Denis Norden
Frank Muir’s brilliant comedy-writing partner, later the avuncular host of It’ll Be Alright on the Night
DENIS NORDEN, who has died aged 96, created – with Frank Muir – one of the most successful scriptwriting partnerships in British broadcasting, first in radio in the 1950s with shows like Take It from Here, and later in television, where he went on to fashion a solo career as the selfdeprecatingly wry host of the outtakes show It’ll Be Alright on the Night.
An ITV staple for almost 30 years, It’ll Be Alright on the Night was one of the first shows to broadcast behindthe-scenes faux pas – known as “bloopers” – from film and television. It ran from 1977 until 2006, subsequently being revived with Griff Rhys Jones presenting.
The avuncular, bespectacled Norden, always cradling his trademark clipboard and wearing a crooked smile, would wander on to an otherwise empty stage to deliver a humorous piece to camera. This would be followed by a selection of out-takes from various programmes, including British and American sitcoms, news reports and foreign broadcasts.
From 1991 the series also inspired the spin-off Denis Norden’s Laughter File, which followed a similar format, except that it also screened clips of pranks, practical jokes and other wheezes such as spoof commercials, real foreign ones, assorted “cock-ups” – anything, as Norden himself once explained, that “tickled our fancies, just when they needed tickling”.
But Norden’s spiritual home remained the poky, cluttered office in the attic of a once-grand building in the West End of London where in the 1950s he and Frank Muir had shared a huge partners’ desk, smoked their way through 50 cigarettes a day (each), and knocked out some of the funniest lines in the annals of radio comedy.
Although their backgrounds had much in common – both had served in the wartime RAF, and they shared a love of London’s East End – Norden was less flamboyant and more studious than Muir, who called him “a swot”.
Indeed, one of the reasons the partnership worked so well was that he and Muir were quite different people: Norden the donnish, deadpan foil to the more effusive Muir. They were selling the products of two minds, an additive process (Muir explained), not one comedy approach divided (like the fee) into two.
Although Norden never enjoyed performing as much as Muir did, his partner recalled that as a performer Norden (“two years younger, and better-dressed”) was “always much better than he thought he was – he almost had to be driven to it”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, outside the office they – like Morecambe and Wise – seldom saw one another.
In Norden, Muir discerned a fascinating mixture of intellectual rigour and showbusiness flair. “He is a worrier,” Muir noted, “alarmingly intelligent, a very hard worker, doodler of complicated geometrical patterns when thinking, a reader of everything, hopeless at doing anything complicated with his hands, like putting a refill into a ballpoint pen, but with a keen and original mind for comedy and a love of musicals and good ‘flicks’ (rather than ‘cinema’).”
Their collaboration began in 1947, when the BBC producer Charles Maxwell invited them to lunch at Frank’s Restaurant in Jermyn Street and asked them to write a radio series for Jimmy Edwards and the Australian comic Dick Bentley.
After a good lunch, the pair returned to Norden’s office and began work on what became Take It from
Here, which ran on the Light Programme from 1948 until 1959. A mixture of skits, sketches and songs, in 1953 it spawned the comic workingclass soap opera The Glums. Although Take It from Here barely survived its first run, it weathered the BBC’S early lack of interest and eventually ran for 11 years – 325 programmes in total.
While scripting Take It from Here, Norden felt that he and Muir were writing for Maxwell the producer more than for the listening public; although they often disagreed with him, they regarded Maxwell as “the customer”, and learnt not to take their own sense of humour for granted.
The pair worked from an office in a converted maid’s quarters at the top of a building on the corner of Regent Street and Conduit Street, where Norden wrote out their scripts in longhand.
They abandoned radio for television in 1959, and the partnership broke up amicably in 1964 when Muir went into management with BBC TV. They worried that their teamwork might degenerate into a permanent groove from which there was no escape.
By and large, their writing was more sophisticated than that of their contemporaries. With Muir, Norden raised the intellectual content of the comedy genre and helped to make scriptwriting a respectable occupation.
Until their arrival, producers by and large wrote their own material, employing gag-writers only to bulk out the scripts. Following the lead of Ted Kavanagh, creator of the wartime cult comedy classic ITMA, Norden and Muir made writers the most important ingredient in a comedy show, a principle that still holds today.
Denis Mostyn Norden was born on February 6 1922 at Hackney, East London, into a middle-class Jewish family. His father manufactured bridal gowns. From Craven Park school he won a scholarship to the City of London School, where he was credited with “a fine academic brain”, knew Kingsley Amis, and took an active interest in politics, becoming secretary of the Peace Pledge Union. At school he learnt to speak fluent French and Spanish, and while still a teenager he worked as an interpreter for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
Throughout his teens Norden steeped himself in cinema: “The way I light a cigarette was determined by films I saw in the 1930s, and I could never wear a belted trench coat without something in me becoming Joel Mccrea,” he once admitted.
Having envied Mccrea in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), Norden had hoped to become a reporter in the same mould, but despite encouragement from Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express, his journalistic ambitions were thwarted by his concerned parents.
Determined to do something “different”, and with the help of the Hyams brothers (friends of the family), he left school in a fit of pique to become a boiler man at the Gaumont State Cinema, Kilburn, and then, in 1941, manager of a variety theatre at Watford.
After talking to the theatre’s musical director, Sidney Kaplan, who had worked at the Holborn Empire before it was bombed, Norden devised and wrote a six-part history of the venue, which the BBC bought and broadcast on radio.
Joining the RAF in 1942, he failed to make the top physical grade, frustrating his ambition to become a pilot, and served as a wireless operator. He began contributing sketches to the station concert party “to get off guard duties”.
Norden landed in Normandy on D-day and was later involved in troop shows with the actor Bill Fraser (later Sergeant-major Snudge in ITV’S The Army Game) and the writer-comedian Eric Sykes. Demobbed in 1945, Norden became, in Frank Muir’s phrase, “a comedian’s labourer”, joining Ted Kavanagh’s Variety Agency and writing solo acts for scores of radio comics – which, as another writer, Barry Took, noted, was “a ghastly, if instructive, apprenticeship”.
As well as Take It from Here Norden and Muir wrote scripts for Bedtime with Braden (on radio), and, for television, And So to Bentley and Whack-o!, vehicles for Dick Bentley and Jimmy Edwards respectively.
Not only did Norden and Muir become the best-paid scriptwriters in the medium; they were also the tallest, although Norden, at 6ft 3in, was dwarfed by Muir, by three inches.
During their 17-year collaboration Norden and Muir also appeared together on the popular radio panel game My Word! A feature was the pair’s excruciating puns, when giving their accounts of how a well-known saying came about.
For example, asked to explain the origin of “A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse”, Norden spun an elaborate yarn about training to use different forms of signalling in the RAF, which finally ended “A prod is as good as a wink to a shined Morse”. This and other examples were later published in Norden and Muir’s book You Can’t Have Your Kayak and Heat It (1973).
As well as forays into television, Norden’s post-muir era also led to his writing screenplays for feature films, his credits including Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell (1968) starring Gina Lollobrigida, and The Best House in London (1969) with David Hemmings.
With Muir, Norden was named the Variety Club’s radio personality of 1978. In his own right he was voted male television personality of 1980, and in 1999 received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. The Royal Television Society presented him with a similar award the following year. He was appointed CBE in 1980. In Who’s Who, he listed his club as the Saturday Morning Odeon and “loitering” among his recreations.
“When I’m gone?” he once mused. “Well, I’d like to be cremated and used as Dolly Parton’s talcum powder.”
Denis Norden married, in 1943, Avril Rosen, with whom he had a son and a daughter.