(6 February 1922 - 19 September 2018)
The writer, presenter and broadcaster Denis Norden, who has died aged 96, was probably best-known as the frontman for It’ll Be All Right On the Night, ITV’s long-running series of outtakes and bloopers from films and television shows which ran from 1977 for some thirty years. He also presented Looks Familiar, a TV nostalgia programme for many years. Long before TV discovered him, Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir, contributed a great deal to radio and TV comedy from 1948 onwards. His career began as a theatre stagehand and then cinema manager. After the war he left the RAF, where he wrote for troop shows, and then began writing for comedian Dick Bentley, while Frank Muir wrote for Jimmy Edwards. They combined forces for the radio comedy Take It From Here for Bentley and Edwards together. It ran from 1948 to 1959 and is still being repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra. They wrote many TV series including Whack-O!, And So to Bentley, The Seven Faces of Jim and its sequels, Brothers in Law, How To Be an Alien, The Frost Report, The Glums etc. They appeared together on radio in My Word! and My Music and on TV in Call My Bluff. Early on in their careers, Muir and Norden had written additional dialogue for the film Song of Paris, with Dennis Price. When they stopped writing together, Norden contributed to several film screenplays including The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell, The Best House in London, Twelve Plus One, Every Home Should Have One, The Statue, Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman, The Water Babies, plus a number of television movies. Frank Muir died in 1998 and Denis Norden retired in 2006 at the age of 84 because he was developing macular degeneration. He was married to Avril Rosen (who died just two months before him). They have two children, architect Nick and radio presenter Maggie. Denis Norden published his autobiography, Clips from a Life, in 2008.
MICHAEL DARVELL
