Music Career
In 1966 Stilgoe played the role of Benjamin in the West End musical Jorrocks. He made his name on the BBC television teatime programme Nationwide, followed by Esther Rantzen's That's Life!, a light-hearted consumer affairs programme for which he wrote comic songs satirising various minor domestic misfortunes, often to the tune of Oh! Mr Porter. His ability to write a song from almost any source material and at prodigious speed is part of his cabaret act, which includes such diverse gems as singing the instructions from a Swedish payphone; a pastiche of the King's Singers listing all the kings and queens of England in which he sings all four parts; and composing a song in the interval from a series of words and musical notes called out by the audience. He has also written and presented numerous BBC radio programmes, including Hamburger Weekend, Used Notes, Stilgoe's Around, Maestro and Richard Stilgoe's Traffic Jam Show on BBC Radio 4.
Well known for his wordplay, Stilgoe is a great fan of anagrams and has appeared over two hundred times on the cult daytime TV quiz show Countdown. He once proudly announced on TV that an anagram of his name is Giscard O'Hitler. Stilgoe also hosted quiz shows, including The Year in Question on Radio 4, Finders Keepers (1981–1985), and Scoop (1981–1982). Stilgoe also wrote a famous 45-minute poem, "Who Pays the Piper?", which humorously outlines the history of music from Pan to the modern day, interspersed with famous classical music with humorously re-written lyrics. He displayed his sense of wordplay fun during a choir rehearsal of the John Barnard and Paul Wigmore carol "So Gentle the Donkey". As the music was handed to him he glanced at the title and, turning to the choir said, "'Funny name for a donkey!" He also appeared on satirical BBC TV show of the 1980s entitled A Kick Up The Eighties'.
As well as being a comic, Stilgoe is a musician, writing lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express and collaborating with Charles Hart on the lyrics to The Phantom of the Opera and writing two musicals for schools, Bodywork and Brilliant the Dinosaur. Stilgoe gave away all his royalties for his work as lyricist on Starlight Express to a village in India. Such was the musical's success that for some years these donations were exceeding 500 Pounds a day. He has appeared on the Royal Variety Performance and presented the Schools Proms for over 20 years, and has toured extensively both solo and with Peter Skellern.
In a BBC radio interview he revealed that he was the current owner of the late Winifred Atwell's "other" piano, the one which she used for her famous honky-tonk performances and recordings.
In 1980 he wrote two Christmas themed songs, "Christmas Bells" and "Imitation Myrrh", which he sang with Broom Leys Junior School Choir, from Coalville in North West Leicestershire. The songs were released as a single vinyl record at Christmas throughout the county of Leicestershire to raise money for the Leicestershire Arts and Music Association (LAMA) and reached Number 1 throughout the county. These two, along with various other Christmas pieces of his composition, also appeared in The Truth about Christmas – or Gold, Frankenstein and Merv – a one-off television programme in 1984, performed again by both Stilgoe and children from the Broom Leys Junior School Choir.
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