TIME RUNS OUT FOR PARSONS’ PLEASURES

NICHOLAS Parsons’ widow, Annie, has been trawling through her late husband’s trove of showbusiness

treasures — and it’s taken much longer than Just A Minute!

‘Nicholas was the biggest hoarder I’ve ever known,’ she says of the Radio 4 comedy panel show star, who died last year aged 96. ‘I’ve given loads away to friends.’

Parsons, who had presented Just A Minute since it was first broadcast in 1967, was an inveterate collector with a passion for clocks, cricket memorabilia, and even props from his 1970s TV game show Sale Of The Century.

There is, however, one hoard that Annie won’t get rid of, she tells me at the launch party for Felix Francis’s latest thriller, Iced, at the Cavalry and Guards Club in London’s Piccadilly – ‘The diaries I’ve kept.’