A WORD from the WISE

The recent death of the writer and editor Anne Scott-James at 96 brought back vivid memories of one of the delights of my adolescence. My Word! was a panel game broadcast on the Home Service and its subject was words. Devised by Edward J Mason and Tony Shryane (who also dreamt up The Archers), it was, needless to say, literate and non-condescending, as indeed was most wireless output in those kinder times. It also had a theme tune, written by the great Vivien Ellis, that was a true call to arms with its first fifteen notes being persistently sounded thirds.

When I first “listened in” (as we used to say) to My Word!, the regular teams were Frank Muir and Dilys Powell against Denis Norden and Nancy Spain. Scott-James joined when Spain died. Muir and Norden were then the eminences grises of broadcast comedy, having penned the imperishable radio sitcom Take It from Here and the raucous prep school comedy for television, Whack-O!, which starred ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards. Dilys Powell was the very doyenne of film critics, reviewing for The Sunday Times for nearly forty years and living, like Scott-James, into her nineties. Scott-James was less known to me aside from the programme, working as she then did for The Daily Mail.

The regular chairman of the quiz, at least in my time, was Jack Longland. Sir Jack, as he became, was an educationalist by profession and the sometime intrusion of a stuffed shirt into his manner rather illustrated the teaching cliché of the time. I remember one occasion when Longland carefully explained some reference, ending his discourse with the – no doubt rhetorical – question “d’you see?” “Yes, Jack” replied Norden with exquisitely understated waspishness. “I see”.

As a burgeoning wordsmith, I found the whole thrust of the quiz utterly absorbing. But the climax of the programme, in which the women took an unavoidable back seat, was the delightful indulgence of the taste for whimsy that Muir and Norden shared. At the start of the programme, Longland would announce a pair of sayings, quotes or other variety of construct that, at the end, would be subjected to an elaborately cod explanation of its derivation by the respective comedy writers. The pleasant fiction was maintained that the clever chaps would dream up these monologues during the course of the quiz.

One such that stays with me was “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Scott-James having identified it as a line from Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Norden then launched into his own account. This involved a disquisition upon the unreliability of seasonal underwear and the need for applying animal skin to the nether regions, thus leading to Shelley’s indispensable advice: “if winter coms can spring, be fur behind”. The use of the term ‘coms’ – popular shorthand for the pre-central-heating one-piece woollen undergarment known as ‘combinations’ – unerringly dates the yarn.

For myself, I always favoured Norden’s fantasies, perhaps because Longland outrageously favoured Frank Muir: “by the extent and volume of your applause, Frank Muir wins that round and he and Dilys Powell win the contest”. Anybody not partisan could hear that the response of the studio audience showed no such regular favour.

Norden is now the only survivor of the programme. A friend who works in advertising says that he was the most charming, affable and punctilious person to work with. I always rather deplored Norden’s voice-overs, largely on grounds of the products he chose to support. I always hoped to meet him – never have – so that I could point out that I would be unable to accept an invitation to dine chez Norden for fear of being served Wimpyburgers washed down with Hirondelle.

By contrast, I would gladly have eaten anything at the table of Anne Scott-James who, after all, was an early commissioner of the columns of Elizabeth David. And I expect that I would have enjoyed fierce arguments with her husband (they divorced in the early 1960s) Macdonald Hastings who, though very right wing, was certainly charming and interesting if I recall accurately his regular reports for the BBC nightly magazine Tonight. Sir Max Hastings is their son.

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A parting note on this year’s magical May that ended yesterday. I happened to be using the binoculars in the garden that morning when I noticed a little face inside the entrance to the nesting box up in the ash. It was a nuthatch fledgling. He kept popping his head out, then withdrawing, sometimes disappearing but then returning to his vantage point. Suddenly he leaned right out of the box and then toppled in an ungainly fashion onto the perch strategically placed at right angles to the entrance. He tottered there a moment or two and then launched himself recklessly at the trunk opposite, landing safely, recovering from his sense of shock and then, with increasing confidence, hopping up the tree in the manner so characteristic of his species. After a few moments, I lost track of him among the leaves. No other face appeared at the nestbox entrance, at least not in the next few minutes. I don’t know whether nuthatches raise a single chick or whether he was the last to venture forth. But I felt that I had witnessed a sublime moment of nature’s everyday evolution. I hope he (or she) chooses to nest in our garden next year and bless us with the next nuthatch generation.




Nuthatch by Jiri Bohdal on Naturfoto website