Nicholas Parsons
“The most extraordinary person I've ever met was hanging from a parbuckle and looked like a cylindrical object. He swung backwards and forwards in the high wind, and, investigating the appearance carefully, it was none other than Nicholas Parsons, our chairman. 'About time,' people said.”
“Well I think everybody knows everything about Nicholas. I mean, there he is: he's got grey hair and he wears a blazer and a smart tie and he chairs Just a Minute and he appears in rude shows occasionally.”
“Blind; paralytic; insensible; wears a wig; puts his teeth into a bucket by his bed... is 90, though he looks younger, but his son lent me his bus pass so I know.”
“NICHOLAS BLOODY PARSONS!!!!!!!!!!”
Character[edit | edit source]
“If you look at him carefully, you will notice a sort of void where charisma is concerned.”
“I make a living out of being pompous! Why should I change?”
“Perhaps the epitome of pomposity is Nicholas Parsons. He chairs this programme like he's got some idea what's going on. He runs the computer in his brain, which, to me, I think, is probably more of an abacus than a computer.”
“You couldn't see fair play if it was written up for you.”
“Some people in this life really enjoy being sent up and Nicholas Parsons is one of them… because he's a sadomasochist.”
“I was going to talk about Nicholas Parsons' ignorance, but 18 seconds would be a wholly insufficient time.”
“Nicholas Parsons has been to me both gracious and kind, attentive and servile.”
“What a heavy load you carry round.”
Generosity[edit | edit source]
“One of the most generous people I know is Nicholas Parsons: he always buys a round.”
“'Please accept my apologies but I have no money to send to you or your cause, but I do suggest that you write to a friend of mine who is both wealthy and philanthropically minded. His name is Nicholas Parsons.' And I give his address, and a stamp just to help it on its way.”
“One of the great ball-givers in the United Kingdom is Nicholas Parsons.”
Career[edit | edit source]
“He's a national institution.”
“There is a habit amongst teenage girls to have 'I love Nicholas Parsons' tattooed on various parts of their body, because, of course, our esteemed chairman is currently wowing them in the West End with his soft-shoe shuffle, singing outside Harrods with a little hat, to collect coins from the grateful passers-by.”
“Who would actually pay to witness Nicholas Parsons? I would not for one.”
Youth[edit | edit source]
“Nicola Parsons was born 90 years ago. A quiet girl, she didn't bother the other kids too much in school. Later in life, she moved to Spain and became a cabaret artiste.”
“Nicholas Parsons' time at the University of Glasgow seems to be absolutely shrouded in mystery.”
Early career[edit | edit source]
“I remember years ago when Nicholas Parsons and I were bright young things. Flappers in the 1920s, down the Strand together, tossing our pearls over our shoulders, blowing kisses to passing Guardsmen, and they would say, 'They are bright young things,' and we were. It's so sad to see him now, in the first flush of his senility.”
“In 1936 Nicholas Parsons wowed the West End crowds with his nude performance as Mary, Queen of Scots. They had seen nothing like it!”
“During the performance that Paul was talking about, Nicholas Parsons was wearing both a codpiece and a banana.”
“During Nicholas Parsons's porno film career I was often called upon to press the flesh.”
“Nominally Peter Sellers was the star; you stole it from under his nose.”
“My first job was an apprentice to Nicholas Parsons who, before he rose to the dizzy heights you now see, majestic and bearing so much gravitas, was an artificial inseminator of pigs, a task which is rightly performed with great momentum in this part of the world. He and I would set off with a spring in our step, armed only with our marigold gloves and a washing-up bowl, and a copy of 'Crackling', a lewdly pronographic magazine, which showed pictures of Kevin Bacon, and Mia Farrow, in positions of enticing and exciting abandon. Now the thing about the porcine species is that the male genitalia is corkscrew-shaped, so I would hold the animal down while Nicholas would spin like a catherine wheel.”
“Apparently, he used to be in showbusiness. Look at him now and think, 'Surely, that's not believeable,' but yes, if you go back in the mists of time: Tommy Handley, It's That Man Again; he was That Man.”
“Who can forget Nicholas Parsons as the Cheshire Cat?”
“John Travolta: His career was heralded in by Saturday Night Fever, and he only got the part because Nicholas Parsons wasn't available.”
Sale of the Century[edit | edit source]
“What a ridiculous farrago it was throughout the 1970's…The befuddled quizmaster would sit in the middle as various greedy pensioners from around the British Isles would say, 'I'll have the kettle for five pounds, the Volkswagen for six, and I'll have Aberdeen for twenty-four.'”
The Rocky Horror Show[edit | edit source]
“Which part of the title do you represent?”
“Oh my goodness, Nicholas Parsons is himself an extravaganza. If you'd seen him there, in his high heels, and his fishnet stockings, it was the most wonderous sight of the whole thing. An audience every night was totally captivated by this elderly gentleman standing tall, flashing his knobbly knees.”
