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Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week my guest is the great Giles Brandreth, whose latest of his many productions is a door-stopping

new work of scholarship called the Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes, which is surely the book that Giles was born to write.

Giles, how did you set about collecting all of these here anecdotes?

It's a good start, isn't it?

My phone is now ringing. I'm going to turn it off.

It's probably... There we are. Forgive me.

That's a very good start.

You can edit that out, or leave it in to show that this is live. Let's leave it in. That's for me is the joy of theatre, it's live, except I hate people who leave their mobile phones on in the audience. Let me try and answer your question. This could be quite a long answer. And bear in mind that I once held the record

from making the longest ever after dinner speech, 12 and a half hours without interruption.

I will try and answer your question.

The record you briefly shared with Nicholas Parsons, I seem to remember.

I did. Neither of us could cope with sharing the record. It was quite a challenge.

I might talk to you about that in a moment.

But to try and answer your question,

in the short term, I set about writing,

finalizing this book this year because of lockdown.

I was due in March to begin a show

with the great Dame Judy Dench at the Bridge Theatre.

...