This Is Your Life: Godfrey Winn

Godfrey WINN (1906-1971)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Godfrey Winn, journalist, author and broadcaster, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at BBC Broadcasting House in central London, having been led to believe he was there to make a documentary about his work on the radio programme Housewives' Choice.

Godfrey, who was born in Birmingham, began his career as a boy actor, appearing in several West End plays and repertory theatre in Liverpool before writing several novels and biographical works. As a journalist, he wrote popular columns for the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Express newspapers, becoming one of the country's most widely-read writers by the end of the 1930s.

He worked as a war correspondent during the Second World War before serving with the Royal Navy on HMS Ganges and HMS Cumberland. After the war, in addition to continuing to write for newspapers and magazines, he appeared on television and radio, regularly presenting the BBC Radio record request programme Housewives' Choice.

programme details...

Edition No: 162
Subject No: 163
Broadcast date: Mon 1 May 1961
Broadcast time: 7.30-8.00pm
Recorded: Wed 12 Apr 1961 8.30pm
Venue: BBC Television Theatre
Series: 6
Edition: 33

on the guest list...

Cecil Parker
Joan Penny
Annie Wallace
Hugh 'Ginger' Bailey
Wilfred Smith
Alan Bonner
Laurie O'Cleary
Maurice Levinson
Jimmy Hanley
Victor Burgess
Jean Burgess
Peter Burgess

production team...

Researcher: Shirley Macnab
Writer: John Sandilands
Director: Michael Goodwin
Producer: T Leslie Jackson

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

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Photographs of Godfrey Winn This Is Your Life

Godfrey Winn recalls his experience of This Is Your Life in his autobiography, The Infirm Glory...

In London, I doubt if in similar circumstances so imaginative a gesture would have been made; but it was typical of the goodwill that was shown to me, too, in a multitude of ways during the months that I spent as the most junior member of The Playhouse company, where most of the plum parts that year fell into the hands of an actor whose talent for light comedy was already manifesting itself. More than a quarter of a century later, I found myself, much to my astonishment, pinioned upon the stage of the Television Centre at Shepherd's Bush, being told by Eamonn Andrews, whose professional skill is concealed beneath the charm of his Irish accent, that This was about to be my Life; the first person from the parade of my past to greet me, and put me at my ease, was Cecil Parker, who had led the Company that year at Liverpool - and whose picture I am looking at at this moment, on my desk, in a composite group of us taken on an outing to Port Sunlight. Cecil, I see, is wearing a hat and I am not. It should have been the other way round.

Months of secret research and tapping of possible sources of information laboriously went to the planning of each of the This Is Your Life programmes. Many of the suggested names had to be discarded en route, because, despite all precautions, the victim became suspicious as to what was in the wind. Like other members of the public, I had occasionally wondered whether the whole structure wasn't a fake. Till it happened to me. Although elaborate plans had been laid weeks in advance to persuade me to accept an invitation for an editorial dinner in London that evening (for like all thorough detectives, the BBC had discovered that it is my habit to spend Mondays working peacefully in the country), they were taking no chances of a last-minute hiatus. Indeed, they took double care to ensure my presence in the metropolis by casually ringing me up on the Friday before, to invite me to record at Broadcasting House itself, at six o'clock that same Monday evening, a television plug for a very popular radio programme which I annually compère for a week. The fact that I had been chosen out of all those whose names are equally connected with the programme, was too much for the natural vanity of a performer. I swallowed the bait in one gulp. If there had been any mention of Shepherd's Bush on a Monday night, I might have been suspicious. As it was, I blithely turned up in Portland Place to do my piece, and hardly had I been briefed by my director in the BBC's own TV Studios, and was going through, as I thought, my first rehearsal, when Eamonn Andrews walked through the curtains like a cat burglar - except that physically he would be rather too big for such a rôle. Whereupon the open-mouthed bewilderment on my face was instantly captured by the cameras.

After that I was the fish on the hook, and there was an anti-climatic hour of waiting before we were due to continue the programme, whose prologue was now in the can, at Shepherd's Bush. Eamonn suggested that we should go into hiding in the flat where he lived at that time in Lancaster Gate. Here his delightful and attractive wife, Grainne, fed me with sandwiches to soothe my nerves, which centred chiefly round the knowledge that my brother, because of his austere legal position, viewed with instinctive horror the idea of any personal publicity. As soon as Eamonn was able to assure me that Rodger, at his own request, had been entirely left out of the programme, and for that evening I was the only Winn in our family, I felt I could face anything else.

Series 6 subjects