“The Rocky Horror Show, where the characters cross-dressed, and had overt sexuality. Why they thought of having Nicholas Parsons in this show, I cannot fathom.”
“There is a production that tours round the country called the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and our chairman Nicholas Parsons was once desperate enough to appear in it, in a pair of fishnet stockings where he would parade around on stage in front of people who'd paid good money to see this, and he would regale them with what he liked to think was his whimsy.”
“The smuttiest thing I've seen in the last 30 years is Nicholas Parsons in the Rocky Horror Show. It is a performance riddled with filth. He walks onto the stage and by his own confession roundly abuses the audience for turning up in the first place, and then performs a rather disgusting exotic cabaret with various selected vegetables. The finale of his act, if you can call it such a thing, is he inserts a marrow f…”
Just a Minute[edit | edit source]
“Cheek is when someone of diminished responsibility goes to the British Broadcasting Corporation and elects to be chairman of a panel game, on the basis that he might have some idea of how to control people whose multisyllabic words he doesn't understand, whose meaning he is unable to comprehend, and whose hours and time he is unable to keep.”
“I've always admired the way Nicholas Parsons controls this programme. I am an enormous fan of his. No, I'm sorry, that's bigger than a white lie, isn't it?”
“You ought to resign!”
“If you weren't here, Nicholas, I don't know what we'd do. Train a budgerigar, perhaps?”
“Nicholas Parsons deserves the lion's share of the credit for the enormous success of this brilliant programme.”
“It'd be bloody good if he'd just shut up.”
“Making an effort is something one says to denote that a person is trying to do his best, from which sentiment I would like to disassociate the chairman of Just a Minute, who has quite tantamountly done very much less than that. I have seldom encountered a shoddier exponent of any panel game.”
“It has been cruelly suggested that the chairman of this game is a joke. I personally don't subscribe to that theory because he is a very dashing, be-blazered chap, and far from a joke.”
“I think he secretly tosses a coin in his pocket: he's doing something in there anyway… looks like heads from where I'm sitting.”
“Confusing the chairman in this game is not exactly a great challenge. No, the trick is to notice if you've done it. I don't know: possibly he's confused right now. Look at him, are his eyes glazing over; I'm not sure. His hair's not moving. The jacket remains burgundy, the tie — ooh my god, where did you get that? In 2050, it could be back in fashion. I think, sometimes he's not confused, he's other things, like asleep.”
“Well, as we get older, it's much more difficult to be a chairman, and I feel rather sorry for Nick, having to cope with this complicated game at his grand old age. Inevitably, he's gonna get a bit befuddled with the rules. Often, he asks the audience, which is the most irritiating thing that he does when he's confused.”
“It's not a difficult task: simple colour and movement usually does it. Come towards him quickly with a very striped shirt and he doesn't know where he is.”
“And they strung up the chairman with a parbuckle.”
“The best chairman we've ever had.”
Old age[edit | edit source]
“You see, Nicholas has now reached the age that when a girl says, 'no,' he's profoundly grateful.”
“Hard times is the future of Nicholas Parsons' career.”
“If it goes down well tonight he'll be here again in the year 2037, by which time he will be 124 and still have all his own teeth. He paid for them in 1956; he owns them; they're his.”
“Poor old Nicholas Parsons. He went mad in the end, you know, married a goat and lived in Rygate for 15 years, never the same man again.”
Appearance[edit | edit source]
“When I look over at Nicholas I suddenly think of the Jurassic Age. I don't know why that should be; maybe because there's an elegant gracefulness in the way that he moves, that reminds you of very big, dead reptiles.”
“Nicholas Parsons is wearing a toupée made from the fur of a fox terrier.”
“Nicholas sitting there with his lovely teeth: they must have cost a fortune.”
“I have seen Nicholas Parsons bowling, and as he does so, he waves his eyes around quite independently in a very seductive sort of way, like a goldfish giving you the come-on. Those are googly eyes.”
“The fact is, you have to look beyond the glasses, further than the grey hair; yes, it's all very well wearing a variety of pastel-shade jackets, but it's the heart that matters, and my personal soul was speared by an arrow from Cupid: the beauty that is our chairman.”
Clothes[edit | edit source]
“Is there a tie shape at the back of that jacket that you've just cut out?… Nicholas Parsons is wearing a combined deckchair, jacket, and tie.”
“You can say that to me wearing that jacket? It looks like a bar-code.”
“Somewhere there's a deckchair with a coat-shaped hole in it.”
“Nicholas Parsons is wearing a magnificent blue jacket with a tie, the finest I have ever seen.”
“As modelled by Anthony Eden.”
