Frank Muir

Frank Muir0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a download from the Desert Island Discs archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it is the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection. The recording didn't contain the guests' eight music choices, so we've rebuilt the original show by using discs from the BBC Gramophone Library. For Wrights' reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Frank Muir0:26

Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Frank Muir0:31

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six.

Frank Muir0:34

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:52

On our desert item this week is someone whom I'm sure will be remembered for his guest appearances on Duke Box Jury. It's Frank Muir.

Presenter1:00

Frank, where would you like your island to be?

Presenter1:04

Um somewhere warm, out of the belt of high winds, out of the cyclone area.

Presenter1:10

Washed. I think it's got to have a a lagoon so that one can swim, or at least immerse the body. Yes.

Presenter1:19

Could you endure loneliness on your seagirt fastness?

Presenter1:23

Um probably, eventually. What would you be happiest to have got away from?

Presenter1:30

I don't think I'd be happy to have got away, really. I d I quite like it here. You do? No no criticism.

Presenter1:37

Not not major, no. Hm. Now we know from your public pronouncements that you have a great interest in and knowledge of music. Have you any skill as an executant?

Presenter1:50

I'm a bit worried about the first half of the question. I mean the statement before the question. I know anything about music. I just like it very much. Well, yes, well it you convince us. You like it very much indeed. We won't mention it. Chesterton thing, if the thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

Frank Muir1:52

Yeah, statement before

Frank Muir2:00

I can't.

Presenter2:14

and I thoroughly enjoy singing because I can't.

Presenter2:17

Did you have any plan in choosing your eight record?

Presenter2:20

Um n a sort of, yes, a sort of approach, which was to uh pick as widely differing records as I could to uh to indicate how um esoteric is the word. It means that the uh the width of the choice is such that it doesn't exist at all. You know, it's uh I just like all music that's rather good of its sort. Right. And what's the first one? First one I thought to be rather suitable.

Presenter2:44

to get us off the ground, to have the Vaughan Williams lark ascending.

Presenter3:45

The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams

Presenter3:48

Sir Adrian Bolt conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. What's your second disc?

Presenter3:54

Uh my second dist I thought would be a a bit of Howie music.

Presenter3:57

Do it, now the lark's up there, I thought we get moving. And I like baroque music. Uh I like telemen. The trouble is with teleman that even as I say the word I have a terrible compulsion

Presenter4:07

to sing every time Oh, mister Telemann, Tellimi sonatas, Daylighty come and I wanna go So I can't have Teleman, so we have Vivaldi.

Frank Muir4:12

Sonatas.

Frank Muir4:16

On the select.

Presenter4:18

And if we could have the four seasons, which all come out rather the same, but summer, the last movement of summer, has got this delicious hoey bit.

Presenter5:29

The Last Movement of Summer from The Four Seasons by Vivaldi, Zuckerman playing and conducting with the English Chamber Orchestra. I remember very well the first time I met you. It was in a BBC studio just after the war, and I'd been hired as compere and straight man to the comics on on on a comedy series, and one of the comics was Jimmy Edwards, and one day he came into the studio twirling his moustache, followed by you, and Jimmy said in a very grand manner, This is my writer.

Presenter5:58

Oh.

Presenter5:59

By heavens, well, it's going back about thirty years, isn't it? Just about, I suppose. What happened to you? You were born before that? Yes, I was.

Speaker 46:05

Form

Frank Muir6:05

That.

Presenter6:07

You're not a little bit more. Your moustache has got smaller. Ah.

Frank Muir6:08

You have

Frank Muir6:09

No.

Presenter6:12

Now before that, before you reach that peak,

Presenter6:16

What had you done? I mean you

Presenter6:18

Being Jimmy Edwards Veiter in nineteen forty six. You're a you're a Londoner.

Presenter6:23

No, Broadstairs. Broadstairs. Yes, I went to the same school as Mr Heath, the politician. Yes, I've heard of it. And uh I was uh about a year earlier. I'm a little bit younger, I think, not much, but a little bit. As a schoolboy, what did you want to be? I wanted to be a writer ever since I can remember. Were you a bookish lad?

Presenter6:43

Um not

Presenter6:45

Literary, but but uh reading, yes, anything from Just William to short stories to anything really in plays and What in fact did you do when you were at school?

