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Frank Herbert Muir (5 February 1920 – 2 January 1998) was an English comedy writer, radio and television personality, and raconteur. His writing and performing partnership with Denis Norden endured for most of their careers. Together they wrote BBC Radio's Take It from Here for over 10 years, and then appeared on BBC radio quizzes My Word! and My Music for another 35. Muir became Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC in the 1960s, and was then London Weekend Television's founding Head of Entertainment. His many writing credits include editorship of The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, as well as the What-a-Mess books that were later turned into an animated TV series.
His aunt was Rose Muir (d. 1970), MBE; she and her brother were orphaned at a young age, and when he went to sea she had remained in New Zealand and taken a low-status position at Christchurch Hospital, serving as matron from 1916 to 1936, and ending up as its superintendent.Muir, Frank A Kentish Lad. Corgi Books, 1998, p. 16 In later years, whenever his dignified speech patterns caused listeners to assume that he had received a public school education, Muir would demur: "I was educated in E10, not Eton College". He attended Leyton County High School for Boys, though prior to this he was a pupil at Chatham House Grammar School, in Ramsgate, Kent, whose notable alumni include former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. He left school prematurely aged fourteen and a half at his father's death, due to the necessity of earning an income to support the family.Muir, Frank A Kentish Lad. Corgi Books, 1998, p. 58 Muir claimed that, when interviewed to join the RAF, he was "a weedy " but that he later "stabilised at a bent ".
Muir, as a photographic technician, was posted to Iceland, which was then a Danish possession under British occupation, and while there, he did some work for the forces radio station. Also while stationed in Iceland – as he described in his memoirs A Kentish Lad – Muir suffered a medical condition which required the surgical removal of one testicle.
Muir and Norden continued to write for Edwards when he began to work for BBC television with the school comedy series Whack-O and the subsequent 1960 film Bottoms Up!, and in the anthology series Faces of Jim. With Norden, in 1962, he was responsible for the television adaptation of Henry Cecil's comic novel Brothers in Law, which starred a young Richard Briers, and its spin-off Mr Justice Duncannon.
The pair were invited to appear on a new humorous literary radio quiz, My Word!. In the final round Muir and Norden each told a story to "explain" the origin of a well-known phrase. An early example took the quotation "Dead! And never called me mother!" from a stage adaptation of East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood, which became the exclamation of a youth coming out of a telephone booth which he had discovered to be out of order. In early broadcasts of My Word! the phrases were provided by the quizmaster, but in later series Muir and Norden chose their own in advance of each programme and their stories became longer and more convoluted. This became a popular segment of the quiz, and Muir and Norden later compiled five volumes of books containing some of the My Word! stories.
Frank Muir was also, like Norden, a contestant on the My Word! spinoff, My Music. As a television personality, Muir's unofficial trademark was a crisply knotted pink bow tie.
In 1976 Muir wrote The Frank Muir Book: An irreverent companion to social history, which is a collection of anecdotes and quotations collected under various subjects including "Music", "Education", "Literature", "Theatre", "Art" and "Food and Drink". (In the United States, this book is titled "An Irreverent Social History of Almost Everything.") A similar format to The Frank Muir Book was used in his BBC radio series Frank Muir Goes Into..., in which Alfred Marks read the quotations, linked verbally by Muir. He published books based on these series. His The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, which again uses a similar format with more scholarly aspirations, was published in 1990.
Muir was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire CBE in the 1980 Birthday Honours.UK: In 1992, for Channel 4, he was the host of TV Heaven, a season of evenings dedicated to television programmes from individual years. In 1997, Muir published an autobiography, A Kentish Lad. Spectator review of A Kentish Lad by Jonathan Cecil
Muir died in Thorpe, Surrey, on 2 January 1998 aged 77. In November 1998, ten months after his death, he and Denis Norden were joint recipients of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Writer of the Year Award. Muir's widow, Polly, died in Surrey on 27 October 2004, aged 79.
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