The host of the show was originally the cricket broadcaster John Arlott, but he was soon replaced by Jack Longland, who spent over twenty years as chairman. Longland was succeeded by John Julius Norwich and finally Michael O'Donnell. Muir and Norden were always on opposing teams. Muir's partner was initially Isobel Barnett, but she was soon replaced with the film critic E. Arnot Robertson. On Robertson's death in 1961, the film critic and Greek scholar Dilys Powell took her place until the show finished, when she was aged 87. Norden's first partner was the journalist Nancy Spain; after her death in 1964 she was succeeded by journalist Anne Scott-James, and then in 1979 by writer and historian Antonia Fraser. Fraser took the chair for one season in the 1980s, when her place on the panel was taken by Irene Thomas. Guest panelists, substituting for regulars, included Alfred Marks, Barry Took, John Wells, and Katharine Whitehorn. After Edward J. Mason's death in 1971, Jack Longland, with the assistance of Peter Moore, took over responsibility for compiling most of the questions. After Longland's retirement, Moore became the sole question-setter. In 1980 Michael O'Donnell, who was already chairman of the programme, became the sole question-setter until the programme ended in 1988.
Format
The two teams faced questions devised by Mason, primarily word games and literary quizzes covering vocabulary, etymology, snippets of poetry, and the like. When stumped by a question, the contestants could be sure of receiving generous partial credit for a humorous answer of enough ingenuity. In the final round, each team was asked to give the origin of a famous phrase or quotation. In early shows, once the real answers were given, Muir and Norden were invited to explain the origin of the phrase less seriously, in the form of a feghoot. An early example was the quotation "Dead! And never called me mother!" from a stage adaptation of East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood, which became the exclamation of a youth coming out of a public telephone box which he had discovered to be out of order. From 1973, the first part of the round was dropped in favour of having the chairman simply announce the accepted origin of each phrase, thus opening up new fields of phrases that would have been too well known or too obscure to be posed as questions. In later series Muir and Norden chose their own phrases in advance of each programme, and their stories became longer and more convoluted. This became a popular segment of the quiz, and Muir and Norden later compiled five volumes of books containing some of the My Word! stories. Examples included Norden's explanation of how he worked his exit from the army with pedantically exact interpretations of his superior officers' orders, and Muir's account of his desperately scouring the contents of his neighbour's greenhouse, having bet him £50 that he could work them into a My Word! story. Another self-referential example described Norden and Muir's work together as "an intimate complicity for talking puns", parodying "an infinite capacity for taking pains", a way of describing genius. The theme music to My Word! was Alpine Pastures by Vivian Ellis.
Books
The published compilations of My Word! stories by Muir and Norden were:
