Quick-witted and long-serving quizmaster
Nicholas Parsons, who has died aged 96, was the presenter of one of BBC Radio 4’s longest running shows. He hosted Just a Minute for 50 years, with almost no deviations or hesitations. In fact, in all that time, the unflappable, smoothtalking quizmaster missed just one episode. Tasked with keeping an array of panellists in check, Parsons came across as “a quibbling pedant from the professional classes”, said The Guardian. But “in many ways, the testily humorous chairman was just another character role for a performer who’d spent the first 20 years of his career as a jobbing actor”, playing everything from a Greek seaman and a Scottish ghillie to an Egyptian camel-herder.
Nicholas Parsons was born in Grantham in
1923, the middle son of a successful doctor who was often said to have delivered the infant
Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher). When his father took a job in London, Nicholas was sent to St Paul’s School. Suffering from a stammer and undiagnosed dyslexia, he became the class clown to disguise his lack of academic progress; and to counter his reading problems, he developed a prodigious memory. (In later life, he never used an autocue because he couldn’t read it.) He fell in love with acting in his teens – not least because his stammer disappeared when he was in character. But his parents did not encourage his vocation: “Someone like you will just end up as an alcoholic or some kind of pervert,” his mother told him. Instead, as he liked fixing clocks, it was suggested he train as an engineer. So it was that aged 16, he found himself on a train to Glasgow, to take up a job at Drysdale’s – a manufacturer of marine pumps with a works at Clydebank. Cast into a tough, working-class world very different to his own, he developed his skills as a mimic to entertain his fellow apprentices, and appeared in a variety show at the Glasgow Empire.
Finally, in 1945, he decided to give up engineering and try his luck as a professional actor. He made his West End debut that year, and started performing in cabaret in the 1950s. His first TV success was as the upper-class straight man to the working-class comedian Arthur Haynes; But it was as the host of the ITV quiz show Sale of the Century, from 1971, that he became a household name. The show attracted as many as 21 million viewers a week.
Just a Minute was devised by Ian Messiter, who, as a schoolboy, had once been ordered to repeat what his teacher had just said “without hesitation or repetition”. To that, he added a restriction on deviation. There were other rules in the pilot, said The Times, but the success of the show, which started in 1967, “lay in the simplicity of the rules and the good humour in which it was generally played”. As the apparently guileless (but actually lighteningquick-witted) host, Parsons came in for some ribbing on air from panellists, particularly Kenneth Williams and later Paul Merton. He was close to Merton off-mic, and he didn’t usually mind the teasing. “The more jokes they do about you, the more they are talking about you,” he told his friend Barry Cryer. But his relationship with one regular contestant was prickly. The late Clement Freud was a “poor loser who considered the host too frivolous” and, off air, he made no bones about it.
Parsons never lost his love of the stage: in 1990, he appeared in a production of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, and at various times in the 1990s, he played the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture
Show. Parsons married Denise Bryer in 1954. They had two children before divorcing in 1989. In 1995, he married Ann Reynolds, who survives him. He had recorded the 85th season of
Just a Minute last year, and though in poor health, was preparing for the next one when he died.