YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicholas Parsons

lines on the record: 49
first: 2007-11-04
most recent: 2007-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The other alternative is not useless, but it's more in the luxury field, and that is a little portable radio with an endless supply of batteries. You can say permanently tuned in to radio four.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have listened to this program for years, and I have suddenly realised that none of your people that you have condemned to this desert island will survive. They've all gone. For the simple reason that it's salt water. So one thought maybe one should have a desalination plant so I could get some fresh water and hopefully survive.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry I love language, I love words, I love poetry, and it would be lovely just to remind all those great poets that I've read, you know, Blake was my favourite and Browning and there's so many of them. They're all in it.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd be on this desert island. I thought well I've got all these lovely records with lovely associations, but I need also think a piece of music which would be exciting and rousy. Shostakovich is a great composer, and when you get a piece of his music which is full orchestra, it's so rousing that you get carried away, and it stimulates you to carry on and go out and achieve something, probably help to keep me going and think right, I've got to get back to civilization, I've got to get up tomorrow and find a way to get off this island.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, put it this way, if it happened. I wouldn't be embarrassed. I think actually it is a rather fabulous way to go, because people who love it and who love doing it, who are part of that. know that to die in harness is probably the way it should go.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, but I think a lot of actors if they were honest would admit to that as well. And if they don't feel like that, then they could become complacent and find that they're not working. I mean, when people say to me, have you ever thought of retiring? And I say, well, no, I'm in a profession that retires you. They let you know when they don't want you to work anymore, or the public don't appreciate you anymore. And I think that I'm privileged in the sense that I can still can work, and the fact that it still goes well, I'll go on doing it.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I knew the answer, perhaps it would unsettle the success, I don't know. I just I've always been aware of what's going on. I've always kept myself aware, and you absorb new thoughts, new ideas, new moods, and you don't stay in your own time warp.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next piece of music is emotional and nostalgic nostalgic because it comes from a Stephen Sometime musical into the woods, which I had the pleasure of working in in the nineties, and in that musical there's a wonderful song called Children Will Listen, a most emotive song, and when it's sung by Barbara Streisant in the special recording she made, it becomes even more emotive.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was in the hospital and very weak, and I even wonder whether he was going to last the night and I was sitting with him. He seemed to be dozing off. So I thought, Dad, do you mind if I put the television on? And I put it on. I didn't even know because this is how little the show meant to me professionally. Sale of the sentry was on. So I thought I watched it and see how it's going. At the end I switched it off. And he had absorbed it all in his drowsy, sleepy state. And he said I've always thought it was particularly clever the way you did that very fast wind up at the end and created that sense of drama which made the show so successful. Thank you, Dad, I did that deliberately and worked it for years and now you tell me, thank you. So I kissed him and I thought well I don't know whether I should stay now all the night or not. I went off and an hour later he was dead.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, yes, I'm sure they were, I'm sure they were. I think they had difficult expressing it, but they were bought up in that generation. My dear father whom I loved very much, it was a very austere man, and he was very weak and almost dying, and he paid me the most beautiful compliment, which always brought the tears to my eyes when he did actually, but when I”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I did, yes, I did have the security of the sale of the century, which was great, and yes, my management and ease did just drift it apart, we're still perfectly good friends and we speak, and I have a lovely lady now called Anne, who's been with me now for almost the same number of years that Denise was. And yes, I was losing my parents, and that they both disappeared away.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What can you say? I mean, it was a success, and I'm proud of the success it achieved, but I never realized how commercially successful the show had become. In fact, the way I put it is that people, when they see someone in such a successful show, they think that is you. When I used to say no, it's a lovely job I had, but it was never a way of life.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a number of reasons and at that time people looked upon quizzes as a sort of down market entertainment, and the press were very condescending and dismissive about it, and so if you presented a quiz show, you were an object for ridicule and take up the goodies used to use me as a regular ridicule character. And so you didn't get any prestige from having a successful show or doing it successfully. And it went on so long, it took me a long time after the show finished to reestablish myself as an actor performer in my own right to think.