TEN YEARS OF TIFH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 4

TEN YEARS OF TIFH

WEALTHY WAL, you may remember, once wandered into a Take It From Here session wearing a wondrously bejewelled wrist-watch, and complaining that time hung heavily on his hands. Neither the pleasantly inno-

cent Wal nor the other principals of TIFH, however, appear to have been unduly weighed down by time. The show is now in its tenth year, and wearing remarkably well. Though still on "steam" radio, it drags British listen-

ers from their television sets, and retains its usual strong adherence abroad. The beginning, ten years ago, was in the mind of BBC producer Charles Maxwell, whose idea was to make use of some of the artists who had established themselves in the last editions of Navy Mixture. The English comedian Jimmy Edwards, and the Australian Dick Bentley have starred in it from the first, and June Whitfield (who has made an enduring name as "Eth" to Bentley’s "Ron") joined in 1953, taking the place of TIFH’s original female star, Joy Nichols. The programme also brought together one of the most successful writing partnerships in British radio, that of Frank Muir and Denis Norden.

: Jimmy Edwards, who won an M.A, after surviving a degree course at Cambridge, and a D.F.C. after surviving a crash at Arnhem, made his first stage appearance at London’s famous Windmill Theatre in 1946, and was heard in his first BBC programme, They’re Out, in the same year. London-born June Whitfield studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, after various stage appearances, first broad-

cast in 1947, speaking some lines and making the noise of a baby crying in Focus on Nursing. The "old one," Dick Bentley, began radio comedian’s work in Australia as long ago as 1933, and has the varied background, as well as the eroded foreground, of an old stager. Besides TIFH he has starred in such other programmes as Gently Bentley and the appealingly titled I Flew with Bismarck.