Mark Campbell blows cobwebs off an unpublished interview with the late, great comedian and host of Just a Minute, Nicholas Parsons

Back in the 90s, I worked for the long-gone London bookshop chain Books Etc. The perks of the job included book launches, film previews and social gatherings (with plentiful food and drink thrown in). One such gathering was a booksellers’ quiz night for Reader’s Digest hosted by the late, great Nicholas Parsons (1923-2020).

I remember thinking at the time that he seemed ageless. Even up close, he looked identical to how he’d appeared in The Arthur Haynes Show forty years earlier. After the quiz, I asked if I could interview him, and he seemed quite amenable to the idea. Professional to the core, he’d taken the quiz night very seriously - even to the point of publicly taking the question-setters to task for an apparently incorrect answer - and he applied the same seriousness to the interview that follows.

Apart from briefly appearing online at the beginning of the noughties on a website I used to run, where it was read by four people and a cat, this interview has never properly seen the light of day before. So, without hesitation, repetition or deviation, here is the much-missed Nicholas Parsons in his own words…

Nicholas at the BBC microphone, and with his TV chum Arthur Haynes

Does compering give you a buzz?

Well, I enjoy any work I do. I’m a professional and I do lots of different things. I’m an actor, stand-up comedian, after dinner speaker, game show host - I do them all. Some are more enjoyable than others, but any job that goes well, you enjoy. You get a feeling of satisfaction, which comes to anybody doing their job well, whatever their profession. So it’s sort of demanding on one’s experience and technical ability. You don’t bring an awful lot of talent into it, you bring technical skill and experience which you hone over the years.