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Am I right? It's a piece of music which isn't my favourite piece of music, it's not something I would choose just to sit down and listen to necessarily. But it is a piece of music with which I've been associated now for forty years. It is the signature tune for just a minute Chopin's Minute Walse and if I was to listen to this, I would have so many wonderful memories coming flooding back of the great times in that show and the wonderful people I've worked with and the fun we've had. It would be self indulgent but lovely. And as the minute waltz fades away, cursey, I have to what is your next question?”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“programme. God know It's the biggest effort of concentration of any job I do and though I thoroughly enjoy it now because it gives you a sort of fries as you set off, but you never confident in your profession if it's going to work and I go out every time we do a new recording thinking it has worked before But will it work again? And that sets the adrenaline going, and you go out there, you get fired up, and you do it, and something happens. And it is the spontaneity of the whole thing, which is conveyed to the audience, because it recognizes that, which is also then conveyed to the listener.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, tremendous. I take some credit for that because I have evolved the rules. I got taken to task once on points of view when somebody wrote in and said Nicholas Parsons has changed the rule from hesitation repetition and deviation from the subject to hesitation repetition and deviation. Well, I had because I run only realised if they did that it gave scope for these bright comic minds to buzz in and think something quite extraneous which was devious. If anything is going to achieve longevity, you have to instinctively adjust like that.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it may interest you to know that the original choice for the chairman was going to be Jimmy Edwards, and I was going to be one of the panellists. And a young David Hatch, who just joined the BBC as producer, said, Nicholas, we're never going to get Jimmy on a Sunday when we want to record the pilot who was playing polo. So I think what we'll do is will you take the role of chairmanship, and Derek Nimo's free will put him on the panel. I said, please don't, David, I'm not right, Fueda. Anyway, I want him on the panel. I'll do a deal with you. Do the chairmanship for the pilot, and if we get this serious, if it's commissioned, you go on the panel. Super, okay, fine, did it. Pilot wasn't very successful. And they didn't want it, and David fought for it because he saw the potential. And he came to me and said.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes. I mean sometimes you don't want a job because you don't think you're right for it. But when you get the job you use all the experience you've got in your profession to try and make it work for you.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's all part of the sixties, my next piece of music. New things are happening in the theatre, and there was a musical came over from America called Hare, and I went to see it, and it was memorable for one scene, I remember, because at the end of the first half they all seemed to be under a huge blanket, and they struggled to get their kit off, and then the blanket was whipped away, and they all stood out with absolutely stark naked, and they went into another number. And you know, it wasn't done to be provocative. It was actually rather innocent, and that was the joy of this period there was a innocence, there was a great love going on everywhere. And one of the songs from that musical which has always been with me ever since is The Age of Aquarius.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, young and middle aged like me, were breaking down all kinds of traditional archaic attitudes and so forth, and the big breakthrough on television came with that was the week that was, and I went to the head of light entertainment and radio and I said, You haven't got anything similar on radio. He said, no, we haven't. And I said, well, I've got this idea. And we called the program listen to this space. And he took off, and I was lucky to get the award writer club award of radio personality of year.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it was a magic to me. My two young children, Blesser Hartson, are still around and I've got lovely grandchildren as well now. They were such fun. I did so many lovely exciting things with them.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did get an opportunity it was a play called Say Who You Are which was after I'd broken up with Arthur Haines actually and had been in the West Islander I was asked to go and start one of the leads in Broadway in the play. I turned it down I actually saw then that if I did it it would be like taking a new way of life and did I want to take my family to New York This is Shobiz I turned down the opportunity of starring on Broadway where were that of taking me?”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, Oh, when do I begin? You know, we don't question. And I joined, and at the end of six shows he got rid of everybody and kept Arthur and me and said I think you two should do sketches together. And the rest is history. We just took off. We went to America at Sullivan shows. It was great, and I evolved from being a sort of actor comedy performer into being a straight man, but that's where you use your experience in comedy, to play comedy, but not always to get the laughs.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and he called it strike a new note the title of his father's famous wartime show is Sid Fieldon, and I happened to see it. It was pretty dire. But there was one chap in it who I thought was very talented called Arthur Haines, and the very next morning I remember it vividly my agent phoned and said, Nicholas, have you seen a program called Strike a New Note? And I said, Yes, isn't it absolutely diabolical? He said they want you to join it.