My Word!
Encyclopedia
My Word! was a long-running radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

 panel game
Panel game
A panel game or panel show is a radio or television game show in which a panel of celebrities participates. Panelists may compete with each other, such as on The News Quiz; facilitate play by guest contestants, such as on Match Game/Blankety Blank; or do both, such as on Wait Wait.....

 broadcast by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 on the Home Service
BBC Home Service
The BBC Home Service was a British national radio station which broadcast from 1939 until 1967.-Development:Between the 1920s and the outbreak of The Second World War, the BBC had developed two nationwide radio services, the BBC National Programme and the BBC Regional Programme...

 (1956-67) and Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 (1967-90). It was created by Edward J. Mason
Edward J. Mason
Edward J. Mason was born on May 8, 1912 in Birmingham, England and died on February 3, 1971. He was a script writer for radio, television and movies for both the British Broadcasting Corporation and its rival Radio Luxembourg.-Brief biography:Edward J...

 and Tony Shryane
Tony Shryane
Anthony Joseph Shryane was a long-serving producer of radio programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation.He was born in Harborne, Birmingham....

, and featured comic writers Denis Norden
Denis Norden
Denis Mostyn Norden CBE is a former English comedy writer and television presenter. After an early career working in cinemas, he began scriptwriting during World War II. From 1948 to 1959, he co-wrote the successful BBC Radio comedy programme Take It from Here with Frank Muir...

 and Frank Muir
Frank Muir
Frank Herbert Muir was an English comedy 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's Take It From Here for over 10 years, and then appeared on BBC radio...

, famous in Britain for the series Take It From Here
Take It From Here
Take It From Here was a British radio comedy programme broadcast by the BBC between 1948 and 1960. It was written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, and starred Jimmy Edwards, Dick Bentley and Joy Nichols...

. The show was pilot
Television pilot
A "television pilot" is a standalone episode of a television series that is used to sell the show to a television network. At the time of its inception, the pilot is meant to be the "testing ground" to see if a series will be possibly desired and successful and therefore a test episode of an...

ed in June 1956 on the Midland Home Service and first broadcast as a series on the BBC Home Service
BBC Home Service
The BBC Home Service was a British national radio station which broadcast from 1939 until 1967.-Development:Between the 1920s and the outbreak of The Second World War, the BBC had developed two nationwide radio services, the BBC National Programme and the BBC Regional Programme...

 on January 1, 1957. For decades it was also broadcast worldwide via BBC World Service
BBC World Service
The BBC World Service is the world's largest international broadcaster, broadcasting in 27 languages to many parts of the world via analogue and digital shortwave, internet streaming and podcasting, satellite, FM and MW relays...

 shortwave
Shortwave
Shortwave radio refers to the upper MF and all of the HF portion of the radio spectrum, between 1,800–30,000 kHz. Shortwave radio received its name because the wavelengths in this band are shorter than 200 m which marked the original upper limit of the medium frequency band first used...

. Although the last programme was recorded in 1990, it is still rerun in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

.

A companion program, My Music, ran from 1967 to 1993.

Personnel

The host of the show was originally the cricket broadcaster John Arlott
John Arlott
Leslie Thomas John Arlott OBE was an English journalist, author and cricket commentator for the BBC's Test Match Special. He was also a poet, wine connoisseur and former police officer in Hampshire...

, but he was soon replaced by Jack Longland
Jack Longland
Sir John Laurence "Jack" Longland was an educator, mountain climber, and broadcaster.He was educated at the King's School, Worcester, and Jesus College, Cambridge. He lectured in English at Durham University from 1930 to 1936. He then served as Director of Education for Derbyshire for 23 years,...

, who spent over twenty years as chairman. Longland was succeeded by John Julius Norwich
John Julius Norwich
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich CVO — known as John Julius Norwich — is an English historian, travel writer and television personality.-Early life:...

 and finally Michael O'Donnell
Michael O'Donnell
Michael O'Donnell , is a British physician, journalist, author, and broadcaster.He became a full-time writer after working for 12 years as a doctor. On BBC Radio Four he was chairman of My Word! and wrote and presented Relative Values...

.

Muir and Norden were always on opposing teams. Muir's partner was initially Isobel Barnett
Isobel Barnett
Lady Isobel Barnett was a British radio and television personality, popular during the 1950s and 1960s.Isobel Morag Marshall was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, the daughter of a doctor. She went to the independent Mount School on Dalton Terrace in York and, following in her father's footsteps,...

, but she was soon replaced with the film critic E. Arnot Robertson
E. Arnot Robertson
Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson was a British novelist, critic and broadcaster.-Family:...

