From David Nobbs's autobio:

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[A friend of Nobbs's] wore a yarmulke jauntily, as if it were a yachting cap, and when he walked he bounced. He looked like a cross between Mendelssohn and Piglet.

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When somebody told Peter Cook that he was writing a novel, Peter replied, "Really? Neither am I."

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[Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.] laughed at my jokes, and unless he was a very good actor his laughter was genuine--but he was a very good actor, so I'll never know.

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There was... an elderly lady called Della who was the Marylebone Correspondent and wrote her stories on lavatory paper.

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[Nobbs wrote] a monologue that began, "How do? My name is God, and I'm here tonight because I'm omnipresent."

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[On the writing team observing David Frost's programmes in real time from the "hospitality room"]

Ian Davidson... claimed that there was an embarrassment order in which people would leave the room, like a pecking order in hens, when David was being particularly shameless.

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David would come up to us and ask our opinion on the show and none of us would admit that we spent most of our time in the corridor. We didn't need to as these inquests were not thorough. The conversation would go:

David: "Super show?"

Us: "Super."

David: "Super."

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[Re. a "message" play that ended with the actors walking into the audience with paper bags on their heads--a gimmick that did not garner the audience response the director had counted on]

I was sorry for the actors, who escaped having egg on their faces only by having paper bags on their faces.

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[More Frostiana, this time from an emergency meeting at a time of staleness in the shows]

There was no doubt that it was a crisis meeting, but it was never called a crisis meeting.... David came in, sat down, looked at us all gravely, even sorrowfully, and said, "Thank you all for some absolutely super shows. We're meeting today to consider how we can make them even more absolutely super still."

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The reviews [of Lance At Large] were actually not too bad, but the public can be very blunt about TV, as if it's their property because it comes into their homes. "What went wrong with your programme?" barked a forthright cousin twice removed, and at that moment I could have wished her three times removed."

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When he was Head of Comedy at the BCC Frank Muir said, "God save me from good ideas," and I know what he meant. This idea sounded good... but it was a straitjacket. It prohibited all surprise.

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I could see the gap between the good stuff and mine. I didn't need London Transport staff to shout "Mind the gap" at me. I minded it terribly.

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Round about this time I used to experiment with a particular cliché. I would drop it into the conversation at appropriate moments. It was "What's grist to the mill is nose to the grindstone." It is of course complete nonsense. Nobody ever challenged me. Nobody ever laughed. "That's true," people would say, or "I suppose so," or some such reply.