My Word!
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My Word! was a radio panel game which premiered on the BBC Home Service on January 1, 1957. 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.
Two teams (Muir and Dilys Powell versus Norden and Anne Scott-James [later 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 was not strictly enforced, and a story was just as likely to begin "A funny thing happened to me on the way here tonight...") In later years, 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 Jack Longland, who was succeeded by John Julius Norwich and then Michael O'Donnell. The two additional contestants were initially film critic E. Arnot Robertson and journalist Nancy Spain; later contestants included film critic and Greek scholar Dilys Powell, journalist Anne Scott-James, and writer and historian Antonia Fraser, wife of the well-known playwright Harold Pinter.
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.
[edit] Theme music
The theme music to "My Word" was "Alpine Pastures", written by Vivian Ellis (1904-1996).
[edit] 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 is not 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 Dennis 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 Dennis 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 Dennis Norden to weave a tale of romance where the agonizing choice between suitors left a woman with the question of what she would 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?"
- "The lights are going out all over Europe" gave the touching story of a kindly but hapless veterinarian who, during his life, could not 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."
