Tales from ‘My Word’

Press, 7 April 1979, Page 17

Tales from ‘My Word’

Take My Word For It. By Frank Muir and Denis Norden. Eyre Methuen. 109 pp. $6.30.

(Reviewed by

A. R. Cant)

“My Word,” as the chairman of the panel explains unnecessarily — at least to most radio listeners in the English-speaking world — is a word game played by people whose business is words. It is equally unnecessary to add, here, that the team leaders, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, are masters of their business. “Take My Word For It,” the third published collection of the stories told by Muir and Norden to round off the famous 8.8. C. programme, will give much pleasure: to those who have heard these particular stories on the air; to those who regretfully have missed some or all of them; and to others who have

vet to make the acquaintance, through either the spoken or the written word, of a special kind of humour that has been polished and refined by the skill and perceptiveness of these practitioners into something approaching an exquisite art. Many readers will be surprised to find how little the stories suffer in their translation from the spoken to the written word — the more surprising when it is remembered that Muir and Norden are both accomplished actors and mimics, and have their own engaging and endearing vocal mannerisms. The explanation, surely, is that good theatre usually starts by being good literature; and Muir and Norden are, above all, good writers. The germ of each of these stories is a pun, ingeniously elaborated, which in the shatteringly anticlimactic punch-line explains how some well-known quotation or epigram might have originated. The responsive chord in hearer or listener is struck not so much because this is a hilarious exercise in literary nonsense, but because it is invariably an acute, but tolerant and warm-hearted commentary on the fads, foibles, and follies of mankind.