Presenter6:54

When I left school I was fourteen and three quarters and I had to go to work because my mother died and couldn't keep me at school. And I joined a firm made carbon paper. Yes. Nice and relevant to typewriters. Of course. And I was there, I think, a couple of years. I can't remember dates. And then along came the war. And you joined the Royal Air Force? Yes. What sort of job did they give you? I was a photographer. Was that their idea or yours? Well, it was we we sort of worked at it between us. What did you photograph mainly? I photographed parachutes and parachuting most of the war.

Frank Muir7:26

Mayor

Presenter7:28

How did the performing and literary arts come into your life? Did you do anything of that sort in the RAF? To get out of guard duty.

Presenter7:36

It soon became apparent that if you could say um concert parties, sir,

Presenter7:40

You you you weren't put on guard duty. What did you do in the concert party? I wrote the concert party's sketches and things and also appare rather like you, I compared them and stewage for the funny men.

Presenter7:53

And when the war was over you stayed with it? I had a go at it. That's where I I first met you. Yes, the the war was it's a terrible thing to say, but it it did a tremendous amount of good for those lucky enough to survive uh who had sort of strong umbilical cords, which Eric Sykes, for instance, would have gone back to the north and gone back to his job in the mill had not he been left on the beach, as all of us were when the tide receded, and we were able to make a fresh start and have a go at what we really wanted to do. You put carbon paper behind you? Yes, you could say that. Right. Rather well put.

Presenter8:30

Let's have record number three.

Presenter8:32

Oh, yes, this is rather rather an odd record, Roy. It's um

Presenter8:37

It's a cigar, and a cigar is a rather

Presenter8:40

erotic dance from the island of Mauritius and it's sung in Mauritian Creole. And the reason for this record is that my wife comes from Mauritius and we've both been there and it's an utterly, utterly delightful not desert, but

Presenter8:54

island. And the interesting thing about this particular recording is that uh the singer is accompanied by the orchestra typical of the police, l'Oquestre typique de la police. You will hear a kind of Detective Inspector Stéphane Guppelli later on in the record.

Speaker 49:26

Bahai Su.

Speaker 49:28

He said to Shana make a game

Speaker 49:32

Um

Speaker 49:33

Don't see a topic

Speaker 49:36

Please and my mother

Speaker 49:38

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Presenter9:43

Sequela Mode, sung by Kersley Vinay with, as you rightly said, the orchestra typical of the police.

Presenter9:52

Now, you were writer in ordinary to Jimmie Edwards. Had you met Jim in the Royal Four Source? No, no, I hadn't. I'm I met him at the Windmill Theatre.

Presenter10:02

Because I was I had been writing for another comedian there, Peter Waring. Yes. A rather disaster-prone man, unfortunately, and I sort of transferred on the death of Mr Waring to Jimmy Edwards. And then we both of us got offered work by the BBC and have survived since then. Yes. It was Ted Cavaner, I believe, who introduced you to Dennis Norton on the premise that each of you was too tall to work with anyone else.

Frank Muir10:05

There

Presenter10:31

But perhaps, yes, why not?

Presenter10:34

Good story, isn't it? Well, let's stay with it. And you elided your two comics, I believe Dennis was writing for Dick Bentley. That's okay. And put them together and take it from here. Yes, the BBC did that, in fact. It was Charles Maxwell, who wanted them to two together and asked us, Dennis and I, whether we could interleave and work together for the two of them. And we did nothing else for 17 years but work together.

Frank Muir10:56

Where?

Presenter10:57

And our dear old friend Charles Maxwell, I believe he was led a beastly time by you and Dennis, because you both used to try to slip double meanings under his guard into the script. That's fine, yeah. Absolutely fair. The great thing with Charles was you gave him an obvious one, and then you fought to the death to keep it in, and exhausted with the fight, you finally said, Okay, we'll take it out. And exhausted with the fight, he didn't dare argue about the ones you really wanted to keep in.

Presenter11:26

Ewan Dennis are the only writers I ever met to work regular office hours.

Presenter11:32

Well, we haven't written together for ten, twelve years, but in those days we used to qu yes, you had to, to to keep sane.

