Christopher Nicholas Parsons (10 October 1923 – 28 January 2020) was an English actor, straight man and radio and television presenter. He was the long-running presenter of the comedy radio show Just a Minute and hosted the game show Sale of the Century during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Parsons was born and grew up in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and was educated at St Paul's School, London. He became a full-time actor following the Second World War and began appearing in various theatre, film and television roles, including support to Arthur Haynes as his straight man. He began presenting Just a Minute in 1967 and never missed a show until 2018. In addition to his well-known roles on this and Sale of the Century, he appeared as a guest on other television shows, including Doctor Who and Have I Got News for You.
Christopher Nicholas Parsons was born on 10 October 1923 at 1 Castlegate, Grantham, Lincolnshire; he was the middle child of the family, having an older brother and a younger sister. His father, Paul, was a general practitioner whose patients included the family of Margaret Thatcher; claims that he delivered her are apocryphal. His mother, Nell, née Maggs, was a nurse before her marriage.
Parsons was born left-handed but was made to write with his right hand. As a child, he had a stutter, which he managed to control as he grew older, and was slow to learn owing to dyslexia. He also suffered from migraines, but nevertheless excelled at school.
After education at Colet Court and St Paul's School in Barnes, London, Parsons' initial career plan was to become an actor. However, his parents believed that a career in engineering would be better, as he had repaired grandfather clocks as a young man and was creative with his hands. While at school, he was best friends with John Treacher who later joined the Royal Navy and rose to become Commander-in-Chief Fleet. Parsons' nickname at school was "Shirley" after Shirley Temple.
After he had left school, his family contacted relatives in Scotland, who arranged a job for him in Clydebank near Glasgow, where he spent five years employed as an engineering apprentice at Drysdales, a maker of marine pumps. Parsons was 16 when his parents sent him from his relatively privileged home in London to the industrially hardened city of Glasgow. Sixty years later, in 2010, he recorded a nostalgic radio programme, titled Doon the Watta, about his time as an apprentice, highlighting his posh middle-class accent amidst the Glasgow working-class dialect. While there, he also spent two six-month periods studying engineering at the University of Glasgow. He never graduated, but finished his apprenticeship and gained sufficient qualifications to become a mechanical engineer. He was offered a posting in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, but he did not join the service after falling seriously ill with pleurisy. He spent five months in hospital and at one point his survival chances were rated only 50-50.
Parsons started his career while training as an engineering apprentice; he was discovered by Canadian impresario Carroll Levis, and appeared in his radio show.
At the end of the Second World War, Parsons became a full-time professional actor. He made his stage debut in the West End as Kiwi in The Hasty Heart at the Aldwych Theatre in 1945 which ran for over a year, then played the lead in a tour of Arsenic and Old Lace. He made his film debut in Master of Bankdam in 1947 and continued his stage career, with two years in repertory at Bromley, and later, Windsor and Maidstone. In 1952, he became a resident comedian at the Windmill Theatre, performing regular nights of stand-up comedy to packed houses.
He starred in the West End show Boeing-Boeing and other West End productions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared in many supporting roles in British films. In the late 1960s, he portrayed David Courtney in the American sitcom The Ugliest Girl in Town.
In the 1950s, Parsons provided the non-singing voice of Tex Tucker in the children's TV puppet series Four Feather Falls, having put himself forward for the job at the suggestion of his first wife, actress and voiceover artiste Denise Bryer, who was in the show. During the late 1960s, he created and presented a satirical programme on BBC Radio 4 called Listen to This Space, which by the standards of its time was very avant-garde, and he received the Radio Personality of the Year Award for his work on this programme in 1967.
Parsons became known to TV audiences in the 1950s and 1960s as the straight man to comedian Arthur Haynes for ten years; the partnership broke up at Haynes' request. They had a successful season at the London Palladium in 1963, and shortly before the split appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States, although Parsons was not credited. Subsequently, Parsons returned to the stage, before becoming a regular on The Benny Hill Show from 1968 to 1971.
After Haynes died, Parsons appeared as a personality in his own right on television, including in the long-running Anglia Television quiz show Sale of the Century, broadcast weekly from 1971 to 1983. In 1983 Hill wrote and performed in the sketch "Sale of the Half Century", with himself cast as Parsons.
Parsons was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1978 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews.
Parsons was the host of the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel game Just a Minute from its first broadcast on 22 December 1967.
Although there were a number of early episodes when he relinquished the chair and was a panellist, Parsons never missed an episode until 2018, when regular panellist Gyles Brandreth stood in for him for two episodes that were recorded in April and broadcast in June, due to a bout of illness: Parsons was then 94 years old. Brandreth again stood in the following year for two shows recorded at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Just a Minute continued to be transmitted with Parsons as host until his last show on 23 September 2019. After Parsons' death there were several guest hosts until a new permanent host Sue Perkins took over from 2021.
In 1988, Parsons appeared as himself in The Comic Strip episode "Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door", alongside Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson. The following year, he guest-starred in Doctor Who, playing Reverend Wainwright in the Seventh Doctor serial The Curse of Fenric.
Parsons featured in the original London cast of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods at the Phoenix Theatre in 1990 as the Narrator. In 1991, he appeared as the Mayor in the BBC's children's series Bodger & Badger. This was followed by an appearance in the fourth and final series of the UK TV show Cluedo as Reverend Green in 1993.