Richard Dimbleby’s other great radio programme was Twenty Questions, a game in which he could use his very quick intelligence to amuse a huge mass audience. He always recognised that broadcasts must be entertaining and he never lost his flair for showmanship. He stayed on Twenty Questions for eighteen years, with Gilbert Harding and then Kenneth Horne as chairmen, and Anona Winn, Joy Adamson and Jack Train as the other regular members of the team. Mike Meehan, for long the producer of Twenty Questions, recalls:
I remember one evening, while we waited for the programme to start, Jack Train, a past master in story telling, turned to Richard and said, ‘I don’t know whether I’ve told you this one before.’ ‘Is it funny?’ asked Richard. ‘Yes,’ replied Jack. “Then,’ retorted Richard, ‘I haven’t heard it!’
During one programme, when the chairman was the late Gilbert Harding, Richard sat quietly, while the other members of the team talked over one another in trying to ‘find’ the object. Gilbert, annoyed by their chatter, called a halt, turned to Richard and said, ‘You’re very quiet, Richard.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Richard, ‘I’m just waiting for the others to wear themselves out.’
Once when we were discussing the different ways the team members played Twenty Questions, Anona Winn confessed to hating ‘abstracts’ because, she said, ‘I have a photographic mind, and like to snatch a clue that flashes a picture of something tangible in my mind’s eye.’ Later that evening her ‘solo’ was ‘The missing arms of Venus’. She, as usual in her solos, got it eventually. Richard promptly asked, ‘Well, what did your mind’s eye see then? Venus or her arms?’
And Anona Winn herself adds:
I remember the evening when Richard’s ‘solo’ was ‘a weighing machine’. I think he had an idea of this, early in his questioning, but he went on in a mischievous vein with: ‘Is it used by men and women?’ ‘Is it publicly owned as well as privately?’ ‘Does one pay to use it?’ ‘How much?’
When the answer to his last question turned out to be ‘a penny’, Richard sighed an enormous sad sigh and said, ‘Ah well, I’ve enjoyed the years I’ve had with the BBC.’
It got an enormous laugh from the audience, who had been rocking all through the questioning.
Kenneth Horne writes:
We all had tremendous admiration for him. He was unselfish to a degree, especially in the actual game of Twenty Questions. But what impressed me was the fact that he never tried to show anyone up. Many a time I have given an answer which he knew to be wrong, but he thought it a poor show to correct ‘The Chairman’.
During the three or four years that we knew he was ill (he told us), he always appeared in the best of spirits, and indeed he looked well too.
Never pompous – never.
Norman Hackforth, for many years the ‘Mystery Voice’ of Twenty Questions, became one of Richard Dimbleby’s closest friends, and took his place in the team for the 1965 series. He recalls an incident which had nothing to do with the panel game:
In January 1955 I was in Jamaica, playing an engagement at a hotel on the north shore. My wife was at that moment on the high seas, on a small banana boat on her way to join me.
At 7 o’clock one morning my telephone rang, and a voice asked if I would be ready at eight o’clock to take a call from London from Mr Richard Dimbleby.
I told them I would, and then proceeded to work myself into a fever of anxiety, wondering why on earth Richard should be telephoning me all the way from London. By 7.30 I was firmly convinced that something ghastly had happened to Pamela, and that Richard, my loyal friend, had said: ‘Leave it to me. I will break the news to him.’ The minutes dragged by and at last, at nearly 8.15, the phone rang again.
‘Hackett?’ a cheerful and familiar voice enquired, ‘this is Dimbleby.’ ‘Yes, Dick,’ I replied. ‘What has happened? Where are you?’ ‘Oh, I’m at London Airport, covering the departure of Princess Margaret to Jamaica, for television. I just thought it would be a good idea to find out from you how the weather is there.’
I looked out of the window, and burst out laughing. ‘If you really want to know,’ I said, ‘it’s – hissing with rain!’ And it was, too!
Just another instance of the master’s passion for authentic detail.
Alongside Twenty Questions and Down Your Way Dimbleby was doing more and more work for the expanding television service. He turned his versatile hand to all kinds of broadcasts commentaries on the Lord Mayor’s Show and the Boat Race, ‘Other People’s Jobs’, visits to the Zoo and to many other parts of ‘London Town’ or places ‘About Britain’. Those were the days before either a daily television news service or Panorama.