Comedy writer who presented It’ll be Alright on the Night
Denis Norden 1922-2018
Denis Norden, who has died aged 96, was one of the last surviving members of a postwar generation of entertainers, said Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail: ex-servicemen who, having experienced the darkness of the War, were happy to provide audiences with what was patronisingly referred to as “light entertainment”. A skilled wordsmith, Norden teamed up with Frank Muir in the late 1940s to become one of Britain’s leading comedy writers, responsible for several now well-worn phrases including “Trouble t’mill” and “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”; later, he became a familiar face on TV, as the twinkling, wryly humorous presenter of the out-takes show It’ll Be Alright on the Night. “Hello,” he said, at the start of one show. “Or for those of you who fast-forward through me to get to the funny bits – goodbye.”
Denis Norden was born in 1922, into an Orthodox Jewish family living in Hackney, east London. His father had hoped he’d follow him into the rag trade, and neither of his parents was ever quite reconciled to his showbiz career. Years later, Norden liked to recount how, in 1968, he’d been asked by the Evening Standard to review a book called Rationale of the Dirty Joke by the American social critic and folklorist Gershon Legman. Anxious to do justice to this honour, he spent six days writing 600 words. On the day his review was published, he went to visit his parents, and found them sitting glumly in front of a copy of the paper. “So this is what it has all come to,” said his mother. “My son – the expert on dirty jokes.”
From a local primary school, he won a scholarship to City of London School. Dreaming of a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, he found work in a cinema on leaving school, and by the age of 20 had become the manager of the Elephant and Castle Trocadero. Called up to the RAF in 1941, he served as a wireless operator and took part in revues to entertain the troops. In search of some stage lighting while performing in northern Germany in 1945, he was sent, with Eric Sykes and another comic, to a nearby prison camp. It turned out to be the recently liberated Bergen-belsen, said BBC Online. Totally unprepared for the scenes they found there, he found the experience shattering.
On being demobbed, Norden turned to writing, and was soon introduced to Muir. Together, they produced some of the most successful comedies of the postwar years, including Take It From Here and Whack-o!. In the early 1960s, one of the lines they’d written for Jimmy Edwards in this period was “borrowed” for Carry On Cleo. Delivered by Kenneth Williams, “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it infamy!” was once voted the best oneliner ever. However, Norden and Muir were not credited. They also wrote Peter Sellers’s famous sketch parodying the holiday industry, Balham, Gateway to the South.
In the 1970s, he and Muir went their separate ways (though they remained close friends) and Norden began writing for the big screen. Then in 1977, he and the producer Paul Smith came up with the idea of a show consisting of the out-takes from TV programmes. They put it to Michael Grade, LWT’S director of programmes, and half an hour later, had a commission. Actors were initially unhappy about it, but most changed their minds when they realised they’d get repeat fees, and could earn more from getting it wrong than getting it right. “It’s like running a farm where the manure is worth more than the cattle,” Norden said. The show went on to run for 29 years. Norden retired in 2006 when he began to lose his sight. He is survived by his two children. His wife of 75 years, Avril Rosen, died two months ago.