theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Nicholas Parsons

Nicholas Parsons has been an actor – he is most adamant that he is first and foremost an actor – for almost 70 years, so it’s not surprising, given the erratic nature of his profession, that he has been obliged to assume a number of alternative guises over the years from leading man to comedy sidekick to quiz master. Yet despite this, he is no chameleon. He has somehow managed to pull off the trick of being supremely adaptable whilst remaining resolutely true to himself – you’ll never catch Parsons dropping his aitches or wearing age-inappropriate clothing. Always dapper, slightly prim and a little aloof, he is the consummate professional and, at the age of 87, more in demand than ever.

Born in Grantham in 1923, Parsons’ family moved to London when he was eight by which time he had already decided he wanted to act, much to his parents’ dismay. The fact that he was dyslexic – although it wasn’t recognised as such in those days - and had a stutter probably didn’t help his cause. When he was 16 his parents sent him to Clydebank, near Glasgow, to train as a marine engineer, but if the Parsonses had hoped this would distract their son from his theatrical ambitions, they were sadly mistaken. He made his first professional broadcast just two years later and spent the next 16 years working as an actor, cabaret artist and stand-up comedian. Today he is probably best known as Benny Hill’s straight man, the slick, slightly supercilious quiz master of Sale of the Century and currently - actually for the last 44 years - as the extremely witty chairman of Radio 4’s Just a Minute, providing a gracious foil for the panel who must, as all good Just a Minute listeners know, talk for a minute without hesitation, repetition or deviation. (Pictured above: celebrating 40 years of Just a Minute, Clement Freud, Sheila Hancock, Parsons, Graham Norton and Paul Merton.)

However, Parsons first became a household name thanks to his appearances on The Arthur Haynes Show. Unless you are over 50, a comedy maven or saw Paul Merton’s recent BBC Four documentary about Haynes, it is highly unlikely that you have even heard of Arthur Haynes but Haynes was ITV’s most popular comedian for over a decade. The only reason he is not as well known today as his contemporary Tony Hancock is that none of his shows were repeated. Parsons’ performances as Haynes’s straight man, in the guise of various snooty establishment types just asking to be taken down a peg or two by Haynes's robust working-class character contributed hugely to the success of the series and reflected the spirit of the age – only a year earlier theatre audiences had been shocked to hear Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger referring to an MP as a “chinless wonder from Sandhurst”.

Watch a clip of The Barber Sketch from The Arthur Haynes Show

But Arthur Haynes’s time has come. Next week sees the release of The Arthur Haynes Show on DVD and Parsons agreed to be interviewed to mark the occasion. He talked steadily, reeling off names and dates with an ease that would put many people half his age to shame and when I suggested we could draw the interview to its conclusion as he had given me plenty of material, he pointed out we had another four minutes left and insisted on continuing the interview for almost another 10. As I say, the consummate professional.

HILARY WHITNEY: What made you want to become an actor?

NICHOLAS PARSONS: When I was five years old I was taken to see the circus and from then on I was absolutely imbued with the idea of becoming a performer. If the circus people had suddenly said, “Would you like to join us?” I’d have gone.

I think it’s in the genes. I was born at a time when you didn’t do what you wanted, you did as you were told and people didn’t automatically train to go into the entertainment industry – and it wasn’t called that then, it was called the theatre. I think it was even worse for women in my mother’s generation because there were very few professions open to them; they either became nurses or teachers. My mother became a nurse which is how she met my father, who was a doctor.

My aunt was a teacher and I used to go and see her at Ealing High School where she taught. She used to take part in the school plays and she was extraordinarily good and very funny and, according to my mother, my grandfather would go to the Bristol Empire every week and come back and take off the turns, so I do think it was in the genes but no one from my background would ever have considered becoming an actor. In those days people didn’t go into the theatre unless their family were already in it, which really was the ethos of the time when I was young. You followed the line of the family. If you came from a professional family, you studied and went into a profession. It was very rigid and very structured in those days and for someone from a professional family, with doctors and vicars in it for quite a few generations, the idea of someone wanting to become an actor was just anathema.