. On Robertson's death in 1961, the film critic and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 scholar Dilys Powell
Dilys Powell
Elizabeth Dilys Powell was a British journalist, author and film critic.She was born into a middle class family in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. Her mother was Mary Jane Lloyd; her father, Thomas Powell, a bank manager...

 took her place until the show finished, when she was in her ninetieth year. Norden's first partner was the journalist Nancy Spain
Nancy Spain
Nancy Brooker Spain was a prominent English broadcaster and journalist.She spent much of her youth in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne. Her father was Lieutenant-Colonel Spain, a freeman of the city and a prominent figure in local military and antiquarian affairs...

; after her death in 1964 she was succeeded by journalist Anne Scott-James
Anne Scott-James
Anne Eleanor Scott-James, Lady Lancaster was an English journalist and author. She was one of Britain's first women career journalists, editors and columnists, and latterly author of a series of gardening books....

, and then in 1979 by writer and historian Antonia Fraser
Antonia Fraser
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE , née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Antonia Fraser...

. Fraser took the chair for one season in the 1980s, when her place on the panel was taken by Irene Thomas
Irene Thomas
Irene Thomas was a British radio personality, well known for her participation in quiz shows and panel games from the 1960s until her death....

.

Guest panellists, substituting for regulars, included Alfred Marks
Alfred Marks
Alfred Edward Marks OBE was a comic actor and comedian.-Biography:Marks was born as Ruchel Kutchinsky in Holborn, London. He left Bell Lane School at 14 and started in entertainment at the Windmill Theatre. He then served in the RAF as a Flight Sergeant in the Middle East where he arranged...

, Barry Took
Barry Took
Barry Took was an English comedian, writer and television presenter. He is best remembered in the UK for his weekly role as presenter of Points of View, a BBC TV programme in which viewers' letters criticising or praising the BBC were broadcast...

, John Wells
John Wells (satirist)
John Wells was an English actor, writer and satirist, educated at Eastbourne College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford...

 (once in 1973, filling in for Muir; once in 1975, for Norden), and Katharine Whitehorn
Katharine Whitehorn
Katharine Elizabeth Whitehorn is a British journalist, writer, and columnist who was known for her wit and humour and as a keen observer of the changing role of women.-Early life:...

 (once in 1975, for Anne Scott-James).

After Edward J. Mason's death in 1971, Jack Longland, with the assistance of Peter Moore, took over responsibility for compiling most of the questions. After Longland's retirement, Moore became the sole question-setter.

Format

The two teams faced questions devised by Mason, primarily word games and literary quizzes covering vocabulary, etymology, snippets of poetry, and the like. When stumped by a question, the contestants could be sure of receiving generous partial credit for a humorous answer of enough ingenuity.

In the final round, each team was asked to give the origin of a famous phrase or quotation. In early shows, once the real answers were given, Muir and Norden were invited to explain the origin of the phrase less seriously. An early example was the quotation "Dead! And never called me mother!" from a stage adaptation of East Lynne
East Lynne
East Lynne is an English sensation novel of 1861 by Ellen Wood. East Lynne was a Victorian bestseller. It is remembered chiefly for its elaborate and implausible plot, centering on infidelity and double identities...

by Mrs Henry Wood, which became the exclamation of a youth coming out of a public telephone box
Telephone booth
A telephone booth, telephone kiosk, telephone call box or telephone box is a small structure furnished with a payphone and designed for a telephone user's convenience. In the USA, Canada and Australia, "telephone booth" is used, while in the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth it is a "telephone...

 which he had discovered to be out of order. From 1973, the first part of the round was dropped in favour of having the chairman simply announce the accepted origin of each phrase, thus opening up new fields of phrases that would have been too well known or too obscure to be posed as questions. In later series Muir and Norden chose their own phrases 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 several volumes of books containing some of the My Word! stories. Examples included Norden's explanation of how he worked his exit from the army with pedantically exact interpretations of his superior officers' orders ("Brief on 'shun' is better than QR" (that is, Queen's Regulations
Queen's Regulations
Queen's Regulations are a collection of orders and regulations in force in the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force, forming guidance for officers of these armed services in all matters of discipline and personal conduct...

) - "prevention is better than cure"), and Muir's account of his desperately scouring the contents of his neighbour's greenhouse, having bet him £50 that he could work them into a My Word! story ("A snipe, a harp, a fern, corn, seeded trayfuls" - "a snapper up of unconsidered trifles").

The theme music to My Word! was Alpine Pastures by Vivian Ellis
Vivian Ellis
Vivian Ellis was an English musical comedy composer best known for the song "Spread a Little Happiness" and the theme "Coronation Scot".-Life and work:...

(1904-1996).

External links

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