Presenter11:39

Um we worked from about ten o'clock in the morning till about six, half past six, uh but usually until that particular day's work was finished and it could go on till nine, ten at night. And you used to have an office with only two chairs in it, which was good thinking. Oh, yes. And a desk. Yes. Otherwise it was no worthi nothing to rest your paper on. But if anyone came in and wanted to talk, there was nowhere to sit down, so he drifted off. That's right. You saved a lot of time. Also, the room was so small, there wasn't room for another chair. Why, after three hundred and seven hard-fought scripts, did you give up, take it from here?

Presenter12:13

Because we were, or we felt we were living off our fat, that we had nothing more to do or to say with that particular format. So we asked to be relieved of it anymore and go into television. Well, at this point, I think we will break for another record. What shall we have? John Bitchman made a record where his poetry was put to music by a modern musician, Jim Parker.

Presenter12:40

I like this record enormously and all the tracks are good. The particular one I've chosen is called The Shotshire Lad.

Speaker 212:50

The gus was on in the Institute, The flare was up in the gym.

Speaker 212:56

A man was running a mineral line, a lass was singing a hymn.

Speaker 213:01

When Captain Webb the Dollyman.

Speaker 213:05

Captain Webb from Dorley came swimming along the old canal that carried the bricks to Lorley.

Speaker 213:14

Swimming along, swimming along, swimming along from seven.

Presenter13:21

Sir John Betcherman, when you gave up writing, take it from here, you became, you and Dennis became comedy advisors to the PBC. What exactly did that mean? What were you doing? Well, it meant we got an office and free paper and carried on writing our normal series, mostly. But on the side, as it were, we used to put up a sign in Purdar on our door. And that meant that we were writing and our advice wasn't to be sought. But when we weren't in Purdar, producers would come in and discuss their problems with us and ask about casting and general problems, whether an original script is worth proceeding with, whether it has any good factors. It was kind of a general dog's body job, purely in the realm of comedy. How long did it last?

Presenter14:11

I think it's four years. It lasted for four years. It was a bit of an interruption to our writing, and we were glad when it was over and could get back to writing only. And then when you and Dennis broke up, decided not to write together, you went to work for ITV? No, I went to work for the BBC first of all, as um as A H L E bracket comedy end of bracket T V.

Presenter14:36

I'm glad about it. I was head of comedy production for television, and that was a three-year contract.

Speaker 414:36

Yeah.

Frank Muir14:36

It was I

Presenter14:43

And I did the three years and it was great fun and I enjoyed myself enormously and lots of my producers produced marvellous shows for which I got a great chunk of the credit and which made it all a very happy experience. And then you went to I T V. Your analogy of of leaving the B B C for I T V I think is worth quoting.

Presenter15:03

Oh, I said it's like leaving a monastery to become dorm at a at a strip club. Yes.

Presenter15:09

Well, then there was the battleship for Temkin gag. I think that's worth quoting.

Presenter15:14

Oh, yes, nobody understood that. I was asked by the then head of independent television about the ITV programmes, and I said okay, I suppose, as long as they learn a lesson from the fate of the battleship Temkin and don't let the ratings assume too much importance. You're now, of course, a freelance and have been ever since then. I've been yes, about seven years, I suppose. You have those two regular shows, My Word and My Music. They've had very long runs.

Presenter15:46

Yes, nothing compared to you in my feeble way. My word is twenty years, and and my music's the newcomer is ten.

Presenter15:58

And you've been writing some books. There's a new one which I've got here, a very handsome term, the Frank Mule Book. Now, this is not an autobiography.

Presenter16:06

No. No. What would you like to describe it? Well, it it's the subtitle does the work, actually. The the subtitle is an an irreverent companion to social history.

Presenter16:16

Which is what it is. Rather difficult book to describe, actually. I've rewritten.

Presenter16:22

Six things, one to each chapter. In other words, the social history of music, food and drink, literature, art, theatre.

Presenter16:30

education from the Greeks until now, through the eyes of people who were alive at the time and didn't like what was going on.

Presenter16:37

And it's heavily peppered with contemporary quotations, and all the quotations are against. Yes, it was originally called Pieces of Hate, which was a a neat idea, but it didn't quite give the idea. Well, there's very little hate expressed in letters and journals, and i in fact expressed generally, because hate is is a stuff that once you express it.

Presenter16:57

it evaporates. You you have to pin sort of pin it up.

Presenter17:01

Pint it up.

Presenter17:02

to make it very sort of nasty. It must have taken immense labour and a very long time.