When I was young, in the nursery at our home in Grantham, my mother encouraged us to show off and perform and we used to put on these little shows, but when I was older and she realised that I was serious and wanted to do it as a proper job, she was horrified. My mother thought that everybody in the theatre was debased and debauched and that I’d finish up either as an alcoholic or some sort of pervert. My parents weren’t only discouraging, they did everything they could to stop me.

You also had a stutter and were dyslexic so…

They didn’t know what dyslexia was then, I just appeared to be rather slow, which I was in reading and writing and it was a huge drawback, but I got through all my exams at school. I did very well actually, but I now realise with retrospect that I relied on my memory. I’ve since discovered that a lot of dyslexics have good recall and I have surprisingly good recall. When I wrote my memoirs, which are now out and about, I never referred to scrapbooks or journals or anything like that, it just all came flooding back from my memory bank and, of course, it’s been invaluable to me in my profession. I didn’t know I was using my memory to this extent but you see, to the outsider, I appeared very slow so they thought I was a non-achiever and what with the stutter as well… But, although this sounds ridiculous, when I walk on a stage, it seems so natural to me that the stutter leaves and I am able to perform. (Pictured above: Parsons, centre, at St Paul's School, London)

But don’t you think, because of your stutter and dyslexia, your mother was simply being protective when she tried to stop you from going on the stage?

Of course she was! Parents are always protective. I’m not slagging them off, I’m trying to be honest about it. My parents did the best they could for their son – and for their other children, too. They thought they were acting in my best interests and I’m grateful for that, it’s just as it turned out, it wasn’t the best. But they thought it was and this is what parents do.

It must have been a terrific culture shock when you were sent to Clydebank to train to be a marine engineer.

It was tough, it was utterly uncompromising, an alien environment to the way I’d been brought up because remember, I went from an English public school talking vere much more lake thet [he ramps his accent up to a Pathe News level of enunciation] than I do today and there I was with people who [says something incomprehensible in guttural Glaswegian accent] talked like that – they might as well have been speaking a different language. In retrospect, I don’t know how I survived but I did and when I think back and try to analyse it, well, humour is a great catalyst and I was always a show-off and I used to impersonate performers. So I built up a rapport with my fellow work-mates and they accepted me and I take that as a huge compliment. It was the greatest learning for life anybody could have and has stood me in incredible stead ever since.

You’ve obviously got a very strong work ethic – do you think that might be a legacy of your time in Clydebank?

I’m a great one for accepting what life deals me, yes. But there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t run away, so I just got on with it and did my best. The reason my parents suggested I became an engineer was that I was very capable with my hands. I always had lots of tools and made things and repaired things, but I see that as being creative with my hands. I was never cut out to be an engineer, I found the technical side very challenging.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that although they’d sent you away so that you’d forget about becoming an actor, it actually gave you the opportunity to start performing?

I think they thought it would get me away from the idea of being an actor and so forth – at least I think that was part of it, although I never asked them - but actually, in retrospect, maybe they did me a favour. Glasgow is a very artistic and creative city and there were many opportunities for me to express myself. I joined an amateur dramatics society and of course, because the war was on, young men were in short supply so I got quite nice parts and then I joined a concert party and entertained the troops with impersonations. I’ve always done impersonations; at school I used to mimic people off the radio.

It was during this time you made your first professional broadcast with the BBC, thanks to the Canadian impresario, Carroll Levis.

