My Word!

My Word! was a radio panel show which premiered on the BBC Home Service on January 1, 1957. It was created by Edward J. Mason[?] and Tony Shryane[?], and featured comic writers Dennis Norden[?] and Frank Muir[?], more famous for the series Take It From Here. For decades it was also broadcast worldwide via BBC World Service shortwave.

Two teams (Muir and another versus Norden and another) would be asked to play a series of word games devised by Mason. The games would vary from simple quizzes to more challenging trials; each episode featured a final round in which Muir and Norden were each challenged to create a story that would end with a pun of a given phrase. (Many of the stories were later collected in a series of books.)

The host of the show was originally Jack Longland, who was succeeded by John Julius Norwich[?] and then Michael O'Donnell[?]. The two additional contestants were initially film critic E. Arnot Robertson[?] and journalist Nancy Spain[?]; later contestants included film critic and Greek scholar Dilys Powell, journalist Anne Scott-James[?], and writer and historian Antonia Fraser.

The show, which ended in 1990, is still rerun in the United States and Australia. A companion program, My Music, ran from 1967 to 1993.