Relationships[edit | edit source]
“Ah, that smile beguiles me even now. One of my favourite mementoes is a lock of Nicholas Parsons' hair. We were young, yes, we were in love. It was a night in Leeds. I found him a sensitive lover, attentive to my needs, patient, a little prone to fainting, but never mind.”
“My Achilles heel is that I find Nicholas Parsons intensely sexually attractive. When I look over there at that blazer and that tie, his hair, the glasses; everything about him says take me. I go home at night, I see these visions of this erstwhile chairman coming towards me, the silvery glint in his eyes beckoning...”
“I have a sugar daddy. He pays for everything: hotel suites, plane tickets, expensive meals, exotic holidays. His name is Nicholas Parsons. He is a marvellous individual to me... Fancy lingerie: there's nothing that he won't buy for me, and as the two of us lie on our Caribbean beach, looking into each others' eyes, I can swim for hours in that deep azure blue that you find just beside his pupil.”
“They say opposites attract, which is possibly why I am very much attracted to Nicholas Parsons.”
“I think Parsons has derived a tremendous amount of pleasure from his various wives. The first one, Denise, was a most wonderful, beauteous, shimmering creature who lived in Rose Cottage. Even his most recent wife is a fabulous woman too.”
Reputation[edit | edit source]
“When I was a boy, my contemporaries chose James Dean as their rôle model, or Che Guevara, whereas I chose Nicholas Parsons, and I think that explains everything that's happened to me since. It certainly explains why… I'm appearing in the West End in a golden codpiece, black stockings, and a purple suspender belt”
Professional standing[edit | edit source]
“You know you've hit the big-time when you find yourself in a radio show sitting next to Nicholas Parsons. This man is truly a giant amongst men.”
“Can I just say before I do this, what a great pleasure it is to do this show, with you, Nicholas, the consummate professional. I know what the other contestants were saying about you behind your back beforehand; I don't subscribe to that. I believe you are a wonderful broadcaster with great taste in clothes.”
“When I seek inspiration I need look no further than Nicholas Parsons.”
“Gliterati consider themselves very lucky people if they spend the weekend at Nicholas Parsons' country retreat. This is where the gliterati from four corners of the globe gather every Saturday and they decide that they are going to worship the man...”
Public image[edit | edit source]
“Just before I came into this room I heard two people talking about Nicholas Parsons; they didn't see me there but I was listening to what they were saying. And one said to the other, 'D'you know, he was condemned before the Second World War and actually still standing. It's really amazing.' The other person says, 'If you look closely he's wearing a bag, you can see it there.' He said, 'No, surely not;' he says, 'no, it's quite true, he does. And he's proud of it as well: if he gets drunk at parties he'll take it out and he's been known to pour it into the punch bowl.' Oh, he's a terrible individual, but it's interesting the way the British public have taken to Nicholas Parsons in the same way they used to take to typhoid.”
“I often think of my best chat-up line, which is, 'I'm a close, personal friend of Nicholas Parsons.'”
Alcoholism[edit | edit source]
“You wear badges on which you put your favourite topic of conversation. For instance, with the aforementioned chairman, it would be alcoholism.”
“It's gin: he can't get enough of the stuff. He drinks it by the bucket-load. If you go round Nicholas's house on a Friday you'll see a tanker delivering him this alcoholic refreshment straight through his letterbox. He's lying on the doormat with his mouth wide open; he's got a pipe going into his mouth. That's how he spends his weekend: he's completely sozzled all the time. Look at him, look at this downed alcoholic wreck that we see standing in front of us now, a sheer rambling wreck of a human being. He is part of the British way of life, and we know how bad that is these days. He is, I suppose, perhaps the last great man we have left in Great Britain who remembers the silent films.”
Scandal[edit | edit source]
“I've known Nicholas Parsons for a fairly long time and his geniune pleasures are in rubber tubes, metal clips...”
“I think he once went to bed with a swan as well, didn't you, on Just a Minute.”
“About five years ago I was asked by the Metropolitan Police to give Nicholas Parsons a character witness. Apparently he'd been arrested in the Ballspond Road at 3 o'clock in the morning with his trousers around his ankles shouting out at the windows above him, 'If you want it lady I'm ready and willing.' This incident was rather nasty and was reported in the local press at the time. I went along to the court and I stood there in front of the judge and I was called into the witness box and he said to me, 'Could you give me your appreciation of this man's character?' I said, 'I have known the individual in question for some ten years. I have always found him to be honest, upright, and one of the fin... oh,' I said, 'I can't keep it up, I really can't.'”
“You can hear the siren coming towards me now because, Nicholas, I'm afraid, has been up to his old tricks again. He's been staring into old ladies' windows.”
“Police were called to Trafalgar Square late on Saturday night where the TV personality and radio host Nicholas Parsons was found attempting to climb the column. When he was arrested, he said, 'I wanted to see whether he was big or small.'”