Well, that took quite a bit of courage because remember, my parents were still not only dead against it [becoming an actor], they discouraged me in every way because they didn’t want me to get any ideas that I could do this properly. Carroll Levis’s claim to fame was his stage show in which he presented new and unknown talent, so when he came to the Glasgow Empire, I decided to go and ask for an audition. That took quite a lot of courage and my stutter got far worse when I got to the stage door, which happened when I was nervous. But I asked the manager in my stuttering way if I could see Mr Levis and he invited me back on the following Friday, when they were holding auditions. As soon as I walked on stage I felt much more at ease and I did some of my best impersonations, such as Jimmy Stewart and Charles Boyer, and to my amazement, I was offered my first professional job in a radio show called Carroll Levis Carries On. It went out at midday from the Paris Studio on Regent Street in London and fortunately, it was on the weekend so I was able to get off from my work at the engineering yard. I got three guineas for it.

But that was in 1941 and I didn’t leave Clydebank until 1944 when I got my “lines” [confirmation of completed apprenticeship]. I’m a qualified marine mechanical engineer and I was accepted into the Merchant Navy as a junior engineer but I never actually sailed - I have the distinction of saying that I was in the Merchant Navy for a mere five days. What happened was that I became very ill and collapsed because I’d really been working far too hard with hardly any nourishment - one of my main memories of the war is that I was always hungry. I would get up at about 6.30 in the morning, do a hard day’s physical work and then rush off to do a play or a concert party in the evening, with very little to eat because there was severe rationing at the time. It’s not in my nature to give in so I soldiered on and ended up in the Victoria Infirmary for five months with a very serious lung complaint.

Then I was discharged from all military service and went to London to be with my parents, who said, “What are you going to do now?” And I replied, “I’m going to become an actor,” and they said, “But you’re a qualified engineer now,” and I said, “I’m not interested.” And they said, “But you’ve got no contacts,” and I said, “I know, but I’ll make contacts.”

I just persevered and got The Stage newspaper, looked up who was doing auditions, wrote letters, knocked at doors and did auditions here, there and everywhere and eventually I got some work and one little thing leads to another.

A journalist said to me the other day, “What was your big break?” Well, I’ve never had what I call a big break, just lots of little breaks. You take advantage of any opportunity you get to work. I never questioned the money, I just thought, that’s a job. I was an understudy in a West End play and then I got a very good part in The Hasty Heart at the Aldwych Theatre. I could have said, “Here I am in a play in the West End - I’ve arrived! I’ve had my big break!” But although the same management gave me the lead in a tour of Arsenic and Old Lace, which was wonderful, nothing much happened after that, so I decided I must get some more experience.

That’s when you went to Bromley Rep.

There were lots of repertory companies around at the time and I’d been asked to go down to one in Bromley in Kent, run by a very enterprising man called Ronald Carr, to play an American in Terence Rattigan’s play While the Sun Shines, which went very well, in fact; a lot of people thought I actually was American, and Ronnie said to me, “Would you like to stay on and become a regular member of the company? I think I can teach you things,” – because he was a very good teacher – and of course, that’s what I needed to do. So I agreed to stay for 12 weeks and in the end I stayed for 15 months and in that time I played every kind of role in every type of play, including Restoration comedies and we even did a couple of Shakespeare plays, so you got a wonderful broad experience. But the repertory theatres have all gone now and these youngsters who come out of these academies and so forth, they don’t really have a chance to learn their craft. They get a little part in a television show but they don’t learn the basics in order to sustain them to go on and make a good career and they’re often defined by what they look like.

And then you started to do quite a bit of cabaret, didn’t you?

After I’d left Bromley I thought, I’ve now proved that I can act - character roles and comedy roles were my forte, obviously - and I was hoping now I would get some wonderful work in a West End play again. And nothing happened. So I got an agent and then I suddenly realised I must prove that I’ve got a broader talent but unfortunately, that doesn’t work in England. In America, if you can do a lot of things well, they are deeply, deeply impressed with what you can do. In this country they’re suspicious of you but, naïvely, I thought that if I could prove I had a broader talent, I would be more likely to get the work I wanted as an actor in the theatre.

