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.
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 Scott, archdeacon of Tonbridge. 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".
Murdoch made his professional stage debut in March 1927 at the Kings Theatre, Southsea, in the chorus of The Blue Train, a musical comedy starring Lily Elsie and directed by Jack Hulbert. He remained in the show when it opened in the West End in May of that year.
