Gyles Brandreth: my role in the deaths of Rod Hull and other comedy legends

Gyles Brandreth has said he blames himself for the death of Rod Hull after encouraging him to climb on to his roof on a stormy night.

Hull, the children’s television star famed for his partnership with puppet Emu, died at his home in Winchelsea, East Sussex, in 1999 after a fall.

Brandreth, 76, has now said he indirectly “killed” him after telling him to fix a faulty TV aerial that was preventing him from watching football.

The former MP said he told Hull – who hoped to watch the Manchester United versus Inter Milan European Champions League game – to stop moaning and “climb on to the roof and fix it”.

The entertainer took Brandreth’s advice but due to the stormy weather he fell backwards off the ladder and died at 63 years old, Brandreth said.

Speaking on his Rosebud podcast, he jokingly said: “I killed a man. It was somebody called Rod Hull, the Emu man.

“We were at the theatre, we were at the first night of Animal Crackers – it was the first show about the Marx brothers.

“Terrible weather, terrible, terrible weather that night. He was sitting next to me and he was complaining all through the show, he was interrupting the show almost, going on about how he wanted to get home because he wanted to watch the football.

“But his aerial, Sky aerial on his thing, isn’t transmitting property. I said ‘Don’t moan about it, if you want to watch the television, get a ladder out, climb on to the roof and fix it Rod’.”

Brandreth added: “And after the show, in this stormy weather, he went home, got out a ladder, he climbed the ladder and he tried to fix the aerial.

“Unfortunately, the wind was very great and he fell backwards off the ladder and killed himself.

“So I wasn’t actually there but I’d encouraged him.”

He added that the funeral of the TV entertainer was “great”, saying as the coffin came in “ there was this [knocking sound]”.

“He’d arranged for a beak sound to be inside the coffin as though the Emu was also in the coffin,” he said.

Hull, who appeared on television in the 1970s and 1980s, rarely went on stage without Emu.

Brandreth added he also blamed himself for the death of the actor and comedian Harry Secombe.

He said: “I also killed Harry Secombe. He died unexpectedly, unfortunately.

“He very kindly, he wasn’t feeling well, and I was doing a programme for LBC in the late 1990s or just the beginning of the 21st century.

“And he went ahead with the interview. He had to do it by phone, he couldn’t come into the studio. He was standing at the top of the stairs, and the interview went well, and he was holding the phones, saying ‘I’ve finished doing the interview with Gyles now – it went surprisingly well’.

“And he’d stepped back to call down to his wife, and he slipped backwards down the stairs. I’m afraid a few days later he died.”

Secombe, who was a member of the radio comedy programme The Goon Show, died at the age of 79 in 2001.