There was a lot of cabaret around then, in the Fifties – most restaurants had a single cabaret entertainer and, of course, there were clubs putting on big floor shows, like the Pigalle and Churchill’s, and so I put a cabaret act together. That was one of the most nerve-wracking things I did because we don’t have a tradition of cabaret in this country and half the people who go to restaurants don’t really want to hear the entertainer, they want to get on with their food, so you have to convince them when you go on that you are worth listening to. But I got one job and it did well, so I got more cabaret work and then – and this is typical of British journalists, they put labels on you – I got labelled as a cabaret artist. But I’m not a cabaret artist, I’m an actor. Even now people say, “What are you?” and they often think I’m a presenter because I’m doing lots of presenting but I’m not, I am an actor. I can do lots of different things.

In desperation, I thought I’ve got to prove to them I’ve got an even broader talent and I did an audition at the famous Windmill Theatre and was taken on as the resident comedian. I did three seasons there - six months doing stand-up – but even that didn’t work because, of course, then everyone said, “Oh, he’s a variety performer,” and I just got more and more variety work.

So then I joined the BBC Drama Rep to prove that I could act and when they discovered I could do lots of different dialects, they labelled me a voice-man so I got lots of different character parts. I played everything from Irish labourers to Yorkshire miners to Italian waiters and I did every kind of character part you could think of. So I left there after a year and only then did the BBC think, oh, he is an actor, and started to offer me some good acting roles. But by then I’d got involved with a programme called The Eric Barker Half Hour. Television was still very naïve but Eric Barker was doing this very funny satirical show – he was the first one to do any sort of satire or take-off of shows [on television]. He really was a pioneer.

How did you get to work with Arthur Haynes?

Well, in the meantime I’d been on the radio, Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, which was very exciting, and I’d done some revues in the West End, because of all my experience of cabaret and so forth, and I now had done a lot of very good work in all kinds of different areas. Then in 1956, Independent Television began. Two producers called George and Alfred Black, who were the sons of George Black who’d invented a war-time show called Strike a New Note, decided to revive their father’s show and, as they said in their press handout, "to discover the new and unknown stars of Independent Television". And I thought, well, I’ve had enough experience for that, maybe I could become one of them, but it wasn’t to be.

I happened to see the first transmission, which was in January 1956, and it was pretty dire but there was one person that I thought was rather good who was called Arthur Haynes. His material was terrible, but I did think he had a very good television personality. Then I saw the second show, which was even worse - these days it would have come off immediately but then they had to keep going because they had nothing else to replace it with. The following morning, my agent telephoned me and said, “Have you seen a programme called Strike a New Note?” and I said, “Yes. It was absolutely pathetic!” He said, “Well, they want you to join it,” and I had to start that day.

I don’t think George Black thought I could save the day but that maybe the addition of some extra talent might help. In those days Arthur played a character called Oscar Pennyfeather, who mimed to an unseen voice, and I was engaged to do the voice. It was a very good television gimmick, it worked very well, and at the end of six shows, George Black said, “I’m getting rid of everybody but I’m going to keep Arthur Haynes and you. I think the two of you should do sketches together,” which was very creative of him.

He changed the title of the show to Get Happy and we continued for another 18 weeks until George Black thought he’d exhausted it all. The following autumn Arthur telephoned and said, “They want me to do a spot on Star Time [a variety show] and I wondered if you’d like to do a sketch with me? I thought we might get that writer from the last series of Get Happy, Johnny Speight, to do something for us - I think he was the best,” and I said, “He certainly was, he was brilliant.” And so we got Johnny to write a sketch and it was very successful and we did a couple more and then ATV decided to give Arthur his own show – The Arthur Haynes Show.

It started very modestly, going out quite late at night. It was a bit like a mini-variety show actually, and then people began to talk about the comedy sketches and then after a year or two it was moved to 8 o’clock, the prime time for comedy shows, and the rest is history.

