My Word!

If you don’t know about this program, let me add some richness to your life. “My Word!” is a BBC radio program that is re-run in San Francisco on Friday nights at 8:00 pm on KALW 91.7, followed by a companion program “My Music” at 8:30. Both are absolutely worth tuning into.

I’ve listened to this program off and on, whenever I could find it, for at least twenty years. And for at least nineteen years I’ve been saying to myself “who are these people and, even though they’re British, how can they be so impossibly erudite and funny?” I finally took the time to look some things up and now I’m even more impressed. For one thing, the program ran from 1956 to 1995, so I’ve been listening to re-runs for ten years and never knew it.

“My Word” is about words and wit; two teams of two players compete to answer questions about the meaning or etymology or usage of obscure words but the topper is a challenge issued by the “chairman” to the two panelists who worked on the show for its entire existence, Frank Muir and Denis Norden.

At the start of the show, they were each given a familiar phrase and asked to explain its origin. At the end of the show, they would cough up hilarious shaggy dog stories that ended with punnish misstatements. So you get stories like “The Massive Men Need Wives of Quiet Respiration” or “You Can’t Have Your Kayak and Heat It." Check out one for yourself here

I remember a few of the other panelists, Dilys Power, film critic and Greek scholar, Anne Scott-James (for years I thought she was a man named “Anscott James”) journalist and gardening fiend, and the “chairman” Jack Longland, who arbitrarily and breezily doled out the points “one and a half marks to Denis Norden for mispronouncing ‘Rostropovich’.

The little more I’ve learned about these people has me finding them even more impressive. A few notes:

Jack Longland (1905-1993)
Before his work on “My Word”, before he became lecturer and patron of the socialist “Workers Education Association”, and well before he became “Sir John”, but after many “climbing firsts” Logland climbed Mt. Everest in 1933.

From his obituary: "The attempt was plagued by atrocious conditions but one episode from it has become a part of mountaineering folklore. Longland's action in bringing down eight Sherpas from Camp 6 at 27,400 ft in a sudden storm and white-out conditions which obliterated all traces of the route, by a ridge on which he had never been before, is one of the great mountaineering epics of responsible heroism.

During the 36-hour ordeal he had continually both to safeguard his exhausted and dispirited men and force them to keep on the move. It deserved and drew the highest praise, and certainly saved the Sherpas lives.

Frank Muir: 1920 – 1998
Surely this clever, cultured fellow, with his odd sort of “Received Pronounciation” accent, where all of the vowels are rich and full and the “rs” turn into “ws” was the beneficiary of a classy public education? Um, no. He dropped out of school at 14 after the death of his father left the family broke and went to work at a carbon paper company. He joined the RAF when war broke out and was first posted to Iceland. At the end of the war, apparently surprised to have survived, he changed from a “shy Kentish boy” and became an outgoing fellow who wanted to make everybody laugh. He teamed up with Denis Norden in 1948 and the two of them became one of the tallest scriptwriting teams of the modern age, (6’6” and 6’3”).

Denis Norden (born 1922)
Norden, also a veteran of the RAF, first ran a variety talent agency after the war. Apparently, he wrote much of the material for his stable of comedians and others. This experience probably helped inform his view of the business side of comedy.

He wrote: "I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny. And when you actually did something with the material the comedian didn't think he could do - when you'd said 'Trust me' and he went on to get his laugh, then you felt you'd created a person.

"The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up."

Maybe this had something to do with his plan in about 1977 to collect outtakes from films and broadcast them on TV in a program called “It’ll Be Alright On The Night”. "Everyone who appears in a scene gets paid," says Denis ... "The only people excluded from this are politicians and royal figures who place themselves at risk by being in the public eye - but if an actor makes a mistake and it gets into an outtake he will get paid wherever it is shown throughout the world. There can be repeat fees. With the paradoxical result that he will get paid more for not doing it right than he would if he had done it right.

"In fact," he says, expanding on the theme, "it's like running a farm where the manure is worth more than the cattle." (Yes, for better and worse, it seems that Denis Norden invented bloopers. Fortunately, he has the good sense to call them cock-ups.)

So these guys started on radio and then wrote for film and television, pretty much since television was invented. Take a look at this list of writers from the BBC’s 1966 show “The Frost Report.”
Marty Feldman
John Law
Antony Jay
John Cleese
Graham Chapman
Michael Palin
Terry Jones
Keith Waterhouse
Willis Hall
David Nobbs
Peter Tinniswood
Frank Muir
Denis Norden

I admire a man whose range of wit covered subjects as divers as:

Like the poetry of Mallarmé, a hi-hat is one symbol on top of another.

In China, the piano piece ‘Chopsticks’ is known as ‘Knife and Fork’.

It's a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan it's when you discover that your wife left you in May.

We don't want the television script good. We want it Tuesday.