Frank Muir
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Frank Herbert Muir (5 February 1920 – 2 January 1998) was an English
comedy Comedy is a genre of dramatic works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. Origins Comedy originated in ancient Greec ...
writer, radio and television personality, and raconteur. His writing and performing partnership with Denis Norden endured for most of their careers. Together they wrote
BBC Radio BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a royal charter since 1927. The service provides national radio stations cove ...
's '' Take It from Here'' for over 10 years, and then appeared on BBC radio quizzes '' My Word!'' and '' My Music'' for another 35. Muir became Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the
BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
in the 1960s, and was then
London Weekend Television London Weekend Television (LWT; now part of the non-franchised ITV London region) was the ITV (TV network), ITV network franchise holder for Greater London and the Home Counties at weekends, broadcasting from Fridays at 5.15 pm (7:00&nbs ...
's founding Head of Entertainment. His many writing credits include editorship of ''The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose,'' as well as the ''What-a-Mess'' books that were later turned into an animated TV series.


Birth and early life

Muir was the second son of steam tug engineer Charles James Muir (1888–1934), originally from
New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...
, and his wife Margaret, daughter of ship's carpenter Harry Harding. Harry Harding had died young at sea; his widow, Elizabeth Jane (née Cowie) subsequently married Frank Herbert Webber, a former lighthouse inspector and licensee of the Derby Arms Hotel and pub at
Ramsgate Ramsgate is a seaside resort, seaside town and civil parish in the district of Thanet District, Thanet in eastern Kent, England. It was one of the great English seaside towns of the 19th century. In 2021 it had a population of 42,027. Ramsgate' ...
,
Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...
. The pub was operated by his widow for 22 years after Webber's death. Muir was born in the pub, and spent part of his childhood in Leyton, London. Charles Muir left his seafaring occupation after marrying, and took up unskilled work such as extending Ramsgate's railway and loading stores onto naval vessels; he finally took a job with a firm at Leyton, supervising their machinery, and died of pneumonia when Frank Muir was a schoolboy. Margaret Muir ran a small sweet-shop across the road from the Derby Arms. His aunt was Rose Muir (d. 1970), MBE; she and her brother were orphaned at a young age, and when he went to sea she had remained in New Zealand and taken a low-status position at Christchurch Hospital, serving as Matron from 1916 to 1936, and ending up as its Superintendent. In later years, whenever his dignified speech patterns caused listeners to assume that he had received a public school education, Muir would demur: "I was educated in E10, not Eton". He attended Leyton County High School for Boys, though prior to this he was a pupil at Chatham House Grammar School, in
Ramsgate Ramsgate is a seaside resort, seaside town and civil parish in the district of Thanet District, Thanet in eastern Kent, England. It was one of the great English seaside towns of the 19th century. In 2021 it had a population of 42,027. Ramsgate' ...
,
Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...
, whose notable alumni include former Conservative Prime Minister
Edward Heath Sir Edward Richard George Heath (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 ...
. He left school prematurely aged fourteen and a half at his father's death, due to the necessity of earning an income to support the family. Muir claimed that, when interviewed to join the RAF, he was "a weedy " but that he later "stabilised at a bent ".


Early career

Muir joined the
Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the Air force, air and space force of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. It was formed towards the end of the World War I, First World War on 1 April 1918, on the merger of t ...
at the outbreak of the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
and spent several years in the photographic technical school taking slow-motion film of parachute jumps on a project intended to decrease the frequency of parachutes failing (sometimes called a 'Roman Candle'). His work provided the manufacturers with the information they needed to improve both the equipment and the training, which was very effective in reducing the number of failures as well as the fatality and injury rate. He was also assigned to take pictures of the agents of the
Special Operations Executive Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British organisation formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and to aid local Resistance during World War II, resistance movements during World War II. ...
(SOE) for identity documents at the training centre at RAF Ringway. Muir, as a photographic technician, was posted to Iceland, which was then a Danish possession under British occupation, and while there, he did some work for the forces radio station. Also while stationed in Iceland – as he described in his memoirs ''A Kentish Lad'' – Muir suffered a medical condition which required the surgical removal of one
testicle A testicle or testis ( testes) is the gonad in all male bilaterians, including humans, and is Homology (biology), homologous to the ovary in females. Its primary functions are the production of sperm and the secretion of Androgen, androgens, p ...
.


