It was at this point that he created the first incarnation of what became his best-known character, Edna Everage. The series once again had a collection of high-profile celebrity guests, such as Tim Allen, Mischa Barton, Sigourney Weaver, Debbie Harry, and Shirley Bassey.

In December 1987, Humphries appeared on the BBC Radio 4 program Today in a recorded interview in which he simultaneously played the characters of both Dame Edna and Sir Les. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.These highly popular programmes have since been repeated worldwide and the special A Night on Mount Edna won Humphries the Golden Rose of Montreux in 1991. Readers of More Please come to appreciate the biting wit of Humphries' acerbic mother, a touch of whom lives on in Dame Edna. Be prepared to read with a dictionary at hand: when writing as himself, Humphries savors the occasional obscure but evocative adjective (olid, nidorous, pinguid, fuliginous, grumous, hispid.

His elder son Oscar was editor of the art magazine Apollo [87] [88] and a contributing editor at The Spectator. Other notable friends of Humphries included the painter Arthur Boyd, [95] the author and former politician Jeffrey Archer, whom Humphries visited during Archer's stay in prison, [96] and the comedian Spike Milligan. Humphries was a patron and active supporter of the Tait Memorial Trust in London, a charity to support young Australian performing artists in the UK. Their friendship began in 1960 after Betjeman, while visiting Australia, heard some of Humphries' early recordings and wrote very favourably of them in an Australian newspaper. Because Barry Humphries deliberately furnished would-be biographers with whimsical fictions and blatant mystifications, the true details of his life are among the best-kept secrets of our time.Wubbo Music" (Humphries said that "wubbo" is a pseudo-Aboriginal word meaning "nothing") is thought to be one of the earliest recordings of experimental music in Australia.