Jimmy Edwards
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Jimmy Edwards (23 March 1920 – 7 July 1988) was an English radio and television comedy actor, best known as Pa Glum in Take It From Here and as the headmaster 'Professor' James Edwards in Whack-O.
Born James Keith O'Neill in Barnes, London, Edwards served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. His Dakota was shot down at Arnhem in 1944, resulting in injuries requiring plastic surgery — he disguised it with the huge handlebar moustache that later became his trademark. He was a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
Edwards was a feature of London theatre in the immediate post-War years, including a season with Tony Hancock, having previously performed in the Cambridge Footlights review. He gained wider exposure as a radio performer in Take It From Here, co-starring Dick Bentley, which first paired his writer Frank Muir with Bentley's: Denis Norden. Graduating to television, he appeared in Whack-O, also written by Muir and Norden, the panel game Does the Team Think?, The Seven Faces of Jim, as well as guest slots in Make Room for Daddy and Sykes. Edwards also worked with Eric Sykes when he acted in the Sykes-penned short films The Plank (1967) (alongside Tommy Cooper) and Rhubarb (1969) (which also featured Harry Secombe). Edwards and Sykes also toured in their theatrical farce Big Bad Mouse, which while keeping more or less to a script, gave them rein to ad lib, address the audience and so forth.
He published his autobiography, Six of the Best, in 1984, as a follow up to the earlier Take it From Me. Amongst his outside interests were brass bands and the Handlebar Club, in which all the members had such moustaches. Edwards was a lifelong Conservative and in the 1964 election stood as a parliamentary candidate for them in Paddington North (without success). He was also a devotee of fox hunting, a pursuit he followed at Rottingdean, near Brighton (where today a municipal bus bears his name). During the 1970s he also came out as a homosexual (and consequently found TV work harder to come by in what were more homophobic times). Edwards was a notable former pupil of King's College School in Wimbledon, London.