Writing for radio

Upon his return to civilian life, he began to write scripts for Jimmy Edwards. When Edwards teamed up with Dick Bentley on
BBC Radio BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a royal charter since 1927. The service provides national radio stations cove ...
, Muir formed a partnership with Denis Norden, Bentley's writer, which was to last for most of his career. The vehicle created for Bentley and Edwards, '' Take It From Here'', was written by Muir and Norden from 1948 until 1959; the last series in 1960 used other writers. For ''TIFH'', as it became known, they created " The Glums", a deliberately awful family, which was the show's most popular segment. For ''TIFH'', Muir and Norden wrote the phrase, "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me", later used by Kenneth Williams in '' Carry on Cleo''. In his autobiography ''A Kentish Lad'' Muir expressed disappointment that he and Norden were never credited for it. Muir and Norden continued to write for Edwards when he began to work for BBC television with the school comedy series '' Whack-O'' and the subsequent 1960 film Bottoms Up!, and in the anthology series '' Faces of Jim''. With Norden, in 1962, he was responsible for the television adaptation of Henry Cecil's comic novel '' Brothers in Law'', which starred a young Richard Briers, and its spin-off '' Mr Justice Duncannon''. The pair were invited to appear on a new humorous literary radio quiz, '' My Word!''. In the final round Muir and Norden each told a story to "explain" the origin of a well-known phrase. An early example took the quotation "Dead! And never called me mother!" from a stage adaptation of '' East Lynne'' by Mrs Henry Wood, which became the exclamation of a youth coming out of a public telephone box which he had discovered to be out of order. In early broadcasts of ''My Word!'' the phrases were provided by the quizmaster, but in later series Muir and Norden chose their own in advance of each programme and their stories became longer and more convoluted. This became a popular segment of the quiz, and Muir and Norden later compiled five volumes of books containing some of the ''My Word!'' stories. Frank Muir was also, like Norden, a contestant on the ''My Word!'' spinoff, '' My Music''. As a television personality, Muir's unofficial trademark was a crisply knotted pink
bow tie The bow tie or dicky bow is a type of neckwear, distinguishable from a necktie because it does not drape down the shirt placket, but is tied just underneath a winged collar. A modern bow tie is tied using a common shoelace knot, which is also ...
.


Later career

In 1954 Muir founded an amateur dramatic society, Thorpe Players, in the village of Thorpe, Surrey where he lived for many years. He was a writer and presenter on many shows, including the 1960s
satire Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposin ...
programmes '' That Was the Week That Was'' and '' The Frost Report''. He was well known to
television Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to a physical television set rather than the medium of transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, ...
audiences as a team captain on the long-running
BBC2 BBC Two is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's second flagship channel, and it covers a wide range of subject matter, incorporating genres such as comedy, drama and ...
series '' Call My Bluff''. Muir found unexpected household fame when he undertook voice-overs for advertisements, including Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut chocolate ''("Everyone's a Fruit and Nut case"'', to the tune of the ''Danse des mirlitons'' from Tchaikovsky's ''
The Nutcracker ''The Nutcracker'' (, ), Opus number, Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet (conceived as a '; ) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination featuring a Nutcracker doll. Th ...
''). Other popular advertising campaigns of the period in which Muir appeared included Batchelors' Savoury Rice ''("Every grain will drive them insane!")'', a coffee advert in which he used the phrase ''"impending doom"'', and Unigate milk '' Humphreys''. In the 1960s Muir was Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC and in 1969 joined
London Weekend Television London Weekend Television (LWT; now part of the non-franchised ITV London region) was the ITV (TV network), ITV network franchise holder for Greater London and the Home Counties at weekends, broadcasting from Fridays at 5.15 pm (7:00&nbs ...
as Head of Entertainment. In 1976 Muir wrote ''The Frank Muir Book: An irreverent companion to social history'', which is a collection of anecdotes and quotations collected under various subjects including "Music", "Education", "Literature", "Theatre", "Art" and "Food and Drink". (In the United States, this book is titled "An Irreverent Social History of Almost Everything.") A similar format to ''The Frank Muir Book'' was used in his BBC radio series ''Frank Muir Goes Into...'', in which Alfred Marks read the quotations, linked verbally by Muir. He published books based on these series. His ''The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose'', which again uses a similar format with more scholarly aspirations, was published in 1990. Muir was appointed
Commander of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...
CBE in the 1980 Birthday Honours. In 1992, for
Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...
, he was the host of '' TV Heaven'', a season of evenings dedicated to television programmes from individual years. In 1997, Muir published an autobiography, ''A Kentish Lad''.


Personal life and death

In 1949 Muir married Polly McIrvine. They had two children: Jamie (born 1952), a TV producer, and Sally (born 1954), a successful painter who also co-founded the Muir and Osborne knitwear design company, and is married to the journalist and author Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Muir died in Thorpe, Surrey, on 2 January 1998 aged 77. In November 1998, ten months after his death, he and Denis Norden were joint recipients of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Writer of the Year Award. Muir's widow, Polly, died in Surrey on 27 October 2004, aged 79.


Bibliography

* ''Christmas Customs and Traditions'' (1975) * ''The Frank Muir Book: An Irreverent Companion to Social History'' (1976); US title, 'An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything'' * ''A Book at Bathtime'' (1982); US title, ''An Irreverent and Almost Complete Social History of the Bathroom'' * ''The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose from William Caxton to P. G. Wodehouse: A Conducted Tour'' (1990), compiled and edited by Muir * ''The Walpole Orange: A Romance'' (1993) – * ''Christmas Customs & Traditions'' (1975) * ''A Kentish Lad: The Autobiography of Frank Muir'' (1997) ;Series * '' What-a-Mess'' series, illustrated by Joseph Wright – children's books; adapted as animated TV series 1979, 1996 * '' My Word! Stories'' series, by Muir and Denis Norden – story collections


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Muir, Frank 1920 births 1998 deaths People educated at Chatham House Grammar School Commanders of the Order of the British Empire English autobiographers English male comedians English radio personalities People from Ramsgate English television personalities Rectors of the University of St Andrews Royal Air Force personnel of World War II People from Leyton People from the Borough of Runnymede Royal Air Force airmen 20th-century English comedians Comedians from Essex Comedians from Surrey Comedians from Kent English comedy writers English people of New Zealand descent Military personnel from Kent