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think everything I've done ever since has stemmed from the success of that period in the sixties when I show became the top comedy shown independent television, but like so many things in our profession, things you hope and expect will take off don't, and things which start in a most unfortunate way and suddenly do I mean in nineteen fifty five independent television began, and George Black was going to make a program for one of the new companies ATV.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I was doing Cabare, one of the songs used to come on to was the aversion of coal porters just one of those things, and Ella Fitzgerald, who is probably my favourite singer, has recorded this, and I think on that island, listening to Ella, in that wonderful escapist number singing It's just one of those things.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you were expressing yourself on. Obviously once I'd proved it to them I could do it. They came round and they were very supportive. I mean I hadn't degenerated to becoming an alcoholic or finishing up in the gutter somewhere so obviously I was okay.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But always it meant that as it was run like a cinema six shows a day, as you walked on, people were sitting in the front and maybe seen it once or twice, they would leave, and people from the back would rush down and get those seats. And it's quite a challenge when you're doing the same material and you've seen that same audience and you're coming off the third or fourth time and a lot of the same faces are still there. Some of them just pick up their newspapers and start to read. I mean what I learnt there was how to make that difficult, strange all male audience laugh. It was only after I left the windmill to learn how to make any audience laugh.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that was later. I was doing the cabaret. I got 20 pounds a week for Cabre, which was better than 12 pounds a week in rep. And then I did do an audition for the windmill theatre, which was the only sort of musical variety theatre in existence there. Because the Lord Chamberlain's office existed then, and they couldn't put anything on the stage which was too daring. I mean, Windmill's gone as a sort of theatrical mythology, really, or something which was very sexy and erotic and exciting. Certainly a certain amount of eroticism there, but it was very bland, really, but it's built up wonderfully on all these pretty girls, and the comic always followed what was called”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ventura is surviving, but you see, I was working, I was expressing myself. I was doing what I dreamed of doing as a youngster And as long as I was busy, I had a job, I was so happy.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents still didn't want me to become an actor, mother particularly, and asked me what I was going to do with my engineering, and I said, well, I become an engineer, I'm qualified now, but I am definitely going to be an actor. And without any connections, I mean, what I did was I used to read the stage, and stage is a wonderful magazine if you find out what's going on. So I discovered the names of theatre producers, and I wrote and knocked on doors of all kinds of theatre management saying please, can I do an audition? And if you push hard enough and persistent enough, eventually something gives way, and one little door gives way, and then another one does, and you move on from that.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next piece of music I love language, said And I love the way people use language. I'm not a singer myself, though I work with music, but I'm always deeply impressed with how a singer can take the words of a good lyric and interpret them, and bring them alive, and when he blends that with the tune. It's to me quite magical. In fact, to make a pun, it's unforgettable.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, absolutely because I think there was a iron determination in me somewhere to eventually get into the entertainment business and do something, and of course the blessing of Glasgow to me was the great feeling for the theatre and the arts up there, and there was an eminent dramatic society I formed, amateur conceptis, and I went and joined one that was called Scottish Command Troop Entertainments. They sent little groups of us round to entertain the troops on the Akakites, the anti aircraft guns, and the Baroom barrages, and I was doing my impersonations, personating all the film stars and the radio stars, and I was doing a bit of stand up comedy pinching jokes from the radio, and I was getting some valuable early experience.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wallace, he was. I mean, they were great fellows. And I think it was in retrospect, I realise, the greatest learning for life one could possibly have.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't know how you expect to get wrong because if you sit around, if you play your cards straight, we'll teach you how to get your effing hunched at him. We'll teach you about life. We'll teach you what it's all about. By the time you leave here you'll be a man I'm telling you”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually I discovered I actually got closer one of them to listen that they were using words as adjectives that up to then I'd only seen written on lavatory walls. And it was a sort of new living breathing experience. And somehow I did survive because maybe it's the one instinctive lesson of life that I've always known is that if you are yourself with people, you can make a relationship. And the fact that again humour was a great help, I was able to make them smile to take off the different formal or gaffers as we call them. And you have to remember if they were strange to me, I was absolute oddball to them, because in those days, coming from English public school, we did speak very much more like the at when I speak today. In fact, if you'll see me in some of the early films that I did and other things, not am I, but everybody else is talking very, very much like that. That was the way we talked, you know, the early forties. Monday”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A more I can't believe how I survived, actually. When I arrived the first day, I thought they were talking a different language. I pray till you see I am not.