Actors - Jimmy Edwards

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	Actors - Jimmy Edwards

Jimmy Edwards (23 March 1920 – 7 July 1988) was a British radio and television comedy actor, best known as Pa Glum in Take It From Here and as the headmaster 'Professor' James Edwards in Whack-O.

Born James Keith O'Neill in Barnes, London, Edwards served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. His Dakota was shot down at Arnhem in 1944, resulting in plastic surgery — he disguised it with the huge handlebar moustache that later became his trademark.

A feature of London theatre in the immediate post-War years, having previously performed in the Cambridge Footlights review, Edwards gained wider exposure as a radio performer, appearing in the long-running Take It From Here, where he developed the Glums alongside June Whitfield. Graduating to television, he appeared in Whack-O, the panel game Does the Team Think?, The Seven Faces of Jim, as well as guest slots in Make Room for Daddy and Sykes. Edwards also worked with Eric Sykes when he acted in the Sykes-penned short films The Plank
(1967) (alongside Tommy Cooper) and Rhubarb (1969) (which also featured Harry Secombe). Edwards and Sykes also toured in their theatrical farce Big Bad Mouse, which while keeping more or less to a script, gave them rein to ad lib, address the audience and so forth.

He published his autobiography, Six of the Best, in 1984, as a follow up to the earlier Take it From Me. Amongst his outside interests were brass bands and the Handlebar Club, in which all the members had such moustaches. Edwards was a lifelong Conservative and once even stood as a parliamentary candidate for them in Paddington (without success). He was also a devotee of fox hunting, a pursuit he followed at Rottingdean, near Brighton (where today a municipal bus bears his name). During the 1970s he also came out as a homosexual (and consequently found TV work harder to come by in what were more homophobic times). Edwards was a notable graduate of King's College School in Wimbledon, London.

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