Nicholas Parsons
Light-entertainment veteran known to millions through Just a Minute and ITV’S Sale of the Century
NICHOLAS PARSONS, who has died aged 96, was best known on television as the debonair quizmaster on ITV’S quick-fire show Sale of the Century and on BBC Radio as host of the long-running panel game Just a Minute. The format of Just a Minute is simple but arresting: contestants are challenged to speak for one minute without hesitation, deviation or repetition on a given subject, for example “My ticklish bit” or “Eating winkles”.
Recruited as a panellist when the show launched at Christmas 1967, Parsons was promoted to the show’s chair when the intended incumbent, the comedian Jimmy Edwards, proved reluctant to miss his regular Sunday polo game. For more than 50 years, Parsons kept the contestants in order – masters of extemporising like Kenneth Williams and Derek Nimmo, succeeded by Gyles Brandreth, Paul Merton and others – with a mixture of geniality and velvety grip, while keeping himself sharp by occasionally taking a seat on the panel.
He was a master of repartee, and even as he approached his 90s managed to sound fresh and youthful. He loved the programme, likening it to “a good dinner party where bright, intelligent guests all try to score points off each other”.
Meanwhile, his customary sartorial elegance made him a natural for Sale of the Century, which for many years he introduced “from Norwich – it’s the quiz of the week” and the studios of Anglia Television. It ran for more than a decade from 1972, and in 1978 a BBC strike boosted the audience to more than 21 million.
It was in this role that Parsons – who initially wrote the questions – acquired his reputation as the quintessential supersmooth game-show host, with a touch of the schoolmaster, particularly if contestants answered wrongly.
Like many television performers, Parsons set out to be a stage actor and soon found he fared best in revue, pantomime and any medium suited to what became a strong light-comedy personality. Inevitably, this included TV, but he had a number of stage successes, mostly in comedies or musicals.
Although he made a mark in intimate revue at the Watergate Theatre in 1954 and in Green Room Rag at the Adelphi in 1955, Parsons made most of his West End appearances in the 1960s. The farce Boeingboeing, in which he took over from Leslie Phillips at the Duchess in 1967, was London’s longest running play at that time. Other titles included Say Who You Are the following year at the Vaudeville, and Uproar in the House at the Garrick and later at the Whitehall.
Parsons suffered from a lacerating stammer throughout his childhood. He was nearly three before he could speak, something hard to conceive in someone who later became so fluent on radio.
He made his stage debut in the City with the Stock Exchange Players. He was then in his teens, and found that when working from a script his stammer disappeared. Confidence developed together with an urgent need for self-assertion.
The son of a successful doctor, Christopher Nicholas Parsons was born at Grantham on October 10 1923, although for years he was coy about his birth year, which he regularly advertised as 1928. When the family moved to Hampstead, he remained there for the rest of his life.
Leaving St Paul’s School at the age of 16, he became an apprentice engineer in Glasgow, where he attended the university and joined local concert parties, developing a talent as a comedian and occasional impersonator. He was spotted by the Canadian impresario Carroll Levis, and his first broadcast was as one of the starmaker’s “discoveries”.
On his return to London Parsons worked as a comedian in various clubs and secured a resident spot at the Windmill Theatre, non-stop revue providing a gruelling grounding. When he joined the BBC Repertory Company he began to be offered better stage work, while at the same time taking his first hesitant steps as a television quizmaster. ITV’S They’re Off in 1956 was one of his earliest.
During ITV’S formative years, Parsons teamed up with the comedian Arthur Haynes, for whom he was straight man, playing the upper-class stooge to the working-class comic. The Arthur Haynes Show proved popular, and brought Parsons to wider attention. The pair also appeared together in revue at the London Palladium in 1963, but Haynes died in 1966 at the age of only 52.
On radio, Just a Minute, originally scheduled to follow the satirical show Listen to This Space, proved hugely successful over the following five decades, while on television, the top-rated Sale of the Century made him a familiar face in millions of homes. Parsons returned to the theatre whenever his broadcasting commitments allowed, often at pantomime time, when he would play venues such as Dartford, Bromley and Croydon.
In 1983 he played at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, in Keeping Down with the Joneses, and later that decade appeared in a revival of the musical Charlie Girl, starring Cyd Charisse, at the Victoria Palace.
In 1990 he returned to the West End in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and for three years in the mid-1990s he starred in The Rocky Horror Show, then toured in it.
He made his film debut in 1947 in the historical drama The Master of Bankdam, and in the 1950s appeared in To Dorothy a Son with Shelley Winters and John Gregson, the Boulting Brothers’ legal satire Brothers in Law and Happy is the Bride, directed by Roy Boulting and starring a roll-call of British comedy talent including Ian Carmichael, Cecil Parker, Terrythomas and Irene Handl.
There were also cameo roles in Ralph Thomas’s Upstairs and Downstairs (1959) and Bryan Forbes’s all-star Victorian caper The Wrong Box (1966), with John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and countless others.
Blessed with prodigious energy, Parsons found time for various business interests, too, including an advertising agency in Eton. In 1981 he wrote Dipped in Vitriol, an anthology of scathing reviews of shows, films and books. Egg on the Face, in 1985, was a collection of broadcasting clangers.
He enjoyed looking after a large collection of plants and was proud to own a painting by Picasso. He displayed some interest in Liberal politics and spoke in support of Clement Freud at the 1974 general election. In 1989 he was elected Rector of St Andrews University.
Parsons was not an “actor’s actor”, and had comparatively few friends in the entertainment world. On the other hand, one of the qualities that so endeared Parsons to audiences of Just a Minute over many years was his ability to send himself up – and allow others, notably the regular panellist Paul Merton, to make affectionate comedy out of his pompous straight-man persona.
He was also noted for much charitable work, especially for the Lord’s Taverners, for whom he played cricket several times, and was a former president. He was active in the Grand Order of Water Rats, the showbusiness fraternity, being King Rat in 2019.
In 1977 Parsons set a world record by making the longest-ever after-dinner speech by speaking for seven hours, eight minutes and three seconds. A year later he shared it with Gyles Brandreth after both spoke for 11 hours in neighbouring rooms at a London hotel in aid of a children’s charity.
His final acting role was as the voice of Dagon in episode one of the fantasy series Good Omens, currently airing on Amazon Prime Video and BBC Two.
His autobiography The Straight Man – My Life in Comedy appeared in 1994, followed by two further books linked to Just a Minute, and in 2004 he was appointed OBE for services to drama and broadcasting, advanced to CBE in 2014.
Nicholas Parsons married, in 1954, the actress Denise Bryer, whom he met in his early days with the BBC Repertory Company, and with whom he had a son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1989, and in 1995 he married Ann Reynolds.