Senex Iracundus

Back in the early 80s I was regularly intrigued by an ad I saw in the back pages of The Stage for a performer of some kind that had a B&W silhouette of a man’s head in profile with his name at the top and the strap line International Man of Mystery at the bottom. It was a tiny ad. About 3cm x 3cm, if I remember correctly. I assumed it was for a magician, but all it said was the guy’s name (which I’d soon forgotten), so the Mystery was genuinely a mystery to me and that amused me and intrigued me no end.

I was directing the Cambridge Footlights Revue in 1982 and found myself with the task of collating the casts' biogs for the programme notes, and one notoriously lazy performer hadn't delivered his to me, so it struck me that it would be funny to use that strap line to describe him. That one line became the entirety of his biog.

Another member of the cast was a chap called Neil Mullarkey, who later spent a while as part of a comedy double act with Mike Myers while Mike was living over here here and involved with impro at the Comedy Store. I met him a few times when we both worked on a children's TV show as writers. Neil carried on working with Mike, and after they split up and Mike went back to the US, Neil got cameo roles in Mike's films. During this time Neil and I lost touch completely.

When the Austin Powers movies came out using that line, I didn't make the connection to my use of it in the Footlights programme. But about a 15 years ago, I bumped into Neil at a BBC function of some kind, and Neil astonished me and the group of people with us by telling us all that I was responsible for the use of that term in the Austin Powers movies. Neil said he had always liked the phrase and had passed it on to Mike Myers. I told him that I hadn’t coined it, but that I'd got it from the back pages of The Stage, but at the time I still didn't remember the name of the man who was in fact the original Man of Mystery.

It was only more recently because of the internet, and idle curiosity, that I was able to look up the name of the performer who had placed that odd little advert. In fact he had been a massive TV star magician in an era before that ad went out, an era before even Paul Daniels.

David Berglas and his family must have wondered for years how it ended up as a movie strap line. I do hope they didn't mind, and at the time, neither Mike Myers nor Neil Mullarkey knew where it had come from.