The Walpole Orange

Captivating ... Muir has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and a wonderful eye for the comic situation.

Fans will recognise his exuberant wit in this light-hearted romp with a P.G. Wodehouse flavour.

Frank Muir lived in Surrey with his wife Polly for many years. He died in 1998.

William Grundwick has a problem. As secretary of the Walpole Club he's duty-bound to arrange whatever function the Events Committee decides is appropriate to celebrate the Club's 250th birthday. It's just that what they have decided upon seems to William almost wholly inappropriate; worse still he's not sure he knows precisely what form such a function should take. And if that isn't bad enough, the whole business is supposed to be a deep secret, so he can't even discuss it with his lovely young wife Milly. Milly has her own problems. Is she going off William? His secretiveness is certainly disturbing. And now the Baroque Trio she runs has lost its viola and continuo player - Catriona has decamped to Los Angeles with a session guitarist called Trev. 
 
Torn between the demands of the Events Committee, Milly, and an accountant in a diaphanous sari, spied on by a treacherous underporter with a hotline to the tabloids and pressurized by the chairperson of the Golden Horn Ladies Belly-Dancing Ensemble, Catford, the harrassed William has some appallingly difficult decisions to make. 
 
The Walpole Orange, astonishingly, is Frank Muir's first novel. As one might expect from Britain's leading humorist, it is highly imaginative, wickedly witty and utterly irresistible.

Frank Muir

Forget the Booker Prize shortlist. Here is something a lot more enjoyable

A treasure trove of funny stories ... a warm, witty, and extremely well-written book

Frank Muir is not just very funny. He is also a scholar with an enormous fund of curious learning. His intelligence, taste and genius with the English language is all his own

Warmly wise autobiography, as good as anything he has written, bracingly amusing, nostalgic and full of shrewd commonsense

This delightful memoir is guaranteed to put a smile on your face

Warmth of heart, love of language, sense of mischief ... he makes you rock with laughter

For more than twenty-five years Frank Muir, in partnership with Denis Norden, produced some of the most sparkling and original comedy ever written for radio and television. On programmes such as My Word! and My Music his distinctive voice became familiar to millions as he displayed an astonishingly well-stocked mind and a genius for ad libbing and outrageous puns. Later, working at the BBC and then at London Weekend Television, he produced some of the best television comedy of the 1960s and 70s. He has written highly successful books for children, and two bestselling anthologies of humour. 
 
Frank Muir recalls, in glorious detail, a happy 1920s childhood in the seaside town of Ramsgate, where he was born in his grandmother's pub in Broadstairs, and in London, where he attended an inexpensive but excellent school of a kind no longer to be found. He remembers his very first joke at the age of six, when he knew that his destiny was to make people laugh. He also knew from an early age that he wanted to write, but it took a childhood illness for him to discover that humour and writing could be combined. The death of his father forced him to leave school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory making carbon paper. Then, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the RAF as an air photographer and his memories of the war years, as might be imagined, are engagingly different from the usual kind. It was during those years, with their rich fund of comic material, that he began his career as scriptwriter and performer. At his demob in 1945 he moved naturally to London and the Windmill Theatre, that remarkable breeding ground of talent where new comedians like Jimmy Edwards and Alfred Marks vied with nude girls for the attention of the audience. In story after story he recalls the lost world of London in the 1940s and early 50s, when the laughter and creative ideas seemed to explode out of post-war shabbiness and austerity. Then came the BBC, the legendary partnership with Denis Norden, and half a century of fulfilling the boyhood ambition of that Kentish lad. 'All I ever wanted to do was to write and amuse people.'

Kentish Lad, A

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Praise for Kentish Lad, A

Forget the Booker Prize shortlist. Here is something a lot more enjoyable

A treasure trove of funny stories ... a warm, witty, and extremely well-written book

Frank Muir is not just very funny. He is also a scholar with an enormous fund of curious learning. His intelligence, taste and genius with the English language is all his own

Forget the Booker Prize shortlist. Here is something a lot more enjoyable

A treasure trove of funny stories ... a warm, witty, and extremely well-written book

Frank Muir is not just very funny. He is also a scholar with an enormous fund of curious learning. His intelligence, taste and genius with the English language is all his own

Forget the Booker Prize shortlist. Here is something a lot more enjoyable

A treasure trove of funny stories ... a warm, witty, and extremely well-written book

Frank Muir is not just very funny. He is also a scholar with an enormous fund of curious learning. His intelligence, taste and genius with the English language is all his own

Books by Frank Muir

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