We were lucky in a sense, in that if something is going to be a success, it needs time to evolve – Just a Minute was initially a disaster but it evolved into a very successful show and has been running for 44 years.

By the Sixties, The Arthur Haynes Show was the top comedy show on independent television. Arthur and I came from very different social backgrounds and our professional training was different – he was from the world of music hall and I was from the world of theatre – but we built up an amazing rapport, we had an intuitive understanding and that’s why the show was so successful.

People think, oh, Nicholas Parsons was the straight man, and I was the straight man, but I took the role into a different direction. Up until then, the straight man had been a very formal individual. For example Jerry Desmonde [best known as the straight man to Norman Wisdom], was always Jerry Desmonde and the humour would bounce off him. Nowadays, it’s interesting, there’s no such thing as a straight man when two comedians get together, like Armstrong and Miller or Little Britain - they both play for laughs. But I bridged the two in that Arthur was the comic and had the gag lines and I was the foil, but I always created a character. In those days, I would play a figure of the establishment, a doctor, a lawyer or an MP or a vicar, and I always gave a performance. Arthur never minded if I got laughs on character – his laughs came from the gags. So although I was called a straight man, in a way I was taking the role of the straight man to the comedian into a different direction. (Pictured above left to right: unknown actor, Parson and Haynes.)

I understand Haynes didn’t like rehearsing.

No, he wasn’t mad keen. Looking back, I think he’d come from a world of music hall and he was never confident in a theatrical situation which is what the sketches were. He had a good memory too, and once he’d got the sense of a scene in his head, he wanted to get back home and get on with his DIY – he was mad about DIY. I didn’t mind because I had a young family and wanted to get home as well, although when I look back, we were living, professionally, very dangerously, because there were limited rehearsals and we’d leave a lot of it to the inspiration of the moment once the audience was there. My memory had been trained by all the scripts I’d had to learn over the years and although Arthur and I never discussed it, he knew I would carry all the words of the sketch and could help him out when he dried up – which he invariably did. I would know from the way he looked at me that he didn’t know what to say, so I would feed him in his line and he would say, “Oh Mr Nichol-arse! That’s very intuitive, that’s exactly the very word I was searching for? How did you know I wanted to say that? You are a clever man, aren’t you?” Then of course, I’d start to giggle and the audience loved it - they knew something had gone wrong and we improvised around that and then eventually got back to the sketch and finished it.

We used to take messages from the floor manager behind the camera, “Speed it up, we’re behind,” but we always finished on time, which was amazing looking back. We had an intuitive understanding of how each other worked. Nowadays it would have been cut out and sent off to It’ll Be Alright on the Night.

There’s that great clip of you and Haynes with Wendy Richard, desperately trying not to corpse.

Well, it was very under-rehearsed and I think Arthur had had to improvise and said something like, “What are you doing with your winkle?” and Wendy started to giggle and then Arthur got the giggles too and I was actually shaking with laughter but I pretended that they had made me laugh as part of the sketch, “Ooh, you’re so funny,” that kind of thing, but actually I couldn’t control my laughter, so I turned it into part of my performance.

Watch a clip of Nicholas Parsons, Wendy Richard and Arthur Haynes on The Arthur Haynes Show

Were you good friends outside the show?

No, we were very good friends inside the show but we didn’t socialise much outside but then a lot of people didn’t, you know. I mean, Eric and Ernie, they were the greatest of pals but they didn’t socialise an awful lot with each other. I think you have enough of each other’s company when you are working, so you don’t necessarily want to go out and dine with each other afterwards, and it’s nice to get away and come back fresh to your relationship the next morning. I’ve never thought about that before but it seemed quite natural.

Johnny Speight devised a show for you both that was later developed into 'Till Death Us Do Part, but Haynes wasn’t keen, was he?

