My 11-hour agony with the master
NICHOLAS PARSONS wasn’t just my friend. He was my hero and role model.
I first met him more than 50 years ago at a Christmas party hosted by the TV chef Fanny Cradock when I was still a student at Oxford. From that day in December 1969 to last Saturday when I called him in hospital, he was my mentor and my guide.
In half a century of friendship we never had a cross word, though in 1978 we came quite close to it when, for charity, we took part in a competition to see which of us could make the longestever after-dinner speech.
After 11 hours of non-stop talking in adjacent rooms — we each attached a rubber tube with a four-pint capacity to ourselves so we didn’t have to pop to the loo — we agreed to share the record.
Nicholas was competitive and ambitious. He always strove to be the best at whatever he was doing. And he always succeeded.
We think of him now as the smooth- talking, silvertongued chairman of the world’s longest-running radio panel show, Just A Minute. But — as he would very much want me to remind you — there was so much more to him than that.
He had half a dozen careers and he revelled in all of them. As an actor, he appeared in several of the films made in the 1950s and 1960s by the celebrated Boulting Brothers, as well as in a couple of Carry Ons.
He starred in the West End in Boeing Boeing. He was a knock-out in stockings and suspenders in The Rocky Horror Show. And right up until last year he was touring the country in his one-man show celebrating the life and nonsense verse of poet and painter Edward Lear.
He wrote several books. He collected antique clocks. He never stopped.
A couple of years ago, when we took part in Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, travelling around the country looking for bargains, he insisted on driving. ‘You’ve got to keep going,’ he insisted. He did just that — right to the end, with courtesy and good humour.
He was a friend who never let me down. Whenever I published a book, he praised it. Whenever I appeared in a show, he came to see it. When I stood in for him on Just A Minute in 2018, he called and said, with a chuckle: ‘You were too good.’
I wasn’t, of course. He was the master. He was just the best. Thank you, old friend.