Presenter17:09

Uh it it was just over five years in the writing.

Presenter17:13

And it it was extremely laborious because uh just technically the sewing together of quotations so that they appear to flow easily is um is very laborious. Yes. And I I may say that practically all these quotations are new to me. You really have mine some new stuff. There are none of the old familiars at all. Well I think this this particular attitude of looking at the uh what is said against rather than for even great figures is um is great fun, it's illuminating and also it it it gives you new quotations because it's a it's a fresh attitude and people have gone through the same books, haven't chosen the same

Frank Muir17:56

Doesn't

Presenter17:57

Quotations for that reason. Let's have record number five.

Presenter18:01

Well, I thought a bit of jazz would cheer us up. The Coleman Hawkins Quintet, playing Sunday morning.

Presenter19:00

Sunday Morning by the Coleman Hawkins Quintet, recorded in 1958. Now what's your next record? Next record, um similar kind of thing actually, a bit Mozart. I love Alfred Bendel playing the K595, the concerto in B flat.

Presenter20:22

Brentle, a soloist with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. twenty seven in B flat, K five nine five. Frank, you spend part of your year on an island, not a very barren one, but you know a bit about island life.

Presenter20:38

Oh, Corsica. Yes, well we we we've got a kind of medieval slum there which we use for holidays and uh we've been going there now for fourteen years. Are you a self-reliant lad? Could you look after yourself in desert island conditions? Not bad, not bad. Uh quite handy with the hands. And we a bit of the um

Frank Muir20:55

Uh

Presenter20:57

Uh, Robinson Crusoe going on there, the Swiss family of Robinson, I think. Any good at fishing? Yes, okay. No, not good at it, but but I know the principles and have done the odd bit.

Presenter21:07

I'd I'd d I'd fish'll be all right, huh? Have you messed about in small craft?

Presenter21:11

Slightly, yes. Would you try to escape?

Presenter21:16

If escape made sense, but not just uh sort of a blind escape. No foolhardy nonsense.

Presenter21:24

Onotimus is the word.

Presenter21:26

Right. Record number seven. What next?

Presenter21:29

Echo number seven, The Beatles. Wouldn't it be nice to hear again, Let It Be?

Speaker 421:34

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom.

Speaker 421:43

Let it be.

Speaker 421:47

And in my hour of darkness she's standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Speaker 421:59

Let it be, let it be, let it be.

Presenter22:04

Let it be by the Beatles, which brings us to your last record.

Presenter22:09

Well, I thought it'd be rather nice to go out with splendid music, with really splendid, splendid music, with pomp and with circumstance. The I don't think this sort of music is is written much nowadays, but just to hear the the strength and the colour and the glory of dear old

Presenter22:28

Pomp and circumstance be a fitting end.

Presenter23:32

Elgar's Pump and Circumstance March number one in D. Norman Del Mar conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. If you could take just one disc out of that eight, which would it be?

Presenter23:43

Ah, I think one could live for many years finding new things in the Mozart.

Presenter23:50

The Alpha Bendron. And one luxury to take with you.

Presenter23:53

I think um a navel blush.

Presenter23:57

A navel brush. It's a little luxury item, uh hardly an essential, for brushing the fluff out of the navel. Uh because it'd be uh good for brushing sand out of the navel. Yes, indeed. And for keeping the records free from sand. I think it'd be frightfully useful.

Frank Muir24:08

Yeah.

Frank Muir24:09

I'm not going to do it.

Presenter24:11

And I do feel in a way, Muir, you're you're doing something to keep up standards, too. Thank you.

Presenter24:16

And one book apart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias. I'd take the Harpole Report by J. L. Carr.

Presenter24:24

Tell me about it.

Presenter24:26

Before it did, no.

Presenter24:27

Good lord.

Presenter24:29

It's a marvellous little story of um elementary school.

Presenter24:33

headmaster in the Midlands trying to fight to keep his school free from his bureaucratic superiors and is very funny and I can still remember everybody who was

Presenter24:46

Who's in the story?

Presenter24:48

Write The Harpell Report by JL Carr.

Presenter24:53

And thank you, Frank Muir, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you, boy. Goodbye, everyone. Bye.

Frank Muir25:07

You've been listening to a download from the Desert Island Discs archive.

Frank Muir25:11

For more downloads, please visit the Radio 4 website.