Family fury as probate for Parsons takes MUCH longer than Just A Minute

HE WELCOMED listeners to Radio 4’s Just A minute, week after week, for more than 50 years — until a bout of flu finally obliged him to miss an episode in 2018.

But the consummate professionalism of the late Nicholas Parsons appears entirely beyond the bureaucratic forces of covid-diminished Britain.

For I can disclose that, 11 months after Parsons died at the age of 96, his family are still waiting for probate.

‘ It’s shocking and really upsetting,’ Suzy, his daughter by his first wife, actress denise Bryer, tells me.

‘Everyone is using corona as an excuse. It leaves you in limbo. You can’t do anything — you can’t even sell a car that’s registered [ to the deceased]. Everything is tied up and frozen.

‘ It means that until the probate is sorted out, nobody can move on with their lives.’

Suzy adds that she and her brother Justin feel just as helpless as Parsons’ second wife, Ann, whom he married in 1995. ‘It’s going through the executors. They keep on saying: “It’ll be done at the end of the month, the end of the week.” ’ But she concentrates her fire on the Probate office.

‘They say one application for my father’s will got “lost in the post” and they never received it — the usual fob off. I realise we’re not alone but we feel we’ve got no alternative but to lodge a formal complaint.’

As well as hosting Just A minute on the radio, her father was the presenter of ITV’s Sale of The century, one of the most popular television game show of the Seventies and early Eighties. But Parsons, who lived his later years in Buckinghamshire while retaining a flat in london, always emphasised that his heyday was long before the fat- cat salaries enjoyed by many TV celebrities now.

‘I have had some good jobs and earned well but never felt wealthy,’ he reflected.

Suzy says he was also ‘a very generous man’, both to his family and to causes dear to his heart, including the Grand order of water Rats, which aids impoverished actors.

‘our lawyer summed it up best,’ says Suzy. ‘He said I didn’t expect probate to take just a minute — but didn’t expect it to take this long.’

The ministry of Justice, which oversees the Probate office, says it is unable to comment on individual cases.