Johnny and I were trying to persuade Arthur to move forward and drop the mini-variety shows which he liked, because they gave him a sense of security, and do a situation comedy. Together the three of us evolved a very strong storyline based on some of the most successful characters that Johnny had created for Arthur and myself, and we were going to do it for the next series but Arthur decided he wanted to stick to the old format. I was very sad. I said, “I think you’re wrong Arthur, we’ve got to keep moving forward and that is the way forward.” So we had a few words - our friendship was strong enough for us to be able to speak our minds - but I think that Arthur didn’t have the confidence to drop the security of what he knew worked. Interestingly, after Arthur and I had parted company and Arthur had died, Johnny took the basic idea of what we had discussed and turned it into 'Till Death Us Do Part. I mean, it wasn’t the same but it was from the same premise.

Was it a big disappointment when Haynes decided to end your partnership?

No, because I fell on my feet. I was immediately offered the lead in a West End show – exactly what I dreamed of doing when I first started out. I took over the lead in Boeing-Boeing, the most wonderful part that could ever be written for a young man, so it was marvellous.

The break up [with Haynes] was perfectly amicable but it was at Arthur’s instigation. He decided that he wanted to move on and I think that was the only way he knew how to do it. I think he was unsettled by the fact that I was getting a bit more recognition than he wanted me to have so he decided to change by taking a new partner, Tony Fayne, with him. Unfortunately, the public was so used to Haynes and Parsons and the magic we had – the public are very loyal to things they like – and it didn’t work. When Haynes went back to Blackpool, where we had broken box-office records, his summer season just didn’t take off, so he had these two disasters and in the meantime, I was getting accolades for starring in the West End and I’d also started my satire show, Listen to This Space.

But the sad thing about Arthur was he had already had one heart attack when he was working with me and then he had another in 1966 and died. Tony Fayne told me at the funeral that Arthur was complaining about these pains in his chest and, of course, he should have gone to see the doctor but he didn’t because he didn’t want to acknowledge it. His agent had persuaded him to do a situation comedy directed by Dicky Leeman and Dicky told me that he quickly realised it would never work because they decided to pair him up with a woman, Joan Sims. Joan is a brilliant, brilliant actress but Arthur really bounced off a man. He’d already had those two other disasters and I think it must have been too much pressure. He was only 52. It was very sad.

Can you tell me how you came to be in The Benny Hill Show?

It all started when I did a charity show one Sunday evening in the late Fifties at the Prince of Wales Theatre. I appeared in a wonderful sketch written by Benny which was a take-off of This is Your Life. Benny came on as all the characters in this person’s life and I did an impersonation of Eamonn Andrews. Benny remembered it and some time later, in the Sixties, he asked me to be in his show, which I did for about three years. (Pictured above left to right: Leslie Goldie, Parsons and Hill.)

What was it like working with him compared to Haynes?

Utterly, utterly different. Benny was such a lovely, warm, engaging person – I did socialise with him a bit - but he was utterly different to work with. Whereas Arthur was very generous and didn’t mind if I got laughs in character, Benny wanted me purely as a straight man, as a foil. If I improvised in character, embroidered it as it were, or interpreted it for laughs rather than just playing it straight, he’d always say – and he did it very sweetly - “Nicky, Nicky! [adopts slightly finger-wagging tone] Don’t go for the laugh there, darling boy, play it straight,” and so I knew he wanted me to be utterly formal and straight, so that’s how I played it with Benny. You go along with the people you work with and I enjoyed it hugely. I just loved working with Benny and we became very good friends and he was very generous in other ways – a lot of comedians have difficulty parting with money, it’s a psychological thing, but Benny was very generous. In fact, he had no concept of money. When he died there was money lying all over the flat.

Watch a clip of Nicholas Parsons on The Benny Hill Show

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You joined The Benny Hill Show in 1967, the same year that Just a Minute started. It has, of course, been an enormous success, but you were a reluctant chairman in the early days, weren’t you?

