My Word! Totally Explained

Everything about My Word totally explained

My Word! was a long-running radio panel game broadcast by the BBC on the Home Service (1956-67) and Radio 4 (1967-90). It was created by Edward J. Mason and Tony Shryane, and featured comic writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir, more famous (in Britain, at least) for the series Take It From Here. For decades it was also broadcast worldwide via BBC World Service shortwave.

Format and History

The show was piloted in June 1956 on the Midland Home Service and first broadcast as a series on the BBC Home Service on January 1, 1957. Two teams (Muir and a female partner, most notably Dilys Powell, versus Norden and a female partner, most notably Anne Scott-James or Antonia Fraser) faced a series of 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. Once the answers were given, Muir and Norden were invited to explain the "real" origin of their respective teams' phrases; each proceeded to weave a shaggy dog story leading up to an outrageous pun upon his phrase (a genre later known as the Feghoot). (Although these stories did sometimes purport to explain the origin of the phrase in question, the rule wasn't strictly enforced, and a story was just as likely to begin "A funny thing happened to me on the way here tonight....") 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. Many of the stories were later collected in a series of books.
   The host of the show was originally the cricket broadcaster John Arlott, but he was soon replaced by Jack Longland, who spent over twenty years as chairman. Longland was succeeded by John Julius Norwich and finally Michael O'Donnell. Muir’s partner was initially Isobel Barnett, but she was soon replaced with the film critic E. Arnot Robertson. On Robertson's death in 1961, her place was filled by the film critic and Greek scholar Dilys Powell, who remained with the show until its end, when she was in her ninetieth year. Norden’s first partner was the journalist Nancy Spain, who upon her death in 1964 was succeeded by journalist Anne Scott-James and then in 1979 by writer and historian Antonia Fraser, wife of the well-known playwright Harold Pinter. Fraser took the chair for one season in the 1980s, when her place on the panel was taken by Irene Thomas.
   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.
   The show, which ended in 1990, is still rerun in the United States and Australia. A companion program, My Music, ran from 1967 to 1993.

Theme music

The theme music to "My Word" was "Alpine Pastures", written by Vivian Ellis (1904-1996).

Some notable ending lines

One notable example of a tale that did purport to explain the phrase's origin told of René Descartes at a New Year party hastily scribbling a note to warn a friend that he'd started on the buffet snacks too early: I THINK THEY'RE FOR 1 AM.
"A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" spawned a tale of a collection containing "a snipe, a harp, a fern, corn-seeded trayfuls" (Frank Muir).
"The game isn't worth the candle" gave Muir the chance to tell the story of "The gay Miss Knotworthy-Kendall". A similar line was "The gay Miss Harp" for "The game is up". (Note Muir's tendency to use "harp" for "up".)
"You can't have your cake and eat it too" inspired Denis Norden to tell of the perils of representing yourself in court after a late lunch - "You can't advocate and eat at two".
Genius is "An infinite capacity for taking pains" according to the old saying. Frank Muir portrayed his partnership with Denis Norden as "An intimate complicity for talking puns".
Oscar Wilde described an English fox hunt as "The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable". In Muir's hands this became the tale of consanguineous lust ending with "The Hon. Sparky Beale in pursuit of the Hon. Etty Beale".
"And so to bed", Samuel Pepys' frequent diary entry, caused Denis Norden to weave a tale of romance where the agonizing choice between suitors left a woman with the question of what she'd see out her bedroom window on her honeymoon. Having made her decision, she looked out one morning "and saw Tibet".
Another favorite: The Roman of classic times who's always had trouble growing flowers awakens to find a beautiful garden and wonders if his servant has taken plants from a famous neighbor: "Our roses arose. Is a row Cicero's?"
Shakespeare's "Dressed in a little brief authority" famously became "Dressed in a little brie for Thora T" after the difficult "what to wear to the fancy dress party" question was solved by a large amount of melted cheese.
"The lights are going out all over Europe" gave the touching story of a kindly but hapless veterinarian who, during his life, couldn't get sheep to open their mouths for inspection; when he died he found in Heaven that "The lambs are going 'Aaah!' to Oliver Yarrop."
In perhaps the most fiendish challenge, the famous Mary Poppins song title "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" was rendered into a shopping list, including a remedy for the shopper's terrible bad breath: "Soup, a cauli, fridge-elastic, eggs, pea - HALITOSIS!"
Winston Churchill's description of Soviet foreign policy ("a riddle wrapped in a mystery in an enigma") yielded a tale of mystery and intrigue as Sherlock Holmes attempts to save the life of a minor noble in England whose life has been threatened by anarchists. The chosen method of execution was a small figurine containing poison inside a crumpled page torn from a penny dreadful, stuffed into a long rubber pipe with a nozzle at one end and a bulb at the other. "See what it is, man? A wee doll wrapped in a mystery in an enema."
"East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet" reminded Denis Norden of a vet who kept birds from building a nest in a horse's mane by sprinkling the mane with powdered yeast: "Yeast is yeast, and nest is nest, and never the mane shall tweet."
Muir's version of the typing exercise "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party" was a story about children's many different (often confusing) words for urination, ending with a call for a committee of worthies led by someone like Lord Goodman to standardize the terms used, because: "Now is the time for Lord Good-Man to come to the aid of the potty".
The John Phillips Sousa march "The Stars and Stripes Forever" led to the tale of a couple attending a cocktail party. When the husband, who had been dressed as Tarzan, had to remove his costume to assist his wife Heather, it led to the tabloid headline "This Tarzan Strips for Heather."
The Gilbert and Sullivan opera "The Pirates of Penzance" led to the story of Ben and his attempt to open a take-away restaurant. When Ben founded a meat pie restaurant with two of his aunts, his aunts' demands for prime ingredients made his prices too expensive, and his business failed due to "the pie rates of Ben's aunts."
The painting "Florence Nightingale - the Lady with the Lamp" let to the tale of the painter determined to get his Italian cathedral scene right, even though a storm was raging...and a new title for the painting: "Florence - Night in Gale - The Laddy with the Lump."
The song title “I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now” became the title of a soon-to-be published memoir of a lady named Wanda who married first a multibillionaire industrialist, then a U.S. Secretary of State, and finally one of the founders of a financial information firm: I, Wanda Hughes Kissinger Dow.

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