Don't Say a Word...

Or: Who’s Afraid of Ronan O’Casey?

Who? Who indeed. Who even remembers him? It’s not a name that might be instantly familiar, but bear with me. Ronan O’Casey was a Canadian actor/producer who enjoyed a long and varied career in film, television and in the theatre. One of his more ‘interesting’ screen roles was that of the corpse in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Yes, really. A minor part in the finished movie, it would appear that considerably more footage was originally planned, elaborating on his character’s affair with the woman, Jane, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Although scripted, none of this additional footage was shot, after the production was shut down prematurely by producer Carlo Ponti. O’Casey’s only scenes were the candid moments in the park glimpsed at a distance by David Hemmings, his only close-up, a brief cutaway shot of the dead body…

Elsewhere on the big screen, O’Casey’s roles were mostly of the minor supporting variety, but on television he was rather more visible, securing a key role in ITV’s early comedy series The Larkins, followed a few years later by a stint as host of two television gameshows. Which brings us back to our title…

Don’t Say a Word was a short-lived charades-based gameshow, running for just two seasons in 1963 and 1964, with a format similar to the later and better-remembered Give Us a Clue. There’s very little information available about the series, with only odd references online, and the most I’ve been able to locate comes from editions of the TVTimes.

The series began on Thursday, 13^th June 1963, and occupied the 7.00pm slot which had become an established home for half-hour gameshows (Take Your Pick, Double Your Money and others of similar ilk). The format appears to have involved chairman O’Casey miming ‘memorable’ phrases which two celebrity teams then had to guess, with none of the participants able to utter a word during the proceedings. The opposing teams comprised Jill Browne, Harry Fowler and Libby Morris on one side, versus Kenneth Connor, Glen Mason and Una Stubbs on the other. And Stubbs, of course, provides a link with the show’s later, 1970s incarnation. The TV Times listing also promised the inclusion of ‘two special guests.’

My earliest television memories are from 1963 and ‘64. I’m not sure in which year I first encountered it, but I certainly saw Don’t Say a Word, and retained a memory of it for years after. The reason it remained in my memory was quite basic. I was afraid of Ronan O’Casey. I had no idea of his name, but I vividly remembered the host of the programme looking directly into camera and saying – quite pointedly – ‘Don’t say a word!’ His mugging and mute miming no doubt also contributed to his ‘scariness’, but I think my reaction had more to do with the way he seemed to directly address the viewer. A TV host saying, into camera, ‘Don’t say a word’ probably came across as an admonishing adult, a schoolmaster figure, perhaps (and I hadn’t even started school!)

Viewers were invited to send in their own suggested phrases to stump the teams, and this may well explain the reason why O’Casey spoke so directly into camera. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone address the viewer in this way before, and I think I must have found it somewhat intimidating. Either way, for some reason or other, I took an almost instant dislike to Ronan O’Casey, who with his prematurely greying hair (a trait of his Irish lineage) looked quite distinctive on the black and white screen. I’m pretty sure that I remember wanting to leave the room whenever the programme came on. Fortunately for me, 1964 was the last season of Don’t Say a Word, although O’Casey returned the following year fronting a ‘guess the lyrics’ gameshow called Sing a Song of Sixpence (the title giving some idea of the kind of prize money offered by the average ITV quiz in those days). I remained utterly oblivious to this latter outing until I unearthed it while trawling TVTimes listings for this article. But the accompanying photo of O’Casey and co-host Anne Nightingale rang a long-silenced Pavlovian bell. This is how he looked as the host of Don’t Say a Word.

O'Casey as host of ITV's Sing a Song of Sixpence (1965) with co-host Anne Nightingale (and yes, I believe it is the same Annie Nightingale who later became a Radio One DJ)

It’s highly unlikely that anything survives of either series. O’Casey himself died as recently as 2012, but had been more or less retired from showbusiness since the early ’80s. DSAW gets a mention in his Wikipedia entry, and the Guardian obituary penned by his son, but otherwise it remains an obscurity, utterly obliterated by the passage of time. In fact, I mention it only because it illustrates a facet of memory: we don’t necessarily remember the good things from childhood, and the commonplace often doesn’t even register. But anything vaguely disturbing or scary is retained forever. Perverse, but true. I have no doubt that O’Casey was a genial, avuncular host, but to a three-year-old kid, unable to comprehend what was going on, both he and the programme were bewildering and unsettling. I didn’t like being confused by what I saw, and the sight of silent mumming on the TV screen was probably a bit too much to take, even in the seemingly benign context of a gameshow.

My memory of Don’t Say a Word is dredged from the deepest recesses of my recollection, but it belongs with a ‘spike’ of similar TV-related memories from around the same time: Will Hutchins as Sugarfoot on Saturday evenings (followed by the debut of Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks); The Littlest Hobo and No Time for Sergeants on Sunday teatime; Space Patrol and Bob Monkhouse with his old movies (also on Sundays); and my dad talking tantalisingly about a cool-sounding TV series called ‘The Aeroplane Story’ that was on too late for me to see (in fact he meant ITV’s boardroom drama The Plane Makers). All this and Alec Douglas-Home on the BBC news (he had just taken over from Harold Macmillan as Tory Party Leader and Prime Minister).

These were glimpses of an adult world that felt sophisticated and out of reach. I knew the likes of The Saint and Danger Man, but only from snatches of their opening titles and pre-credits. And TV coverage was also beginning to make me aware of events like the 1964 Olympics, staged in Tokyo. There was a wider world out there, which television was slowly revealing. Then as now, some of that world was intriguing, some of it incomprehensible, and some of it scary – for whatever reason. I wonder how many of today’s three-year-olds stare unknowingly at the television screen and get that same scary feeling from the sight of Donald Trump?