Yes, completely. I had taken Ian Messiter’s idea for the show, which was a rehash of a programme Ian Messiter had done during the war called One Minute Please, up to the Commissioning Editor for BBC Radio because I’d done a lot of improvised comedy in cabaret and elsewhere and I wanted to do some more. The plan was that Jimmy Edwards would be the chairman and I would be going on the panel. Then the producer, David Hatch, who’d just come down from the Cambridge Footlights, said to me, “We’re never going to get Jimmy on a Sunday, will you be the chairman?” and I said, “No, David, I’m wrong for it, I don’t want to do it,” and he said, “I’ll do a deal with you. If you’ll be chairman for the pilot and if we get the series, you can go onto the panel.” So we did the pilot with Derek Nimmo and Clement Freud and two women who weren’t very successful, and the show didn’t work at all. The BBC wasn’t going to commission the series but – and this is the lovely thing about show business, from some of the most unfortunate beginnings, some of the biggest successes arise – David saw the potential of the show and fought to get a series. Rumour has it that he laid his job on the line and they didn’t want to lose David so they gave him a series. He showed his skill as a producer by bringing in Kenneth Williams, who struggled for a bit but turned out to be a great success, and then a bit later he brought in Peter Jones and slowly the show evolved and became extremely successful.

After a while it became a bit predictable because we only had the four regulars (pictured right, clockwise: Clement Freud, Derek Nimmo, Kenneth Williams, Peter Jones and Parsons) and to some extent it was all about how they sparked off each other. And then, when Kenneth Williams died, Paul Merton came in and then slowly people were introduced, such as Graham Norton and Stephen Fry – when he has the time. If we have somebody who has never played it before, we always make sure that they are surrounded by three people who are very experienced. It’s such a difficult game. We make it sound easy and fun and so forth but it is such a disciplined kind of comedy thinking.

You really have to be on the ball because you have to treat each of the contestants quite differently and play to their strengths, don’t you?

Well, of course you do because they are all different. I see my job as first and foremost trying to generate the fun. I use my skill as a presenter to keep the show moving and then my skill as a straight man to feed in the lines so that the contestants will come back with their comedy response. And I also use my skill as a comedian to add to the humorous concept of the show.

They were quite nervous about having Paul Merton at first, weren’t they?

Only the producer, Ted Taylor, who was very much of the old school. I’d never recommended anyone new before because it hadn’t been necessary but I’d worked with Paul before on a show called Scruples, and I said to Ted, “If you’re ever looking for someone new, I think this chap will be brilliant.” Then Kenneth Williams died and we invited various guests to fill the fourth chair and Ted phoned Paul and asked him if he’d like to do the show. Ted really didn’t know much about Paul so he said, “I know you’re one of these new alternative comedians,” – which is a boring phrase because there’s no such thing as alternative comedy, you’re either a comedian or you’re not – “but you do know we don’t swear on the show,” and Paul said, “Yes, I do, I’ve listened to it for many years.” “Right,” Ted went on, “and what will you wear?” “I think I’ll just come dressed normally,” was the reply. Paul later said, “I think he thought he was engaging Sid Vicious!” So Paul came on the show and he was brilliant and now, of course, he’s become a regular.

Tell me about Kenneth Williams.

He was always a challenge – although an enjoyable challenge. Kenneth was very professional but he’d get carried away on occasion and I had to rein him in. The funniest thing about Kenneth was that he was basically a self-educated man and he loved the opportunity so show off his erudition. Ian Messiter, who thought up the subjects, used to put in things like Aristotle just for Kenneth because he knew that Kenneth knew about these things. Within a few minutes of having the subject however, Kenneth might pause and the others would challenge, even though they didn’t really want the subject because they didn’t know anything about it, and of course, Kenneth would then go into a sulk because he knew the subject had been thought up especially for him. I would then have to use my instinct as a bit of a psychologist to draw him out of his sulk and get him back into the show.

