Richard Bernard Murdoch (6 April 1907 – 9 October 1990) was an English actor and entertainer.
After early professional experience in the chorus in musical comedy, Murdoch quickly moved on to increasingly prominent roles in musical comedy and revue in the West End and on tour. He made his first radio broadcast for the BBC in 1932 and in 1937 and 1938 he featured in early television broadcasts.
He came to national fame when cast with the comedian Arthur Askey in the radio show Band Waggon in 1938. Their contrasting styles appealed to the public and they took a version of the show on tour to theatres around the country and made a film adaptation of it. Serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Murdoch met a fellow officer, Kenneth Horne, and together they conceived, wrote and starred in the radio series Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, which ran from 1944 to 1954. Murdoch's last long-running radio programmes were The Men from the Ministry (1962–1977) in which he played a well-meaning but disaster-prone civil servant, and Many a Slip, a panel game that combined humour and erudition, in which he appeared from 1964 to 1973.
Murdoch appeared on air and on stage in Australia, Canada and South Africa, and continued acting and broadcasting into his eighties.
Life and career
Early years
Murdoch was born on 6 April 1907 at his family's home in Keston, Kent, the only son of Bernard Murdoch, a tea merchant, and his wife, Amy Florence, daughter of the Ven Avison Terry Scott, archdeacon of Tunbridge Wells. He was educated at Charterhouse School in Surrey, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree. His biographer Barry Took comments that Murdoch's appetite for a career in show business was "whetted by success with the Cambridge Footlights". He remained in the show when it opened in the West End in May of that year. He graduated from the chorus to a supporting role in a tour of Oh! Letty, a "musical farce" in which he was praised by Neville Cardus for "a stretch of distinguished dancing". In 1932 he married Peggy, daughter of William Rawlings, solicitor. They had one son and two daughters. and the lead in a 1936 tour of Gay Divorce in the part played in New York and London by Fred Astaire.
The BBC transmitted a live radio relay of Stand up and Sing in April 1932, and Murdoch was in another such relay in 1934 in an entertainment called Bubbles. His first studio work for the corporation was in 1936 in a radio show called Tunes of the Town, and during 1937 and early 1938 he took part in five broadcasts by the fledgling BBC Television service, including an adaptation of Noël Coward's one-act comedy with music, Red Peppers in which he played the Coward role.
Band Waggon and Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh
In 1938 the BBC teamed Murdoch with Arthur Askey in the radio series Band Waggon, where they were soon billed as "Richard ('Stinker') Murdoch and "'Big-hearted' Arthur Askey". The smooth West End style of Murdoch contrasted with the down-to-earth humour of Askey, whose background was in seaside concert parties. Their main slot in the weekly show took up only about ten minutes, but caught the public imagination. They were depicted as occupying a flat on top of Broadcasting House. Took comments that their humour was a forerunner of much radio comedy to come: