Profile of Frank Muir on Famous Like Me

Frank Muir (5 February 1920 - 2 January 1998) was an English comedy writer, radio and television personality, and raconteur.

Born and brought up in Kent, he spent part of his childhood in the E.10 district of London. 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 E.10, not Eton."

Frank Muir joined the Royal Air Force during World War II and became a photographic technician, being posted to Iceland. While there he became involved with the forces radio station. While serving in Iceland, he sustained a medical condition which required the surgical removal of one testicle: an incident which he later described in detail in his autobiography. Despite the loss, he later fathered two children.

Upon his return be began to write comedy for BBC Radio, soon forming a partnership with Denis Norden which was to last for most of his career. Muir and Norden became principal writers for Take It From Here, starring Jimmy Edwards. They created one of the most popular segments from the show, "The Glums". He and Norden continued to write for Edwards when he moved to television with the series Whack-O.

The pair were also invited to appear on the newly-formed humorous literary radio quiz My Word!. A feature of the show was the final round, in which Muir and Norden would each tell a long-winded story inspired by a well-known phrase provided by the quizmaster and ending in a terrible pun on the phrase in question.

Frank Muir was also a contestant on the My Word spinoff My Music (as was Norden). As a television personality, Muir's unofficial trademark was a crisply knotted bowtie.

He was well-known to television audiences as a team captain on the long-running BBC2 series, Call My Bluff, and did voice-overs for advertisements, notably Cadbury's Fruit & Nut chocolate, and a coffee advert in which he coined the phrase impending doom, and the Unigate milk Humphreys. In 1954 he founded the amateur dramatic society "Thorpe players". He was a writer and presenter on many shows including the 1960s satire programmes, That Was The Week That Was and The Frost Report.

His pets, which prompted many an anecdote on My Word!, included Afghan Hounds and Burmese cats. The hounds were also the inspiration for a series of picture books about an accident-prone Afghan puppy called "What-a-Mess".

Other shows he was associated with include Take It From Here, Whacko! and Brothers in Law.

In the 1960s Frank Muir was Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC and in 1969 joined London Weekend Television as Head of Entertainment. His magnum opus, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, was published in 1990.

He married in 1949 and had two children. His wife, Polly, died on 27 October 2004.

In 1997, his autobiography, A Kentish Lad, was published.

External link

• The Official Frank Muir Tribute Page

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