Frank Muir - Later Career

Later Career

In 1954 Muir founded an amateur dramatic society, "Thorpe Players", in the village of Thorpe, Surrey where he lived for many years. He was a writer and presenter on many shows, including the 1960s satire programmes That Was The Week That Was and The Frost Report. He was well known to television audiences as a team captain on the long-running BBC2 series Call My Bluff, and did voice-overs for advertisements, including Cadbury's Fruit & Nut chocolate ("Everyone's a Fruit and Nut case"), Batchelors' Savoury Rice ("Every grain will drive them insane!"), a coffee advert in which he used the phrase "impending doom", and Unigate milk Humphreys.

In the 1960s Muir was Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC and in 1969 joined London Weekend Television as Head of Entertainment.

His pets, which prompted many an anecdote on My Word!, included Afghan hounds and Burmese cats. The hounds were also the inspiration for a series of picture books about an accident-prone Afghan puppy called "What-a-Mess".

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.") For example, "Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore" Robert Morley. "Education, n, That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary. The quotes are interspersed with linking comments by Muir.

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. Muir published books based on these series. Muir's magnum opus, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, which again uses a similar format with more scholarly aspirations, was published in 1990.

In 1992, for Channel 4, he was host of TV Heaven, a season of evenings dedicated to television programmes from individual years.

In 1997, Muir published a well-received autobiography, A Kentish Lad. BBC Radio declined to serialize it as a reading.

Muir died in 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.