"If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it." -- Denis Norden
Denis Mostyn Norden CBE (born 6 February 1922) is a former English comedy writer and television presenter. After an early career working in cinemas, he began scriptwriting during World War II. From 1948 to 1959, he co-wrote the successful BBC Radio comedy programme Take It From Here with Frank Muir. Muir and Norden remained associated for more than 50 years: after they stopped collaborating on scripts, they appeared regularly together on radio panel programmes My Word! and My Music.
Norden wrote scripts for Hollywood movies. He also presented television programmes on ITV for many years, including the nostalgia quiz Looks Familiar and blooper shows It'll be Alright on the Night and Denis Norden's Laughter File. He retired in 2006.
"And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.""And when you're on your own there is that terrifying possibility that you may be the only person on the planet who thinks it's funny - and you have no way of finding out.""Everyone who appears in a scene gets paid.""Frank liked administrative work and was good at it.""I defy anyone to get a decision that quickly these days.""I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.""It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.""The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.""Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.""There's an unseen force which lets birds know when you've just washed your car."
Norden was born in Mare Street, Hackney, East London, and educated at the City of London School where he was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis. He "was considered to have a fine academic brain" and was well regarded by his peers.
Upon leaving school he worked as a stagehand, moved into cinema management by the age of 17 and organised variety shows. His writing career began in the Royal Air Force during World War II for troop shows following which, he wrote material for comedian Dick Bentley, before meeting Frank Muir, who wrote for Jimmy Edwards in 1947.
Their first joint venture was the radio show Take It From Here, which they scripted from 1948 to 1959. They went on to write many successful radio and television scripts, including Whack-O! (1956—60) and three series of Faces of Jim (1961—63), both as vehicles for Jimmy Edwards. They also wrote the satirical sketch Balham, Gateway to the South for the BBC Third Programme. The sketch, which had originally been broadcast in 1948 as part of a comedy series called The Third Division and which featured actor Robert Beatty, was later famously performed by Peter Sellers on his 1959 LP — The Best of Sellers. In 1964, their writing partnership broke up, as Muir moved into management with the BBC. Over the next several years, Norden, who had long had a fascination with Hollywood, wrote the scripts for several films, including Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell and The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom. While no longer writing with Muir, they regularly appeared together on panel shows My Word! (1956—90) and My Music (1966—93), first on radio then TV. Norden also hosted an ITV nostalgia quiz, Looks Familiar.
In 1965, Norden wrote, narrated and starred in a featurette jointly made by the James Bond producers and The Ford Motor Company. The colour short, entitled "A Child's Guide to Blowing up a Motor Car", went behind the scenes of an exploding car stunt being filmed for Thunderball. Norden takes a young relative on a day out to a movie set, where they meet several stars and production team members, but not Sean Connery. Lost for many years, it is now available on the 'Ultimate Edition' DVD of Thunderball, as released in late 2006.
Denis' daughter Maggie was a presenter on London's Capital Radio in its earlier days and she presented the Sunday afternoon programme "Hullabaloo".
Norden was also later well-known to television audiences for his ITV shows: Looks Familiar, It'll be Alright on the Night and Denis Norden's Laughter File.
It'll be Alright on the Night, first broadcast in 1977, consisted of out-takes from film and television linked by witty comments. Much of the material from the early episodes was used on Dick Clark's "Bloopers" specials which aired on NBC a few years later. A couple of mid-1980s editions featured several home video clips: with the increasing private ownership of domestic camcorders were spun off into the long-running You've Been Framed (1990-).
Denis Norden's Laughter File, first broadcast in 1992, showed spoof adverts, real foreign adverts, practical jokes, live television mistakes and other various 'oddities', which Norden said, "tickled our fancies, just when they needed tickling". These items included virtually everything discovered during research for material suitable for Alright on the Night that was not eligible for that show.
He announced his retirement from his two ongoing ITV shows It'll be Alright on the Night and Denis Norden's Laughter File on 21 April 2006 because of his age (84) and also because of poor health.
A special show was recorded on 14 May 2006 as a 'farewell tour' to all his shows over the years, called All the Best from Denis Norden, which was shown on 2 January 2007. As the show's closing credits were shown, the studio audience gave Norden a standing ovation, which was followed by Denis placing his trademark clipboard on his desk, which the camera then zoomed in on to as the credits ended. He has since been succeeded on It'll Be Alright on the Night by Griff Rhys Jones, as that show resumed in September 2008.
For years, he was resistant to producing an autobiography, claiming that much of his life and career had already been well covered by Frank Muir's A Kentish Lad and a book called The Bits Frank Left Out would be too brief. Nevertheless, in October 2008, a book containing a sequence of autobiographical sketches was published entitled Clips from a Life.
He continues to make occasional television and radio appearances. He contributed to a BBC Four season about the history of satire, and he appeared as a guest on The One Show in October 2008 to talk about his life and career as well as his book. He was interviewed in a one-off documentary Der Sommer 1939 ("The Summer of 1939"), which was broadcast on 12 August 2009 on the German television station Arte.
He and his wife Avril have a son, Nick, an architect and a daughter, Maggie, a radio personality and lecturer at the London College of Fashion.
