Humph RIP

I don't have much truck with celebrity anything, particularly as I'm not a TV watcher. I read the Guardian online, so I pick up bits and pieces. But I often find myself puzzled, in conversation, when someone is talking to me about people they assume I know – most recently a couple called 'Adam and Joe' (or maybe it's 'Adam and Jo') – who usually turn out to be from television.

And when something happens to a celebrity I have heard of, I don't feel emotionally involved; I keep that for people I know in person. For example, my most vivid memory from when Diana died was the experience of a journalist girlfriend who was telephoned by a colleague at 4 am that Sunday morning. He told her Diana had died in a car crash and she needed to get her arse into the office pronto. As the office was in London, and my friend was asleep in bed with her lover in Manchester, she asked her colleague if he thought she was born yesterday, gave him a stream of abuse for disturbing her with such a ridiculous mickey-take, and slammed the phone down. Apparently he had to ring back several times before she would believe him.

I didn't cry when Diana died. I felt sorry for her, and more sorry for her sons, but I watched the public outpouring of grief with detached fascination. Yet I shed tears this week for Humph.

Humphrey Lyttelton wasn't a celebrity, he was a personality. He was full of contradictions: a modest man of great stature; a toff who became a conviction socialist; a perfect gentleman who told the rudest jokes on radio. He was impossible to categorise: he was a professional musician with his own record label, had a lifelong interest in calligraphy, and held silliness in high regard. He was a journalist and author, too. And he felt like part of my family. He chaired the wonderful anarchic radio comedy game I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue from its inception in 1972. I was eight years old then, and listening soon became a family ritual. We didn't have a television, so the radio was enormously important in our lives. And of course in those days there was no option to 'listen again'; I can still hear the urgent cries of 'Quick! It's starting!' that brought us all from our various pursuits to the living room as the opening music played.

I got married a couple of decades ago. He'd never listened to I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. I should have realised it wasn't going to work. Top Bloke, on the other hand, grew up with the programme like I did. Humph and his colleagues influenced the development of our own humour as much as The Goon Show or Monty Python or Molesworth. One of the best things Top Bloke ever did for me was to get tickets for a live recording of the show. These tickets were rarer than testosterone in a frock shop, and despite Top Bloke's best efforts over the years we only managed to go that one time, but it was a fantastic evening. I laughed until I cried, until my ribs and face hurt, until I could barely breathe. I felt incredibly privileged to be privy to the off-mike banter of Humph and the teams. And now I know what Samantha looks like!

This has puzzled my friends, at times, as much as their televisual references puzzle me. These days Top Bloke and I can introduce people to I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue through the 'listen again' function on Radio 7 or the clips on the programme's own page on the BBC website. They don't always get it. 'Mornington Crescent' will have us in stitches while our friends try to work out the rules. 'One Song To The Tune Of Another' makes other people go 'eh?' but often has us laughing from the announcement, particularly when it's something challenging for Jeremy Hardy, Stephen Fry or Sandi Toksvig – or yet another way of getting Rob Brydon, with his silken vocal cords, to sing 'Delilah'. (The words of 'Whiter Shade Of Pale' to the tune of 'My Old Man's A Dustman' was a classic – try it, it works.) The programme is so entrenched in my head that my own personal cure for insomnia is an imaginary round of that game where each panellist has to say a word that has no links whatsoever to the word said by the previous panellist. This has a wonderfully surreal effect, and I find it stops me worrying about whatever's keeping me awake, and amuses my brain gently into sleep.

For me, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue was the main attraction where Humph was concerned. I also listened, albeit more sporadically, to his 'Best Of Jazz' programme on Radio 2. Humph had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things jazz, and was a well-regarded professional player himself, working with an eclectic range of musicians from Sidney Bechet to Elkie Brooks, Helen Shapiro to Radiohead. I love jazz, and I enjoyed the programme. But for me, the best music was always when Humph got his trumpet out at the end of the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue Christmas Special, and his joy in jazz mingled, for a few moments, with his joy in comedy.

Humph chaired the show with a unique combination of the reluctant and the irrepressible. He affected a world-weary air, and often subverted the stereotype of the chairman by feigning inattention or boredom. When I saw the show live, they recorded a half-hour show in one take, and then re-recorded a couple of segments where something hadn't quite gone right – a panellist coughing, perhaps, or a slip in someone's speech. The producer would come onto the stage, give instructions to whoever needed to repeat a line, then re-record it. Humph had to do a couple of these, and one wasn't quite up to the required standard. 'Sorry, Humph, could you do that again?' the producer said. Humph propped his chin on one hand, looked at the audience, heaved a sigh and said 'I'm losing the will to live.' As he was over 80 at the time, this was edgy humour, and got a big laugh.

But he never did lose the will to live, or to work, which for Humph seems to have been much the same thing. He did the last gig with his jazz band the night before he went into hospital, was in the middle of recording the latest series of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and had almost finished both a book and an album. He leaves a tremendous legacy of music and humour, and his life is definitely something to celebrate rather than mourn.

So, as the comedy jazzman of time meets the grim reaper of eternity, and the sad listeners of fate snivel and reach for the handkerchiefs of destiny... it's the end of the show.