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is the kind of music that I love to relax to. And why I'm fascinated by musicians is the way they improvise on a musical instrument and create the most wonderful sound from it, and I'm carried away, and Oscar Peterson is a fine example of that night train.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I was a bit shocked and shell shocked in a way, and my uncle took a hand, and he pointed out that I was always very clever at making things and repairing things I had a lot of clocks I'd repaired and still have them. And he said, Why don't you become an engineer? So he got in touch with relations in Scotland, and they got in touch with friends, and they arranged for me to start an engineering apprenticeship on Clydebank with a firm called Drysdale's that made pumps and turbines.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a very sad thing which I don't understand because the war came, and I could have continued with the school being evacuated. But my pants took me away from the school, and then they suddenly said to me So what are you going to do? And that's when I brought it up again. I said, Well, you know, I want to be an actor. And my father was very succinct and said, well, we know all about that. But let's be serious.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't remember it. I think people didn't have the same understanding of children and Charles Psychology when I was young, and I think that my personality didn't gell very easily with my mother's. And while she obviously loved me, and I think I irritated her, and I was always fooling around and I was being told off for fooling around, and when you're often told you're a bit foolish, your defence is to act foolish. And if it gets a laugh as well, you go on doing it. So I think I gave the image of not being as bright as I perhaps was.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yesterday again your parents never came to the school. I don't know what it was I don't know whether they realized that I came acts my last year at the school just when the war started I was top of the class and there were some pretty bright people there.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I've only said that in retrospect, and if I don't know I've actually said those words, because it wouldn't be fair to my parents. But I think it's true that my mother was somewhat irritated. I think I minded her of her brother whom she didn't get on with, and when I show these signs of wanting to be a performer, she freaked out because she thought everybody in the show business must be debased and depraved and I was so weak and ineffectual, and the fact that I was dyslexic, which they didn't understand meant that I was very slow at writing, and also having a very strong and dominant older brother whom I looked up to and admired tremendously, maybe that inhibited me, and the stutter, maybe the stutter arose because of that.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you see, in those days there was what was called a servant class. We had a nanny, yes, we had a housemaid and a cook, and it wasn't sort of that you were particularly privileged that you could just afford it, and I had a lovely nanny whom I absolutely adored I kept in touch with her, and also I still keep in touch with her children, and she meant a great deal in my life.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, certainly he ministered to all the Roberts family. In fact, I believe he actually brought young Margaret Roberts into this work. Which not everybody's going to approve of that particular action.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was what they called upper middle class, and my father was a successful doctor, his lovely fellow, and I know his patients loved him very much. One of the things, of course, coming from Grantham, everybody when you mention, when I do it in my comedy show, people react because they know that Margaret Thatcher was also born in Grantham. She was in Margaret Roberts, and my father did have among his patients the Roberts family.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it's a great piece of music beautifully sung by a great interpreter singer Sachmo Louis Armstrong It's a wonderful world and when you get to my age you realise what a wonderful world it is”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I obviously do. You can find that role in life quite young, I did'cause my brother was very charismatic and dominant, and I had this insecurity from my stutter and dyslexia which I didn't know what it was. But I got my laughs by allowing myself to be put upon, and of course it came in very handy when I worked with Arthur Haynes because you can play for the comedy, play for the laughs, help the comedy get his laugh, and at the same time be a wonderful foil. My good friend Paul Merton said to me once,'cause I often throw lines out to him on just a minute,'cause I know the way his comic mind works, and you'll come back with a most amazing foot downs. And he said to me, he said, You really are a very good straight man, Nicholas.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still get great joy in performing. I think any actor, and certainly any comedian would say that the pleasure of getting an audience reaction and then uplift, especially when they laugh, nothing replaces it, and if you really love that, it inspires you to keep going, and that's probably why I'm still working at my advanced age.”
2007-11-04 · Desert Island Discs · Nicholas Parsons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source