And Clement Freud?

Clement Freud was utterly, utterly competitive, in a subtle way, and he liked to win. I mean, he was brilliant in the show and he was an intellectual but he wanted you to know that and also, as we went to school together and we knew each other very well, it was always a battle with him. Whereas with Paul - Paul will be rude to me and get laughs at my expense but if you listen, you can hear there’s no hidden agenda behind what he says. We have a very good rapport and we get a lot of comedy out of it. But Clement would enjoy trying to embarrass me if he could because that was Clement’s temperament, and you accept it and you go along with it and you have to be strong to stand up to it. But I’m not belittling Clement – I was very fond of him and I admired his great skill in the game as well, of course, as his great intellectual prowess.

Did you enjoy Sale of the Century?

I enjoy any job I do. I give myself up to the mood of the show and do whatever is necessary to make it work. I’d never done a quiz show before. I met the producer, Peter Joy, in London and he showed me this programme, which was American, called Sale of the Century. It had very simple questions and huge prizes of cars and boats and God knows what, and we didn’t have prizes like that in this country in those days and I said to Peter Joy, “Well let’s make the questions very simple to start with so that the contestants gain confidence and then we’ll make them a little bit more challenging. Then in the last section, I’ll ask some more simple questions,” – because I wrote all the questions – “which require quickness of recall and knowledge, which will create excitement,” because as an actor, you always want to build up to a dramatic finish, which is exactly what we did and it worked. We were the first to do that kind of quiz with those sorts of questions and it worked very well and the show took off – it was only in the Anglia area to begin with and then it was slowly networked and then it became one of the most successful quiz shows ever. It ran for a record 14 years. (Pictured above: Parsons with a Sale of the Century hostess and a contestant.)

But it must have been difficult afterwards to get work as an actor?

Oh, yes. I was now a household name in a different way. I was identified as a po-faced quiz-show host and at that time, remember, there was no respect for presenters and the press used to criticise quiz shows because they thought they were downmarket.

The great bonus of it was that, not only did it give me a very good salary so I could pay the school fees without having to worry about doing other work, but it also gave me the opportunity to develop my one-man shows on WS Gilbert and Edward Lear, which I’m still doing around the world, and also my one-man comedy show [The Nicholas Parsons Happy Hour] which I still do from time to time. I also formed a production company and made comedy shorts for the cinema, which we’re currently trying to sell to television, so it enabled me to be creative in lots of other areas which weren’t necessarily very profitable.

But unfortunately, employers are so simplistic, they think that if you do a quiz show you can no longer act and it has been very frustrating because I stopped getting work in plays and films which is why I went off and did lots of other different things because that’s what you have to do. It was Night Network [a late-night music show in which Parsons presented a quiz, The All New Alphabet Game] that brought me back after Sale of the Century. I was asked by an enterprising producer, Dave Morley, if I’d like to do a television show for radio money and I said, “All right,” because I always put money secondary to a good job and I developed a whole new audience amongst the younger generation which led to Mr Jolly Lives Next Door [one of the Comic Strip Presents series, directed by Stephen Frears] and The Rocky Horror Show. (Pictured right: Parsons in a promotional photograph for The Rocky Horror Show).

You’ve been incredibly adaptable over the years

Yes, I think you have to learn to be and this is where experience counts - you find a way to make a job work, not only for yourself, but also for the show, and that’s what I’ve done all my life. I maintain that I learn something from every job that I do. It may be only a little tiny thing but, I watch my shows back if I can and I analyse them to see what works and what doesn’t. Actors who say, “I never read my reviews,” well, I think that’s rubbish. If someone is critical then I think that there must be a reason and you should analyse it and learn from it.

If you look at a map of your career, it does go up and down and if you reach a peak, it will probably be followed by a little bit of a dip - that’s just the way it is - but I’ve never been afraid of a challenge.

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