ARISE SIR NICHOLAS
No hesitation . . . radio’s most irritating man MUST get a gong
ACAMPAIGN i s afoot to have Nicholas Parsons knighted. Sir Nicholas? Is i t really such a ridiculous notion? If David Attenborough and Bruce Forsyth merit knighthoods for their decades of television stardom, surely the veteran presenter of radio’s Just A Minute, who was 90 yesterday, is equally deserving.
He’s a unique performer — pompous, infuriating, the butt of all jokes. What many people fail to realise, including fellow actors, is that this is a deliberate persona, a comic front. Nicholas Parsons does something that no one else in the history of comedy has quite matched. He’s a straight man without a double act. Instead of being the fall-guy for one funnyman, he sets himself up and lets everyone poke fun — the contestants, the audience, the whole world.
And he does it with utter politeness. Nicholas has the equable charm of a character from a pre-war murder mystery. Only Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would guess how much more his twinkling smile disguises than it reveals. In my view, he deserves a peerage, an earldom at least — Lord Parsons of Panelgame, with special dispensation to sit as Speaker of the House of Commons. Imagine how quickly the business of state would be completed with Nicholas in charge of proceedings.
MPs would be obliged to wrap up their speeches i n 60 seconds, with penalties for hesitation, deviation and repetition — according to the hallowed rules of Just A Minute, the radio game he has presented since 1967.
But not everyone appreciates him. He cultivates the air of a shameless smarm merchant on a TV game show — a role he played to perfection as the host of Sale Of The Century in the Seventies — and that is bound to rub many people up the wrong way.
And not just people in the audience: plenty of performers on Just A Minute have been driven to distraction by his flustered clumsiness a nd innocent obtuseness.
Yet it i s all part of his urge to perform — an urge that has kept him in work for more than 65 years. He rarely reveals the real Nicholas: a shrewd and self-analytical man with a streak of melancholy.
No one would suppose, hearing his plummy voice and seeing his colourful attire, that he was an engineering apprentice on Clydebank in Glasgow for five years.
His father, a doctor in Grantham, Lincolnshire, whose patients included Margaret Thatcher’s f amily, had dismissed the notion that Nicholas could become an actor.
But young Nick was also obstinate. While working in Glasgow in the early Forties, he practised his impersonations for wartime concert parties. Soon he was noticed by the BBC.
His speciality was taking off comedians such as Max Miller, W. C. Fields and Tommy Trinder, and when he was invited to appear on the radio variety show Happy-Go-Lucky Hour, he leapt at the chance. Each week, he’d travel all night by train from Glasgow to the BBC studios in North Wales, just to record a two-minute spot.
His eagerness to show off got him into trouble at the engineering works. Apprentices would sneak away to the toilets for a cigarette, and Nicholas spotted a captive audience. Ready to get a laugh anywhere, even the gents’ in a Clydebank factory, he ran through his repertoire.
The laughter alerted the foreman, a purple-faced man with bad dentures, who used to spit his false teeth into his hand when he was angry so he could swear more freely.
All Nicholas could remember afterwards was ‘ a continuous stream of expletives’ climaxing in the furious command: ‘Get back to yer bench, ye big impersonator!’
THE young comic got his revenge. A week later, he had his first engagement at the Glasgow Empire, and all his workmates t urned out to cheer as he impersonated a n apoplectic foreman — brandishing a set of dentures.
It seems an unlikely start for the urbanely preening Parsons we know today. But all his life he has been unable to resist an audience — which is why he still takes his one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe each year, competing with comics young enough to be his great-grandchildren.
After working in repertory theatre, and a long spell on television as the straight man for comedian Arthur Haynes, Parsons persuaded the BBC to let him try out a panel game on the newly launched Radio Four.
The invention of Ian Messiter, the game was called One Minute Please, and Parsons was to be a panellist alongside actress Beryl Reid and bon viveur Clement Freud.
By the time the pilot episode was recorded, both the show’s title and Nicholas’s role had changed. Though he is still now chairman of Just A Minute (or JAM, as fans call it), the format barely survived its first series. Whatever Parsons tried, the show lacked drama. The arrival in 1968 of the ultimate drama queen saved him. Carry On actor Kenneth Williams proved the ideal contestant, spieling erudite monologues on improbable subjects before breaking off to hurl vituperation or sarcastic flattery at the chairman.
FORTY years later, beginning the research for my authorised biography of Williams, I wrote t o Parsons asking f or an interview. He phoned me immediately and arranged to meet the night before a JAM recording.
It was obvious within minutes that I was talking with the real Nicholas Parsons, not the comic persona.
He was sharp at first, testing my intentions. When he decided I would not be hostile ,he set about answering questions.
He revealed a deep psychological knowledge, with insightful explanations for Kenneth Williams’s many contradictions. They had known each other since 1947. Williams, who died in 1988, suffered f rom depressions induced by performing.
‘His highs on stage were so much higher,’ Nicholas explained, ‘so his lows were correspondingly lower.’
Parsons also understood his own moods. His family, especially his children and his second wife Anne, had kept him sane throughout his career, he said: without them, he might have been swallowed up by gloom like his friend Kenneth.
‘I miss him,’ he told me in tears at the end of our interview.
Not all JAM’s contestants returned his affection. Clement Freud detested him at first, loathed him later, and spent the last ten years of his life refusing to speak to him except on the show.
One night in Edinburgh, furious that Nicholas had docked him a point in the game, Freud rounded on him. Parsons was baffled: Just A Minute was a game, the performances were acts.
Yet he never criticised Freud. Even today, he will say: ‘ Clement was basically a nice man, an interesting and complex person for whom I had huge admiration and respect. Working with him was far from easy . . .’
Another performer with a reputation for truculence, comedian Paul Merton, has been a regular on the show for more than 20 years. He heaps insults on the chairman during the game. If Parsons protests that he is trying to say something, Merton will snap back: ‘Yeah, so I assumed you’d be talking rubbish as always.’
Nicholas likes to say that Merton only does the show to be rude to him. The truth, as they both know, is that Paul Merton idolises him.
So do millions of radio listeners worldwide. That’s why he’s a national treasure. Where’s that knighthood?