FAREWELL TO LEGEND
Stars pay tribute to extraordinary career that began in 1940s and endured up to his death at age of 96
Tributes were paid last night to Nicholas Parsons, the genial, punctilious host of radio’s Just A Minute. His death at 96 brought down the curtain on one of the great showbusiness careers. He was described as “the kindest and most generous person”.
TO ONE generation, he was the genial, punctilious host of radio’s Just A Minute; to another the straight man whose feed lines let big-name comics like Arthur Haynes and Benny Hill get the laughs.
But there was more to Nicholas Parsons than could be summed up in 60 seconds, with or without deviation or repetition.
His death at 96, announced by his family yesterday, brought down the curtain on one of the great showbusiness careers.
As Stephen Fry put it in a tribute, he had “ruled Just A Minute for Just a Lifetime – a stunning achievement; never scripted, always immaculate”.
The chat show host Graham Norton added that Parsons was “truly the kindest and most generous person I’ve ever worked with. His continued delight at being a part of showbusiness should be an inspiration to us all”.
The writer and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, a frequent panellist on Just A Minute, said Parsons’ death was “the end of an era”.
“I thought he was immortal because he was always so alive,” he said. “Such sadness today, but what a career to celebrate, from the 1940s to 2020. My hero.”
Parsons had presided fastidiously over the show on Radio 4 since its inception in 1967 and only missed two recordings. His last episode had aired in September.
He combined the role with fronting the long-running Anglia TV game show, Sale of The Century, and a heavy schedule of stage work.
He had been a star from the very earliest days of ITV, when the impresarios George and Alfred Black had plucked him from the otherwise undistinguished cast of a failed variety show and paired him with the up-and-coming comedian, Arthur Haynes.
The two created a partnership that made them among the most popular stars of their day. Haynes’s show, scripted by the future Till Death Us Do Part writer Johnny Speight and with Parsons as the perennial straight man, was a fixture in prime-time for a decade, and ended only with Haynes’s early death, at 52, in 1966. After that, Parsons began performing a similar service for Benny Hill – though Hill was not averse to impersonating his parttime feed man in send-ups of Sale of The Century.
However, it was for his radio work that today’s audience knew Parsons, and the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, said “very few people” had done so much to entertain audiences over the decades. “No-one deserves to be called a broadcasting legend more than Nicholas Parsons,” Lord Hall added. “His charm, inventive intellect and ability to create laughs were unsurpassed.”
He had died after a short illness, his family said, in a statement thanking staff at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital for their care of him.
Despite his fulsome CV, Parsons once said he believed he would have got more work if he had been “more rugged-looking”.
Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where his father was GP to the family of Baroness Thatcher, he had two children with his first wife, the actress Denise Bryer. He married again, to Ann Reynolds, in 1995.
His charm, intellect and ability to create laughs were unsurpassed. The BBC’s director general Lord Tony Hall.
Top, Nicholas Parsons poses with his CBE medal in 2014; above left, with his wife Denise Bryer and their children Suzy and Justin; above right, with Parsons in 1957 is Jill Summers, later famous as Phyllis Pearce in Coronation Street.