Giscard O'Hitler - Anagram Man and Witty Lyricist

Back in the 1970s, most beards you saw on the telly belonged mainly to hippies or long-haired pop stars like Roy Wood. They didn’t often feature on the faces of reporters on current affairs programmes. Enter Richard Stilgoe. In our household, after the early BBC news bulletin we usually watched Nationwide over tea (or dinner, if you were posh). It was about fifty minutes long, incorporating the regional news ‘opt-outs’ followed by a mix of London studio and filmed segments from across the whole country. Think Inside Out meets The One Show.

Many of these items were light in nature, which appealed to my much younger self. Reporters like Bernard Falk and Martin Young seemed to specialise in such cheery trivia, but Richard Stilgoe added an extra dimension. It wasn’t just the hairy chin, although he used it to amusing vox-pop effect in 1974, the year of the beard.  In parallel with Esther Rantzen’s Saturday night show That’s Life, to which he also contributed, the Cambridge-educated man from Camberley took on Nationwide’s  regular consumer slot which I think became known as ‘Pigeonhole’, later ‘Watchdog’.

The other major string to his bow was a talent for humorous songs, which he often used to illustrate the featured topic to great effect. His ‘Statutory Right of Entry to Your House’ ditty became the stuff of BBC legend. Apparently in the early Sixties he had been the lead singer of a Liverpool beat group, performing at the Cavern Club. In one of those weird showbiz coincidences, his band-mates included his future Nationwide colleague Bernard Falk!

Successful writer-performers of humorous songs are thin on the ground. Benny Hill, Richard Digance, Tim Minchin and Victoria Wood spring to mind, while Bill Bailey brilliantly weaves music throughout his stand-up comedy routines. However, blending funny, satirical lyrics with original music for consumer programmes was in the Seventies pretty much Stilgoe’s domain.

Yet he wasn’t only about the music. Whether at the piano, in the studio or on the road, a knowing half-smile was never far from Stilgoe’s face on screen, and yet you could trust him. In 1977 he fronted a series of short films for Nationwide about DIY called, I think, ‘Odd-Jobbing with Stilgoe’. If memory serves, they were designed to give the layman confidence to have a go at more challenging tasks around the house himself (and in those days it probably wasn’t herself). As a totally useless teenager, I was quite interested and entertained but to this day I’ve never attempted to replace a window. I have changed a plug, though.

My 1979 diary records that I watched his eponymous BBC show but I can’t honestly remember what he did in it.  I probably didn’t watch the Beeb’s breakfast election results show in the same year but it could have been simply distilled into just two minutes of our Richard’s witty ditty which he must have written that morning. It wasn’t especially political but, with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing government and consequent industrial meltdown, the UK was crying out for genuine satire.

I’m not sure that BBC Scotland’s A Kick Up the Eighties was it, but as a comedy sketch show it was quite entertaining. Looking back it featured an impressive line-up of young talent, including Tracey Ullman, Robbie Coltrane and Rik Mayall (as Kevin Turvey) while Richard Stilgoe contributed humorous topical links. I must admit they jarred a bit with the sketches and he was dropped from subsequent series.

Indeed I don’t recall seeing him on television again, barring the occasional guest spot. I was too old to watch his children’s game show Finders Keepers in ’84. I remember being aware of his penchant for word puzzles. I was nowhere in his league but I could appreciate his brilliance at anagrams. I think he published a book of them.

What I didn’t expect was Stilgoe’s role in the success of musical ‘Starlight Express’. As lyricist he must have hoovered up awards and royalties and Andrew Lloyd Webber eventually drafted him in for ‘Phantom of the Opera’. Charles Hart may have re-written much of the ‘book’ but these supremely profitable shows must have set him up financially for life.

However, Richard must be as nice as he looks because he gave most of his earnings to charitable foundations at home and in India. I could even forgive his presidency of the hated Surrey county cricket club for that prodigious philanthropy, and his knighthood was well deserved. He wasn’t the funniest comedian, most credible investigative journalist or the greatest musician but as a witty wordsmith and entertaining presenter in the 1970s he had no peers.