As a young man he worked for a bank, but began contributing articles to Punch, and became its assistant editor, a post in which he served for eighteen years.
In 1927 he became a bank clerk (it was later a source of pleasure to him that P G Wodehouse had started his working career similarly) and in his spare time he played the saxophone in a band called 'The Synco Peppers' and was a part-time repertory actor for the St Pancras People's Theatre.
[1][3] While still working as a bank clerk he started writing for Punch in 1938, and during World War II he continued to contribute, using his experiences in the RAF as source material.
Malcolm Muggeridge who became editor in 1953 insisted on a less cosy style of writing ("No more articles about Celia and the washing-up"), and Boothroyd, according to The Times "chafed at … having to mount an attack on people whose only offence was to have been in the headlines that week, and much preferred chronicling the waywardness of common things or the vagaries of commuting.
"[3] Boothroyd had a long connection with the BBC writing radio comedy, including a series for Ian Carmichael and Charlotte Mitchell, The Small, Intricate Life of Gerald C Potter, which ran from 1975 to 1981,[1] and was still receiving repeat broadcasts in 2022.
Few have worked harder to make a sentence right, or to conceal the effort that had made it so, few have truffled longer or deeper in our bottomless vocabulary for the one word which would corral the elusive thought, and very few indeed have sat like him, staring at a typed semi-colon for half an hour and deliberating whether or not a full colon might produce a more effective pause.
Then coming back two hours later and making it a comma … It prevented him from writing novels – "I might spend the rest of my life re-polishing the first thousand words".[6]P.