The irrepressible Gyles Brandreth (who you may know from QI) has worked with Jimmy many times over the years, on both TV and radio (see here).

Gyles started out in radio in 1969 and, according to his website, moved to Britain’s first commercial speech radio station (LBC) on its launch day – October 8^th 1973.

He had a show called Sunday with Gyles Brandreth that was a weekly arts and entertainment review and he hosted 200+ episodes between 1997 and 2002.

While scouting around in the British Newspaper Archives (for the year 2000) I found a couple of articles relating to one of Jimmy’s very early gigs, that refer back to “regular appearances” on this LBC show (but with no specific dates).

So, it would appear that the pair have known each other since around 2000.

Picture below of the two of them, recording a 2025 episode of Rosebud (here).