NICHOLAS PARSONS
Barry Cryer on his hilarious friend of 50 years
Nick always referred to himself as a straight man. That was the role he had played very successfully as a young man to the comedian Arthur Haynes, whose ITV show was huge in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and then again later with Benny Hill. And it was how he went about chairing Just a Minute for 52 years – as the sensible one keeping the rest of us in check. He even titled his autobiography The Straight Man, but he was doing himself a disservice.
Nick was so sharp, and that brain of his remained absolutely on the ball right to the end of his long life. His reactions to what people said to him live on stage, on the radio or on television were always just so very quick. When he was doing his “Happy Hour” show at the Edinburgh Fringe from 2001 to 2018 (he had to cancel 2019’s four sold-out shows because of ill health), he would interview people live in front of an audience and he never had a single note to fall back on.
He was also a radio pioneer. In the late Sixties, it was Nick who persuaded reluctant BBC radio bosses to commission a weekly topical comedy show called Listen To This Space. It was the first of its kind on the airwaves, and Nick felt it was sorely needed because, while television had embraced the satirical boom with Ned Sherrin’s That Was The Week That Was, radio was being left behind.
Much later, I heard him – politely, as was always his way – telling the stars of the shows that came in its wake, such as Week Ending and The News Quiz, that Listen To This Space with its jokes and sketches was the first of its kind on radio. He won a Radio Comedy Award for it, one of many in his long career, but he believed it had been forgotten.
It was on Listen To This Space that I first met Nick in 1967, when he invited me to appear. That was the start of a friendship of over 50 years that ended yesterday morning with the news of his death. It only feels like a few months ago that I was attending his enthronement as “King Rat” at the Grand Order of Water Rats, the showbusiness charity we both belonged to. While I had to be driven there and was walking with a stick, Nick was up there on stage knowing every detail of the ritual and running things as smoothly as ever.
Only a few weeks ago he had been on the phone telling me not to worry that he had missed a couple of episodes of Just a Minute, and that he was fine.
I remember another call, in 2018, when for the first time in 51 years he missed an episode of the show through ill health. I had been wondering about whether I could carry on making jokes about Nick in a live show I was doing. I had a song that parodies Let’s Do It and it includes the line, “Nicholas Parsons still does it/but he only lasts a minute”. On the phone, he just laughed and told me to put the song back in. He loved being the butt of affectionate jokes. He had no ego.
Nick liked the phone. That is how we usually talked. Though, like me, he never quite got used to mobiles or the text and email age. Gyles Brandreth, another veteran of Just a Minute, and one who would make a brilliant successor to Nick in the chair, always says that when his landline rings, he knows it is either me or Nicholas Parsons as we are the only two people left who use them.
In the original pilot for Just a Minute, Nick had been one of the panellists – it was called One Minute Please back then – but the chairman
I never once saw him lose his temper. If he needed to restore order, he would speak as smoothly as ever
never turned up. So he landed the job when it went on air in January 1967 and did not miss an episode until 2018.
He had a gift for imposing the rules on us panellists without ever seeming to lose his cool, even the more disruptive ones such as Kenneth Williams in the show’s golden age.
Part of his knack was pandering every week to the jokes about how old he was – which seem to have started very early on. I once asked him if he minded. Not at all, he replied shrewdly. The more jokes they do about you, the more they are talking about you.
There were, of course, moments when he would get rattled trying to keep the show on track, but the only way you knew you had gone too far was when Nick stopped smiling and pulled his serious face.
The BBC is infamously intolerant of presenters who grow old. It can be uncomfortable being the “old man” on a long-running show, as I have found as the most senior one since Humphrey Lyttelton’s death on I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. Nick, though, just kept going. I think the suits recognised just how good he was.
You don’t hear it on air, but Nick would begin every show by doing a warm-up act with the audience. For a straight man, he could be hilarious.
There was one story he liked to tell against himself about when he was doing his “Happy Hours”. For once – and it really was a rare occurrence – he had forgotten that he had to introduce the cabaret group, Four Poofs and A Piano.
When he was reminded, he apologised profusely to the audience and then said: “Here are my first guests, Four Poofs and A Funeral.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t repeat that the day after his death is announced, but
Nick would laugh if he could hear me. In all the years I knew him, I never once saw him lose his temper. If he needed to restore order on Just a Minute, he would speak as smoothly as ever but use just the right words to impose his authority. Again, it was that lightning-quick brain of his.
He was always in such rude health that he would walk on to stage well into his 90s. He could have sat in the chair on Just a Minute in his pyjamas and no one would have noticed that anything was amiss. That is both the magic of radio, and the magic of Nicholas Parsons.
I should, of course, end this with a funny story about Nick. But there are just too many and – like his friends and fans – I am grieving someone who I believe was one of the originals.