The Complete and Utter "My Word!" Collection [antikvár]

IntroductionReaders who have never heard the radio programme in which these stories were first brought forth are due a word of explanation.'My Word!' was devised by Tony Shryane and Edward J. Mason in 1956. It is a literary quiz in which the contestants, instead of treating the subject with the usual po-faced reverence, are encouraged to indulge in what Robert Frost called 'perhapsing around'.For one of the questions on the first show the two male contestants were each given a quotation and asked to explain when, where and by whom the phrase was first used. The quotations were 'Let not poor Nellie starve', and 'Dead, dead and never called me Mother!'. As the first one was too easy, and the second one was a bit difficult to identify as to names and dates, we each invented our answers: (i) 'It was first said by the chef at the Savoy when, late at night and short of puddings, he poured things over a peach, hastily christened it "Peach Melba", and sent it out to a famished Dame Nellie Melba'; (2) 'It was first said by a lad reeling away from a vandalised phone-box after failing to telephone his parent.'This round became a permanent part of the show and, as the years rolled by, the short explanations grew longer, wilder and more wide-ranging, while the puns at the end - apart from giving pleasure to those listeners who guessed them before wc came to them - became less important and more desperate.And so for a great many years now we have been faced each week with the agony of having to knock out a reasonably coherent story based upon a given quotation - however unpromising the quotation's syllables appeared at first sight.This volume is a fmal medley of the squeaks produced by the pips being thus squeezed.F.M. and D.N.