the day with Tony Blair and my wife could see the glint in my eye. Because I am fascinated by politics. She said, 'You are not going back. The British people, Gyles, have spoken: 60,000 of them got up on the same day with the express purpose of kicking you out of Westminster. Please, please, for God's sake don't.'"

He didn't. But he did scribble down a list of unfulfilled ambitions. I suspect, to judge from the way he ate his pizza, that he is very well organised in the list and year-planner departments. Feeling even more limp-wristed than usual, I could hardly cut into my Funghi Special. "I seem to have been given a rather blunt knife," I explain weakly. "I don't think it's the knife. I think it's the pizzas," he says comfortingly. Maybe so, but he has managed to hack lines as straight as the boulevards of Paris in his. Mine looks like something the cat got at.

One of the unrealised ambitions he jotted down was playing Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. "I was rather peeved when Trevor Nunn gave the role to Jonathan Pryce." But then there was also Jesus Christ Superstar to think of. (I wonder silently: are we hitting a seam of megalomania here?) And Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat couldn't be ruled out either. Why not do everything?

The idea of a pocket musical has been in his mind for nearly three decades now. It dates back to the time in the early Seventies when, as a young man of 23 and a recent graduate (having, as one does, served as President of the Union and editor of Isis) he fetched up as artistic director of the Oxford Theatre Festival. Enter Sir Ralph Richardson, signed on to be the star of this venture and destined to be the unwitting, long-range (and until this moment unsung) progenitor of Zipp!. The plan was for Sir Ralph to play the leading role in a play called The Missionary. "All the other characters were to be animals. Anna Massey was going to be the giraffe. It was basically a 'one man in the African jungle with a lot of animals' type of show. 'Le Douanier' Rousseau sets. But then Ralph lost his nerve. He summoned me to his place in Regent's Park. 'Oh, cocky, I so wanted to be with you this summer, but I've read the piece again and I know that Anna is going to be the best damn giraffe since Johnny [Gielgud] played Noah. But I can't do it.'"

General despair. Plan two went into quick action – Sir Ralph now to star in a bio-play about the artist Goya. "He rang me up: 'I've just read the first act. Brilliant.' In the first act, Goya, who was hard of hearing, was to boom out his lines whenever he was on stage, while the rest of the cast mouthed theirs silently, to get the effect of deafness." If only there hadn't been an Act II. "Goya goes blind and the audience are invited to shut their eyes whenever the hero comes on. Sir Ralph rang again. 'I'm so sorry, cocky, I've just read the second act. They're going to miss the best parts of my performance. I'm sorry, I can't do it."

General despair revisited. "Sir John Clements, who was directing our production of St Joan, said to me, 'When in doubt, do a musical. They're buoyant, they're bouncy, they're fun.'" But now they only had a cast of five. Brandreth's solution was to announce Waiting for Godot: the Musical. He hadn't thought of checking that this was all right with Beckett. When he wrote to the great man in Paris, saying, 'Can I?' he received a postcard back with just the words: "You can't." "His handwriting was rather hard to decipher. I think that's what it said."

After a flurry of communications, Beckett did allow Brandreth to put on the first British revival of Godot since Peter Hall's premiere in 1955. So Beckett's generosity has kept us waiting 29 years for something a little more tangible than his absent eponymous hero: the sight of Gyles Brandreth in suspenders and fishnets in a show that is apparently making him even more of a lesbian icon than did his role as the patron of Lesbians for a Conservative Re-election. Audiences are dense with both lipstick lesbians and diesel dykes.

He once interviewed Sir Peter Hall, and it's characteristic that he didn't bring up the Godot connection. Of fellow practitioners in the interviewing trade, the two I envy most are Brandreth and Sue Lawley. Both have a terrific lightness of touch; they rarely get in the way; and they often gentle surprising things out of their subjects. It was Brandreth – not Professor Anthony Clare when he had Sir Peter in his psychiatrist's chair – who elicited from Hall a most revealing story about a recurring erotic dream that he had at the age of four. Zipp!, too, uses a light hand to uncover hidden depths. It's a camp celebration of the musical form, but also an anatomy of the form, demonstrating what makes musicals either work or fail miserably.

Devotees of TS Eliot will be relieved to hear that the hair was the only portion of the boy Brandreth that the author of The Waste Land ventured to stroke. Did the poet let drop any aperçus while stroking? "I didn't start keeping a diary until I was nine, so it was too early," laments Brandreth. Flicking his floppy schoolboyish fringe, he says: "I just hope it doesn't fall out. TS is the only reason I'm hanging on to it." I doubt it ever will fall out. Which is good, because something survives in Brandreth that – in the nicest possible sense – makes you want to follow Eliot and give those now-greying locks an avuncular ruffle.

'Zipp!' is at the Duchess Theatre, London WC2 (0870 890 1103) to 26 July