Swimming cheerfully against the tide
Jonathan Cecil
A KENTISH LAD by Frank Muir Bantam, £16.99, pp. 386 In a much publicised decision, made ear- lier this year, the controller of Radio 4 rejected Frank Muir's autobiography as unsuitable broadcasting material. This was regarded as a fairly brutal farewell to an old tradition of BBC comedy — amiable and civilised. Although both adjectives fit the book, it has a more surprising quality; it is quietly but continually subversive.
Frank Muir was never an angry young man nor has he become an elderly curmud- geon. But from his first joke made in class at the age of six and throughout his war service as an aerial photographer and then in his dealings with both the BBC and ITV, he has always been a good-tempered rebel quietly swimming against the tide. Good temper — together with high spirits and light-hearted erudition — is an essential ingredient in Frank Muir's humour, as it is in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, the best comedies of the Ealing era and such tele- vision series as Dad's Army and Porridge.
Good-tempered comedy is not the same as 'gentle' comedy, which suggests the need of a magnifying glass to identify the jokes. The humour in Muir's memoirs is generally as uproarious as that of the immortal Glum Family from his and Denis Norden's radio smash hit, Take It from Here. The anec- dotes which punctuate his narrative are the best kind: real-life ones based on observa- tion, rather than set jokes, apart from the puns — not normally a form of wit I care for, especially when used by journalists as a substitute for thought, but in Muir's and Norden's hands exceptionally ingenious.
The source of Muir's sunny nature was an idyllic Kentish coastal childhood with impecunious but cheerfully self-sacrificing parents, both from seafaring families. Happy times on the beach and in Muir's grandmother's pub at Ramsgate are beauti- fully described with a Betjemanesque eye for period detail: boiled sweets, cigarette cards, brilliantine. Muir is not an introspec- tive writer and just one short-lived child- hood fear emerges: the dreadful thought that his mother might die (she actually lived into her late seventies). Otherwise his relationship with his parents appears as un- neurotically affectionate as subsequently that with his own wife and children. He always wanted to write or amuse peo- ple; during a serious childhood illness he discovered he could combine the two. Like so many other entertainers of his genera- tion he found his first opportunities during the war. Stationed in Iceland, he compered a forces radio programme at a recording studio, or, in Icelandic, rikisutuarpsslar, (`How the word trips off the tongue'). Demobbed, in the exhilarating austerity of postwar London, he strove to enter the fashionable medium, wireless. The way in was to find an up-and-coming comedian for whom to write. The prewar radio comics Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey — all had music-hall backgrounds. Muir searched, among novices at the Windmill Theatre, for more sophisticated types. The first find, named Commander Peter Waring DSO, turned out to be a charming con-man and fraud. His arrest and suicide are virtually the only grim episodes in the book. Success came with Cambridge graduate Jimmy Edwards and a chance pairing with Denis Norden. Muir and Norden were already busy young gag-writers who might have continued separate careers. Apart from being exceedingly tall — unfolding like hinged rulers, I always thought — they had initially little in common. Unlike Muir, the amazing autodidact who left school at 14, Denis Norden had been at the City of London School with Kingsley Amis and was considered to have a fine academic brain. The pair's senses of humour were complementary rather than identical; they rarely socialised outside office hours, never quarrelled, yet had a 25-year partnership. Only now, as elderly men, do they exchange weekly social telephone calls.
They brought a new literacy to radio comedy; also, by way of the Glum family, a new, if grotesque, realism. They were often quietly at loggerheads with BBC officialdom; when they entered television their sympathetically eccentric boss Eric Maschwitz called them 'Los Layabouts'.
When Muir took charge of comedy series, bringing to the job an avuncular but youthful enthusiasm that has never been equalled, he swam against the tide again. Just when Reithism was giving way to com- mercialism he took the lightly paternalistic line of enhancing public taste; some of the results were Steptoe and Son, All Gas and Gaiters and Till Death Us Do Part.
Muir's subsequent period at London Weekend was shorter-lived. Expecting a freer hand, he found the financiers of com- mercial television less sympathetic to cre- ativity and innovation than the civil servants at the BBC. Resigning with other senior colleagues in what was for Muir an unusually acrimonious episode, he became freelance again: an inimitable parlour- game panellist and after-dinner speaker, an anthologist and children's book writer. No wonder that in his seventies he collapsed from overwork.
Now he returns with this warmly wise autobiography, as good as anything he has written, bracingly amusing, nostalgic and full of shrewd commonsense about broad- casting. On modern methods he has this to say: Management consultancy is a self-perpetuat- ing, inexact science which manages to get itself paid enormous fees. It is altogether a much more sensible career to put a person- able, intelligent, perfectly ungifted son or daughter into than making television programmes.
The reasons given for the book's exclu- sion from radio were that it was too 'liter- ary', and Frank Muir too lugubrious. As an inappropriate epithet the latter takes some beating. However, Muir does have an attractive drawl with a celebrated weak 'r' — remember the commercial, `Evewyone's a foo-woot and nutcase'? — and his style is deadpan, sometimes reminiscent of Jerome K. Jerome: I do not recommend pleurisy. Have some- thing else if you can; pleurisy lacks charm.
To read such a sentence jocularly would be a grave mistake; it needs lugubriousness and preferably a weak `r'. As for the book being too 'literary', this word suggests Nabokov or Anthony Burgess. Could the controller have meant too literate?
It is a thought at once melancholy and pleasing that even in retirement good- tempered Frank Muir can upset whatever is current lazy-minded received broad- caster's opinion.
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